Shades of Submission: Fifty by Fifty #1: Billionaire Romance Boxed Set

by Hunter, Adriana

  You bastard, Charlie.

  My bedroom: the same. Nothing out of place, the duvet pulled up and smoothed down, the trio of randomly patterned cushions arranged at the foot; all just as I’d left it this morning.

  The front room, the tiny kitchen, the bathroom.

  No sign of anything wrong, no indication that there had been any intruder.

  §

  “Call them off, Will.”

  “Who?” His voice sounded tight, sharp, and very distant at the other end of the line. “Call who off, Trudy?”

  “The guy who’s sitting across the street in his dark blue Peugeot, munching on the apple he’s just bought from my local store, never quite looking up here where I’m standing staring out at him. The guy Charlie tells me broke into my apartment while I was out this morning. Him.”

  “Charlie? Bugger it all, I told him to stay out of this. He doesn’t... Listen, Trudy. Believe me: I don’t know who this guy is. I haven’t sent anyone to watch you, or to snoop around in your flat. Just move away from that window and sit tight, okay? I’ll be there in ten.”

  §

  He got here in less than ten minutes, but still wasn’t in time.

  37.

  As I watched, puffer jacket guy rolled down his window and tossed the stripped apple core out into the road. I saw him more clearly then, a thirtyish guy with thinning chestnut hair and a curved, blade-like nose, that drew my look up to the dark pits of his eyes.

  Then he looked up and there was the briefest moment of eye contact.

  I stepped back from the window, but it was too late. His expression remained unreadable, but he had seen me watching him, and he knew his cover was blown.

  Or he was an innocent stranger who had just finished a snack and glanced up to see a mad woman staring out of her window at him.

  It was either deeply menacing, or entirely innocent, that exchange of looks.

  Definitely one of the two.

  He rolled his window up, dabbed at his pursed lips with a handkerchief and then reached down to open the door.

  Standing in the street, he smoothed down the front of his puffer jacket, then unzipped it, removed it, and turned to place it carefully on the passenger seat of his car. Straightening again, he closed the door and there was a flash of lights as he locked the car.

  Checking both ways, he crossed the street.

  I felt like a gazelle being stalked by a lion. The big was cat there, in full view, and I was powerless to do anything but watch, transfixed.

  He stretched, covering a yawn with the back of one balled fist.

  Big hands. What a thing to notice. Big hands, no rings. His cream shirt rode up his forearm when he stretched, then slid back down to cover his wrist. Silver cufflinks, nothing flash. He was just an ordinary guy with an ordinary car, a well-made shirt and big hands. That was all.

  He took a step across the pavement, as I watched him from the shadows.

  My mind had been stuck on those details, but now it started to race. Mine was a ground floor apartment, and my kitchen had a door into the shared garden at the rear. From there, there was a gate set into the tall back wall, an alleyway. Would that escape be staked out, too?

  It was a moot point. My feet were stuck to the ground, my legs as weak and jelly-like as they had felt when I finally stepped off that god-damned treadmill this morning, but for different reasons now.

  He was at the foot of the steps that led up to the shared entrance now.

  Was he really that slow, or had time somehow stretched for me, as I stood there in my own personal bubble of sick anticipation?

  Abruptly, the world caught up.

  I moved, stepped back, raised a hand to my mouth, feeling that I might actually be sick.

  Then puffer guy who was no longer wearing his puffer paused and started to turn.

  A guy, shouting at him, haranguing him, gesticulating with a raised fist.

  Charlie.

  Damn it, Charlie. Don’t be a fucking hero!

  The guy took a step back, Charlie took a step forward.

  Both of them, arms flying now, shouting at each other.

  Charlie put a hand to the other guy’s chest, as if to push him or calm him, and then, as fast as a striking viper, the guy reared back and then whipped his whole body forward and down from the waist, his forehead cracking into Charlie’s face in a sudden mushrooming of red.

  Charlie staggered, his hands clutching his broken face.

  The other guy straightened, looked around, glanced up at me in the window, and then turned, strode across the road to his car, keys out, lights flashing again as he unlocked it, climbed in, and then was gone.

  §

  When I looked back at Charlie he was on the pavement, legs splayed, sitting up, supported by a guy in jeans and a black t-shirt. Will.

  A woman approached them, clearly come to see if they needed help, while what must be her young son stared goggle-eyed at the scene.

  Will shook his head to her, then waved gestured for someone else to come closer. Maninder, his driver and bodyguard, and who knew what else.

  I went out.

  “What...?”

  The three of them looked up at me. Maninder was squatting to tend to Charlie’s mashed up face, and Will was on his knees, still cradling Charlie.

  “Are you okay?” To Charlie. His nose and mouth were bleeding, and there was a nasty-looking split across one eyebrow, one eye blackening up already.

  Instinctively, he nodded and then grunted in pain.

  “I recognized him,” said Will now. “We’ve used him before. He wouldn’t have hurt you, okay? They would only have put him here to protect you.”

  “‘They’?”

  “The family,” grunted Charlie. “Looking out for their own, isn’t that it?”

  I turned to Will, but he had nothing to say.

  “He wouldn’t have hurt me?” I said into the silence. “Is that like no one would have hurt Sally Fielding?”

  “I–”

  “Just go,” I said, backing up the steps to the entrance. “Just tidy up this little mess like you always tidy things up. Take Charlie to hospital, see if they can straighten his nose and clean him up some. Okay? Just go.”

  §

  “I want you to forget all about them, okay?” I said.

  Julie looked at me over the rim of her Cosmopolitan, and said nothing.

  “I know you said you’d do some checking, but you have to stop. It’s too risky. Just forget all about them?”

  “Is that what you’re going to do, too, hun?”

  I’d told her about the confrontation outside my apartment this afternoon.

  “And even if you do, are you going to feel safe going back there tonight? Or tomorrow?”

  “I don’t have to believe Charlie.”

  “The man has his face split open protecting you and you still think he might have made up the one about the guy busting into your place? Have I got that one right? That guy had been in your flat once already and he was just about to pay you another visit when Charlie-boy stopped him with his face.”

  I didn’t answer, didn’t know what to say.

  “Well maybe you’ll believe him when I tell you some of the things I’ve found out about Will and his creepy family...”

  38.

  Sally Fielding wasn’t the only one, it seemed.

  “Emma Judd, daughter of a Tory Member of Parliament, but I suppose we can’t hold that against her. Close to Willem Bentinck-Stanley for a time a couple of years ago. That is, until her father was exposed as a tax-dodging, womanizing drunk with a soft spot for teenaged hookers, and the family closed in to protect your lovely Will.”

  “No...”

  “It’s okay. She wasn’t killed or anything like that. Just stood by her father as he sank without a trace and your delightful Will chose his family over and above the poor Emma.”

  She took a long sip from her cocktail, and continued. “Not so lucky the Norfolk lad who was seeing Eleanor wh
en she was barely sixteen and her folks didn’t approve. Came off his motorbike one night and broke both his legs. It was an accident, of course. Just like the fall that took her next boyfriend out of the picture for a few weeks, during which time he decided to move on to pastures new.”

  “What about Ethan?”

  “I’d say your brother’s safe enough. They let him marry her, after all, so I’d say he passed their test. But if I touched on all these stories in a single day’s research , it’s clear that ‘accidents’ tend to gather round the Bentinck-Stanleys like flies. They’re a family who get what they want and protect it fiercely.”

  That was pretty much the first thing I’d been told about Will: he was a man who knew what he wanted and was accustomed to having it.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a lot to take in.”

  Julie reached across the table and put her hand on my forearm. “Take all the time you need, hun,” she said. “Because this is the kind of thing you need to get right.”

  §

  I ignored his calls that Sunday night. I turned my cell phone to silent and left it in my small overnight bag by the hotel room door. I only saw that he’d called when I checked my phone late that night. Two calls and a voicemail.

  Three cocktails down, Julie had Googled nearby hotels on her phone, and found me an anonymous little place overlooking a crescent-shaped park that consisted mainly of tennis courts in Bloomsbury. Not too far from my place, so we called there to get some things; and not too far from Covent Garden for if I decided to go to work tomorrow. The question mark over that had been put in place by Julie as she left me in that little hotel room. “Listen to me, hun: you don’t know what that guy was up to, you don’t know who he was. All you have is Will’s vague assurances that he wouldn’t have hurt you. You be careful, you hear? They might be watching your office too, you know. And stay in touch with me or I’ll be getting all paranoid and worrying about you instead of my book, and you wouldn’t be wanting that now, would you?”

  I watched TV on the small screen mounted on a bracket halfway up the wall of my room. David Attenborough. Something about whales. It didn’t really make much impression on me. Night Nurse and a little Shiraz in a small plastic cup came to my rescue that night, and I slept like the proverbial log, albeit one that dreamed about being chased across rooftops that never ended while my legs got shorter and shorter until I was dragging myself along by my hands, still desperate to get away.

  Next morning it was one of those beautifully crisp early fall days, the sky a bleached blue and the leaves just starting to change color. I gathered up my sturdy satchel stuffed with manuscripts and set out for the half-hour walk to my office.

  As soon as I was on the street, however, yesterday’s paranoia returned. That black cab, slowing as it passed me. The guy in a black biker’s jacket, sitting on a wall while he had a quick smoke. The young black woman walking on the other side, matching my pace.

  All the eyes, watching me.

  Heart racing from my own paranoid fantasies, I ducked into Russell Square Tube station and took the Piccadilly line two stops down to Covent Garden.

  A short walk from there and I was safely at my office, telling Ellie I’d had a rotten weekend and didn’t want any calls this morning, and then I was able to shut my door and pretend that this really was just another Monday morning, business as usual.

  §

  It was the kind of morning when you find yourself sitting there at your desk, staring off into space, your mind leaping from thought to thought. The kind of morning when deadlines and targets might just as well have been words in a language you didn’t know, didn’t even know existed.

  Cost-benefit analysis, Julie had called it. So many negatives... could a relationship with someone like Will ever be worth those costs? But that was the kind of argument where you ended up in a comfy cardigan and zip-up slippers, everything safe, no risks, no exposure. There had to be a middle ground between the two extremes, the kind of relationship where excitement and thrills went hand in hand with security and stability.

  But Will was not a middle ground kind of a guy.

  There was not a single thing about him that was middle ground.

  And yet now, safe in my office, that all seemed so distant. What kind of man could ever balance up an equation like this?

  One time, when we’d been fighting and I’d driven him away, he’d said, I was falling. Now, sitting in my office, it was just like that for me too: I’d been falling.

  At some point in all this, a distant me had been falling, but now...?

  §

  I buried myself in work. Those manuscripts, third-quarter sales projections, a virtual mountain of email. The quiet was bliss, as were the big mugs of tea Ellie kept plying me with.

  When my desk phone went, I knew it was him.

  I looked out through my open door and saw Ellie peering back, a nervous smile on her face. She must think we’d had some kind of quarrel, that putting him through was the right thing to do, God damn it.

  “Trudy Parsons, Editorial.”

  “Good morning, Trudy Parsons-Editorial. Did you get my message? We really do need to talk.”

  That voicemail! I’d seen it late at night when I was already woozy with wine and pills. I’d decided to leave it until morning and then forgotten all about it.

  “I... No. No, I didn’t get any message.”

  “Ah... Ah. Never mind. Can’t be helped.”

  He was doing that flustered upper-class Englishman routine again, his Hugh Grant thing. It was one of his many layers of defense and deflection.

  “I need some time, okay?”

  “Whatever you need,” he said. “I’d give you anything that’s in my powers to give.”

  The charm seemed superficial, an act. What had I ever seen in him?

  And then, softly, he said, “I love you.”

  §

  Goddamn.

  Three words. Three little words.

  Am I really a sucker for those three words?

  Do they change everything?

  39.

  “It’s okay. You don’t have to reply. You don’t have to feel that you need to say it back to me, like some kind of plea-bargaining. I just... I don’t fall easily, so I thought you should know... I thought you should know that despite all the shit that attaches itself to my life, all the complications, the sordid history and the over-protective family – despite all the barriers I deliberately put in place to deal with all that, there’s a real, vulnerable, although thoroughly endearing... Sorry: I’m doing it again, even if feeble jokes make flimsy barriers.

  “What I mean is, well, underneath all this nonsense I’m a real man, capable of love, and so how could I possibly fail to fall in love with you, Trudy Parsons-Editorial? Laws of physics, and all that.”

  Silence. Long, heart-racing silence.

  Ellie was still watching past the half-open door. I realized that the latest mug of tea remained untouched on my desk, a delicate film formed over its surface.

  “It’d be quite nice if you’d say something at this point, though. Unless, of course you’ve fainted, which I think I’d take as a positive.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t know what to say, or what to do.”

  “Then do nothing right now,” he said. “Do nothing, for fear you might rush and do the wrong thing.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And one more thing. You don’t need to worry about Easton – the chap who was rather clumsily doing a background check on you at the weekend.”

  So that’s what it was called. A background check. One that involved breaking Charlie’s nose, loosening two of his teeth and two stitches to his eyebrow. One that involved breaking into my apartment and making it so that I was never going to feel safe there again.

  “It was a family thing. Getting a bit over-zealous in looking out for my interests. It seems my parents think I have a tendency to make bad choices, and when your journalist friend st
arted digging...”

  Sure, Julie had been digging, but only because there were things to dig up. Like the girlfriend whose father had been exposed as a crook. Or Eleanor’s boyfriends who hadn’t quite shaped up. Or Sally Fielding.

  He sure knew how to spoil a moment.

  “Anyway. I’ve warned them off. I don’t need them to look out for me.”

  But I’ll always come second to them, won’t I?

  “Whatever,” I said, suddenly overwhelmingly tired.

  All the costs, all the benefits... That insight swept them all aside.

  Whatever the costs, whatever the benefits, who should ever have to settle for coming second?

  §

  I got through that week, somehow.

  I managed to put a brave professional face on and function. Given the circumstances, you can’t really ask for much more than that, can you?

  I worked early and stayed late. I went to the gym and ran for miles and beat the crap out of the punchbag, in an effort to sweat all the toxins and gloomy thoughts out of my system.

  I am a strong, modern woman. I can deal with crap like this. Or at least that’s what I kept telling myself.

  Yeah, right.

  §

  Friday evening, I called him from my office.

  “Can we talk?”

  “Of course. You want to come over? Maninder could be with you in no time. Or would you prefer to meet somewhere neutral? Or at yours? Or–”

  “I’ll come to your place, it’s fine,” I said.

  40.

  He was standing on the balcony again, just like the first time I’d come to his Docklands apartment. It looked like a deliberate thing: keeping a distance, not crowding me, but also asserting the hierarchy – I had to go to him, where he was commanding this sensational, and very expensive, view over the city.

  Or maybe I was being over-analytical. That returning paranoia making me read too much into something that was really very straightforward, and unladen with meaning.

  He turned as I approached, his jumping eyes betraying a nervous tension, belied by his casual pose, leaning back against the balcony, his arms spread, hands gripping the rail. He was in black pants, herringbone blue shirt, that dark tie knotted tightly but pulled loose with the top button undone. A fuzz of evening stubble darkened his jaw, and his eyes, those dark, predator eyes, fixed onto me, devouring every inch of me.