Reining in the Billionaire

by Dani Wade

  “No,” she snapped.

  “Then why the secrecy?”

  Before she could tell him to go to hell, her father bellowed, “What’s he talking about?”

  “Nothing.”

  Still he struggled to his feet, always willing to use his large stature to intimidate an answer out of her. “Why would you need a career?” he demanded. “We agreed you’re taking the job with Mrs. Robinson.”

  “A job?” Mason’s voice had gone deadly deep, shaking EvaMarie far more than her father’s at his worst. Mason moved in closer, right over her shoulder. He left no space for her to turn and face him. “What? No two weeks’ notice? Or do you only grant others that kind of courtesy when it suits you to do so?”

  Sixteen

  Mason should have been satisfied as he replayed the memory of EvaMarie running from the Young house, the fragile vintage gown pulled up away from her heels. Instead, he clenched his fists around the steering wheel and hit the gas with considerably more force.

  He’d walked away from a blustering Daulton as he demanded EvaMarie tell him what was going on. Their little family drama didn’t interest him. She’d run past him across the large main foyer as he’d made his apologies to Liza’s parents for disrupting their party. But he had the uncomfortable feeling that the argument hadn’t bothered them the way it had Mason.

  After all, he’d just made them the talk of the town without any effort. Though Lord only knew what this would do to the Harrington reputation. Probably enhance it, considering how backward things like this worked in the world.

  Now he let himself into the house and paused a moment to listen to the stillness. EvaMarie’s car was in the drive, not in the garage where she normally parked it.

  Was she in her room? The kitchen? Was she planning to continue their discussion? Maybe offer him something special to tease him out of his bad mood?

  Mason shook his head. As angry as he was, he recognized that wasn’t the EvaMarie he knew. Yes, he’d lashed out and accused her of sleeping with him to get what she wanted. But deep down he didn’t want to believe that could be true.

  But he wasn’t sure the woman he’d come to know as an adult was real. Had she been hiding behind what he wanted to see in order to hold on to the life she hadn’t been ready to give up? Even worse, he wasn’t sure what to do about that.

  Right now, he just needed some freakin’ sleep.

  Only it didn’t look like he was going to get it. As he approached the darkened back staircase, Mason looked up to see EvaMarie seated on one of the upper steps, a pool of frothy material puddled around her. She stared out the arched window opposite, giving him a decent view of streaked mascara and the luxurious wash of hair she’d let down to cover her bare back.

  Did she have to be so lovely?

  He clenched his fists, wishing he could eradicate all sympathy, all regret from his emotions right now. If only she didn’t look like a Cinderella after the ball, after her world had gone to hell in a handbasket. If only she didn’t make his heart ache to hold her just once more—even when he knew he shouldn’t.

  The silence lasted for long minutes more as he stared at her from the bottom of the stairs. Maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe she was justified in keeping her secrets. But what about the job? Or rather, the new job. That familiar anger and hurt flooded his chest once more.

  Just when he’d thought she wouldn’t, EvaMarie spoke. “I’ll be out by Monday.”

  He drew in a deep breath, but she didn’t give him an inch of ground.

  “I’d be out sooner, but everything was going so well, I sort of forgot I was supposed to be packing.”

  “So did I.”

  And he had, because deep inside, he hadn’t wanted to think about EvaMarie leaving. Because her leaving would have made him wonder why being without her left him lonely, why laughing with her made him happy and why knowing she’d kept even a small part of herself from him made him angry.

  Because he’d fallen in love, all over again.

  She stood, the fall of the gown reflecting the scant moonlight from the window opposite. A few steps was all she gained before she turned back. “I’m sorry, Mason. I know you probably won’t believe that. Probably don’t even care. But I need to say it for myself. I’m sorry that I kept things from you.”

  Her huff of a laugh resonated with a sort of despair that startled him. “I thought everything I’d done for you, with you, would have told you what you needed to truly know about me. But I forget that’s not the way life works. It never has been. At least, not for me. I’ve spent a lifetime protecting myself, and old habits die hard, regardless of whether they are serving you well or not. And that’s my fault.”

  “No, EvaMarie.” Without thought he moved to the bottom of the stairs, gripping the newel post in his hand. “No, I just didn’t expect—”

  “That the young, innocent girl you knew would grow up into such a complicated woman. So needy. So scared.” Her hand was a pale blur as she waved it to indicate the house at her feet. “After all, I had the perfect life. The least I could do was meet your expectations.”

  She moved down a step, then stopped to hold herself in frozen stillness as if realizing she’d made a mistake. “That’s what everyone else wants. So you should too. Only I thought you wanted me to grow, wanted me to break out from my past—” her voice rose to echo around the black space “—wanted me to take what I wanted.” A small sob escaped her throat. “But no one really means that. They just say it to be nice and take it back when it doesn’t go the way they expected.”

  She turned away once more, not speaking again until she reached the top step. Mason’s gaze traced the fragile line of her spine where the dress dipped to midback below the fall of her hair, remembering the feel of it against his fingertips.

  Her words floated down without her turning her head toward him. “Jeremy was right. No one will ever respect me, because I don’t respect myself. So from here on out, I’ll accept nothing less...only I figure that means I’ll spend a lifetime alone. Funny how that works, huh?”

  In that moment, Mason realized he’d let EvaMarie down far worse than anything she’d ever done to him when they were kids. Then, she hadn’t stood up for him because she didn’t know how. Now, he’d taken advantage of the fact that she wouldn’t stand up for herself to exorcise his own anger and conflicting emotions.

  Guilt gripped his throat, refusing to let him call out to her as she walked away. He heard the door to her room close, then the distinct click of the lock.

  She was done talking, leaving Mason to spend the night contemplating just how big of a jackass he truly was.

  * * *

  She’s really done it.

  Mason came around the corner of the house to find a long horse trailer parked before the stables. Jim came out the arched entryway leading Lucy, her foal not far behind. Somehow, seeing the horses loaded up with their new owners—without EvaMarie anywhere in sight—told Mason’s brain more than anything else that she was gone.

  When she’d left him a note telling him she wouldn’t be back, she’d meant it.

  He hadn’t seen her after that night. Her room had been empty the next day, save for a stack of moving boxes in one corner and the furniture. If she had been at the house since that night, it hadn’t been while Mason was present. He suspected Jeremy was helping her coordinate her movements, though the other man hadn’t said a word.

  All of her belongings, including her sound equipment, had been loaded into moving trucks the third day by a group of burly men in uniforms. But it still hadn’t seemed real. Until the horses...

  EvaMarie had loved those horses. He’d just assumed she would be here to say goodbye to them.

  Kane appeared beside him. “What’s going on?”

  Mason bumped his chin in the direction of the stables. “New owne
r is here for the Hyatts’ horses. Got the stables all to ourselves now.”

  Kane grunted. “We’re gonna need to hire on some help for Jim.” He was quiet again for a moment, then said the very thing Mason didn’t want to hear. “You okay with this?”

  “Hell, yes.” But he wasn’t. And that was eating away his insides.

  “No,” he finally conceded. “Hell, no.”

  Kane slapped Mason’s shoulder. “About time you admitted that.”

  “Why? So you can gloat?”

  “Would I do that?”

  “Yes.” And that was an understatement.

  “Nah! But I might have to indulge in at least one I told you so.”

  As much as he’d like to, Mason couldn’t begrudge him that. “You were right.”

  Kane clutched his heart in a mock death grip. “And you admitted it? Is the world ending?”

  “It will for you if you don’t drop the theatrics.”

  Kane chuckled, a sound so rare it startled Mason. “I can’t resist.”

  “Try.”

  Mason frowned as Jim and the new owner checked over the inside and outside of the trailer to make sure the horses were safe and secure. “This didn’t go how I thought it would.”

  “Life is full of surprises, Dad used to say.”

  “And not all of them good, if I remember correctly.”

  “He did mention that a time or two. And as much as you showing up here was a nasty surprise for the Hyatts, I think it was a good thing for EvaMarie.”

  “I doubt she’d agree with you now.”

  “You sure about that?”

  Mason studied him.

  “Do you remember the year I was in sixth grade?”

  “Yeah. That was a pretty miserable year for you.” It was before Kane had gotten any height on him. He’d spent the year being picked on by a particularly burly boy at school. “Why?”

  “I learned something that year. Oh, I didn’t learn it right then. But many years later, looking back, I was taught a massive life lesson.”

  “That bullies need their asses kicked?”

  Kane smirked. “Besides that. I learned that the job of a bully is to make you cower. Not just outside, but inside. To make everything you are shrink until it disappears, including the very essence of who you are.”

  Mason could see where this was going, and it wasn’t helping him feel any better.

  “EvaMarie lived with a bully her entire life,” Kane went on. “The thing that amazes me to this day is the amount of strength it took for her not to give up, not to lose who she really was. She buried it, and protected it, until the time when it was safe for her to bring it back out.”

  “So I could stomp all over it.” Mason watched the truck and trailer disappear down the drive. Jim raised a hand in acknowledgment before heading back into the stables. They really had to get that man some help. “I completely screwed up. How do I change that?”

  “It’s easy...”

  “For you to say.”

  Kane squinted as he gazed across the rolling hills behind the stable yard. “Nope. You’ve just got to help her be who she should have been all along.”

  Seventeen

  “Jeremy, come on,” EvaMarie hollered. She couldn’t help it. Wondering if Mason was gonna walk in at any minute had her stomach cramping.

  Jeremy finally came around the corner from the basement with a grin that made her want to smack him. “Seriously, you could at least be curious as to how the game room turned out.”

  Oh, she was. More than anything she wanted to take a leisurely stroll downstairs to see all the cool goodness Jeremy had been able to put in place. She wanted to see how the plans they had all discussed and dreamed about had come to life... She wanted to see how the furniture she and Mason had picked out looked in the game room. She wanted to talk party plans and food and music...but that wasn’t her place anymore.

  “I just want to get my stuff from the safe and go,” she insisted, ignoring what she wanted but could no longer have.

  “Well, why didn’t you go on up and get it?”

  Because it was weird.

  She knew Mason had now moved the focus of the renovations to the second floor. Honestly, she’d be surprised if he hadn’t gutted her room. He probably wanted absolutely nothing to remind him of her. Probably the entire floor was unrecognizable now. What had they done with Chris’s bedroom? The thought left her cold. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see.

  Jeremy watched her closely, seeming almost amused. “I told you Mason left the safe on purpose once I explained you’d forgotten some things in it.”

  “I’m amazed he didn’t blow it out of the wall,” she mumbled.

  “Oh, stop fussing and get a move on.”

  She totally wasn’t in the mood for his attitude. “Now who’s in a hurry?” she challenged.

  But she did want to get done before Mason arrived. In the three weeks since she’d left her childhood home, she hadn’t seen Mason once. Not driving around town, not out shopping and certainly not here at the estate.

  The few times she’d returned for her things, Jeremy had arranged for her to show up when Mason wasn’t home. Whether her former lover approved of this strategy or not, she wasn’t sure. When she realized that she’d forgotten to get the few real pieces of jewelry she still owned from the wall safe in her closet, it had taken a whole week for Jeremy to find a window for her to come by.

  But standing around here in the hall that had seen all the ups and downs in her life made her sink even further into the morass of sadness that darkened her life at the moment. She needed out. As a matter of fact, she almost gave Jeremy the code and asked him to get her stuff from the safe, but she’d done enough wimping out for the day. This she needed to do for herself.

  Hard as it might be.

  So she forced herself to climb each step, focusing on Jeremy’s leather shoes at her eye level in front of her. They shouldn’t be so fancy for all the work he did in construction zones, but somehow he managed to pull it off without a single scuff. Amazing.

  With a grimace, she acknowledged that she was in deep avoidance mode, but she still refused to look right or left as she crossed the landing to her old room. Her brother’s room pulled at her senses, but what good would looking do? He was gone. So was her childhood. Wandering these halls to reminisce about either would probably throw her into a depression she could never crawl out of.

  “How are the parents?” Jeremy asked, as he paused outside the door to her old bedroom.

  “Currently refusing to speak to me,” she confirmed. “Once I told them they could agree to my terms or not see me, they immediately set about breaking every rule I put in place. We’re in what I call the tantrum stage.”

  “Ah, the terrible twos.”

  “And threes and fours and fives... I feel like it’s never going to end.”

  “It will.”

  “I hate to say it, but I agree. The minute my dad has his first big health scare and they need me, they’ll come calling. I’ll just have to remind them that I mean business on a regular basis.” Just the thought exhausted her sometimes, but this was life with her parents, since she wasn’t willing to cut them out altogether.

  Jeremy echoed her thoughts. “I know it’s hard, but stick to your guns.”

  She hated to admit it, but being away from her parents right now was easier than going along with all their demands had ever been. But remembering that would help her keep her backbone strong. It would have been nice to have someone by her side, giving her encouragement and support while she dealt with all of this, but she’d lost that chance the night of the ball.

  Without voicing her complicated thoughts, she nodded. “All right. Let’s see it.”

  Jeremy opened the door and stood aside
, telling her something had definitely changed beyond the threshold. As much as she dreaded it, this was another good thing. A hard thing, but she needed to remember that this was no longer her home. The past was gone. She couldn’t go back.

  Especially now that her room had been turned into an office. Her first thought was that it had been turned into Mason’s office, but the pale purple of the walls didn’t really scream “masculine.” With a quick glance, she scanned what appeared to be an antique rolltop desk, a modern ergonomic desk chair covered in a leather that matched the desk’s finish and some bookshelves. She didn’t look closer. She didn’t want to.

  Definitely not.

  The pale purple had been carried over into the dressing room, but unlike the other space, this one remained unfurnished. Then she opened the door to the walk-in closet and gasped.

  Instead of the stripped walls she’d expected, all the surfaces had been reinforced with cushioning covered in some kind of leather. Decorative tufting had been created with upholstery buttons. At the far end, a custom-built shelving unit and desk took up the entire wall. An L-shaped addition on one side was filled with equipment that made the woman who had poured over sound equipment sites to find the best of the cheapest drool.

  “Oh my God, Jeremy,” she breathed.

  “Do you like it?”

  That deep voice wasn’t Jeremy’s. Barely able to breathe, EvaMarie turned in a slow circle until she faced Mason in the doorway. A remote part of her brain recognized that she’d started to shake, but the rest of her was simply working to keep herself upright.

  “Um...” Oh, real intelligent, EvaMarie. “It’s wonderful.”

  He stepped farther inside, sending a jolt through EvaMarie’s core that she struggled to hide. When his gaze narrowed, she wasn’t sure she’d succeeded.

  “I’m glad you like it,” he said, that deep, soothing tone gliding over her like a calming wave. “I did it with you in mind.”

  Um, thanks? She could have happily gone years without knowing that she’d inspired a room in his house. Was he crazy? “I don’t know what to say,” she murmured.