The Big, Bad Billionaire

by Ashenden, Jackie

  It wasn’t fair. She didn’t want to think about him or what he’d done. She didn’t want to think about how he’d kissed her right at the end either, gathering her close to his chest and taking her mouth with such sweetness she hadn’t been able to do anything but respond.

  She didn’t want it to mean anything either, or acknowledge the way her heart had constricted when he’d told her the reasons why he’d kissed her.

  “Because sometimes, Little Red, you need someone to take care of you, no matter how badly you don’t want them to . . .”

  No, he was wrong. She didn’t need any of those things, still less from him. He was . . . manipulative. She’d promised him just a kiss and he’d pushed and pushed, and ended up taking so much more than that, the bastard.

  The righteous anger lasted through the moment she finally conceded defeat and decided to go home. Lasted through the cab ride back to her parents’ house. It powered her steps up to the front door and through it, and made her stride down the hallway, totally forgetting to put her head around Aurora’s door to check on her the way she liked to do.

  It wasn’t until she was lying in bed, sleepless, that she had to admit to herself that her anger was hollow. Sure, he’d pushed and taken more than she’d promised him, but she’d agreed to let him undress her. And when he’d put his hands on her and touched her, she hadn’t pushed him away. She hadn’t told him no.

  She’d closed her hands in his hair, shut her eyes, spread her legs, and let him do whatever he wanted to her. And she’d liked it.

  You didn’t just like it. You loved it.

  Ella groaned and rolled over, burying her hot face in her pillow, trying to find a cool spot.

  Okay, so her anger was probably more to do with the fact that she didn’t know how to deal with her feelings than about what Rafael had or hadn’t done. She hadn’t expected him to take off her ballet shoes and massage her calves. She hadn’t expected him to say all those things about how she didn’t have anyone to take care of her. And she certainly hadn’t expected him to uncover a whole lot of needs and desires that she’d thought she’d buried so far down she never thought of them.

  But like he’d stripped her off her clothes, he’d somehow stripped off the warm, protective layer of self-denial she’d kept firmly drawn around herself, leaving her painfully aware of how much she’d been lying to herself.

  “Bastard,” she whispered into the darkness.

  She thought briefly about seeing if Aurora was awake and, if she was, whether she might want to talk. But then talking to Aurora would probably involve confessing that Rafael had done far more than kiss her and there was no way she wanted to talk to her grandmother about that.

  It was at times like this where she missed her mother acutely. She’d been only thirteen when her mother had slipped on icy pavement crossing a street and hit her head on a curb. She’d been rushed to the hospital immediately, but the damage to her brain had been too severe and she’d ended up dying an hour later.

  Such a stupid accident. One moment she was alive and telling Ella to look where she was going, an hour later she was dead from a massive brain bleed.

  Even now, even seven years later, Ella hadn’t gotten over the suddenness of it. The complete randomness of the accident. Of course, her mind kept telling her that if she hadn’t dashed across the street without looking, her mother would perhaps have been paying more attention when she’d stepped off the sidewalk, but she tried not to think too hard about that. Not when it would lead into a spiral of guilt she wasn’t sure she’d ever get herself out of.

  Then there was her father, who had been so busy grieving over the abrupt loss of his beloved wife that he’d ignored some persistent symptoms of his own. Too busy being strong for his little girl to notice that he was slowly being eaten alive by cancer.

  He’d died a mere month after his wife, leaving Ella completely alone, with his own mother her only relative.

  Yeah, thinking about it now, perhaps it was better that her parents weren’t here. Her mother would have been horrified if Ella had talked to her about Rafael, because neither she nor Ella’s father had wanted Ella to have anything to do with him.

  It felt like hours later that she fell into a fitful sleep, dreaming of running through woods and being chased by a large animal—and not being quite as scared as she should have been.

  She woke the next morning feeling gritty eyed and sick from lack of sleep, moving through the day like an automaton. Aurora asked her several times if there was anything wrong, but Ella didn’t want to talk about it so she said no.

  Instead, she got herself ready for the matinee she was due to perform at that afternoon.

  She didn’t hear from Rafael that day, and she was glad since she had no idea what she would have said to him. The money appeared in her account just as he’d promised and for a long time she stared at the amount on the screen, feeling inexplicable anxiousness gather in the pit of her stomach yet again.

  Which was strange because it was exactly what she’d wanted. The money to go to Paris, attend the summer intensive, and be hopefully accepted into the prestigious ballet company. So there was nothing to be anxious about. Perhaps what she was feeling was excitement. Not that there was any time to think about it anyway, not when she had a schedule of performances to get through.

  She didn’t sleep well the subsequent nights either, and on the third night was reprimanded by the artistic director for missing a couple of cues. It came as a shock, since she almost never made mistakes like that, but she was aware enough not to argue with the woman, knowing that she wasn’t dancing as well as she should, and that there was a reason for that.

  Getting home that night, she checked on Aurora, then went to bed, hoping to get a good night’s sleep, only to wake up the next morning feeling like she hadn’t slept a wink.

  Forcing herself to get up, she dragged on some clothes and then went into Aurora’s room to help her grandmother do her hair and get dressed.

  But when she came in, it looked like Aurora was still asleep.

  Moving to the curtains, Ella pulled them open. The sound usually woke the older woman if she was still sleeping, but today the small form in the bed didn’t move. Frowning, Ella went around the side of the bed and bent over her grandmother’s sleeping figure.

  “Gran? It’s time to wake up. Do you need anything?”

  Aurora didn’t move.

  A cold thread wound through Ella. “Gran?” she tried again. “Are you awake?”

  But there was no movement from her grandmother, not even when Ella shook her gently. Trying not to panic, Ella took Aurora’s thin, bony wrist in shaking fingers, attempting to find a pulse and failing.

  No. No, this couldn’t be happening. She couldn’t lose the only person she had left in the world. She couldn’t. She wasn’t ready.

  Stumbling back from the side of her grandmother’s bed, Ella did the only thing she could think of, which was to call 9-1-1.

  She was proud that she managed to hold it together when the paramedics came and shocked Aurora’s heart back to life again before loading her into the ambulance. She even managed to stay collected as she held Aurora’s hand on the way to the hospital.

  But it wasn’t until Aurora was taken away by the doctors into the mysterious depths of the hospital and Ella was left in the waiting room by herself that it suddenly hit her.

  She’d been so caught up in what was happening with Rafael that she hadn’t been checking on her grandmother as assiduously as she should have been. Perhaps she’d missed some vital sign that would have prevented her heart attack? Perhaps she hadn’t done something she should have?

  God, the cigarettes. She should never have let her grandmother keep smoking. What a terrible person she was to let that keep happening.

  She got up from the chair she’d been sitting in and started pacing around, unable to keep still, restless and terrified and exhausted all at once. Trying to outrun the terrible knowledge that was trying to get insid
e her head.

  The knowledge that if Aurora died, she would lose the one person in all the world who knew her. Who cared about her. Who loved her. And without her, Ella would be alone.

  Completely and utterly alone.

  The thought was so terrifying, that she found herself fumbling for her phone, wanting to call someone—anyone—just to talk. And then realizing that she had no one to call. She’d kept herself deliberately distant from her dancer friends because her father had told her she needed to protect herself and so she had. But that had also meant that when she needed someone, like now, there was no one she knew well enough to talk to.

  There is one person.

  Ella’s chest felt tight.

  “Poor Little Red . . . perhaps there are days when you’d like it if someone else took care of you?”

  She didn’t want to call him. She didn’t want to, not when she was vulnerable and scared and hurting. Then again, informing him about Aurora’s health was probably something he should know, especially as her guardian. So maybe she’d send him a quick text letting him know her grandmother was in the hospital. Hell, she didn’t even have to speak to him.

  Swallowing, she typed in a quick text and pressed send. A second later, her phone began to ring.

  Her hand was shaking as she hit the accept button, though she had no idea why she did since she didn’t actually want to speak to him. And then she was lifting her phone to her ear and his rich, dark-honey voice was flowing right through her.

  “Don’t move,” he said. “I’m coming.”

  Chapter 8

  Rafe was in his father’s massive office—or rather his massive office—on the hundredth floor of DS Tower, having a meeting with a less-than-impressed Lorenzo and their very grumpy half brother, Nero.

  They were discussing the management structure of the company now that their father had stepped down. All three men had very different ideas about how it should be done, and none of them were remotely interested in agreeing with one another.

  It was making for a rather difficult discussion.

  Rafe didn’t want to start laying down the law quite yet, not until he was more firmly in command of the company, but given both brothers’ intransigence, it was looking like that was the only way forward.

  They were, of course, starting to get an inkling that he wasn’t simply their father’s puppet and never had been—no matter how it looked on the outside—but he wasn’t ready for them to to know the full extent of his manipulations quite yet. Which meant he had to take the softly, softly approach.

  Sadly, it wasn’t proving to be at all successful, not up against Nero’s impatience and his oldest brother’s less-than-tolerant approach.

  The text from Ella that popped up on his phone was just the diversion he needed.

  When he read it, all thoughts of his company, not to mention his brothers, went out of his head entirely, and he was getting up from the meeting table and striding to the windows, hitting Ella’s number to call her.

  The call connected but he didn’t wait for her to speak. “Don’t move. I’m coming.” Disconnecting Ella, he put another call through to one of his personal assistants requesting some information, texted Clive to get his car ready, then he turned and headed straight for the door, ignoring the looks of surprise his brothers sent him.

  “Where the hell are you going?” Nero growled.

  “To see a man about a dog,” Rafe replied and strode out without another word.

  Clive was right on time, the limo already at the curb by the time he got out of the building, his personal assistant texting him the address of the hospital Aurora was at before he’d even gotten into the car.

  Which was as it should be. When he’d said it was urgent, he’d meant it was urgent.

  Ella had contacted him. Ella had contacted him.

  It was the very first time she’d initiated things and sure, it had only been a text telling him that her grandmother was sick and in the hospital, but it was still contact. She didn’t have to do that, she could have let him find out through other means. But she hadn’t. She’d reached out to him and, even though it wasn’t much, he was taking it.

  He wanted to help her. He wanted to prove to her that she could trust him, and this was his opportunity.

  That’s cold.

  So? He didn’t know Aurora Hart. In fact, she was the mother of the man who’d kept Ella away from him, so why he should feel any sympathy for her he had no idea. Anyway, besides all of that, he was a cold man. He had no sympathy for anyone.

  Ella was in the waiting room when he arrived, a small, slender figure sitting hunched over on one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs. She looked up when he came in and there was a moment when he thought she was going to slip off the chair and come to him, and his heart nearly stopped in his chest at the thought.

  But she didn’t move, her hands clasped together tightly, her knuckles white. “You didn’t have to come.”

  Shoving away the disappointment he wasn’t going to let himself feel, he gave her a stern look. “Of course I had to come. Why else did you text me?”

  “I just wanted you to know what was happening. You didn’t need to race down here and—”

  “What’s the update on her condition?” He wasn’t going to let her try to make that text mean nothing. She’d contacted him for a reason and whether she knew it herself yet or not, that reason was because she needed him. And now he was here, she didn’t have to worry about anything anymore.

  “I . . . I don’t know. No one’s told me anything.” There were dark circles under her eyes and she was very pale. Clearly she hadn’t been sleeping.

  Well, that was going to stop. Today.

  “Wait here.” He turned toward the door. “I’ll find out.”

  Ella began to say something, but he was out of the room before she had a chance to finish. Finding a nurse wasn’t difficult, neither was charming the pants off her, and pretty soon he was talking to one of the doctors, who was also extremely easy to charm. She managed to get the doctor who’d actually worked on Aurora to come out to the waiting room to talk to Ella about Aurora’s condition.

  She blinked when he came in with the doctor, but made no protest when he reached for her hand as the doctor began to tell her about strokes and how it was still early, but it looked like Aurora wasn’t going to be able to go home any time soon.

  Her fingers were cold so he enclosed them in his to warm them and she didn’t pull away. But her face had gone bone white and she kept shaking her head, as if disagreeing with what the doctor was saying.

  It wasn’t until after the man had left that she belatedly tried to pull her hand away from his, but he merely tightened his fingers and, without a word, led her from the waiting room.

  She didn’t protest, as if all the fight had gone out of her, which he didn’t like at all. It was good that he was around. She desperately needed someone to take care of her, and that would be his job from now on.

  Out on the chilly sidewalk, he pulled open the door to the limo and ushered her inside before following her in, catching Clive’s eye to let him know they’d be heading back to the house, then sitting on the seat opposite her.

  Ella was still shaking her head. “I need to go home.”

  “No, you don’t,” Rafe said flatly. “You’re coming with me.”

  Her head shook more violently. “No. I can’t. I have a performance tonight and I need to get a little bit of sleep.”

  “Out of the question.”

  She went even paler than she was already. “You don’t understand. I haven’t slept in two days. And that’s probably why Aurora was sick. I wasn’t paying enough attention to her.” Her voice had begun to rise, a panicked note in it. “It’s all your fault. If you hadn’t touched me in the dressing room, I would have slept. I would have known to check on her. But I didn’t and now I can’t sleep and I—”

  Rafe leaned forward and took her face between his hands, staring into her frightened gray eyes. “W
e’re going back to my place. And do you know what I’m going to do when I get there? I’m going to push you down onto the carpet and fuck you senseless.”

  “What?” She blinked a couple of times and the glazed look in her eyes cleared, a spark of anger entering them. “Are you crazy?” Jerking her head away, she glared at him. “Take me home. Now.”

  Excellent, that’s what he liked to see. Anger was far better than panic.

  Ignoring the order, he reached into the drinks cabinet that had been built into the seat and took out a small bottle of expensive brandy and a crystal tumbler, pouring out a measure. Then he pushed the tumbler into her hands. “Drink that.”

  “But I don’t—”

  “Drink it.”

  She blinked again, looking down at the alcohol in her hands. Then quite suddenly she let out a breath and lifted the tumbler, taking a deep swallow before choking slightly on it.

  “Not all at once,” he murmured, amused.

  Ignoring him, she took another, less-deep swallow. Color began to appear in her cheeks, and she slowly leaned back against the seat, cradling the tumbler in her hands. “I don’t like brandy.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She kept hold of the tumbler. “Take me home.”

  “No.”

  Her gaze narrowed. “Why not?”

  “Because you look exhausted. Because you need someone to look after you right now. And since I’m your guardian, that’s my job.”

  “But I have a performance tonight.”

  “You will not be performing tonight,” he said, flat and hard. “I will be calling the artistic director as soon as we get home to tell her that your grandmother has been taken to the hospital and that you need to be by her side.”

  Ella looked incensed. “But you can’t—”

  “Yes, I can. And I will. Like I told you, you’re exhausted. Do you really want your performances to suffer?”

  Her gaze flickered at that. “They’re not suffering.”

  “Yes, they are. The past couple of nights your form has been off. Don’t think it hasn’t been noticed.”