BILLIONAIRE ROMANCE: The Unforgettable Southern Billionaires: The Complete Collection Boxed Set (Young Adult Rich Alpha Male Billionaire Romance)

by Walker, Violet

  He blushed. I did not think that this was the time to be embarrassed. “No,” he said.

  “Not your father? You didn’t want to tell him that you almost managed to bring some money to the family?” I was surprised at the poison in my voice. I certainly hadn’t planned to attack him, but it just slipped out of my lips as though I was not in control of them.

  Edmund stared down at his shoes. It seemed as though my voice had caused him genuine pain, which left me feeling worse than ever. “I told no one,” he said quietly.

  A part of me was relieved that he had not shared our affair with anyone. It reassured me that, whatever our transgressions, he did not intend to ruin my family name or bring my father to shame because he had failed to attract me into a marriage. But most of me was just annoyed and confused.

  “Well someone must know – does your sister know anything?” His sister was the wife of a local weapons maker who had provided me with a pistol to modify. She had seen Edmund and me together. She might have drawn conclusions.

  But Edmund shook his head. “No,” he replied. “She doesn’t know anything about us. Why?” he asked suddenly.

  I pointed at the envelope. He looked at me for a moment, but I nodded my permission and he took the envelope up and read the letter inside. His eyebrows rose with every line. I could tell when he had finished because he was blinking rapidly as though trying to decide what to say.

  “Well,” he said finally. “That is troubling.”

  “How can she know those things?” I demanded.

  “Perhaps she has listening devices in here?” he offered, gazing around the room.

  “But when would she have had the chance?” I asked. “The only time I’ve even left this room since the attack was when we went to town – and no one could have known that I was planning to go out. Even the maids had no idea.”

  “The maids,” Edmund said slowly, frowning down at the letter. “Who gave this to you?”

  I shrugged. “Kitty,” I replied. “The new girl? She said that it arrived a while ago.”

  Edmund frowned harder. “The post has not come today…”

  I suddenly realised what he was trying to say. “But… Kitty seems like a good girl. Very –” What? I thought. Very accommodating? Very accepting of my eccentricities? She had seemed to be completely uninterested – even unimpressed – by my tinkering. Almost as if she was used to seeing scientists work. Or perhaps she was just used to seeing scientists stop working.

  She would be well-placed to inform my mother about my work. She came to my room at least once a week and she’d seen enough of my blueprints to have a good idea of what I was doing if she knew how to read them. All of the maids must have had a good idea about what had happened between Edmund and I – at the very least, they would have known that we were close, and then there was a falling out.

  I looked at Edmund and I knew that he was coming to the same conclusion that I was. He rang the bell and we waited, but Kitty did not return.

  “Dammit,” he muttered, stalking out of the room without a word to me.

  I could hear his uneven walk down the hallway and quickly took my modified pistol out of its drawer. I was not entirely sure if it was modified to the same specifications as The Mothers’ had been – I had only gotten a very brief look while they were threatening me – but I had tinkered with the cylinder so that each pull of the trigger released three bullets.

  A noise behind me made me turn. Kitty was standing in the doorway with her own pistol pointed at my face.

  I froze. For the first moment in my life, my brain would not work. It seemed to be stuck on the image of Kitty pointing her pistol at me, so that it wasn’t until several moments later that I realised that she was speaking.

  “– terribly sorry – I’ve actually rather enjoyed working here, there was never a dull moment certainly –”

  “You’re one of them?” I demanded. “One of The Mothers?”

  She gave me a long look. “I’m a little young to be a mother, don’t you think?” she said. But then she shrugged. “I’m more of an apprentice, really – a method of infiltration when the usual methods are thwarted.”

  “But you’ve been here since before the attack!” I said.

  Kitty’s hand did not waver. The pistol remained fixed on my face. “You were a very troubling case – they wanted to make sure that what they were hearing in the listening devices was actually true. I mean, indoor illumination globes? It hardly seemed real.”

  I glanced over at the box of broken indoor illumination globes still gathering dust in the corner. They were technically a failure – I hadn’t been able to make them light up without exploding – but I could understand how someone would think that such things may not be real.

  “So you went through my things to decide if I was a true threat,” I said slowly. “And then you, what? Reported back to my mother?”

  Kitty shrugged. “I thought I might have to go over her head at one point – she has always had a soft spot when it came to you.”

  I didn’t know how to feel about that. I wondered where Edmund was – whether he’d realised that Kitty was not with the other maids, or whether he’d been waylaid by something else in the house. There were dozens of rooms – he could have been anywhere.

  “So what now?” I asked, my eyes zeroing in on the pistol in Kitty’s hands. “Are you going to kill me?”

  “I would if I could,” Kitty said. My blood froze in my veins at the cold tone in her voice. “You’ve proven yourself incapable of following instructions, and that in itself should be enough to demonstrate how important it is to remove you. But my orders are to give you one more warning.”

  Her eyes darted to the modified pistol on my workbench, as though she hadn’t even noticed that it was there until then. She sneered at it as though it were a child’s toy. I realised belatedly that I should have been taking this time to get a good look at what her pistol had been modified to do, but I had been too concerned with the fact that it was pointed at my face to think about anything else.

  Kitty stepped forward and lowered her pistol slightly so that it was pointed at my chest. When she spoke again it was in a bored tone as though she were reciting a script: “You have until the sun sets to dispose of all of your infernal devices, abominations, and blueprints. You will destroy these items in a manner which will prevent others from replicating your work. If you do not comply with this final warning, then the organisation I represent will be forced to intervene on behalf of future generations and the world as a whole. As a consequence of your failure to comply, you will of course be terminated. Do you understand what is expected of you?”

  I chewed on my tongue to bite back the long diatribe that I was longing to throw at her. “I understand,” I said finally.

  “Good,” Kitty said.

  “You’re fired,” I added.

  Kitty raised an eyebrow. “Terminating me will not prevent The Mothers from coming for you.”

  “I don’t care – I want you out of my home immediately.”

  Kitty smirked and curtseyed before heading for the door. I considered seizing my own pistol and emptying the barrel into Kitty’s back, but I didn’t. Instead, I waited until she was out of the room and immediately sat at my workbench, taking up a pen and writing quickly on the back of one of my steam engine blueprints.

  I heard the sound of Edmund’s uneven steps coming down the hallway. He knocked on the door and I waved for him to enter.

  “Just a moment,” I said.

  I finished the list and handed it to him, raising a finger to my lips in a shushing motion so that he would know not to read it aloud. The Mothers could have still been listening in. As with the letter from my mother, I could see the expression on his face change as he read through. Then he looked up at me and nodded.

  “I understand,” he said.

  “Good,” I replied. “Then let’s get to work.”

  Chapter Three

  Item 1: The Mothers are coming
for me at sunset. Get the maids out of the house. I do not want them to get injured.

  I do not know what Edmund said to the maids, but the house fell eerily quiet within a few hours of Kitty leaving. I hoped that he had given them a reasonable excuse. In the event that I survived this, and the house survived this, I did not want it getting back to my father that it had briefly been turned into a battlefield.

  I did write a letter to my father and left it on the hall table for Edmund to see delivered in the event that everything went wrong. It was a confessional letter, although certain aspects of the last few weeks – my relationship with Edmund, for example – had been heavily censored for his peace of mind.

  When Edmund returned from getting the maids out of the house, I was working on connecting the indoor illumination globes together with copper wiring.

  “Do you need any help?” he asked.

  I hesitated. I knew how good he was with his hands, but I did not want him to get too involved with the work I did in case The Mothers decided that he, too, was a threat to the world. “You can get started on item two,” I replied.

  He nodded shortly and began gathering my blueprints into his arms.

  Item 2: Take all of my blueprints, lock them in a trunk, and bury them in the yard. Use your best judgement for where to hide them.

  Edmund had trouble getting the trunk down to the garden with his bad leg. I’d offered to help him, but he had waved me off and hooked his cane over his elbow as he headed down to hide away the trunk. I watched him go with a twinge of something… I could not quite describe. It felt like hope. Hope that I would survive this. Because I knew that The Mothers were coming to kill me.

  The indoor illumination globes were all set up with the make-shift trebuchets I had thrown together. They were poised and ready to fire next to the window. I did not know that The Mothers would be coming in their mechanical flying machine, but I thought that it was a strong possibility. I was setting up a string of bullets and attaching them to the wheel on my steam engine. If all went according to plan, this would make a damaging dent in their defences.

  I knew that Father would have begged me to consider cutting myself off from all of this – science, experimentation, tinkering. But he had to have known that such an act would be as devastating as cutting off a limb. I was grateful to Edmund because he did not question my decision to stay and fight instead of laying down and showing The Mothers my belly. He was just quietly following instructions.

  When he returned from completing the second item on my list, his forearms were covered in soil.

  “It’s hidden behind the rose garden,” he whispered into my ear, gazing around as though he were hoping to catch sight of the listening devices which we were both convinced were hidden somewhere in the room.

  I nodded. His breath against my ear was distracting, but my fingers remained firm and steady on the cogs that I was tightening. If I lived through this, I would have to go and retrieve the trunk and all of my ideas. At that moment, all I needed was to know that they were safe.

  “Item three, then,” I said, trying not to lean into Edmund’s warm, solid chest.

  Item 3: Go and stay with your sister for the night. Do not return until morning.

  “No,” Edmund said sternly, waving the list at me as though he meant to smack me over the nose like he would a wayward mutt.

  It was just barely 3pm – I still had a few hours to prepare for The Mothers’ arrival. But I would have been able to concentrate better if I were not getting distracted every ten minutes with thoughts of what could happen to Edmund if he were still in the house when The Mothers arrived.

  “You said that you understood!” I said.

  “I did, I never said that I agreed!” Edmund replied angrily.

  “Well, I think you’re being a fool,” I said. Edmund’s cheeks were pink with emotion and I did not appreciate the way it made my heart race.

  I stepped closer, knowing that this was not the place to be raising our voices – there was no way to know for certain how much The Mothers would be able to hear.

  “Edmund, they are coming to kill me,” I hissed, lowering my voice as far as I dared.

  “I know, Rosalie,” he replied, his voice more breath than anything else.

  I realised that we were chest-to-chest, with our heads bent so that our lips were inches away from the other’s ear. We hadn’t been this close since his confession. I was hyper-aware of the way his chest would brush against mine when he breathed, the way his hair tickled my cheek, and the way his hands twitched convulsively as though he meant to drop his cane and wrap them around me. I did not know whether I wanted him to do it or not.

  Edmund had deceived me… but all I wanted to do was trust him again. I wanted to let myself care for him the way that I had been beginning to before.

  “You cannot truly expect me to leave you alone tonight?” he asked, apparently not as affected by our proximity as I was. “Rosalie, you need someone here with you.”

  I truly was expecting him to ask me to give in. It was on the tip of his tongue, I could tell, but he did not say it out loud.

  “I could die,” I said again, because I felt like it hadn’t been said enough.

  “Then you will not die alone,” he said fiercely.

  “I cannot have that on my conscience,” I said. “Don’t you see, Edmund? I cannot fight knowing that you are in danger.”

  I could see his knuckles burning white on his cane. “Rosalie, if I were willing to leave your side, I would have done it weeks ago. I will not leave you. Not ever.”

  “It’s not your place to make decisions like that.”

  “You’re wrong,” he replied, and he finally pulled back enough to look me in the eye. He seemed to hesitate, before tentatively reaching up to run a hand over my cheek. “Rosalie my place is right here, supporting you.”

  Instantly, I was drawn back to the night The Mothers had attacked, when Edmund had held my hand and defied my mother. He had made me feel braver. Without another thought, I surged forward and kissed him hard on the lips.

  He didn’t even hesitate. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me closer, holding me against his chest as though I were something precious which could disappear at any moment.

  Before we could forget ourselves, a massive crash from outside the house made us pull apart and stare out the window. The Mother’s colossal flying machine was hovering outside. It was gun-metal grey, and I could make out the blur of propellers and ropes tying the conical balloon to the glass compartment at the bottom.

  “But – no,” Edmund said, pulling me closer so that his arm around my waist was tight enough to act as a second corset. “They said you had until sunset – we should have had more time!”

  “I know,” I said, and now that I was staring out the window at the instrument of my demise, I did not feel ready. I wondered if it was too late to turn away. Could I take Edmund and run?

  But no, I thought. I could not turn away from everything I loved just for a few extra years. I would have to be content with everything that I had found until this point. But I would not go quietly – I would not lay down and let The Mothers take everything I had worked so hard for. I would go kicking, screaming, and fighting. I ran my fingers over Edmund’s hand. A part of me was glad that he had refused to leave me to face them alone – another, stronger part, wished that I could bundle him up and hide him away from any dangers.

  He wasn’t going anywhere. He pulled away just enough to look down at me. “Where do you want me?” he asked.

  “Oh, that is a dangerous question to ask,” I said.

  Despite the tension, he snorted in a very ungentlemanly manner. “Clever,” he said wryly.

  I pointed at the trebuchets. “Get those ready. Be careful not to let the globes touch each other.”

  Edmund nodded, finally pulling away enough to move over to the window. I missed the heat of his arms around me, but I pushed the thought away. There would be time for us later, if we survived
this.

  My bedroom window was quite wide. So wide, in fact, that when Edmund opened it there was enough space for an average-sized person to climb through. He was almost decapitated when a zip line shot through and embedded itself on the opposite wall.

  “Be careful!” I shouted.

  I swung around the steam engine and pointed it toward the flying machine. It looked monstrously huge from this angle. I felt my heart pounding in my chest at the sight of it.

  Edmund had recovered quickly and aimed the trebuchet carefully.

  “Wait,” I said. He froze and waited for my signal.

  I recognised her as Elizabeth, the woman who had joined my mother in threatening me during the first attack, standing on the flying machine’s deck. I groped for the pistol on my workbench and stuffed it into my tool belt.

  Within the glass compartment, staring across the void at my bedroom window, was my mother. Her black dress made her look almost demonic. She had her fingers wrapped tightly around the circular steering wheel, and her hair was loose around her shoulders. I could not read her expression from such a distance, but if I had to guess, I would have said that she was glaring at Edmund and me. I was suddenly deliriously happy that Edmund had stayed with me for this. He may have excused himself from my boudoir, but he had not excused himself from my heart.

  The flying machine vibrated and something lowered from the bottom, looking troublingly like a humungous pistol barrel pointed towards the house.

  “Rosalie…” Edmund said slowly, poised like a coiled spring ready to snap at my command.

  “Wait.”

  Elizabeth attached a wired contraption to the zip line and began to slide down to my window. That was how I knew that the flying machine did not intend to fire on the building. At least not while Elizabeth was inside. My mother might be willing to kill me, but she would surely balk at killing her protégée.

  I set my hand on the steam engine and opened the grill to let the coals inside begin to heat. Edmund was watching me closely. I nodded to him.