The Billionaire's Secrets
Meadow Taylor
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
The Billionaire’s Secrets. Copyright © 2012 by Meadow Taylor.
All rights reserved.
For my darling husband
“All my heart is yours, sir: it belongs to you; and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Chapter 1
The fog was so thick Chloe didn’t see the car until it was almost on top of her. Certainly she didn’t have time to react. One moment she was slogging along the road bent under the weight of her bags and suitcases, and the next moment she was eye to eye with a Rolls-Royce hood ornament!
The car ground to a halt inches from her, and she could feel the warmth of the engine against her face. Blinded by the headlights, frozen with shock, she stood rooted to the spot, not even sure for a moment whether she had been hit or not. Then, she heard the car door open and a man’s voice yelled out of the darkness. “What are you doing? Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
His voice penetrated the shock. Finally able to react, she let out a cry. She dropped her bags and staggered back from the car, only to trip over one of her suitcases and fall on her behind. “I...I didn’t see you,” she gasped. She raised her arm to shield her eyes from the glare of the lights, but still she could not see the owner of the voice.
Suddenly she became aware that while he wasn't visible, she was definitely in the spotlight. Her coat and skirt were bunched up around her hips, her legs spread at an immodest angle. She felt a hole open up in her stocking over her knee. One of her cases had sprung open, and bright white bras, slips, and panties spilled onto the road. Feeling her face flush with embarrassment, she grabbed at the escaped lingerie and stuffed it into her old suitcase as she scrambled to her feet.
With the lights no longer in her eyes, she was no longer blinded, though what she saw almost made her fall over again.
He was standing by the side of his car, fashionably dressed in a long black cashmere coat. He was not wearing a hat, and his hair was black and thick. Hair to run your fingers through, she thought absurdly. The dense fog and the dark night suited him. Sexy, dark, mysterious, he was so handsome that she wondered for a moment whether the car really had hit her. Maybe she was dead. Only was he some heavenly angel or the devil himself? He looked angry enough to be the devil. His eyes flashed fire, his movie-star features set in hard lines. “What the hell are you doing here anyway?” he asked, his voice low and cold.
Nervously, Chloe took a step back. “I’m looking for Widow’s Cliff,” she stammered. “It’s the name of a house...,” her voice trailed off.
“I know it’s the name of a house,” he interrupted her impatiently. “It happens to be my house. And who are you?”
“You’re Gaelan Byrne?” she asked in dismay. Perhaps she would have preferred him to be the devil. Preferable to meet the devil on a dark country road than to find out that this man - so good-looking and yet so rude - was her new employer!
“And who wants to know? You’re not some damned journalist, are you? I’m sick and tired of you people - why do you think I live way the hell out here?” The night was cold, and his words came out in clouds, merging with the fog.
“No, no, I’m Chloe.” She wondered if she should extend her hand but decided against it, putting them both instead in her pockets. He didn't look like he wanted to shake her hand. The interviewer had told her he was a widower, so she had expected someone older. Not even the fact that he had a six-year-old child had deterred her image of him as grey-haired. Old enough to be her father, old enough that a romantic relationship would be completely out of the question. After her last experience, she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to be involved with another man again. “I’m the new tutor,” she said unsurely.
He said nothing, his expression morphing from anger into distaste. Maybe she didn't need to worry - his bad manners were very quickly making up for his good looks. But then bad manners were not very appealing in an employer either. She felt a premonition of impending disaster.
“For your little girl,” she explained with a sigh. “I thought someone was supposed to meet me at the St. John’s airport. Nobody came. I figured maybe the car had broken down or something, and I didn’t have your phone number... I had to take a bus...” She was on a roll now, reciting the litany of disasters that had occurred since leaving her apartment in Boston that morning. The nerve of him getting angry with her! She was the one who had stood around the airport all afternoon before catching a shuttle to Puffin’s Cove. Then the local bus driver had dropped her on the side of the highway, telling her the house was still a mile down a dirt road. Then this man almost runs her over with his fancy car. Her stockings were torn, she was freezing…
Suddenly he started to laugh, but there was no warmth in it, and his eyes still shot lightning bolts at her. He was definitely laughing at her, not with her.
“It’s not funny,” she protested, feeling a slightly hysterical edge creep into her voice.
He stopped laughing. “You’re right, it’s not funny,” he said soberly. “It’s infuriating." He threw up his hands. “I can’t believe my assistant hired you. Not only do you walk down the centre of dark roads not paying any attention, you can’t even arrive on the right day.”
“It’s the right day,” she said defensively. “It’s April the seventh today.”
“And you were to start on the seventeenth.”
“No, the seventh,” she insisted. “The man in Boston who interviewed me told me the seventh.”
“That man in Boston is my second-in-command. I can assure you he has never made a mistake in his life.” He leaned against the car and crossed his arms. He looked her up and down as if he had never seen anything that disgusted him more. Chloe wouldn't have been surprised if he found the squashed bugs on his windshield more appealing. “Let me correct that. Never made a mistake until he hired you. What did you do? Flash those sexy legs at him?” Well, at least she had scored points for having nice legs. Or had she? Wasn't he accusing her of seducing his assistant?
She opened her mouth to make some sort of retort in her defense, but no words came to her.
He looked pleased that he had rendered her speechless. He opened the car door, then turned to her. Chloe was very aware of his dark, smoldering eyes locked on hers. “You’ve got half a mile more," he said coolly. "I have a meeting tonight, and you’ve made me late. The housekeeper will let you in. Now, pay attention to where you’re going. If you miss the house, you’ll walk right off the cliff. And you wouldn’t want to do that - it’s a three-hundred foot drop onto the rocks, and it’s been done before.”
It was obvious he was waiting for her to get out of his way. Mortified, Chloe grabbed her bags and struggled to the edge of the road. And while he had sounded as if he would be delighted if she fell off a cliff, the least he could have done was offer to take her bags!
“Consider it a chance to redeem yourself," he said, watching her impassively. "If you get to the house alive, I’ll reconsider my decision to fire you on the spot.” He got into the car and put it into gear. She stood among her bags and watched helplessly as the huge silver car rolled past her. He didn't even look at her, and within moments the taillights were swallowed by the fog.
The sound of the car soon faded too, and in the quiet she could hear the distant roar of the ocean. Angry tears pricked at her eyes as she arranged her bags in her arms and continued on the road to the house. It was so dark and misty
she couldn’t see more than a foot in front of her. Conscious now of the threat of cars, she walked on the edge where the gravel met the grass. She wasn’t too worried about dropping off a cliff - the bus driver had said to keep to the road and it would lead her right to the door. As she walked, she thought back to Gaelan's words. You'll walk right off the cliff, and you wouldn't want to do that. It was pretty obvious that if she did, it wouldn't bother him in the least.
How had she gotten herself into this mess? She hadn’t even started her new job, and already everything was going wrong. That is, if she still had a job. It wasn't looking too hopeful at the moment. It sure wasn't what she'd pictured when she had answered the ad in the back of the magazine for retired teachers. Not that she was retired. She had in fact been fired. All thanks to Shawn.
But the ad had looked like the answer to her problems - a job, and a way of putting distance between herself and Shawn. She had met Shawn on a white-water rafting adventure trip in Maine a year ago. He was a teacher too, and their relationship seemed like a natural. Before long, they were living together. A few months later, she lost her job at a private school due to declining enrollment. The financial crisis had hit the Boston banking community hard, with many families pulling their kids from the school. Out of a job and short of money, she was also forced to leave her Master’s in Education program a few credits shy of her degree. Luckily, she found another teaching position at a nearby boarding academy. True, she lied on her resume about already having that degree, but it was a requirement for the job and what else was she to do? Her parents couldn’t help - the stock market crash had wiped out almost all their retirement savings, and now they were forced to work at The Home Depot on Cape Cod to make ends meet. The headmaster never would have even known - if it hadn’t been for Shawn.
Shawn had asked her to marry him, and she was close to saying yes, when he told her he couldn’t see them having a family. In her heart, she realized this was a deal breaker - she adored children. That’s why she had become a teacher, and she couldn’t imagine her future without a few of her own. And at thirty-two, she didn’t want to wait much longer to start. But when she told him this, he’d become petulant, swearing that if it was so important to her, why hadn’t she told him before? She had, but clearly he didn’t think it important enough to remember. The fights had been terrible, and in the end, he’d grudgingly agreed in the end that maybe one child would be okay. But Chloe knew this wasn’t good enough. She didn’t want to raise a child with a father who was only “okay” with the idea and so broke off the relationship. Shawn was furious. Still unable to grasp the simple concept of how important a family was to her, he became convinced it had to be more. Certain now she was having an affair, he informed her new headmaster about her lack of a degree. The headmaster wasted no time in firing her. And if that wasn’t revenge enough, all their friends sided with him, so not only was she boyfriendless and childless, she was also jobless and friendless.
She didn’t have the nerve to ask for a reference, even though her work record and ratings were otherwise impeccable, and things were looking pretty bleak until she saw the ad in the magazine. A companion/tutor for a six-year-old girl in a secluded oceanside setting in Newfoundland, the ad had read. She'd pictured herself taking long walks along the ocean, early nights, easy work. She was used to teaching twenty children at a time - just one would be a breeze!
She had answered the ad and to her surprise received an answer almost immediately, asking her for an interview the very next day at the Boston offices of Byrne Investments. From the signs in the lobby, she determined there were also offices in Montreal and San Francisco. The man who interviewed her introduced himself as Marcus and his employer as often away on business. He asked her several questions about her own education and interests and seemed especially pleased that thanks to her French-Canadian mother she spoke fluent French. Much to her relief, he did not mention references. He hired her on the spot and asked her to start on April 7. Or so she had thought.
At least the bus driver had been right. The road did lead right to the house. She saw the glow of lights through the fog only steps before reaching the door. The sound of the ocean battering against the rocks filled the air. The cliff was very close now. She put down her bags and paused to regain her breath before ringing the bell. The door was huge, made up of heavy oak panels. There was no window, and Chloe thought it looked like the door to a castle, not a house. She looked up at the facade to where it disappeared into the fog and decided that perhaps it was a castle. It was built with huge stone blocks, and light flowed from diamond-paned leaded windows. In her imagination she had pictured a cozy wooden house, its siding weathered with salt and wind, like the ones seen in calendar pictures of the New England coast. But this was anything but cozy. It was downright daunting, and when she rang the bell she wondered for a moment if it would be answered by a hunchback named Igor.
But it wasn’t Igor. It was a little girl with blond curls and an angelic face. My new student, Chloe thought, her heart already opening up to the child. But the girl obviously didn’t feel the same way. She took one look at Chloe, her eyes widened with fear, and started to scream!
* * *
Gaelan navigated his way through the fog, cursing it, his friend and assistant Marcus, the occasion that had made this trip necessary, and the woman he had just left on the side of the road. He probably shouldn’t have been so hard on her. It was just that all things combined, he had been pretty furious. The sight of her in his headlights had been a shock, and even though he had immediately slammed on his brakes, he was sure he was going to hit her. Really, he had only yelled at her because his adrenaline had gone into overdrive. Well, at first. What was it about her that immediately started to irritate him? It was the way she looked up at him from the ground, he decided. The way she had scrambled around picking up her things, pulling down her coat, embarrassed and modest. After Colleen, these glimpses of vulnerability in a woman no longer brought out the gentlemanly side of him but rather made him instantly angry.
Fair enough. Colleen’s vulnerability turned out to be a calculated game that was intended to trap him. Marcus constantly reminded him that not all women were like her, but Gaelan knew when one was as rich as he was, the Colleens of the world beat a pathway to the door. A couple of others had tried since her, and Gaelan had been pretty quick in telling them where to go. Being taken for a fool once was more than enough for him.
He liked the look of this woman all right. Whereas Colleen had been the tall, thin, half-starved model type, this girl was not nearly as tall and, if what he had seen of those legs was any indication, all curves. Just my type, he thought. That is if I still have a type, he corrected himself.
He couldn’t believe Marcus had hired this woman! He hit the steering wheel with one of his gloved hands. He had been more than clear that he wanted a retired teacher, sixty at least. Someone old enough to not get any ideas about wooing her way into his bed and fortune. Someone old enough that he, in a weak moment, would not find himself looking at with lust. He had in mind a sexless, seventy-year old in support hose and tweed. As much a grandmother for Sophia as a tutor. And here Marcus sends this girl - and one with legs that could drive a man crazy!
Surely this girl was up to no good. Otherwise why would she have applied for the job? No attractive young woman would want to isolate herself like this - unless she had something in mind. He was sure he had fortune-hunter-proofed his ad, but no doubt he had been wrong. And even if he had, he knew enough women who the moment they got a whiff of his money had been on him like a bloodhound - even ones that had a considerable amount of their own. Where money was concerned, there was never too much.
The fog was lighter on the highway, and it wasn’t long before he reached the town of Puffin’s Cove. He didn’t want to be here, but he had promised to put in a showing at the town council meeting to support a motion on declaring a nearby wetland an environmentally protected region. Gaelan sometimes found himself at odds wit
h some of the local businesses and politicians who believed everything, including the environment, was fair game when it came to making money. He saw it instead as everyone’s duty to make sure there was still a planet around for future generations, and he was seen by some as an environmental champion.
However, he found it hard to concentrate on the meeting, which turned out to be even more contentious than he had predicted. All he could think of was this girl, worming her way into Sophia’s good graces as she planned how she would worm her way into his. Better to get rid of her sooner rather than later. The child didn’t need to feel like she was being deserted yet again. Damn, he was going to kill Marcus!
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