by Emily Bishop
I want to make a move for it, because he is distracted, but it’s always trained loosely on her.
“So, I learned everything I could about that fucking show, and it took some work. I had to get creative. But I got your phone number out of them, didn’t I?”
“I didn’t care,” Roxanne insists.
I glance at her, and my eyes narrow. She’s the new Roxanne, the one that fell in love with me. The pride is in her eyes. The strength in her chin. She’s back. And she’s going to get us both killed.
“You don’t scare me,” she adds.
Amazingly, Jared lowers the gun.
“Because you still want me, deep down, Roxanne,” he explains for her, like it’s the most regular, understandable thing in the world. “You remember my cock, and you want to be on it again.” His eyes travel heavily over her body, then his eyes flick to me. “You aren’t the only one who came inside her.” His eyes turn back to her, going soulful and intent with memory. “Every night. For years.”
Roxanne is rigid beside me, her eyes fastened to his with pure hatred. “I was on the pill,” she sneers. “I was on the pill the whole time. The maid got me a prescription. Because I fucking begged her too.”
Jared’s jaw sets. She’s done it. They must have been “trying” to get pregnant, as far as Jared knew. She knows where all his landmines are buried.
But why is she infuriating him like this?
Then it hits me: she knows that he doesn’t really want to kill her, and she can distract him. She trusts me to disarm him. Without a word between us, I know we have a plan. My heart gets tight with such love for her.
Jared cocks the gun, though it is still down. “What did you just say?” His face is eerily blank.
“How could you possibly think that I would let you put a baby into that house—”
Jared’s blank face twists again and he goes to step forward, to cross in front of me and attack Roxanne, with or without firing the gun. It’s cocked, but angled at the floor. He’s not looking at me at all. He’s crossing directly in front of me. I have to take it. This is the moment.
My leg flashes out and kicks into his stepping leg. He staggers and the rifle goes off into the ground. Now someone will come. I grip the barrel of the gun quickly, before he can regain his balance, and ram the butt up into his chin. Jared flies backward and slams into the floor in a full sprawl.
Now I have the gun.
Jared’s not getting up. He groans and rolls onto his side, then goes totally limp.
A fine tremble runs all through Roxanne’s body as she climbs to her feet, using the table and the chair for support, and then clings onto my side.
“Blake,” she breathes. Her voice sounds rough. I gaze down at her face, tracked with dry blood.
“Did he—?” I can’t even bear to voice the words. Did he hurt the baby? How much hell did I miss? “Did he hurt you?”
“He only got in one shot, and it was a cheap one,” she tells me. An actual smile blossoms over her lips, and my heart swells with relief.
“You did good.” I settle the shotgun behind us and come wrap my arms around her.
“Thank you.” She buries her face against my shoulder and, for a moment, we’re just pressed together and still. My hand runs slowly up and down her back. “I love you.”
I pull away from her slightly and touch her cheek with my fingertips. “You’ve never said that before.”
“Are you serious? Never?” she wonders.
“Never.”
Her eyes hold mine, and her eyebrows draw together with intensity and sincerity. “I love you, Blake,” she repeats.
My fingertips skate down to her jaw, and her face tilts. Our lips come together and the kiss tastes of blood and sweat and war, but I don’t care. I just want to feel her. I love her, too.
“Then come home,” I plead, running my fingers over her right hand, the one with the knuckles still wrapped in the chain and my house key. “Come home.” Our fingers interlace over the chain, the key pressed between our two palms, and the kiss deepens. Our lips crack open and tongues entwine. For a few seconds, I just drown in her. I can’t even feel the pain. Then we break for air. “Come home,” I breathe against her mouth, ragged now.
A slow grin spreads over Roxanne’s lips, and she nods. “I’m coming home,” she whispers back, winding her free arm around the back of my neck and pulling me down to meet her body. Our fingers still entwine over the key, and she sighs up at the ceiling as I kiss her neck. “I’m coming home.”
Behind us, I hear a deep voice grumble its disapproval. “Who the hell just ruined my 1967 John Lee McCoy nine iron, and is he dead?”
Our lips separate, and Roxanne’s eyes move to Rudy, shuffling down the hallway and holding the back of his head.
“He might as well be,” she tells him, squeezing my hand. I squeeze it back. “He might as well be.”
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I get what I want, and I want her!
Meeting Fiona while returning to my home town was an unexpected surprise.
She doesn’t remember me, but my company put her father out of business.
Beautiful curves fit snugly into tight jeans and enough confidence to take on a lion.
She’s not impressed by my billionaire charm, which turns me on even more.
One little problem.
She thinks I’m someone I’m not.
Lucky for me, there isn’t ANYTHING I can’t overcome.
Prologue
Shane
I was being interviewed for a puff piece article when Bart came barreling into my office. His eyes looked wild, and sweat slicked his brow. Something was seriously wrong.
Bart had been with my company longer than I had, and he’d always been rock-solid in a crisis. For him to be this worked up, the world must be ending.
He looked like he was about to speak until he saw the reporter sitting in front of my desk. Bart stopped short, and his jaw clenched so tightly I thought his teeth might shatter.
Allison, the reporter for the Houston Star, was here to ask me some questions about this year’s Most Eligible Bachelor article. She mostly worked on non-news stories like this, but like any half-decent journalist, she could smell when there was blood in the water.
Her eyes danced back and forth between Bart’s face and mine. She couldn’t hide the intense interest in her gaze. It was time to end this interview before she started asking real questions.
I flashed her my billion-dollar smile and stood up from my desk. “I hate to cut our interview short, Allison. But I need to have a word with Mr. Burrows.”
Allison’s shoulders drooped and her brow furrowed, but she snapped her notebook shut and gathered her things without protest. She’d been around the block enough times to know when to leave.
“I understand,” she said. “Can’t keep the president of the company waiting. Thank you for your time, Mr. Perkins. We’ll reschedule.”
She shook my hand firmly and swept from the room, shutting the door behind her without being asked to do so.
I turned my attention fully on Bart. He was my right-hand man and my strongest supporter, but I’d never seen him wearing an expression quite like this one. Not when we’d found out the shit that my father had caused. Not when his ex-wife had filed for divorce. Not even when she’d taken his kids and moved to the other side of the country.
Fuck.
“What is it?” I asked, my razor-sharp gaze focused firmly on him.
His beefy body collapsed into one of the chairs across from the hulking expanse of my desk.
“There was an accident on one of the oil rigs. People are hurt. We’re waiting for the preliminary report on what caused it, but there seems to have been some kind of explosion.”
The
hairs on the back of my neck rose, and my veins turned to ice. “How long until we get the report?”
“A couple of hours at most.” Beads of sweat dotted his forehead and his coloring was off, but I couldn’t blame him for that.
Incidents at oil rigs are comparable to plane crashes: they occur rarely, but when they do, they have the potential to kill people, cost the company millions of dollars, and spark calls for increased safety measures.
“Do we know how bad the injuries are yet?” It felt like there was a vice grip around my heart. If there were any deaths, I would feel personally responsible.
I started pacing around the office, trying to relieve the ball of stress settling in my stomach. It had already been a long week, but they were all long weeks. They always had been, ever since I took over the company from my father. But nothing like this had ever happened on my watch before.
A catastrophe of this scale had the potential to damage this company irreparably. It might seem callous for me to be thinking about the company at a time like this, but as much as my heart went out to the people impacted by this accident, I had thousands of other employees who still needed a job after all this. Those people and their families were counting on me, too.
Bart dabbed at his sweaty brow with a handkerchief. “We don’t have any official injury reports yet, but they’ll be coming in soon. All I know right now is that it’s bad.”
Armed with the preliminary report and no answers to the questions it contained, I headed for the boardroom down the hall from my office. My board of directors were gathered there to wait for an update.
I started speaking as soon as I strode through the wide double doors, even if I didn’t know what to think about what I had read only minutes before. “Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here on such short notice. Please be seated.”
They sank into their seats as I lowered into mine. “Let me start by saying that it is true that there was an explosion on one of our rigs earlier today. I have reviewed the report myself, and I’m not going to sugarcoat it. It doesn’t look good.”
I wished for a second that I had a pin that I could drop, to confirm my belief that you’d be able to hear it. But there was no pin, and no time for an experiment anyway.
“The choke on the gas buster failed,” I said. “As you well know, the effect of such a failure was that the gas couldn’t escape, and that is what caused the explosion.”
There wasn’t an eyebrow in the room that didn’t shoot up into its owner’s hairline. Shit like equipment failure was bad and very, very rare. The mechanisms were built to be practically failure proof, and they were generally safe. Or they should’ve been, at least. Which was why we would be facing a shit storm in the media very soon, and also why I needed to take a good long look into the supplier.
“We need to face the facts here,” I said. “The public will be demanding, if they’re not already, that I step down for the course of the investigation at the very least.”
A round of protests erupted around the room, interrupting my announcement of the plans I’d already committed to. I was not so set in my ways that I couldn’t change them if I had a good enough reason, but it was going to take some convincing to divert me from the course of action that I was sure would be best for the company under the circumstances.
“Shane, no,” one of them said.
“What’s best for this company is you at the head of it,” another board member argued. “You need to be leading us through this crisis, Shane.”
I raised my hands to quiet the room. “I’ll still be at the helm, steering us through this mess. I will simply be doing so away from the public eye. By taking a step back and letting someone else handle the internal investigation, it will show the public that we’re taking this accident seriously. And that I’m not trying to cover anything up, which I’m not.
“As soon as the heat and public pressure die down, the public will be appeased and more accepting of my remaining in my role as CEO. In the meantime, my dad has a property in Connecticut. I’ll be going there. I think that some of the original procurement documentation from the time when the valve was installed will be at the house, so I might be able to find it and send it back to assist with the investigation. However, as always, I will abide by what you think is the best decision.”
The members of the board looked stunned and started murmuring among themselves. The murmurs grew louder and louder until someone slammed a fist on the table.
“Shane is right,” Bart said. “As much as we need him here, it will reflect badly on our corporate governance, on his leadership, and on our sense of accountability if he doesn’t step away and allow for transparency in the investigation. The last thing we need is people pointing fingers and alleging that he knew of wrongdoing or is protecting his father’s decisions.”
One by one, the other board members nodded in agreement, grim-faced and stressed, but they were behind me and my plan. As always.
“Well, that’s settled, then,” I said. “I’ll be flying out to my dad’s place in Mystic this evening. I’ll be available on my cell and through email, but it’s probably best if we keep our distance as much as possible for purposes of the investigation.”
Mind made up, I adjourned the meeting. I answered a few more questions, said my goodbyes, and strode out of the conference room.
I gathered what I needed from my office and headed straight home, calling my pilot on the way.
“Eric,” I greeted the man that I trusted with one of my favorite toys. “I’ll need the wheels to go up as soon as possible.”
“Sure thing, boss. Where to?”
“Mystic, Connecticut,” I informed him.
Just saying the name of the small town aloud brought back warm childhood memories of fishing off the pier. I remembered the cool breeze rushing in from the water while I dangled my pole in the harbor. The sea gulls hovered overhead, keeping me company with their constant cries. The whole world seemed drenched in a salty, ocean smell. It seeped into my pores and made me feel like I was truly a part of that place. Like I was home.
Eric’s voice brought me back to the present.
“I’ll make the calls and ready the jet. See you at the hangar, boss.” Eric hung up, never one to say more than what was absolutely needed. I appreciated that about him.
True to his word, the jet was fueled up and ready to go by the time I reached the private airstrip. The crew rushed to grab my bags. I took one last look at my surroundings. It would be a while before I was back here in Houston. The thought saddened me as I boarded my plane.
Settling into one of the wide leather recliners, I set up my laptop and dealt with the fallout of the explosion as the jet carried me to one of my childhood homes.
The explosion was simply one loose brick in the empire that my family had been building for generations. I wasn’t going to allow it to cause the whole damn thing to crumble down. Even if I had to hold it up myself all the way from Mystic, Connecticut.
Chapter One
Fiona
Working with my best friend, Drew, was both a blessing and a curse. Right now, it was definitely a curse. I stood atop a stepladder, waiting for him to pass me another can of paint so I could restock the top shelf. But the can never came.
I turned around to see what the hold up was. Drew’s lanky body was hunched over his phone, his thumbs tapping quickly on the screen. I couldn’t see his face, only the dark, tangled mess of his hair.
“Are you seriously texting right now?” I asked.
He grinned without looking up. “It’s an emergency.”
“Sure it is,” I said. “What’s her name?”
“Cordelia,” Drew said, drawing out her name like a sigh.
I rolled my eyes. “Are you sure she didn’t give you a fake name? Because that sounds fake as hell.”
His smiled widened. “I’m sure I don’t care. As long as she agrees to go out with me tonight, I’ll call her whatever she wants.”
“Well, do
you think your flavor of the week can wait until we finish restocking the paint?” I asked.
“Love waits for nothing, Fiona,” he said.
I snorted. “Love? Like you’d know anything about that.”
Drew finally looked up then and raised an eyebrow at me. “Ouch. You know I’m a romantic at heart. You might be, too, if you got a little action every once in a while.”
I shook my head. “Getting laid and being in love are not the same thing. If you spent more than a week with a girl, you’d know that.”
He smiled at me. “Oh, Fee. I think you need to worry about your own love life instead of mine. Then you might actually have one.”
“I have a love life,” I said, but the words sounded unconvincing, even to me.
“One that’s not powered by batteries, I mean,” Drew said, shaking his head in mock sadness.
I was about to tease him right back, but I stopped myself. “Goddammit, Drew. You always do this.”
He looked at me innocently. “What? Bring up your vibrator? Not always. Maybe once a week, tops.”
“No,” I said. “You always find a way to sidetrack the conversation when I ask you to work.”
He made an offended sound. “That hurts. I’m just worried about you. Clearly, you’re all wound up and stressed. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be lashing out at me, your oldest and dearest friend in the world. Which is why I think you need to get laid. Not just for your sake, but for mine.”
I sighed. “You’re not wrong. I just—” I stopped short and groaned. “Dammit, you’re doing it again. Please stop distracting me. We need to get this done.”