by Ava Claire
To Love A Billionaire (The Billionaire’s Baby Series, #5)
Ava Claire
Copyright © 2016
Cover by RBA Designs
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The Billionaire’s Baby Series
To Want A Billionaire, #1
To Need A Billionaire, #2
To Crave A Billionaire, #3
To Trust A Billionaire, #4
To Love A Billionaire, #5
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E-book License Edition Notes
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Table of Contents
Copyright Page
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Billionaire’s Baby Series
About the Author
Chapter Twenty-Two
Angelique tossed the keys at me, but her parting threat made me miss the pass completely.
“I suggest you keep an eye on the time. I’m starving, so I’m liable to start cutting things if you’re late.”
She’d been waving a gun around like it was no biggie, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when she threatened to do someone physical harm. She’d already proven that she wasn’t just talk. She’d left an innocent woman in the hands of a psychopath. She’d forced Alicia and I to stand outside the room where they were holding Jacob hostage, powerless and losing our collective minds as we listened to the blows rain down on the man we loved. She’d forced a nurse on me one minute, then demonstrated that she had no qualms about harming me, pregnant or not. And she’d just flung a set of keys at me that would set my husband free and yet, her words made it clear that we remained bound by the Eichmann’s.
I thought the physical threat was the thing to fear, to fight, but it hit me that the psychological warfare was infinitely worse.
It was a battle that my mind couldn’t handle, packing up and burrowing inside itself. Henchmen and flying bullets were somehow foes that I could weather, but the knife? The knife paralyzed me.
There was something disturbingly personal about the act of advancing, blade gleaming in the shadow of the candlelight that made my stomach drop to the floor. My skin turned to gooseflesh at the thought of that serrated edge slicing across someone’s skin.
Maybe it was because I knew all too well what it felt like to be on the other side of the knife. To be powerless, in the grip of a someone who had zero issues about making me bleed.
It didn’t matter that time had healed the wounds from my kidnapping, or that we were entrenched in a whole new catastrophe that required all hands on deck.
It didn’t matter that not catching the keys and flying to Jacob’s aid was costing us precious time.
I floated outside myself, all smoke and regret and white hot terror. I parted my lips to shout, to tell myself to move, goddamn it! Blinking alone seemed like a tall order. I was trapped in a kung fu movie where the words rushed to catch up with the mouth. My fingers reached out for the keys, oblivious to the fact that they were already on the floor, a tangle of metal at my feet. And my worries that any sudden movements would further set off our captor? Irrelevant, since Angelique was long gone. The fears that flooded my mind pulled me under, like quicksand that would devour me the more I moved.
Two syllables that sounded a lot like my name echoed in my ear. It was a musical sound, a jingle, a candy sweet and harmonic thing that reminded me of the lingering notes a spinning crib mobile makes. The light in my belly that could usually pull me out of any darkness sent a warm beam through the terror, but I was still paralyzed by fear. The darkness rushed back in and all I saw was the metal, sharp and glittering. The shadows it created on the floor stretched like clawed monsters with razor sharp teeth.
It’s not over.
You’re a fighter.
You will get through this.
You have to.
This time when I blinked I regained control, embracing the tears that spritzed my cheeks. As I drew unsteady breaths and pulled myself from the depths, I dismissed the notion that all was lost. That I should stay in the darkness and throw in the towel here.
The baby that was nestled inside me, refusing to be still, refusing to let the negativity level me? That was real. The keys at my feet that would free Jacob? They were real.
Shaky but determined, I bent my knees and swiped them. My fingers rattled as I squeezed the keys so tight I felt the imprint on my bones.
The metal, cool and jagged, pulled me back down that defeated road.
The woman that was fighting to regain her mental footing dashed back to her bed and burrowed under the covers. She stuck fingers into both ears to shut out this new reality. Maybe if she squeezed her eyes shut hard enough, it would all go away. And when she woke up, she’d be back at home.
Jacob’s arm draped around her.
Safe and sound.
“Leila.”
New tears, along with new worries, flooded me.
Who was Angelique going to cut? Why hadn’t I seen the truth? If I’d been paying attention instead of being starstruck-
“Leila!”
The voice repeated my name, louder this time, but it was lost in the crunch of metal. The gnashing of teeth. The begging as Angelique wielded the knife.
As she slid it into someone.
Or maybe the blade would flash like lightning, the air whistling as it sliced towards a frantic hand, held steady by Marco or Tomás.
“Leila, you have to-”
The only thing my mind had to do, and seemed capable of doing, was to stay in this place. To see this terrifying scenario that I created to its bloody end.
Knowing Angelique, the real Angelique beneath all the lies and theatre, she would do one better.
She’d make me hold the hand.
Powerless.
The victim, innocent, would beg me to help them. To spare them. But how could I help them if I couldn’t help myself? If I couldn’t see the psychopath in a celebrity’s clothing?
“LEILA!”
Even if Jacob’s voice hand’t sent a lightning bolt that lit up the dark, rushing through my fog of terror, our baby shimmied inside me and I swore I felt the love reading from the heart of me.
The keys balled in my fists transformed the metal ring into plastic. The silver coating was traded for bright, happy colors. When I saw myself, I wasn’t frozen in terror, forced to do Angelique’s bidding or face dire consequences; I was folding onesies, pausing mid conversation when I saw our lil one was T-minus two seconds away from popping that rainbow colored teething ring that was on the floor into her (or his) mouth. With the ninja-like skill of a mom ready to take on germs and dust bunnies, I swiped it and flew to the bathroom, rinsing it off while I rolled my eyes at my mother’s insistence that my teething rings lived on the floor and I turned out alright. Jacob’s chuckle filtered in from the other room as he overheard our phone debate.
I couldn’t help but linger in this.
Explore this look at what could be.
While this happy place was preferable to the events unfolding at the moment, I had to fight for the future.
The
room flickered back into focus and I wrangled that fear and got my bearings. My gaze darted away from the regal four poster bed, the luxury duvet speckled with Jacob’s blood. The glitter of something that looked a lot like brass knuckles.
My throat was on fire, the fear lodged firmly in my chest, ready to reclaim the wheel.
I scrambled away from the bed and what had happened to my husband, needing neutral territory. My dark eyes shot to a framed portrait of a woman who looked as formidable as I needed to be to help us out of this mess. The woman had Alicia’s beautifully terse features, her golden brown pin curls held back by a studded hair clip. Her eyes were the color of midnight and despite the smile on her lips, it was clear that she preferred to scowl.
Jacob’s grandmother.
Jacob!
I whirled to him, the heat of embarrassment seizing my cheeks like hands slapping my face. I felt stinging, choking shame as I looked at the man I loved with everything in me, swollen and broken, I felt weak.
He hadn’t wasted seconds, minutes, by having a nervous breakdown. Parts of him that he probably didn’t even know could hurt were likely screaming in pain. That was his reality. Not the imaginings of what could be, lingering in a place filled with what could happen.
I dashed to him, cradling his bruised face in my hands, and I couldn't help but force my lips against his. My tongue dove into his mouth, tasting love and worry. Terror and agony. Stealing a kiss, just in cass it was the last time we’d kiss. Making it count as I weaved my fingers through his ebony waves, a sob echoing from my throat when I felt something wet. Heart breaking at the fact that when I pulled away and looked at my fingertips, they wouldn’t be tinged with sweat.
I ended the kiss, my forehead against his, my eyes still closed as I prayed for strength. “I’m so sor-”
“If you finish that statement, I’ll take you over my knee.”
My eyes flew open at that, my eyebrows nearly touching the ceiling. I half expected my weary mind to be messing with me again, distracting me from this brutal reality. But his eye, blue and gorgeous, was sparkling with mischief, wrapped in so much love that it took my breath away. It would have been easy to gasp and tell him that now wasn’t the time for jokes, but I saw it in his gaze. I felt it in my chest. We would get through this, and if cracking a joke or two was how we did it, so be it.
Swiping my eyes with the back of my hand, I jingled the key ring. “I wouldn’t threaten me with any discipline until I get you out of the chair. Just sayin’.” My face fell as I tried several of what felt like dozens of keys and came up empty. “I wasted so much time and now I can’t find the damn key!”
“Take a breath,” he said calmly. His face was as still as time, pausing like it did whenever he said he loved me. Whenever our lips met. “Don’t worry about what Angelique said. You can find the key, babe You’ve got this.”
I angrily forced a key into the lock, practically breaking it off when it didn’t go all the way in. “How can I not worry about Angelique threatening to slice and dice someone if we don’t meet her deadline, which I’m pretty sure has already passed?”
“Exactly,” he answered gently. “This isn’t about deadlines. It’s about power. That woman will do what she wants, up to and including hurting people, whether we hustle in just in time or we show up a few minutes late. She’s playing with us.”
I knew he was right, but I still kept flying through keys, some of which I knew I’d tried already, wondering if there actually was a key that would unlock the chains at all. This was all a game to her. And even if we had managed to be on time, she’d pull something else out of her ass to excuse her doing something awful. Jacob’s shirt was untucked, so she’d have to punch someone. My hair was too messy, so she’d have to scalp someone. We weren’t scarfing down our food, so she’d have to take someone’s teeth.
If she could see me now, she’d probably be grinning from ear to ear while I flailed, crying, blubbering, trying to find the key to no avail.
I stopped cycling through the ring and sucked in a couple of breaths, trying to listen to reason. Trying to listen to my husband.
“The key is there.” His voice was steady. Soothing. “You just have to find it.”
My nostrils flared indignantly at his words and that drew a weary chuckle from him.
“Still my defiant little sub, eh?”
I almost stuck my tongue out at him, but when I landed on the right key and it twisted, padlock clattering to the floor, I let out a triumphant whoop instead, complete with fist pumping. “Ye-Oh!”
Apparently. procrastination and wasting time was something he wanted to take a crack at too. He shot up like a man with things to do and number one on his list was to pick up where I’d left off.
He roped an arm around my waist and snatched my body against his. Our first kiss had been one of passion. Of longing. This one was apocalyptic. Our teeth clanged, hands all over the place, pulling, scratching, gripping. His groans were equal parts pain and lust and he didn’t let me ask if I was hurting him or if he was okay. His mouth plundered me with abandon. With one sole mission to let me know that no matter what, as long as he had breath, I belonged to him, and he belonged to me...and there was nothing Angelique or anyone else could do to change that.
His hands, powerful and mischievous, still gripped my butt, and my body was more than willing to make use of the bed right behind us, but I pressed my hands against his solid chest, reluctantly ending the kiss.
He swept my curls behind my ear, grazing his knuckles along my jaw. “I know, the plan. But I’ve spent the past two hours thinking of nothing but the light at the end of the tunnel.” His eyes danced over my face and just in case I had any doubts that this man was madly in love with me, the devotion and desire that swirled in the waves of blue righted that wrong. His love consumed me. Lifted me up because he was the light at the end of my tunnel, too. Then and now.
His jawline hardened, the edges as sharp as the imagined knife that had turned me to stone a few minutes ago. “The things that he said he would do to you, to my mother.” Jacob cleared is throat, trying to get a handle on his emotions. On his rage. “Everything he did to me, I swore I’d give it back to him and then some if he even breathed in your direction...”
He trailed off and I almost threw my arms around him. Squeezed until I exorcised the demons that I knew were at the door. The memories from this would haunt us like ghosts.
Even if Soren, Angelique, any of the people who’d tormented us and those we cared about got to feel a fraction of the pain they’d doled out, it wouldn’t heal the wounds that were left. The invisible pain would linger, aching every time we lied and said that we were fine. Every time we fought to push this day to the back of our minds when we got out of this.
When.
Not if.
I interlaced my fingers with his and stared into his eyes, wading into the blue. I knew the storm that raged there; knew that it would be as easy as breathing for him to scorch the earth, leaving destruction in his wake. To disappear inside himself. Dust off the mask we’d worked so hard to put away. Heck, even I was struggling to find the balance between vulnerable and fierce. Trying to remember that being courageous didn’t mean that you squashed ever trace of fear. Trying to remind myself that fear didn’t have to be weakness.
There were men with guns, led by a woman who had no problem getting her hands dirty. A woman who was even more terrifying than her father because the mask she wore was so deceiving that she’d convinced the world that she was a beautiful actress who spent her time reading scripts and honing her craft when in reality, her spare time was spent doing her criminal father’s bidding...and loving every minute of it.
So instead of steeling my spine like before and letting my husband lay cover fire while I helped him build a wall and pretended there'd wasn’t a lot at stake, I brought his hand to my lips and pressed a kiss on his knuckles. Gently brushed the tender grooves that were raw from a couple of solid blows he’d dealt to his captors b
efore he lost the advantage.
“All of them—Angelique, Soren, Marco, Tomás, Eichmann—they made a huge mistake.” I looked Jacob right in the eye. “They targeted the Whitmore’s. They thought they could break us. Physically. Emotionally.” The next part felt like I’d picked up the pliers from the bed and was trying to wrench a tooth from my mouth. Too painful to say out loud, but damn necessary if we truly wanted to get out of this. “And they did. They broke us, Jacob.”
He looked ready to interject, his pride rendering him incapable of acknowledging that truth, but I didn’t stop. I needed to say this. I needed him to understand.
“Eichmann’s arrival made us hire a body guard. You worked your contacts and put him under surveillance. I was locked up in ‘Whitmore Tower’ like some damsel in distress.”
Those waves, the powerful blue eyes that slayed me every time, looked ready to take someone down. To tear someone limb from limb.
It would have been foolish for anyone else to approach Jacob Whitmore when he had murder in his eyes. His hands were fists of muscle and anger, shaking at his side. His gaze was far off, picturing a whirlwind carousel with the faces of Eichmann, Soren, and Angelique streaking past and laughing manically. Taunting him.
So I reached for him, my fingertips gliding across the angry planes of his jaw. “We never imagined they’d go this far. How could we have known that a client, an actress heralded as the next big thing, was carrying this secret? How could we have known that while we were watching Eichmann, they were watching us?”
His eyes flickered to me, softening before they went back to sea glass. “I failed you. I-”
“No.” I pressed a finger against his lips, my heart wringing in my chest because I heard the pain wrapped around his words. I saw the weight of the situation that he unfairly carried on his shoulders. “You didn’t fail me, Jacob. We underestimated them.” I dropped my hands and this time, when I stood up tall, focused, ready as I was gonna be, it wasn’t an act. “Unfortunately for them, they underestimated us, too.”
Jacob’s brow furrowed, missing a piece to bring this puzzle together.