All That He Loves (Volume 2 The Billionaires Seduction)

by Thorne, Olivia

  “Okay, well, let’s talk about these photos – who is this mystery woman? The reports say her name is Lily Ross – ”

  Connor’s face set almost imperceptibly. “That’s correct, but I’d really appreciate it if you leave Lily alone. You can come after me as much as you want, but she’s an innocent victim in Miranda’s and my parents’ plot to try to destroy my plans to help America.”

  “Well, she’s kind of made herself a public figure here – ”

  Connor smiled coldly. “No, Miranda and my parents made her a public figure to try to blackmail me.”

  “Yes, well, is there any truth to the allegations that you paid her $50,000?”

  Connor tackled it head-on, not angry, just levelheaded and smooth as silk. “Oh, yes, that’s completely true. But I know what the insinuation is – that I paid her $50,000 for sex. That IS what you’re thinking, right?”

  “Well – it does raise questions – ”

  “Lily’s my girlfriend. We’re in a committed relationship.”

  My heart soared. Suddenly all the strange awkwardness of an hour ago was forgotten.

  “ The money I gave her was a gift, not a payment,” Connor continued. “Yes, those photos are regrettable – I lost my head, I took her there, I begged her to do it, she did it for me, to make ME happy, against her better judgment – ”

  I frowned a little. What he was saying wasn’t exactly wrong, but it made me seem like a little lost sheep. I hadn’t exactly fought that hard. And any fool could see from the photos that I had enjoyed it – immensely.

  “ – but she shouldn’t be punished because she cares for me. If anybody wants to come after me, that’s fine, I’m a public figure. But I’m asking people to please give Lily her privacy. She was just trying to make me happy, and now Miranda and my parents are hell-bent on destroying her just so they can continue to line their pockets with dirty, polluted money.”

  Again, the nervous, titillated laughter from the host. “I’ve got to be honest, Connor, I think there are a lot of women watching this show right now who would have been HAPPY to, uh, try to make you happy.”

  I felt a little surge of relief that she wasn’t judging me – and a little spike of anger: Hey, quit flirting with him!

  Connor grinned. “Well, I certainly hope people can see it that way and put the blame where it belongs – on my ex-fiancée and my parents, for trying to destroy an innocent woman’s life.”

  “She’s your girlfriend, you say?”

  Again, that almost imperceptible setting of Connor’s expression. I wondered if I was the only one who could see it, or if it was apparent to everyone else watching the show.

  “Yes. Yes, she is.”

  “Soooo… you’re in love with her, I’m assuming?”

  His smile became more fixed, like he had to struggle a bit to maintain it. “Yes. Yes, I am. Very much so.”

  An ice-cold shadow passed over my soul.

  It was the only statement he’d made the entire time that wasn’t entirely convincing.

  36

  Connor said his goodbyes to the GMA host, then they cut to commercial.

  I remembered something about Fox, and flipped through the New York channels until I found the cable news station. I didn’t have to wait long before the whole rigmarole started again.

  There were the pictures, the ‘shocking scandal’ quotes, Connor’s introduction as a billionaire. There was a slightly different tone this time – the hosts were more combative, and seemed to view him with self-righteous smugness and more than a little mistrust. Especially when he brought up the solar company.

  “Wait, wait – are you saying there’s something wrong with the coal and oil industries?”

  “They were appropriate for their time,” Connor said, “which ended as soon as the researchers I’m funding found an easy, inexpensive way to harness solar power and distribute electricity. No pollution, and energy independence from the Middle East. Surely you’d like our country not to have to depend on the whims of OPEC and countries that don’t have our interests at heart? I mean, we’re talking about regimes that fund terrorists – I want us to get away from them IMMEDIATELY, and give Americans inexpensive, clean energy while I do it.”

  “Well, I don’t disagree with you there, Connor, but coal – Kentucky, for instance, or West Virginia – Kentucky’s economy depends on coal, there are so many places in America that would be destroyed, absolutely decimated, if you do what you say you’re going to do.”

  “Go ask all those Kentucky coalminers who have black lung, go ask all those families who’ve lost fathers and brothers and sons in the mines, if they wouldn’t like to have their family members back.”

  “Well, that may be the case, but they still want to have a job and put food on the table.”

  “My companies will be hiring for tens of thousands of jobs – we’re going to need factory workers, people to do the installations out in the desert, technicians to keep five million solar panels running, construction workers to build new plants, people to upgrade the entire electrical grid across America – and we’re going to have to train people for that, we’ll have to educate them, we’re talking about ordinary people being able to leave one industry and start in an entirely new one. Trust me, for every coalminer that loses his job, we’ll have a new job available for him if he doesn’t mind moving west.”

  “Yes, but, you’re talking about destroying those local economies – ”

  “And YOU’RE talking about letting my parents and my ex-fiancée continue to make billions of dollars on the backs and the graves of those Kentucky coalminers, but you don’t seem to have a problem with THAT.”

  It spiraled into a shouting match for awhile, but it eventually came back to what everyone was really interested in: the sex scandal. When the issue of our relationship came up, they went straight for the jugular – the $50,000 and the scandalous nature of the photographs.

  But then, something unexpected happened. Somebody – one of the show’s producers, maybe – had watched the GMA interview just a few minutes before.

  “You said in a previous interview that you love Ms. Ross.”

  Connor’s face tightened the tiniest bit. “Yes. I do.”

  This time, the hosts were more jovial, almost ribbing him good-naturedly. “‘I do’ – is that something we might be hearing again sometime soon, in front of a minister? ‘I do’? Maybe some wedding bells in the future for you and Ms. Ross? Or, should I say, Mrs. Templeton?”

  Connor’s smile froze. His eyes looked like a trapped animal’s. “Well, we’ll just have to see what the future holds.”

  I wanted to cry – and not from happiness.

  37

  The slowly creeping nightmare continued, channel to channel, minute to minute.

  The first interviews were all about the scandal, the photos, the implied prostitution. And Connor stayed right on track, repeating the same phrases over and over again, about wanting to ‘give America inexpensive, clean energy’ and how Miranda and his father were lining their pockets while practicing blackmail and screwing over the average American. It almost became funny how many times he mentioned ‘America’ and ‘American,’ as though Connor was the red-blooded patriot, and his family and Miranda were gangrene, rotting away the soul of all that was good and decent.

  Which was kind of over the top – but, yeah, they absolutely were psychopathic assholes, so maybe it wasn’t so overblown.

  But over the course of the morning, things began to change. Subtly at first, then with even greater speed.

  Ever hear of ‘the Narrative’ in the ‘Mainstream Media’? I never heard about it until I watched Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, when he would excoriate news programs for not reporting subtle or contradictory details. He basically said that when news programs reported stories, they created ‘a Narrative’ – a frame that they put around the facts, a structure that tied everything together in a neat little bow. Basically, a way to understand things in five seconds or les
s. The story underneath the story – the underdog narrative, the ‘Mr. Smith Goes To Washington’ narrative, the ‘hometown kid makes good’ narrative, the ‘Congress is a bunch of idiots’ narrative. Jon Stewart’s problem was that ‘the Narrative’ became a filter, a pair of rose-colored glasses through which the news programs viewed everything, and anything that was messy or contradicted the Narrative got left out.

  In this case, it wasn’t that the messy, sex scandal stuff got left out.

  It was that I could see the Narrative change before my very eyes.

  It was gradual, but it was there.

  The earliest shows concentrated on how shocking and scandalous the photos were, and how bad I must be – after all, Connor had paid me $50,000. I must be a prostitute, right? And as we all know, prostitutes are bad, bad, bad.

  Sarcasm in that last sentence, if you didn’t catch it. No, I don’t want people to think I’m a prostitute, but, hey, ‘she works hard for the money.’

  Which is what the news programs were saying about me, with a very nasty edge to their words. The Narrative was basically ‘criminal slut cavorts with playboy billionaire.’ Not that baldly stated, but you could tell that’s what they meant.

  But slowly – I guess as producers began hearing about previous interviews, and as Connor began to push them in that direction – the Narrative changed to something more like Cinderella. Instead of an evil stepmother and stepsisters, there were the Templetons and Miranda. And poor little Lily Ross was Cinderella – the not-so-bright victim of evil, greedy blackmailers. And Connor was Prince Charming, who wanted to make an honest woman of me and shower free gifts on all the realm – if it weren’t for the asshole stepmother and stepsisters.

  Don’t get me wrong, there was still plenty of finger-wagging and haughty disapproval… although it was veeeery interesting how it was doled out. Slut-shaming for me, but a bunch of nudge-nudge-wink-winks for Connor, especially from male anchors. The women interviewers seemed to split down the middle: half who alternately flirted with Connor and sniffed down their noses at me, and half who treated Connor as some sort of Neanderthal. Although he usually had the latter smiling (and even giggling) by the end of the interviews.

  I had never really considered myself a hardcore feminist before – but seeing how Connor was almost congratulated for what he had done, and how I was portrayed as either a delicate, fallen flower or a gold-digging ho-bag, made my blood boil. The difference in how we were treated was obvious, nauseating, and infuriating.

  I wanted to track down Gloria Steinem and go burn some bras.

  But that urge was short-lived, because something else was scaring the hell out of me.

  If Connor was Prince Charming, that meant he had to marry Cinderella.

  And that’s what they kept harping on.

  “Does that mean you two are thinking about tying the knot?”

  “Have you set a date? What does a billionaire’s wedding registry look like?”

  “Have you proposed yet?”

  “Could we be hearing the pitter-patter of little billionaire feet before too long?”

  And every time the question got asked, there was a little more panic in Connor’s eyes. In fact, that was the only part of the interviews where he looked ill at ease, when the reporters got to his and my relationship.

  But he followed Sebastian’s advice to the letter, I’ll give him that. We were ‘soul mates.’ We were ‘meant for each other.’ I was the ‘love of his life.’

  That’s probably what turned the Narrative around.

  But every time he recited some romantic platitude, I could see the cornered animal inside him, the wolf with its paw bleeding in a steel trap.

  And every time I saw that, the knife in my gut twisted a little bit more, and I got a little more terrified.

  By 7AM Pacific time, I was in full-on hand-flapping mode.

  38

  Something else unexpected happened, too: the villains entered the fray.

  I saw Miranda by chance as I was flipping through the channels.

  “…these accusations against me and his parents are slanderous, they are defamatory, and we WILL be suing him in court. Frankly, everything he’s saying is bizarre. Augustus Templeton and I would never stand in the way of progress in America. We support green energy initiatives, we support solar. This is just Connor ginning up a bunch of outrage to promote his own greedy, illegal schemes to defraud the people of Nevada and steal federal land. Which, by the way, Nevada state officials and Congressional members are helping him do solely because he’s lining their pockets with cash. The man has no shame, and anyone helping him is a criminal. I think you can see why I left him eight months ago – not just because Connor Templeton is a liar, but because of his sleazy sexual proclivities.”

  “You fucking BITCH,” I screamed at the TV.

  She was good, I have to give her that.

  But somebody (maybe Sebastian – ohhh, I hope it was Sebastian) coached a news anchor who interviewed her thirty minutes later.

  “Yes, Ms. Lockwood, but did you take those photos of – ”

  “NO, I did not take those photographs.”

  “Did you PAY anyone to take those photographs?”

  “No I did not.”

  “Did you send those photographs to TMZ.com and release them to the rest of the media?”

  “No, and anyone who says I did is a liar.”

  “That’s interesting, because an editor at TMZ.com is saying that he spoke directly with someone who works for your company.”

  “I have no knowledge of that – ”

  “You don’t know what your own employees are doing, Ms. Lockwood?”

  She blustered her way out of it, but she didn’t come out looking so good. Especially when she later said Connor was a liar, and the reporter asked if she had released the pictures again.

  Mr. Templeton appeared once that I saw, but he wasn’t nearly the natural that Miranda was. She was remote and composed, but absolutely gorgeous (I hate to admit it, but pangs of jealousy always accompanied the loathing I felt for her every time I saw her). Mr. Templeton was just smug and haughty, as though he couldn’t believe he had deigned to step down from Mt. Olympus to deal with this crap.

  “Sir, did you in any way participate in a blackmail scheme against your son?”

  “No, that’s outrageous! My son is lying to the American public. That’s what he does, he LIES – about his so-called plans for clean energy, which, by the way, Templeton Industries is a forerunner in developing for – ”

  “So, you had no contact with Ms. Lockwood?”

  “I know Miranda from when she dated my son. At the time I wished they had gotten married, but frankly, she’s too good for him. You can see from these filthy photos the sort of trash Connor associates with now.”

  If I’d had a gun, I would have pulled an Elvis and shot the fucking TV, just so I could say I put a bullet through Augustus Templeton’s head and not have to go to jail for it.

  “So, sir, did you or did you not meet up with Ms. Lockwood and your son and Ms. Ross yesterday in Las Vegas?”

  “No, we did not.”

  “Sir, we have eyewitnesses at a Las Vegas restaurant who say you did.”

  “Well, we MET with them, but there was no blackmail or pictures – ”

  “Then what did you talk about?”

  “That’s none of your damn business.”

  “You don’t want to tell me? You don’t want to clear up any misunderstandings?”

  “We met on business. I can’t divulge what it was.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a strange coincidence that you and Ms. Lockwood meet Connor and Lily Ross yesterday, and then you storm out of the restaurant, according to eyewitnesses – ”

  “We didn’t STORM out of anywhere – ”

  “ – and then these photos were released last night?”

  “It’s a coincidence. My son is lying, he’s obviously of low moral character, as is this whore he’s associating wit
h – ”

  BANG BANG. Would’ve shot him a second time. And maybe for real, not just the TV.

  All he needed now was Lenora Templeton on there to add in ‘harlot.’

  “But sir, you just said that you DIDN’T meet with them, and now you’re saying – ”

  “I know what I said! I was not involved in any blackmail – my son is a liar – ”

  “But sir, you just lied directly to my face – how can I take ANYTHING you say as – ”

  “This interview is through!” Mr. Templeton shouted as he pulled off his tie microphone and walked out of frame.

  Connor had the last laugh in an interview later that morning.

  “Connor, you’ve said that your ex-fiancée betrayed you behind your back with your father. Some sort of a business deal, right?”

  “Yes, that’s absolutely true.”

  “Now – I’m sorry to be indelicate, but do you think there was anything else… going on there?”

  “You mean, like an affair? You mean, Miranda Lockwood and my father were having a sexual relationship?”

  “Well – yes.”

  Connor looked directly at the camera and all but winked. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly speculate on that. But I’ll let your viewers make up their own minds.”

  39

  Eventually I got tired – or numb, really – of the interviews. I took a shower and did my makeup, though I couldn’t quite get up the enthusiasm to wear Prada or Armani, so I just settled back into the hotel robe. I ordered breakfast (even though it was almost noon by that point), picked at it listlessly, and spent a half hour gazing out the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  At some point I figured it was time to face the music. I went and got my cell phone out of my purse to call my parents…

  …and realized I had 79 missed messages.