Come and Get Me: The Magister Series, Book 2: A Billionaire Romance

by July Hall

  And then he didn’t really know what would happen. He did not know who, or what, he would become if Sandra left him. It would certainly not be a change for the better. But he couldn’t pin that responsibility on her; he could only wait in agony for her decision.

  She looked back into her water. “I don’t want to tell you anything unpleasant,” she said huskily. “But nothing’s changed, has it? I’m still going to hate feeling like a dirty secret.”

  What a pity he hadn’t figured that out earlier. “You don’t have to.”

  She still didn’t look up. “No?”

  “No. Sandra, if you wanted, I’d take you out to dinner at Le Bernardin tomorrow.” She blinked at him. He took a deep breath. “I would have asked you for that tonight, if things had played out like I’d intended. I didn’t want to cause a lot of talk before Stephen’s wedding. He deserved to have his day. That’s the only reason I’ve waited.”

  “A lot of talk,” she mumbled. She bit her lip. “Yep. There sure would be a lot of talk.”

  “For a while.” He had to be honest, but there was no reason to dangle worst-case scenarios in front of her. “Not as long as you think, probably, and it would die down. But those are your choices.” Dirty little secret, or the talk of the town. He could see why neither would appeal to her. She still couldn’t seem to look at him. “Sandra—I’ve been the object of gossip before. It’s unpleasant, but it’s not the end of the world.”

  “Nobody ever called you a gold digger, did they?” she asked flatly.

  “No,” he responded in kind. “They called me an upstart little bastard who killed his father.”

  Her jaw dropped. He watched her throat bob in a gulp. Then she mumbled, “Um…I was told not to ask you about that.”

  Charles went through the possibilities and eliminated all but one. “Warrick.”

  “Don’t get mad at him,” she said quickly.

  “Getting mad at Warrick is pointless,” he said. “I’ve tried it. It’s like getting mad at the Great Wall of China.” Same thing with Violet, really.

  Charles settled back against the pillows and crossed his legs. Sandra glanced up and down his naked body, apparently before she could stop herself.

  “I was your age,” he said. “Everything seemed possible. I was sure of my talents. I was happily married to my childhood nemesis.” She smiled. “And I was sick and tired of hearing my family name becoming a joke thanks to the way my father mishandled everything. I thought, well, somebody has to fix this. So I found allies who thought they’d be able to control me like a puppet when I unseated Father.”

  Sandra raised two skeptical eyebrows. “And what happened to them?”

  Charles gave her a thin smile. “What happens to everyone.”

  She shivered. “Everyone?”

  “Everyone who tries to come after what is mine, yes.” He gave her a considering look. “You, of course, will never be in that position.”

  Sandra squirmed. “Um...I wouldn’t have thought so either, but I’m kind of curious about what you mean.”

  “Because what’s mine is yours.” He felt remarkably calm as he said it. He always did in moments like this, when the only way out was through.

  Sandra did not look remarkably calm. Sandra’s face went bright red, and she fumbled her water glass. “What?” she choked.

  He shrugged. “You heard me.”

  “Wh-what does that mean?” she asked. She raised the glass to her lips and then appeared to realize it was empty. “What do you mean by…I’m sorry. That is not true. Is it? What do you even mean?”

  Charles steeled himself. The moment was here whether they were ready or not. Just as well. Hadn’t he been tired of flapping uselessly in the breeze?

  “You said to ask for what I want, instead of just telling you,” he said. “All right.” This did not seem to reassure her. She looked petrified. “I am asking you to be a part of my life.” He hesitated for just a moment. That wasn’t right, and it was time to be honest. “No. I am asking you to share my life.”

  “Share it?” she whispered. “Like…um. Going out to dinner. Like that?”

  “Among other things, yes.”

  “Other things.” She licked her lips. “This is what you were going to talk to me about before?”

  Charles winced. “Not exactly. I was going to lie to you, too.” She frowned. He shrugged again. “I intended to tell you that I cared for you, and only that. Not anything deeper. I thought that might not scare you off.” She raised a sardonic eyebrow. He chuckled ruefully. “I had also thought to tell you that I wanted to stop hiding, because I don’t like it, and I wanted our relationship to be...” In spite of himself, he hesitated. “Serious.”

  Sandra wasn’t looking spooked anymore. Now she was listening to him very intently. Then she blinked, and shook her head, and said, “I’m sorry, this all seems so unreal. An hour ago I thought you were dumping me. Or however long it was.”

  His watch was somewhere on the floor, and his internal clock was shot to hell. “No idea.”

  She set her empty glass on the nightstand and lay on her stomach with a faint “oof” as her breasts pressed into the mattress. It was his turn to look appreciatively at her, even though there were more important things to worry about. She tapped her fingers against the duvet and said, “This isn’t changing the subject as much as it sounds like. What happened to your dad?”

  Charles almost got goose bumps. As he’d thought while dancing with Josephine, he and Sandra recognized each other. That was not always a comfortable feeling.

  He cleared his throat and kept looking in her eyes when he said, “After I took over the company, I was advised to put him into some kind of ceremonial role or make him head of a division that didn’t matter much. I refused. It would have been insulting to him.” She nodded. “So I pushed him into full retirement. I thought it would be fine, eventually. He’d never seemed to like work—took long vacations, came in late, delegated everything. I thought he would spend all his days on the golf course, or his sailboat, or looking after those damn cars he liked so much.”

  “But he didn’t do that.”

  “No, he did.” Charles wished his water glass held something stronger than water. “For a very short while. We thought he was happy enough. He called me once from Shadow Creek in Las Vegas and told me he’d just seen Arnold Palmer. He didn’t seem angry.” Decades later, Charles still couldn’t fathom that reaction. If not for the green eyes, he wouldn’t believe Leon had donated half his DNA. “I took everything from him and he never seemed angry.”

  “You didn’t take everything,” Sandra argued. She kicked her legs back and forth in the air. “He still had you and Stephen and Rosalie. He had all those hobbies, and he had friends, right?”

  “Those friends ran off like rats from a sinking ship after I came in,” Charles said. “Or so I was told later. He never let me know. He would ask how the company was doing. Told me that I’d done the right thing. Said he was looking forward to being—” His breath caught at the worst moment. He cleared his throat again. “A grandfather again. And then he went off to die like a dog in the woods.”

  “What?”

  Charles pursed his lips. “Or as good as that. He bought a house in the Colorado mountains. Said he’d always wanted his own place near Aspen. A week after he moved, his housekeeper found him dead in his bed.”

  “Oh God,” Sandra whispered.

  “You want gossip?” Charles asked. The bitterness crept into his voice before he could stop it. It was reflex by now. “At least nobody accused me of poisoning him, but that was all. There was all kinds of talk about how he must have committed suicide. The coroner told us no such thing. But either way.” He took a deep breath. “I took his company away, every single bit of it, and he died. I might as well as unhooked him from life support.”

  “You didn’t know,” Sandra said.

  He looked at her in astonishment. Eleanor had said the same thing. Eleanor and Sandra were, as far as he c
ould remember, the only people who’d told him You didn’t know instead of It wasn’t your fault. Because it had been his fault, and Eleanor knew he needed just one person to accept the truth and love him anyway.

  Stephen and Rosalie couldn’t manage it. They had to not blame him. Eleanor had understood that his father’s death had been a miscalculation, something unplanned for, but of his doing anyway. Did Sandra truly understand that too?

  The mattress shifted. Sandra was scooting closer to him. On her belly, so she looked like an extremely attractive caterpillar. “Hey,” she said. She put her hand on his arm. “Are you okay?”

  Of course she’d ask that. “Actually, yes,” he said. “It was a sad time. I felt guilty. But in hindsight, I don’t know—” He hesitated. If anything made her walk out the door, this might well be it.

  “If you’d do it again?” she asked.

  Close enough. He’d been going to say if I’d do anything differently. He certainly would have done it one way or the other. Some people would say that made him a little less than human. Those people would not have really known his father.

  “Everyone talked about him like he was some sweet-tempered old saint,” he said. The anger surfaced in his voice again. “My innocent victim. They didn’t see how he neglected my mother, even when she was dying. Or how he treated my brother and sister.”

  “But not you?”

  “Hell no, not me.”

  Sandra couldn’t seem to help a laugh, and then looked embarrassed.

  He gave her a half smile. “He was a good-natured man. But at his worst, he picked on people who were weaker than he was, and he was a coward otherwise. It’s one of the reasons Magister was floundering. He showed his throat again and again to bigger wolves.” Charles set his jaw. “I couldn’t tolerate it. We had such a name, and there he was, flushing it down the drain. I can’t really explain how it felt. How degrading it was.”

  Sandra picked up one of his hands and kissed it. “I’m sorry.” He touched her chin with his thumb, and she rested her head on his thigh, looking up at him. “You love the company, don’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t put it like that.” He stroked his fingers through her hair. “I don’t love my arms or legs, if you know what I mean.” She nodded. He admitted, “It’s more like my heart or brain, really. I don’t expect to last as long as my father did in retirement.”

  That made her sit up. Her mouth fell open. “Charles! That’s an awful thing to say.” She put a hand over her chest, dug her fingers in as if something hurt. “Please don’t talk like that. I’m serious.”

  This was definitely not the moment to say that he would leave her well provided for, if she was interested. “I know it’s unpleasant.”

  “It’s freaking terrifying.” Indeed, she’d gone pale. “I mean—there are other things to live for. There really are.”

  “That’s easy to say when you’re twenty-five.” He was starting to get irritated. He’d had this conversation too many times, with too many people who didn’t understand. He really didn’t want to have it with Sandra. “Your whole life’s ahead of you. Everything is an opportunity.”

  Sandra crossed her arms. “Stop talking like that. Because—” He opened his mouth. “You don’t believe it. You’re twenty years older than me, and everything’s an opportunity to you too, and it’s always going to be.” She rolled her eyes. “Don’t give me some crap about how you’re going to die in retirement. You’re never even going to retire. You’re going to be ninety years old and still at that desk.”

  Well, that sounded as accurate as anything he’d ever heard. Not least because Bradley was still his only heir, and he would prefer to die in his desk chair than watch his nephew ruin his legacy.

  “This isn’t exactly what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said dryly.

  “I bet not, but it’s important.” She seemed to consider for a moment and then lay down next to him and took his hand. “Tonight happened because we don’t understand each other.”

  That wasn’t right at all. “I disagree,” he said flatly. “We’ve had different experiences, but we have the same values. Are you as honest with anyone as you are with me?” She looked down at their entwined hands. “Exactly, and why is that?”

  She swallowed. “I don’t think I’m totally honest with anyone. There are things I can’t stand for anybody to see. It’s not even anything bad, like, I don’t have any sordid secrets or anything. Um…except for this.” Instead of dignifying that with a response, Charles squeezed her hand. “I’m just private, I guess.”

  “So am I. Lots of people are.” He tilted his head to the side. Earlier, he’d said they’d worked off some of their tension. Thank God for that; now he was better equipped to watch her, see if he could spot any of those things she hid. He couldn’t afford to miss a single step now. “It seems to go further with you.”

  “I can’t stand being laughed at,” she blurted. He blinked. She kept looking at their hands. “It’s what I hate more than anything.”

  “I can’t say I’m fond of it either,” Charles said slowly.

  She glared at him. “Nobody laughs at you. Has anybody ever? Even when you were a kid?”

  “No,” he admitted. Well, there had been Stephen and Rosalie laughing about the stag party—but that wasn’t what she meant. “Never.”

  She gulped. “They laughed at me. And they did it because they knew I hated it. I was…this is going to sound stupid.”

  Charles said nothing, but nodded for her to keep going.

  She did. “I was in third grade, and I was so shy. The teacher tried to make me do something in front of the class. I started to cry. They all started to laugh. Now try to imagine that happening every day from when you’re nine to when you’re fifteen.” She shuddered. “For a while, they hit me too, but my dad put a stop to that when he found out.” She got a haunted look on her face. “And once…this gang of boys…”

  Charles inhaled sharply.

  She shook her head. “A teacher saw before they could do more than try to pull my pants down. We were only eleven. I never told my dad about that. I thought it was my fault for letting them catch me on my own.”

  Charles was nearly too appalled to speak. Nearly. “Why the hell did they do that?”

  Now she met his eyes. Her expression softened for just a second. “You really don’t know, do you?” she murmured. “You never did anything like that.”

  “I’ve been called a bully from time to time,” he said. “As you can imagine.” She hummed in agreement. “But no, I never picked on anyone in school.” Eleanor didn’t count. Eleanor would have been more likely to pull his pants down than the reverse. Hell, maybe she had. He couldn’t remember.

  “It sounds stupid,” Sandra repeated. “It shouldn’t bother me anymore. It stopped ten years ago.” Charles blinked. How strange to think that when Eleanor died, Sandra was being miserable somewhere too. “And I learned to protect myself after that. By—” She hesitated.

  “By never crying,” Charles guessed.

  Sandra bit her lip and looked away. She mumbled, “If you show weakness, people hurt you. That’s how people are. I got away from the bullies when I went to high school. I just wanted to forget it ever happened to me.”

  “What about your sister?”

  Sandra shrugged. “What about her? She was three years younger than me—that’s a lot when you’re a kid. And it’s always been easy for her to make friends. I tried not to let her see.”

  She’d been protecting Kristen, in her way. He understood that perfectly. “That wouldn’t have happened if I’d been there,” he said. She looked up at him with wide eyes. “What? I always looked after Stephen. It seemed to make a difference. People just didn’t bully other kids when I was around.”

  “What about Rosalie?”

  Charles shook his head. “Rosalie was the prettiest girl in school. She had lots of friends. I had to keep boys away from her for a different reason.” He chuckled wryly. “Then I went off to Yale
, Robert Cliffe came calling, and what do you know?”

  “Bradley,” Sandra sighed.

  “Bradley,” Charles agreed. “My father—” He hesitated. She wouldn’t tell anyone. “This isn’t known, do you understand?” She nodded. “Robert had no interest in raising a child. My father pressured Rosalie to have an abortion. Rosalie told Stephen some insane thing about running away, so I stepped in and arranged for her to marry Robert, promised he could work for the company, all that.” Sandra’s eyes were as huge as plates, but she nodded again. “Nobody was really happy, but Bradley was born.”

  “And he doesn’t know this?”

  “Of course not. No child should have to know that.” Even a fuckup. He gave her a stern look. “Let’s keep it that way.”

  She didn’t dignify that either. “And that’s another reason you took over from your dad.”

  Charles ground his jaw. “He spoiled her to death, but when she really needed him…”

  “Yeah.” Sandra gave him a very serious look. “So I can’t stand to be laughed at, and you can’t stand to need anyone.” She ran her fingers through his chest hair. “But you say you need me.”

  “I—” His breath caught in his chest. “I do.”

  “And you don’t want to, I bet.”

  He shook his head. “That kind of thinking is pointless. I need you. Nothing else enters into it.”

  “But what do you need me for?” Now she looked truly mystified. “You said, share your life? I don’t know what that means. What do you need from me that you’re not already getting?”

  Charles dodged the question. Honesty was important, but discretion was too. He touched her chin. “You say what we do degrades you.” She flushed. “I would rather you not feel that way. I’m not ashamed of what we have. I’d be proud to have you on my arm.”

  Sandra turned an even more brilliant red. “Really?” she whispered.

  “Really.” If anything, it was an understatement.

  After a long pause, she said in a wondering tone, “That’s what it was. All the jewels and you wanting to give me things. You weren’t really doing it because you thought I’d like it.”