Dirty Rich Betrayal

by Lisa Renee Jones

  “It is special, which is exactly why we need to be here, to remember who we are together. I know you don’t want to talk now, but we have to talk. It’s time, Mia. It’s past time.”

  “I know,” I concede, “but not before we—not tonight. I don’t want to need to leave again. And I don’t want this place to become about a final goodbye.”

  His lashes lower and he cuts his gaze, torment etched in his handsome face before he looks at me again. “Be clear, Mia,” he says softly. “We will not part ways in the middle again. I want you. I will fight for you, but we’re in or we’re out. We’re together or we both move on once and for all.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Mia

  The past, a year and three months ago…

  The sky and the ocean are the same blue today, I think, my hands resting on the ledge of the cutout inside the lighthouse that sits a couple of miles down from Grayson’s family home. So blue, so perfect that despite the sky and the ocean starting at different places, they meld together as one. The way I do with Grayson. I rotate and rest my elbows on the ledge, my gaze landing on Grayson where he sits in one of the cozy chairs we picked out recently for our many hours spent here. His gaze is downturned, focused on his MacBook as he goes over numbers on the newest of his nationwide expansion of his father’s law firm, this one opening in Washington. He’s so damn good looking, so unassuming in faded jeans and a black snug T-shirt that hugs his impressive chest, his dark wavy hair rumpled and not from the wind. Because I can’t ever keep my fingers out of it.

  He glances up and his green eyes meet mine, and even after nine months and almost every day since with him, I feel the punch of that connection. I feel him in every part of me. He winks the way he does often like we’re sharing a private secret, which we often do, and I smile, reaching for my wine glass on the table beside him. He catches my hand and pulls me to him, kissing me before he scowls into the phone. “Negative, Eric,” he says, and then releases me. “I do not like the numbers on that building. Tell Davis if he can’t negotiate better than that, I’ll do it myself.”

  My lips curve because Davis, like Eric, is one of Grayson’s closest friends, but Grayson doesn’t pull any punches with them. When it comes to business, he’s smart, savvy, and if need be, brutal but he’s always honest. The honest part is probably the thing that makes me love him beyond all else, and there is plenty of else.

  “That’s it,” Grayson says behind me. “I’m done for the day.”

  I rotate to find him standing up and walking toward me with his wine glass in hand. Instantly, my stomach flutters like a schoolgirl who is about to stand next to her crush. That’s what this man does to me and has since that day I ran into him. “Did you notice which wine this is?” he asks, both of us facing each other, our elbows on the railing.

  “That cheap but good one that I fell in love with in Sonoma last weekend after I learned there are wines to taste and wines to drink. And that the expensive ones are barely tolerable. Yes. I did. Thank you. I still love it.”

  “It’s a good choice,” he says. “And I like that you look beyond the price tag.”

  Because so many people in his life see his money before they ever, if they ever, see the man. “We should go to that Italian place you love tonight.” He leans over and kisses me. “Or we could order in and eat in bed in between fucking and fucking some more.”

  My cheeks heat and do so despite the fact that I’ve done about every naughty thing possible with this man. “I do love our nights in bed.”

  He sets his glass on the ledge next to us and then takes mine and does the same. “Then bed it is.” His fingers tangle in my hair, and he drags my mouth to his. “I love you, Mia. You know that, right?”

  “I love you, too.”

  “I mean I really love you.”

  “What’s wrong?” I ask, pulling back to look at him, sensing his suddenly darker mood.

  “Nothing is wrong. Nothing has been wrong since the day I met you.” His mouth closes down on mine, and his tongue strokes deep, his hand settling between my shoulder blades, molding me close. It’s a passionate kiss, a hungry kiss. A kiss that is all about emotion and not sex. A kiss that screams “I need you” and says so much more than even words.

  It ends with me breathless and his thumb strokes away the dampness on my lips. “I have something for you.” He kisses me and then walks to his chair. “Come here.”

  His mood is hard to read and I tilt my head to study him. “What are you up to, Grayson Bennett?”

  “Come find out.” His green eyes light with challenge. “If you dare.” With those words, the edge I’ve sensed in him seems to soften.

  My lips curve and I join him. “I dared,” I say, stepping between him and the chair, my hands settling on his chest. “Now what?”

  “Sit and close your eyes.”

  “Now you’re making me curious.”

  “Good. Sit, baby. You’ll like this, I promise.”

  “Of that, I have no doubt,” I assure him because this is him and he gives me no reason to do anything but like and love each day and moment.

  I sit.

  “Shut your eyes,” he orders.

  “Eyes shut,” I say, doing as commanded.

  He kneels beside me or I believe he does. My eyes are, of course, shut. “What if I was to blindfold you?”

  My eyes open and meet his sea-green stare. “Is that what you’re going to do?”

  “Would it be a problem?”

  “Of course not. I trust you. Is that what you’re going to do?”

  “Not until later.” He sets an envelope in my lap. “Open it.”

  My teeth sink into my bottom lip and my curiosity is ripe. I unseal the flap and pull out a contract. “You bought the lighthouse from the man who retired it?”

  “I did,” he says. “Look at the name on the deed.”

  I scan and note the extreme price this place cost, and I know he did this for us, for me. “There’s no name. I don’t understand.”

  “I want you to fill in your name.”

  I shove at his chest. “No. No, I won’t take this. No.” I stand up and he sets the paperwork on the chair and joins me, his hands shackling my waist and pulling me to him. “I want you to have it.”

  “I want to be here with you. I don’t want a present like this. I’m not with you for this.”

  “What’s mine is yours, Mia.”

  “No. No, that is not true and all I want is you, Grayson. I don’t care about the rest.”

  He cups my face. “I left it blank for a reason. I want your name on that deed, but I want it to be my name.”

  I blink. “I don’t understand.”

  “Marry me, Mia. I need you forever.”

  I suck in a breath. “What?”

  “I love you. I need you with me forever. Say yes.”

  “I—I have to sign a prenup. I don’t want you to ever think-”

  He kisses me, a deep slide of tongue before he says, “Is that a yes?”

  “Yes. Yes, you know it is. You know I love you. You know I need you, too. Forever.”

  His lips, those perfect lips, curve. “Then I have something else for you.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a satin pouch. “It was easier to carry this in this than in a box today.” He removes the stunning, incredible, giant ring inside. “If you don’t like it-”

  “My God,” I say eyeing the emerald-cut diamond that sparkles with hints of blue. “It’s gorgeous, but I think I need a security guard to wear it.”

  He laughs. “I’ll be your security guard.” He slips it on my finger. “It’s a rare blue diamond. I special ordered it. I wanted you to have something no one else would have.”

  I look at it and then him. “Thank you.”

  “Thank me by spending the rest of your life with me.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way.” I swallow hard. “I hate that my mother isn’t alive to know you.”


  “As do I of mine, Mia.”

  It’s one of the things we’ve bonded on. The love of our parents. The loss of our mothers. Mine to cancer two years ago and his to a car accident five years ago. “Does your father know?”

  “Not yet, but he loves you. He’ll be happy, but Mia, he’ll be harder on you at work. You need to be ready for that.”

  “I want to prove myself. You know I do. I can handle it.”

  He cups my face. “It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you. Just the opposite. He’s hard on me. He always has been.”

  I can’t think about his father right now. I smile. “We’re getting married.”

  He smiles. “Yeah, baby. We’re getting married.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Mia

  The present…

  “We will not part ways in the middle again. I want you. I will fight for you, but we’re in or we’re out. We’re together or we both move on once and for all.”

  As much as I’ve told myself that I’m “out” with Grayson, right now—as much as I know I have real reasons for that choice—standing here with him, his body pressed to mine, his words in the air between us, it’s not that simple. Especially not here, in the lighthouse where he proposed to me. Right here, right now, the idea of never seeing him again is unbearable.

  He cups my face and tilts my face to his. “You aren’t going to tell me you’re already out?”

  “No,” I say. “And I should, but no. I’m not.”

  He strokes my cheek, studying me for a long moment before he says, “Everything I could say to the ‘I should’ part of that statement, I won’t. Right now, I think we both just need to be us again. To just live in the moment.”

  “I can’t do that here. There are too many memories here. Too much to question.”

  “If you keep saying things like that, I won’t hold back what I have to say.” He leans in and kisses me. “So yes. Let’s leave. Let’s go to the house.” He doesn’t wait for the confirmation that he knows he’ll receive. I’m the one who didn’t want to clutter all my good memories of us in this place with the way we are now.

  He links the fingers of one of his hands with mine and turns toward the stairwell, leading me that direction, but he doesn’t urge me in front of him, as the gentleman that he is might do another time. He goes first. A choice I understand, because I understand him. God, I really do understand this man. Being at my back would have been dominant, and while he’s dominant without question, he doesn’t want me to feel that he’s suffocating me with that dominance. Even so, he doesn’t let go of my hand the entire walk down the stairs. He holds onto me and keeps me close and the thing is, I want him to hold onto me. I want him to prove what can’t be wrong. That’s why I haven’t let him try. I know he will fail. I know that once he does, I have to say that final goodbye and I don’t know how I survive that. Not now that I’m with him again. That’s why I don’t want to talk right now. I just need to pretend none of the bad exists. I just need to be with Grayson, and I can’t seem to find the will to fight that need.

  We step onto the beach, and his arm slides around my shoulders. “What did Eric and Davis say about Ri?”

  “Let’s not talk about Ri,” he says. “That’s part of the bad and we don’t want that right now, right?”

  “Yes. Right.”

  “What were you thinking about in the lighthouse?”

  “Good memories. Not bad. I was standing on the beach, looking at your house, and I just—felt like I was suffocating in everything bad and so I ran there.”

  “I still went there until after the funeral,” he says. “Alone.” He looks down at me. “I went there alone, thinking about when I went there with you.”

  My teeth scrape my bottom lip and I cut my stare. “Before the funeral,” I whisper. “You mean before the second time I left?”

  “Yes, Mia,” he says, “before the second time you left.”

  We don’t look at each other, but that reality hangs in the air between us. That’s when he stopped trying to tear down my walls. That’s when he let me slam them down between us and keep them down. That’s when he moved on. I don’t like the idea of him moving on. I’ve never liked the idea and yet, I have no right to care. I walked away. It doesn’t matter that it killed me to do it.

  We reach the house and enter through the patio and the minute we’re inside the living room, he turns me to him, his fingers lacing into my hair. “After the funeral because you left me not once, but twice. After the funeral, because I needed you so fucking badly and you still left. Again. After the funeral, because that’s when I started to question us. That’s when I decided that if what we had was real, then you wouldn’t have written me off without really hearing me out.”

  I lower my chin, trying to catch my breath, my hand flattening on his chest. “Words won’t fix this.”

  “Mia—”

  I jerk my gaze to his. “And I’m going to tell you what I admitted to myself walking with you from the lighthouse. I didn’t want you to try to explain because we both know you can’t, and once you can’t, we’re done. Some illogical part of me, and you know I’m not an illogical person, felt that if you never tried, I could keep clinging to maybe, to that possibility that what we had was real.”

  “It was real,” he says, stepping into me, his hand flattening on my lower back, fingers tightening in my hair. “It is real.” His mouth comes down on my mouth, and when his tongue strokes mine, I don’t even consider holding back. I have craved this man forever it seems. I have needed him eternally. I sink into him and the kiss, I drink in the taste of him, the feel of him, the absolute perfection of him.

  His hand slides up my back, settling between my shoulder blades, molding me to him. “I can’t stop needing you, Mia. I shouldn’t have tried.” His mouth is back on mine before I can even fully process those words, his tongue licking into my mouth, stroking and tasting me the way I do him. And he tastes of those words, of need and hunger, of regret and passion. Suddenly I can’t get close enough to him, I can’t get enough of him.

  My hands slide under his T-shirt, a raw need clawing at me. I need and need and need some more. I shove at his shirt and he pulls it over his head, but my hands never leave his perfect body, which he spends hours in the gym making that perfect. I kiss his chest and he drags my sweater over my head, his hands settling on my face, even before it hits the ground. His lips are on mine. We’re wild and hungry, and he scoops me up and starts walking. That’s when reality hits me.

  “Stop!”

  He halts, his lashes lowering, and I can see him reaching for restraint. “What are we doing, Mia?” he asks softly.

  “Not the bedroom.” He stands there a few beats and then starts walking again. “Grayson.”

  He doesn’t reply. He doesn’t stop again until he’s laying me down on the bed we once shared, and he’s on top of me. “This is our bed. That lighthouse is our lighthouse. We’re these things, and we need us right now. So yes, Mia. In the bed, our bed, where I plan to fuck you and make love to you as many times as humanly possible this very weekend and the rest of our lives if I have my way. If you have a problem with that, I need to know now.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Mia

  My reasons for not wanting to be in this bed fade with his declaration that it’s ours, and that he wants me in it for the rest of our lives. “The only problem I have right this minute is that you aren’t kissing me.”

  He leans in, his lips a breath from mine, but he doesn’t kiss me. “Why didn’t you want to be here with me?”

  “Ask me later. Kiss me now.”

  “No. You think I’ve had someone else here, in our bed.” It’s not a question.

  “I don’t have the right to ask.”

  “Is that why you didn’t want to be here?”

  “Yes,” I whisper, my hand settling on his cheek. “But I know—”

  “I never brought a woman here or to my pla
ce in the city. Just you, Mia. But I can’t tell you that I didn’t try to fuck you out of my system. I needed to fuck the images of you with Ri out of my head.”

  “I wasn’t with Ri.”

  “I know that now, but I didn’t then. It doesn’t matter who it was. The idea of you with someone else drove me crazy. It still does.”

  “I wasn’t with anyone else,” I dare to confess, when a part of me doesn’t believe he deserves that confession and another feels I owe it to him.

  He pulls back to study me. “What?”

  “Never. I didn’t. Not once. And I told myself that it was because I was busy, trying to build my career, but—”

  “But what, Mia?”

  “I just wasn’t ever ready to let go. I didn’t want to leave you. But I had to.”

  “No, baby. You didn’t, but I get that you really felt that you did. It hurts, but I get it.” His mouth comes down on mine, and I feel as if he’s breathing me in. I know I am with him. No. I’m drinking him in, arching into the sweet weight of him on top of me. We kiss with desperation, like two people who need each other to survive, and right now, I don’t know how I have survived without him. He rolls us to our sides facing each other, his fingers catching the hook of my bra and just that fast, he’s pulling it away, and his hand replaces the silk. His mouth is back on mine and sensations consume me, so many sensations colliding with emotion and need.

  “Are you still on the pill?” he asks.

  “Yes. I just—I am.”

  “Good. For now.” He kisses me, a quick brush of lips over lips. “I need you naked. I need to feel you next to me.” He rolls me to my back and with that “for now” in the air, he moves and resettles with his lips to my stomach and this is not an accidental connection. My heart squeezes with the certainty that he’s reminding me of how many times he told me he wanted a little girl just like me. It affects me. We had so many plans. We were best friends. We were so many things that happened so very quickly and easily, and then it was gone.