by Tara Wylde
Nate grins, and his lips get to meet mine again. His breath is hot against my face. “I’m not done…”
Chapter Thirty-One
Epilogue - Kim
Eighty thousand dollars.
Say it again – slower this time. I’ll do it with you.
Eighty. Thousand. Dollars.
It’s the amount Boris transferred into my account when he was trying to set me up. It’s a whole hunk of a lot of money. It’s more money than I ever expected to see in one place, at one time, in like… ever. I truly never imagined nor expected it to be mine!
But as far as I can tell, it is.
Landwolfe never asked for it back; that’s for sure. The second the truth about what had happened came out, they went into full damage control mode. I can understand why. Their reputation was at stake. That $80,000.00 was dirty money. It was proof that bank employees had been laundering drug money, and they wanted nothing to do with it.
Landwolfe couldn’t wash their hands quickly enough.
Paragon – that company Nate had worked for – well, after he gave his old boss, Natalie a call and told them to track the cell phone he had slipped into Carlos’s jacket pocket … let’s just say they were more interested in following that trail across London, until they caught up with all three of the Mexicans underneath the railway bridge somewhere just past Clapham.
They didn’t make it.
Nate poked all kinds of fun at some guy called Ryan, but I guess he must have done some shooting practice; either that, or Nate’s more intimidating than he realizes.
The cartel never knew I had the cash anyway; the only person who did know was Boris, and Boris died outside the front of a convenience store in Hoxton, riddled with bullet holes. In all truth, I didn’t feel very sorry when I heard he had died.
So, because no one seemed to want the money, I kept it. Wouldn’t you?
Eighty grand doesn’t buy you a house; definitely not a house in London. Do you know what it does get you? An absolutely, unbelievable vacation; the kind to tell grandkids about! (I’ll say more on that later).
Actually, I’m not sure I can call it a vacation. If it lasts three months – does that still count?
The truth is, I wanted to keep the cash. You know what I’m like, after all. I tried to argue that it would be better saved: Setting up a 401(k); that kind of thing. Nate just rolled his eyes at me. He made a few calls before we booked our flights, and told me I didn’t need to worry about it.
Easier said than done!
But as I’ve learned – both ways – before, Nate has a way of getting me to trust him. So since it’s mostly worked out fine for me so far, I decided that – just this once – I was going to go with the flow.
We booked flights to Morocco. It’s an amazing country. I don’t know how to explain it. The whole place is crazy. It’s a riot of color. It’s so different from where I grew up back home that it doesn’t just feel like a different country, it feels like a whole different planet.
The market in Marrakesh is one of the wildest places I’ve ever been. Tiny little alleyways stretch out between store after store – and men, mostly men – shout at you, advertising their wares. It’s not a scary place at all, but I sure felt safer with a guy like Nate by my side.
We headed down to the beach in a town whose name I can’t pronounce, in an area whose name I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter. It was the kind of place that will linger in my memory forever, even if all I remember is that Nate was by my side. We checked into a quaint little beach house, woke when the sun hit the horizon in the morning, and went to bed when it got dark; or we would lie outside underneath the stars instead and talk until the sun was tickling the sky again.
The bad news – if that’s what you want to call it – is Nate lost his job while we were away. The good news – and you can definitely call it good – is that he was going to quit even if he hadn’t been pushed out first.
I can’t say I was sad about it. Especially since, as far as I can tell, Nate’s missions all seemed to revolve around him going undercover and getting girls to trust him!
By the time three months were up, the sun had burned into my skin. I had never been this tanned in my entire life. I started to get worried about what in the world I was going to do when I got home, but Nate sprung a surprise on me.
It turns out, that when an international bank gets one of their employees embroiled in a major drug scandal that results in them being kidnapped, and nearly costs them their life, they certainly become very willing to settle.
Five million dollars willing to settle…
Here I thought eighty grand was a lot.
Heck, I don’t know what I’m going to do with it all. I guess that because I don’t have to work for a while – probably ever if I don’t want to – I have some time to figure it out.
I’m going to put major life plans on the back burner, though, just for a little while. Just for a few months. I guess while I was out in Morocco, I never thought about protection once. The truth of the matter is, I guess, I didn’t want to.
So Nate and I are having a baby!
I don’t know if it’s a boy, and I don’t know if it’s a girl. I don’t want to know, not yet. But if she’s a girl, I’m going to call her Alice, after Mama. I haven’t told Nate this yet, but if it’s a boy, I want to call him Tony. I hope he likes it.
I guess that’s about all I wanted to say. I should go, anyway. It’s the second trimester scan, today, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
Faking It
Fake Husband, Real Daddy.
I've got the perfect kid, and I’ve got the perfect life.
But there’s something missing: the perfect virgin wife.
It doesn't matter if it's fake.
The second Penny walked into my office, I knew I was f*cked.
Nineteen, sweet, soft, delicious.
I sense it just by looking at her. The hesitation when she hides from my stare.
She's a virgin.
Her sweet scent tempts me to pluck the innocence right out of her.
When my billionaire nemesis bribes Child Protective Services to pressure me to sell my company, Penny steps in to play mommy.
She has no idea how bad I want this. How bad I want her.
Fake marriage to help save my daughter?
What a f*cking turn on.
She played mommy in my time of need.
Now it’s time for me to play daddy!
Chapter One
Penny
Glass. Glass everywhere. That means reflections: everywhere.
I can’t hide from the reflections; nor can I hide from myself. Everywhere I look I see a ginger girl with an ironing board chest and a bowling ball ass staring back at me. Oh, and she’s pale, to boot. I need some sun: except – even if I get some – I’m not going to get a killer tan, just freckles.
I accepted long ago that I’ll never be on the cover of Vogue.
But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
“Don’t just stand there, girl,” Miss Casey says. “How did you get this job, anyway?”
I can’t believe I have to call this woman Miss Casey. I feel like I’m back in kindergarten. She’s a stern woman in her late fifties, and it shows. She wears her hair in a tight bob, pulled back, and a freaking tweed skirt pours all the way down past her ankles.
Seriously; I kid you not.
But the worst part of all this? She makes me feel exactly who I am – a nineteen-year-old virgin, and hopelessly out of my depth.
“Sorry,” I squeak. The tray of hot drinks rattles in my hand, betraying my nervousness.
Now that I’m here, it all feels so real. It’s my first day, but I’m not just working behind the counter at a Starbucks – not even close. A security lanyard dangles around my neck. I’ve been background checked like you wouldn’t believe.
Just getting into the skyscraper headquarters of Thorne Enterprises was, well, thorny. I had to dance through half a dozen
security checkpoints. The closer I got to the CEOs office, the more intense they got: hard-faced men – all ex-special forces – eyeballing me, hands twitching on their weapons.
I dunno. It all seems a bit much. But – I made it here: to the inner sanctum. Miss Casey’s desk sits right in front of the frosted glass doors to the CEOs office. New York stretches out ahead and below of the skyscraper’s huge windows – all the way to the horizon, and fifty stories down.
“Give me that,” Miss Casey huffs.
Close, but no cigar.
“I can do it,” I squeak. But it’s too late.
I’d done my research – just like anyone should do when they get a new job – and a whole lot more. But Charlie Thorne’s secretary is an enigma cloaked in mystery. As far as I can tell, she’s been with Mr. Thorne from the start. He took her with him on his meteoric rise to billionaire-dom: lucky woman.
She reaches over to grab the tray. At that same moment, a harried-looking executive in a tailored suit storms into the office lobby. It would be a cliché to say he’s leaving sheets of paper in a trail behind him, but that’s close enough.
“Ella,” he grunts. “I need to see Charlie: now.”
He doesn’t even bother looking at Mister Thorne’s secretary. I know his type: self-important; myopic; bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders. I recoil in distaste. The tray rattles, again.
I wish you could see the look on Ella – no – Miss Casey’s face. A stormy darkness, worthy of a summer Oklahoma tornado, crashes across her visage, and that’s just when she’s facing me.
“Excuse me?” she hisses. Her voice is chilling. It reminds me of every terrifying schoolteacher or imposing headmistress I have ever had in my life. “Precisely what did you just call me, Michael?”
The executive glances up. His thin eyelashes brush each other rapidly as he realizes his mistake. Unfortunately, he’s got too much pride to back down.
“Ella,” he says, doubling down. “This is none of your business. I need to see Charlie – now. You’re just a secretary –”
Oh, crap. You should not have said that. You should NOT have said that.
Miss Casey holds up a single finger. Michael freezes, as though she’s reached in and squeezed his vocal chords. “You,” she says, “wait.”
She turns to me. She fixes me with an intense, questioning stare. I just stand there, steam wafting from the hot drinks. I know she’s about to really test me; I just don’t know whether I’ll pass.
“Penny, please go into Mr. Thorne’s office and deliver this tray. If you can accomplish this task without being seen or heard that would be lovely. Don’t spill anything.”
She turns away.
My throat clenches. A tiny shudder of adrenaline passes through my body. This is what I wanted – of course it is. I couldn’t be closer to power than I am about to be. Yet: after all this work; the research; the job hunting; the hours of careful preparation for the interviews; I couldn’t be more terrified.
“Sure thing, Miss Casey,” I say. I twist on my heel and face the big frosted doors. Be seen and not heard. I can do that. I’ve been doing it all my life.
“And dear?” She says more than asks. I turn my head. “Remember the nondisclosure agreement you signed. Believe me, it’s ironclad. If you reveal a word you hear in there, I’m afraid that’ll be it for you.”
I nod. The tray rattles. My stomach does a backflip as I realize I’ve landed myself in an incredibly serious situation.
Miss Casey dismisses me, turning back to the hapless executive. She lowers her voice to a hushed, outraged whisper. I can’t fault her professionalism. She’s all kinds of pissed, but there’s no way she’s going to let her boss hear the drama.
“And, as for you, Michael: let’s get some things straight. It’s Mr. Thorne, not Charlie. And I am most certainly not called Ella.”
“But Charlie – I mean – Mr. Thorne said I could –”
I push the frosted doors aside. They whisper open without a sound, and hush the argument behind me.
A huge office opens up in front of me. The CEOs desk is right at the other end of the sixty feet long room, pushed up against the floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Otherwise, the office is sparsely decorated.
Whoever Charlie Thorne really is, apparently he doesn’t do ostentatious wealth. This place is elegant and understated. Even so, it screams that it’s the office of one of New York’s most eligible, and billionaire, bachelors. It surprises me. I expected everything to be dripping leaf gold.
I hear the murmur of conversation. I freeze for a second. I need to remember why I’m here: I’m Mister Thorne’s new personal assistant. Everything he knows, I need to know.
“Mister Thorne, I really must insist –”
He sees me.
His piercing gray eyes search me out from across the room. Crap, I didn’t expect him to be quite so handsome. In the pictures I’ve seen he looks colder, somehow. In all the research I did, I’ve never seen him do a spread in BusinessWeek or Time Magazine. He’s not in the society pages, either. He’s not that kind of billionaire. He’s elusive, hard to pin down. He flies under the radar.
He beckons me over.
A prim lady is seated in front of Mr. Thorne’s desk. Her legs are crossed, and her hands rest neatly on a yellow legal notepad on her lap. She’s sitting on a wing-backed, aged maroon leather armchair. She twists to look at me, but dismisses me instantly. Strangely, my new boss’s gaze never wavers. His eyes follow me all the way in.
“The fact is, Mr. Thorne, we’ve had a number of complaints. I really don’t see how you can run a corporation of this size and still have enough time to devote to a healthy home life –”
Mr. Thorne bites his lip. I can tell he wants to say something, but is only holding back through a monumental force of will. I close the distance to his desk.
“More to the point, my records state that you are a single father. You are unmarried. This is simply not acceptable. How can you possibly hope to provide a stable environment for your daughter? The simple fact of the matter is that my department is of the mind to remove her from your care until –”
“Miss –” he says, his face flinching with the effort of not biting back at the woman. It doesn’t take a genius to work out what is going on. The woman in front of him is from Child Protective Services. If I heard her correctly, she wants to take away Charlie Thorne’s child.
I didn’t even know he had a daughter. How the hell did I miss that?
“Ms. Winters,” she says. I reach her, and I see a sickening, saccharine smile sweep across the face. It’s such an obviously fake smile, it hurts. I can’t believe that she believes the words coming out of her own mouth. I feel like I’m watching a game of chess play out in front of me.
Charlie smiles at me. I mean – Mr. Thorne. I can’t let myself think of him as a real person, though this situation is quickly making it difficult not to.
“Ms. Winters,” he says. “What complaints are you talking about? My daughter has everything she could ask for. I’m there when she wakes up; I’m there when she gets home from school. She has the best tutors; the best of everything. Hell, she’s on a hockey tour of England at the moment –”
The woman from CPS raises her hand. “You’ll understand, of course, I simply cannot reveal my sources.”
An idea strikes me with the force of a lightning bolt: a way to solve Charlie’s problem – and my own – in one fell swoop. It’s neat: it’s tidy; it’s damn near genius. If I manage to pull it off. And that’s a big if.
“But you’re happy to sit here,” Charlie spits, “and threaten to take my daughter away because I –”
Oh God, I can’t believe I’m going to do this. Someone stop me. This is quite simply the most foolhardy, craziest thing I’ve ever done. How can it possibly end well?
I bring the tray to rest on the green leather that tops Charlie Thorne’s mahogany desk. My heart is thundering inside my chest. My throat is clenched.
I walk towards him, breaking his train of thought. He looks up at me questioningly. His eyes would steal the breath out of me, if I had any to give. I don’t. I need it all.
I loop my arm around Charlie Thorne’s waist. I reach up onto my tiptoes – I need to – and plant a little kiss on his cheek. “Charlie,” I say in a stage whisper, in an accent that makes me sound like I grew up on the Upper East Side, not half-homeless in Brooklyn.
“I’m so, so sorry I’m late. It was the traffic. I had to get out of the car on 5th and run the rest of the way. Did I miss anything?”
You could hear a pin drop. Charlie Thorne – billionaire Charlie Thorne – a man who has never met me in my entire life, looks me in the eye. He has no idea who I am. I can tell he doesn’t know what to do.
“And you are?” Ms. Winters says from her armchair. She ruffles through the papers on her lap. “I don’t have any records of you having a girlfriend, Mister Thorne. And might I say that I find it somewhat improper –”
“Girlfriend,” I say. I let out a tinkling little laugh that seals my fate. “Charlie, please. Didn’t you tell the poor lady?”
Cruella de CPS’s forehead wrinkles suspiciously. “Tell me what, precisely?”
“That we’re married, of course,” I say. “We kept it quiet, but only because that’s what Charlie’s like. You hate being in the society pages, don’t you, darling?”
I hear an intake of breath. I can’t tell whether it’s from Ms. Winters, or from Charlie himself. Since the lady from CPS opens her mouth a second later, I realize that it’s Charlie: definitely Charlie.
