by Cari Quinn
The Boss Vol. 6
a Billionaire Romance Serial
Cari Quinn
Taryn Elliott
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
1. Blake
2. Blake
3. Blake
4. Grace
5. Grace
6. Grace
7. Blake
8. Blake
9. Blake
10. Blake
11. Grace
12. Grace
13. Grace
14. Grace
15. Blake
16. Blake
17. Grace
Epilogue
Serial Fiction
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About Cari Quinn & Taryn Elliott
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
The Boss, Vol. 6
© 2016 Cari Quinn & Taryn Elliott
Cover by LateNite Designs
All Rights Are Reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First Rainbow Rage Publishing e-book edition: July 2016
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We couldn’t do this without music, our moms, and midnight plotting sessions. Oh, and coffee. All of the coffee.
Thank you, coffee.
One
Blake
My assistant was in danger.
My lover.
My…Grace. She was mine in so many ways, and I’d wanted her for so long that I scarcely remembered what it was to breathe without her in my head. She’d intoxicated me from the first day I’d laid eyes on her so many years ago.
Now I had to worry someone wanted to cause her harm. Worse, that her grandmother’s tangled past and my own misdeeds would be the catalyst.
“It doesn’t make any sense.” She stared at the files from the old thumb drive plugged into my CEO Jack Hollister’s borrowed laptop, scouring them as she had been for hours. Jack had left a while ago, and I’d said Grace and I would be heading to bed.
But she couldn’t pull herself away. And because I’d intended to get her to sleep only so I could do some digging of my own once she was safely resting, neither could I.
“Why would she hide diary pages on here? In code, no less? Never mind all the rest of this stuff. It’s going to take forever for us to go through it all.”
“Who’s to say why anyone does anything?” It was a pat, hollow answer, and I wasn’t at all surprised that Grace narrowed her eyes at me.
She’d been surrounded by enough liars that she could probably identify them at fifty paces. I didn’t doubt one bit that she far from fully trusted me.
As she shouldn’t, because I was lying to her too.
“She lived a long, full life,” I began, shutting up as Grace lowered her head and turned her attention back to the computer screen.
Longer than some, sure. Long? Not nearly long enough. Annabelle had still been in the prime of her life and vibrant. Indicating she’d had a lot of years had to sting considering she was gone, and her granddaughter missed her every single day.
The last thing I wanted to do was hurt Grace. Even though I already had, numerous times. And would again. It was unavoidable.
“She had so much left to do,” Grace said softly, moving her hand over the trackpad. She continued to scroll through the endless documents, searching for what, I didn’t know. A clue. A memory. Answers.
Some reason why her grandmother had left a video before her death, saying Grace was in danger. Probably that reason had a lot to do with the recent break-ins by supposed “kids” at her grandmother’s house.
My house now. As hard as it was for Grace to come to grips with that, she wasn’t the only one. I’d forever be the young boy peering longingly through the windows even though all that glass now belonged to me.
Grace shifted on the stool, locks of her silky blond hair slipping down her back, and all I could see were the parallels between those windows and Grace.
Both seemed transparent. Both blocked out just as much as they let inside.
“I know.” I cleared my throat and tried to shove down everything but what mattered now.
The facts. Only the facts. Muddled and full of what the fuck as they happened to be.
“The grandmother I knew rarely dated. My grandfather died years ago, and then it was just her and me. But in her diary, she mentioned two younger men. I don’t know when she saw them. When she even had time to see them, since she was so focused on me and my activities. As I grew older, she would’ve had more opportunities, of course. But when I first came to live with her and when I was a pre-teen, then a teenager—well, I thought her life was an open book.”
“It’s hard for children to see their parents or grandparents as they truly are,” I hedged.
“What is that supposed to mean? I saw her just fine. Or I thought I did. She just had hidden sides. So many parts I never knew about.” Blowing out a breath, she braced her chin on her hand and stared at the screen. “What the hell is this?”
I glanced from her to the laptop and couldn’t stop my quick intake of breath. I was on her screen. Oh, the picture was grainy, and she probably wouldn’t recognize me from that long ago. Not right away. I wore my hair longer back then, in a messy style that made me cringe. I’d had on the full complement of denim and leather, and a surly expression dominated my face.
But it was definitely me, standing outside the Beacon School. With a perfectly coiffed Annabelle at my side, all smiles. We’d been surprised by the picture taker, my teacher. Ms. Phelps had wanted to add some “fun” shots to her classroom wall, and Annabelle was a prime benefactor of the art program, so she was a natural choice to photograph.
Me, I’d been an unhappy bystander. Caught outside smoking and tugged into conversation with a woman I mostly tolerated because of her granddaughter.
Grace.
“Photographs too.” My voice sounded rusty from disuse.
“Yes, Blake, photographs. There’s a ton here. A bunch of my grandmother with people from town, with me. Some with my parents. But this one.” She closed the one of me and Annabelle and immediately opened it again. “This is at the Beacon School,” she said slowly.
“Yes.”
“And this boy—”
I reached out and gripped her shoulder. “It’s me.”
She bolted off the stool as if I’d scalded her from the warmth of my hand. “You told me you knew her. You just didn’t tell me when, or how, or why. Goddammit, why?”
Swallowing hard, I laced my fingers behind my neck and paced around the counter and back again. She gave me a wide berth.
I suspected she’d be doing a whole lot more than that soon enough.
“What other photographs are there? Show me.” When she made no move to oblige, I sat at the laptop and slid my fingers over the trackpad, prepared to do the honors myself.
Instead I just stared into my own angry, mistrustful eyes.
We’d both been children back in those days, Grace more so th
an me. I’d been fully a teenager then, shuttled to a summer art program in the hopes I wouldn’t end up bleeding out in a gutter somewhere as my father had. That was the legacy he’d left me, you see. To threaten and cheat people while I smiled in their face and waited for the day a knife appeared between my ribs.
I’d grown up using my fists. Kids talked, as they always do. They knew my mother raised me alone, and they made comments. Innocent things sometimes, usually not. They called me a bastard and other things, names that I used as fuel later on. At first, I’d ignored them. Then came the day I beat a boy until his mouth was raw with blood and I knocked out his front two teeth.
After that, I’d been transferred to a school for problem children. An alternative school, they called it. My grades were fine. More than. I was acing all my classes. But I didn’t fit in. I was a potential threat to the other students.
Me, the one they’d taunted. I was the one who needed to be sent away.
School let out during the summer, of course, and my mother hadn’t had a clue what to do with me. I didn’t need remedial classes. Far from it. Somehow I’d ended up at an art camp at the Beacon School in Marblehead, miles away from my own district in Lynn. The two towns weren’t far apart geographically, but when it came to money and opportunities—well, they might as well have been at opposite poles of the Earth.
I’d shown some aptitude for art at my own school, mainly because it was another way to segregate myself. Most of the other kids—especially the boys—wouldn’t have been caught dead with a paintbrush or a ceramic piece, but I’d found the intricacy of creation quieted my mind. When I was involved in a project, I wasn’t thinking about my mother working three jobs to make the rent, or my father breezing in and out with some trinket when it suited him, or the neighborhood criminal types who knew I’d eventually give in and join up with them.
What did I have to lose? I was so fucking alone.
Glass work had been my first class at art camp. My mother had signed me up, hoping I’d turn my vague interest in art into a usable skill. At the very least, maybe I’d meet a girl. I was so angry back then that even the opposite sex barely got my attention. When I needed relief, I saw to myself.
The class in glass design had shown me a whole new avenue in artistic exploration. It had also given me Grace.
She’d been small for her age, with eyes too big for her face. Eyes she kept riveted on her demo pieces even as she tried to instruct the class in her low, halting voice. I’d had a feeling that she too had been sent there for a reason other than her own desires. Surely not to keep her out of trouble. She’d seemed about as dangerous as a rainbow. A million different colors, diffused by the light. Utterly untouchable.
Her grandmother came up to me one day as I stood outside smoking and generally being pissed at the world. She’d asked polite questions. Was I enjoying the class? Did I feel like I was learning a lot? What kind of art did I gravitate to?
I couldn’t figure out what her angle was. Even at that age, I’d known she had one. Everyone did, especially the fucking rich. But even after Grace’s brief time assisting the teacher ended, Annabelle returned and spoke to me. Once or twice, she gave me a ride back to Lynn.
Eventually she admitted she knew my father, rat bastard that he was. She’d been aware of my existence before I’d ever showed up at camp. In fact, she’d purposely contacted my mother and paid my tuition for the summer, offering to serve as my patron of sorts. My mother hadn’t questioned it. She knew I was a gifted art student, and she’d been eager to get me out of her hair and off her troubled mind.
I’d known right away Annabelle felt sorry for me. She was obviously a very wealthy, connected woman, and I was the poor wrong-side-of-the-tracks son of her supposed friend.
Of course I’d suspected that friendship was more than that. But she’d never said, and I’d never asked.
The following summer, Grace had come back to teach again. She helped teach two different glass classes that time, one basic and one more difficult, and I’d taken both.
Once, she’d glanced at me with questions in her eyes. How could I be both a beginner and an advanced learner at one time?
By that point, I wasn’t a beginner by any stretch. What I happened to be was a sixteen-year-old boy who was falling for a girl he could never have.
The camp was big enough, the amount of students diverse enough, and Grace’s tenure as student teacher brief enough that we barely spoke. A few fractured conversations here and there, the imparting of a technique, a question when I managed to stifle my shyness and actually speak to her. But she was totally engaged in her art, and I was completely immersed in her.
Like a good little stalker, I found out everything I could about her. I knew she was Annabelle’s granddaughter, obviously, and that she’d been mostly raised by the woman. I knew she had no siblings. I knew she tended to dress young for her age, wearing the kind of knee socks and plaid skirts made famous in porn videos, but in total innocence.
There was no feigned purity in Grace Copeland. Not then. She’d been truly untainted.
Once, I saw her grandmother push her on the swings at the playground beside the school. She was far too old for it, of course, and had protested heavily until her grandmother’s teasing encouragement had quashed her resistance. When Grace hadn’t been able to go high enough on her own, she’d begged her grandmother to help push.
Watching them laugh together, their joy palpable, had been like another kind of knife. Except this one had been fashioned from want.
I had little family. My mother loved me, in a distant, tolerant way. She was far too occupied with basic survival to think about the warm, fuzzy stuff she probably thought I didn’t need.
What I needed was Grace.
For years, I banked that need. In the summers, I took her classes. Anything she offered, I signed up for. If she recognized me from one year to the next, she never indicated so. Plenty of the students returned to the program, and she was entirely immersed in sharing her gift.
But even in the off-season, I kept tabs on her. She was a pampered Marblehead townie, and I wasn’t good enough to shine her shoes. The car I’d scrimped to save for hadn’t been used only as transportation to my part-time job. It had also been about Grace. To say she became my obsession would be like saying glass could be used to shield as much as to reveal.
All along, I’d planned for the day I would stop watching Grace and we would be together. Until that door was closed to me forever.
I’d never expected Grace herself to be the one to blow it wide open again.
“Blake?”
Her voice forcibly ripped me out of the past. “Yeah, sorry.” I jerked my fingers over the trackpad, closing the photo of me and a dead woman. And inadvertently clicked on something so much worse.
The picture was as clear as the other one was grainy. This one showed a man in a dark suit moving up a driveway to a house. Beside him was a black Range Rover. His entire bearing betrayed his irritation. From the length of his stride and his pinched brow, he wasn’t pleased at being interrupted it what likely the middle of the day from the amount of sunlight.
The man was me, the driveway belonged to Grace’s grandmother’s beach house, and the date imprinted in the corner was the day before Annabelle Stuart died.
Two
Blake
“You.” Grace’s voice wobbled. “Another picture of you.”
There was no denying it. How could I? I was in living color, filling the damn screen.
That was Annabelle, always fucking me over. This time she’d even managed it from beyond the grave.
“I can explain.”
“Oh, I’m sure you can. I don’t doubt that for a moment. The great Blake Carson always has a reasonable explanation for the ridiculous.” Grace gripped the edge of the counter and stared off into the distance. “The bigger question is will you even bother, or will you just fob me off with some morsel as you have every other time I’ve tried to dig at the truth?”
I hated that she was right. Hated more that I’d have to do it again this time, if I intended to keep her close. And I had to, because her safety was paramount.
That I’d wanted her for so long I couldn’t imagine my life without her now that I’d finally, finally gotten a taste…well, that was secondary.
I sure as hell hoped it was secondary.
“You won’t believe me, but I can assure you that I never intended for things to go like this.”
“Like what? Me squatting in your house, demanding my job back after you fired me? Or maybe you mean you never expected to get involved with me after you were clearly somehow involved with my grandmother. Something you refuse to elaborate on.”
“Refuse is a bit strong.”
“You know what’s strong? My willpower, or else I’d probably grab the lapels of your fancy shirt and demand some damn answers.” She slapped her hand down on the counter beside the laptop and it jumped, displacing my hand.
“Did it ever occur to you that I might not just be trying to hide things from you? That I could have genuine reasons for not elaborating? Ones that have nothing to do with keeping you in the dark, and everything to do with—”
Just keeping you, period.
She stared at me, not speaking. Her eyes were bluer than I’d ever seen them, her hair somehow wild in its delicacy.
For an instant, I saw Annabelle in her face. Their features were more different than alike, their coloring closer to opposite than the same, but that knowing, shrewd expression was all her grandmother’s.
“I first met your grandmother as a teenager. After I met you, actually.”
“Met me? What are you talking about? You never met me back then.”
I moved my fingers over the trackpad, hoping that Annabelle would have more evidence to the contrary. More pictures had been taken that day at the Beacon school, and I hoped she’d kept them. But as I scrolled through the list of photos on the thumb drive, my eagerness dimmed.
