Billionaires In Love (Vol. 2): 5 Books Billionaire Romance Bundle

by Glenna Sinclair

  Before Porter could answer, the trailer windows blew out and a deafening blast filled Taylor’s ears. The next thing he knew he was slamming against the floor, glass shattering and scattering over his head, raining down like needles. He covered his head, scrambling to process what had occurred.

  Outside, Lawrence shouted, “Bomb!”

  Then Taylor heard something crash to the gravel beyond the trailer as the light changed, and he knew the explosion had caused one of the work lights to fall.

  “Hey!” Lawrence yelled. “What the hell have you done?”

  Vaguely, Taylor heard the executive run after the assailant, as he lifted his head to see how his father had made it through.

  Porter was lying on his back, his eyes lolling dizzily, as Taylor crawled towards him, discovering a sharp pain in his ribs on the right side.

  “Dad?”

  Porter groaned, and when Taylor reached him, cradling his head in his lap, the older man said, “Kill or be killed. Don’t you see that’s where this is headed?”

  Chapter Eleven

  “She did what?” Rose was utterly beside herself that Layla had gone off on her own and once again acted recklessly, endangering others to thwart the pipeline. Carter had her by the shoulder from where she sat at Taylor’s desk, but it did little to comfort her.

  “She’s in the county jail,” Taylor explained. “I could overlook one attack that didn’t hurt anyone, but this time she used a grenade, blew out the side of our trailer, and put my father in the hospital. He’s going to press charges, needless to say.”

  “Is he all right?” she asked.

  “He hit his head fairly hard and fractured his shoulder, but neither are life threatening.”

  Rose could hear his voice waver as though he was entirely beside himself.

  “How are you?” she asked urgently.

  “A bruised rib, but I’ll live.”

  Rose sensed Carter get to his feet, as his hand slipped off her shoulder.

  “I have to see her,” he explained. “Let’s get Harold on this if we can. Get her bail set.”

  “You can try,” said Taylor. “I doubt she’ll be offered a bail. She’s dangerous and this is the second attack.”

  “Meaning you told the authorities about the first one?” Carter demanded.

  “How could I not?”

  Intuiting that the men were staring each other down, Rose got to her feet as though it might mitigate the tension rising between them. It didn’t.

  “I’ll call Harold,” she began, “but we’re out of funds and no one works for free. What the hell was she thinking?”

  “She’s desperate,” Carter offered as though anything could justify Layla’s level of reckless destruction. “We all are.”

  “But we don’t kill people to stop a corporation from killing people,” she countered, completely astonished that anyone could defend Layla’s logic. Then decisively, she asserted, “I’m sorry, Carter. She’s out.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “She’s out. I can’t have this on my head. I can’t have her actions representing my organization. If she needs an attorney and wants to contact Harold, fine, but it won’t be on One World’s dime, and I have to say, if you support her in this then you’re out, too. This is serious and I’ll not be a party to it.”

  “I’ll be out?” he gaped. “I’ve done nothing.”

  “You brought her in and you assisted the first explosion.”

  “But after everything we’ve accomplished in the last three hours, you’d cast me out by mere association.”

  “You heard me, Carter,” she stated, taking a firm tone. “It’s not mere association. You took measures prior, and I have a zero-tolerance policy on that.”

  He didn’t have to say anything for Rose to know he was staring at her wide-eyed and astounded.

  “It’s late,” she said softly. “I think you should go.”

  “I was and I will.”

  He punctuated the statement by pulling his satchel over his shoulder and crossing through the office, and Rose thought she caught the distinct sound of him clipping shoulders with Taylor. She waited until she heard the suite door open then shut, indicating he was gone, before she asked Taylor, “You really are okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said in an exhausted voice.

  She felt him wrap his arms around her. He winced at the embrace.

  “Why are you lying?”

  “It’s just a few bruised ribs. They’re tender, and if you weren’t so boney—”

  “Oh shut up.” She smiled. “I’m not boney.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “No, we worked straight through.”

  Releasing her in favor of taking her arm, Taylor guided Rose through the office and down the hall. She was getting strangely used to the feel of each room in Taylor’s suite and sensed immediately when the ceiling overhead opened up, indicating they were now in the living room.

  “What do you feel like having?” he asked, rounding her through the living room and into the kitchen where he gently deposited her at the table. He didn’t let go until she eased into a chair. “I can make pasta.”

  “Make?” she said teasingly. “You can cook?”

  “I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I don’t always order delivery,” he said and she could hear the smile in his tone. “What about pasta primavera?”

  “I won’t argue with that.”

  “Red wine while you wait?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Rose listened to the sounds of Taylor placing two long-stem glasses on the marble counter and popping the cork from a bottle. After pouring, he set her glass with a click on the kitchen table and she found the stem with her hand, lifting it to her mouth and taking a sip.

  “This isn’t going to knock me out?”

  “I’ll keep an eye on you,” he said easily, “but I doubt your painkillers from this morning are still in your system.”

  As Taylor filled a pot with water and got the burner going, riffled through the cabinets and refrigerator, and collected the ingredients, Rose contemplated all that she’d found in his office.

  In addition to drafting up new reports, composing their argument to shut down the pipeline based on her accident, working with Madison’s findings as well as their attorney to frame their argument as best they could, Rose also spent the first hour talking Carter out of searching through Taylor’s office for evidence that Starlight knew and disregarded the hazards of their chemicals, as well as dirt on Taylor, in general. But Carter had become more aggressive in terms of getting her consent, and when she heard him opening filing cabinets she knew she wouldn’t be able to stop him.

  Carter had come across two critical pieces of information, both equally disturbing, though she recognized she may have been and may still be in denial about the fact of their damning power.

  The first was that Starlight had conducted a test on the chemical back in the late 90s, which proved it would not only burn human skin, but had the chemical composition necessary to burn through steel and iron—the very materials the pipeline was made of. But that wasn’t what had disturbed her. Carter had also come across legal correspondence between Porter Montgomery and the Starlight attorney, all of which Taylor had been CC’ed on, which delineated how to omit the test findings in order to gain governmental approval and permits in order to move forward with their first pipeline in Arizona. Granted, Taylor was a teenager at the time and launched into medical school after undergrad, so Rose was holding out hope that he, perhaps, never took the time to read the messages. But if that were the case, why did Taylor have these e-mails printed and filed in his office? Clearly, he had reviewed them in tandem with taking on his role as CEO of the Bellevue pipeline and used the findings to make identical arguments and draw up falsified documents to gain the necessary permits to build Starlight here.

  Rose had begged Carter not to take cell pics of the e-mails, arguing that One World wouldn’t be able to use any information o
btained illegally, but Carter had been too strong willed.

  If that hadn’t been enough of a gross misuse of Taylor’s trust in allowing them to work in his office, Carter took it one step further when he hacked into Taylor’s user on the computer.

  At first, Carter had meant to find further evidence of Taylor’s involvement in the conspiracy to use hazardous chemicals that the government would never approve had they understood the true nature and test findings, but what he happened upon was so much worse. Carter had uncovered Taylor’s medical files surrounding his months in the hospital after he’d fallen into the pool at his father’s charity event.

  They discovered the alarming results of a drug test that the hospital had run upon Taylor’s admittance. The test had come back positive for PCP and MDMA, two recreational drugs Rose would’ve never thought a man like Taylor would have indulged in. But that wasn’t the most puzzling part. The test also ran positive for scopolamine, a drug neither Rose nor Carter had heard of. After some Internet research on Carter’s end, he told her that the medical use for Scopolamine was to quell motion sickness. It was administered as a patch placed on the skin. When it had sounded odd anyone would use that drug recreationally, Carter dug deeper and found a street use for the drug. Though it was prevalent in Colombia and Buenas Aires and not the United States, criminals would use the drug to subdue their victims either by blowing it in their face or handing them a business card laced with the substance. Within minutes, the victim would be rendered debilitated, highly suggestible, functioning by command, but without their true cognitive abilities. The criminal could then merely suggest the victim take them to an ATM, empty the cash from their account, and hand it over, and the victim would. When the spell lifted, the victim would have no recollection of anything that had happened. For this reason, scopolamine, or devil’s breath, as it was referred to on the streets of Colombia, was considered the world’s most dangerous drug.

  The bottom line was that no one would ever use such a drug recreationally. Because of this, Rose knew Taylor hadn’t done drugs that night. He’d been drugged.

  So who had drugged him?

  And why?

  She had barely had time to wrap her mind around that when Taylor had returned to give them the news of Layla’s egregious behavior. And though she now had a minute to think while Taylor strained the pasta and drizzled his white cheese sauce on top of each plate, it was still too much to comprehend.

  The ramifications of having been drugged with scopolamine had led Taylor to over a month of clinical psychosis, which he marginally lifted out of in time to botch a routine appendix removal, resulting in the end of his medical career.

  More than anything, she was pained that he could’ve gone through something so gut wrenching as to lose his career over something he couldn’t have controlled.

  Did she really want to take him down and ruin another career of his?

  Not by a long shot, but what could she do to prevent Carter from going public with all that he’d learned?

  Taylor set the plates on the table and took his place in the chair next to Rose, then helped her hand over the utensils to the right of her plate.

  “You seem deep in thought,” he said warmly.

  “You can tell?”

  “I think I’m getting to know you well enough. Anything you want to talk about?”

  She smiled, but it was grim. “Why do I get the feeling we’re turning into Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog?”

  “The old Looney Tunes characters?” he said, laughing.

  “Every day we’ll go out into the world, fighting against one another, but every night we’ll come home and spend time together, closer than ever.”

  “So am I the wolf or the sheepdog?”

  “I’m definitely the wolf,” she asserted with a sense of humor before taking a sip of her wine.

  “Really? I thought you’d brand me the wolf, since I’m so evil.”

  “The wolf is powerful. The sheepdog is dopey.”

  “Ah, thanks for that,” he teased. “I’ll have you know the wolf never succeeded in those cartoons.”

  “Crap, I think you’re right.”

  As they dove into their meal, Taylor found moments to squeeze her hand. She felt a bit childlike stabbing at her pasta with little awareness when she accidentally pushed it off her plate, but Taylor cleaned up after her, making no fuss of collecting the bits and placing them into a side plate to his right.

  “One piece of good news about being at the hospital for an hour,” he started, but paused to drink his wine. “I was able to speak with a reputable ophthalmologist about getting you in for an appointment soon.”

  “To do what? Did you find an eye donor?”

  “Well no, not yet. They’ll need to run a number of tests first to see how your optic and retinal nerves are healing. I had thought we'd need to wait weeks before you'd be well enough to undergo tests, but after speaking with the specialist, it looks like you can go in right away. It’ll give them insight as to how to proceed when we do find a donor.”

  “And you like this doctor?”

  “He’s one of the best in Seattle and has had promising results with a number of other patients, though they didn’t suffer the same degree of trauma to their eyes.”

  “So...” she began, trailing off and wrapping her head around the implication. “If my eyes are totally shot, and they clearly are, then why would anyone need to know how the nerves are doing? Wouldn’t the doctor just take my eyes out and replace them?”

  “Rose,” he said, taking her hand and angling towards her so that he was very close. “If the nerves are damaged, then they can’t attach new eyes, because there wouldn’t be a signal for your brain to receive.” When she didn’t say anything, but drew in a stuttering breath, he wrapped his arm around her shoulder and leaned his forehead against hers. “We have to start somewhere.”

  “Right,” she said, but her voice was barely audible.

  “I made an appointment for tomorrow morning. It could be premature, but I’d like to get the ball rolling.”

  “So what you’re telling me is that tomorrow I’ll either get the best news of my life, or the worst.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Rose woke with the morning sun on her face, but its warmth wasn’t what struck her. She could see a burst of light flickering and waning. She could see. She bolted upright in response and angled her face towards the window where the sun was streaming into the bedroom.

  Was her mind playing tricks on her? Was this merely a desperate psychological reaction to her fear of receiving a damning diagnosis later this morning? Or were her eyes miraculously coming back to life?

  To test her ability, she hugged both hands around her eyes until darkness fell then drew them away fast and waited for the burst of life. It was slow, but came through. Why would it be slow? Frustrated to discover a surefire cause and effect, she kept covering her eyes then removing her hands, but the light burst was unpredictable. At times, it would come immediately. Other times, she remained in darkness. She didn’t understand the anatomy of the eyes or the brain behind them. Were neurons firing, alluding to sight that wasn’t there? Was her pituitary gland acting up and the light was only chemical? Was this what yogis described during meditation? Or was her sight flickering slowly back to life?

  Taylor groaned, rolling from his back to his side and reaching for her, so she stilled. She didn’t want to wake him or get his take on the phenomenon. If this weren’t good news, she needed to believe it truly was for just a little while longer before he asserted his doctor’s take on it, dashing her hopes. Not that he’d want to dash her hopes, but he cared about her enough not to give her false hope or let her entertain her own delusions.

  Once she sensed him falling back into a deep sleep, as indicated by a gentle snore, she felt for the gauze around her head and began unwrapping it. When she had the length of it balled in her lap, she removed the two cotton pads from her eyes. How long had it been since she’d felt air on he
r eyelids? Other than Taylor redressing her wounds, which only lasted a few seconds, she couldn’t even remember.

  Just as she was about to angle her head towards the window to her left, she felt her face, the skin around her eyes and across the bridge of her nose. It felt slick and rippling—burnt skin that had healed badly.

  She couldn’t imagine how grotesque she must look, and her heart sank at the thought. She decided not to proceed with the experiment that had given her such hope, if only for a fleeting moment. Whether she could see light or not, nothing made up for how scarred she was, and not just on the outside. Having lost her sight had scarred her inside, as well. It had taken part of her identity away. She wasn’t sure who she was anymore, or how she’d function in the world if her sight never returned.

  Suddenly, she felt very afraid to see the eye specialist. No news was better than bad news, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to go with Taylor to the hospital at all. Could she take any more bad news?

  Taylor drew in a deep breath then grumbled awake beside her, and Rose scrambled to wrap her eyes, but there was no use. She didn’t have enough hands. Whenever Taylor had redressed her bandages, she always had to hold the cotton pads in place over her eyes. Discarding them, she did what she could to replace the gauze, but in her haste she kept letting the loose end fall and it wouldn’t wrap with any kind of promising hold.

  “Hey,” he groaned, snuggling up to her as he sat upright. “You took off your bandages?”

  “Ah, sorry, they were itching me.”

  “You could use fresh gauze, anyway. Here,” he said, gently taking the gauze from her, but his kindness only ratcheted up her anxiety.

  “Don’t,” she snapped, covering her eyes with her hands in a defeated hunch.

  “Hey, what’s wrong?”

  “I’m frustrated.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think? Look at me!”

  Though she’d demanded him to, she wouldn’t lower her hands.

  Taylor rubbed her back and held the silence with her, as though words wouldn’t come close to soothing her. And she appreciated it when he didn’t push the issue.