The Dangerous Billionaire

by Jackie Ashenden

  You’re out of control.

  Yeah, he was. And, worse, his brother was right. He wasn’t thinking straight.

  “If he doesn’t want to harm her, he might want her for other reasons.” Van had to struggle to keep his voice even. “Such as using her against us.”

  “How?”

  Forcing his brain away from its single track around and around the fact that Chloe had been taken, Van tried to think about de Santis’s motivations instead. The guy had wanted Chloe, that was for sure. But what could he want from her? It wasn’t a simple case of a father wanting to reconnect with his daughter, because de Santis wasn’t that kind of man, not from what Noah had told him about the guy.

  No, Cesare de Santis was ruthless, corrupt, and even though he might stop short of physically harming Chloe, he probably wouldn’t when it came to using her to get what he wanted. Especially if what he wanted was Tate Oil.

  “He wants the company,” Van said. “I wondered if that fucking takeover was because he wanted to take Tate Oil down, but maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he wants to keep it for himself.”

  “I thought he didn’t have enough stock to make a move on the takeover?”

  “We were pretty certain, but it wasn’t absolute. There were a couple of shell companies who owned stock that the team was having difficulties finding the owners for.”

  “Okay, so what if he doesn’t have enough? And that’s why he took Chloe. As leverage to get us to hand it over.”

  Van cursed under his breath, a cold thread of worry somehow getting through the wall he’d placed around his emotions. It made sense. It made a whole lot of extremely crappy sense. “Yeah, fuck. I think you’re right.”

  “Shit,” Lucas muttered.

  “You got that right.” Van turned from the window, his brain finally kicking into high gear, turning over a whole bunch of options in his head. “One thing’s for fucking sure, I’m not sitting around until we get confirmation. I want to move on this now, while he still thinks he’s taken us by surprise.”

  His phone vibrated with an incoming text and he lowered the phone from his ear to look at the screen. And everything in him went quiet and still.

  It was from Chloe.

  I’m okay. I’m not in danger. Please don’t worry. I’ll be back in less than twenty-four hours, I promise.

  The rage he’d thought he’d securely battened down flung itself at the walls he’d put around it yet again. I’m not in any danger.… Fuck, did she really think she was safe? Did she really know what kind of man Cesare was? Noah had told her he was the enemy, but she wouldn’t truly understand. She hadn’t had all the deals and bribes and embezzlements that de Santis had committed pointed out to her the way Noah had pointed them out to Van. Instructing Van to keep an eye on their old enemy, to keep watch, because the guy was evil and one day he’d come for Tate, and if he did, no one was safe.

  “No one” being Chloe.

  Come on, give her some credit. She’s not stupid. She’s handling it.

  “Van?” Lucas’s voice was tinny through the phone’s speaker. “What’s happening?”

  Van wrestled his anger back under control and lifted the phone to his ear. “Text from Chloe telling me that she’s okay and that she’ll be back in twenty-four hours.”

  “You think that’ll happen?”

  “Christ, I don’t know. If that’s even her texting and if it is…” He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “We got to get a plan in place. We need to go get her before shit gets serious.”

  Because regardless of whether she was handling this or not, her safety was his mission goal and that’s all that mattered. The only thing that did.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “What do you want to know?” Cesare de Santis was sitting back in his chair, his legs outstretched before him, idly swirling his crystal tumbler full of whiskey.

  “Everything,” Chloe said.

  He laughed. “That’s a lot all at once. Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.” She reached over to where she’d put her own tumbler, on a side table next to the couch she was sitting on, suddenly deciding that maybe she could do with a shot of alcohol after all. The glass was heavy in her hands and when she lifted it to her mouth and drank, the whiskey felt like fire going down.

  De Santis put his head back against the armchair and watched her. “You’re a brave woman.”

  She lifted her chin. “I do what I have to, Mr. de Santis.”

  “I can’t ask you to call me Dad, not when we don’t know each other, but please, at least call me Cesare. So, where would you like me to start?”

  The alcohol glowed warmly in her stomach, settling her. “Dad apparently took me as some kind of surety for your good behavior. He thought you were going to do something to him or the company, so he wanted a way to make you keep your distance. Is that true?”

  The blue of de Santis’s eyes gleamed. “Yes. Not long after you were born, I got a letter from him, along with a paternity test, informing me that he had you and that if I cared about you, I was never to come near him, the boys, or Tate Oil ever again. He didn’t elaborate on the threat, but I took it seriously.”

  There went the vague idea that somehow Van had misread the letter Noah had left for him. It really was true. Noah really had used her as a threat to hang over his enemy.

  The settled feeling vanished, leaving her cold and a little sick. She didn’t let it show. “I see. So is that why you didn’t try to come for me?”

  “I loved your mother and I didn’t want anything to happen to her child. Plus, as I already told you, I was married. Your appearance would have been somewhat … problematic.”

  Problematic. She was problematic. Story of her entire life, wasn’t it?

  “So you let him keep me?”

  Cesare turned his palm up to the sky. “What could I do? He would have harmed you if I’d come near you.”

  “No,” she said automatically. “He wouldn’t have.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Cesare’s blue eyes gleamed. “There’s a lot you don’t know about Noah, Chloe.”

  Apparently there was. But still, would her father really have hurt her?

  You never knew him, not really, and maybe there was a reason for that. Maybe he didn’t want you to know what he was capable of.

  But the instant the thought occurred to her, she knew it wasn’t true. Yes, Noah had kept a part of himself separate from her, but it wasn’t because he was a monster who would physically hurt a child. He was a deeply flawed man, yes, but he would never have raised a hand to her. Never. She knew it like she knew all the trails on Shadow Peak.

  Still, Cesare clearly thought otherwise.

  “Why?” she demanded. “Give me one good reason Dad would do something like that to me?”

  “Because we were enemies. He didn’t trust me not to make a move on Tate Oil.”

  “Yes, I get that. And he had reason, didn’t he? You tried to take Tate Oil from him.”

  He’d gone very still, the color of his eyes glittering like sharp, hard sapphires. “Is that what he told you? That I tried to take it?”

  Chloe gave him a narrow look. There was a tension around him, a tension that hadn’t been there before. “Yes,” she said slowly. “Soon after he claimed the oil strike, you tried to argue that it was on your land.”

  There was silence for a long moment.

  Then unexpectedly, Cesare burst out laughing.

  Chloe shifted in her chair, uncomfortable all of a sudden. Had she said something particularly amusing? She hadn’t thought so. “What’s so funny?”

  Cesare took his time to answer, his laughter slowly winding down. “My God, the gall of Noah. It’s really quite impressive.” He raised a finger and pretended to wipe a tear from his eye. “Let me correct a misunderstanding. I didn’t try to take the oil from Noah. He took it from me.”

  Chloe nearly laughed herself at the preposterousness of the statement. “No, he didn’t. Don’t be ridiculous.”

&
nbsp; All amusement vanished abruptly from Cesare’s face. “Of course he told you that. He always hated to look bad.”

  Her heartbeat had gotten faster, sounding loud in her head. “Told me? Told me what?”

  Cesare ignored the question. “We used to be friends, did you know that?” He took another sip of his whiskey, that bitter edge corroding his voice. “We did everything together. When he bought the Tate ranch, I bought myself a little piece of Wyoming too, bordering his place. We thought we could get our properties in order together, share the load, help each other. Eventually we started to plan having families, bringing our kids up side by side.” He paused, looking down at the amber liquid in his tumbler. “I never wanted to go into the gun business like my father. I wanted to work the land. And that time … well, it was the happiest of my life.”

  The bitterness had faded from his voice, a wistful note entering it that made Chloe’s chest tighten. Because the life he’d described sounded … idyllic. Yet that wasn’t the life he was living now, which meant something had happened. Something terrible.

  Something she could probably guess at if she let herself think about it.

  Cesare swirled the whiskey in his tumbler yet again, a slow circling movement. “We were digging drainage ditches in one of the fields. It was on my property, not even near the border of Noah’s, but his shovel hit something and when we looked to see what it was, there was this black stuff welling up in the hole.” He lifted the tumbler to his mouth, took a sip. “It was oil. And we both knew what that meant. We got drunk that night celebrating and I promised him a share of the money I was going to make from the strike, because he was my friend. He slapped me on the back and told me he didn’t need anything.” Cesare’s mouth twisted in a strange kind of smile. “Then the next day there were surveyors everywhere and a couple of days after that he sent me a letter. It had been drawn up by a lawyer stating that the boundaries of my ranch had been redrawn and that the field with the oil strike was actually on Noah’s side, not mine.”

  Chloe frowned, because this was all very familiar. “Yes, that’s what happened. Except you’re the one who tried to get the boundaries redrawn.”

  Cesare’s gaze didn’t even flicker. “No. I didn’t.”

  Noah told a lot of lies, you know that. All those promises he never delivered on …

  A thread of cold was twisting its way through her, the edges of her tumbler digging into her palms yet again, but she didn’t loosen her grip. “What are you saying?”

  “The properties were old and the boundary lines hazy,” Cesare went on, as if she hadn’t spoken. “And I couldn’t find any legal record anywhere that stated clearly where they were. Noah took advantage of that and had the boundary lines redrawn in his favor. He wanted the oil.” This time Cesare smiled. “So he took it.”

  No. She couldn’t believe that. Sure, Noah may have been deeply flawed, but surely he wasn’t that venal, that underhanded. That dishonest.

  “Of course you don’t believe me,” Cesare said. He didn’t sound angry about it, more … mildly interested. “Why would you? No one else did when I pointed it out either. I had no proof because he’d been quite thorough, had Noah. He’d gotten it all locked up tight legally so I couldn’t do a thing to stop him as he claimed my fucking oil for himself.”

  Except that hadn’t been the way Noah told it.

  “That’s … wrong,” she couldn’t help pointing out. “You were the one who took advantage of him and had those boundaries redrawn. And at the last minute Dad found some old plans that proved you were wrong. He said you never forgave him and tried to sabotage the company.” She stopped.

  Cesare said nothing, his expression hard, fury glittering in his blue eyes.

  Noah lied to you for years about your parentage. Why wouldn’t he lie about this?

  A kernel of doubt solidified in her chest, sitting there in a cold, hard lump.

  She didn’t want to believe what Cesare was telling her. Noah hadn’t been the father she’d wanted, but he’d still been the only father she’d known. And the thought that he’d lied to her about everything …

  How is that any different from anything else he’s ever told you?

  No, it couldn’t be true. Could it?

  Chloe studied the older man’s face, trying to figure out if he too was lying. Except why he’d lie she couldn’t imagine. What would he even get out of it?

  The kernel of doubt got larger, the thread of cold, colder.

  Was it true? Had the multibillion dollar company her father built all been on the back of stolen oil? This man’s stolen oil? Her real father’s stolen oil?

  “I’d give you proof if I had any,” Cesare said. “But unfortunately I can’t prove it. Noah made very sure of that.”

  Her fingers had gone numb and she had to hold onto her tumbler very tightly to stop it from slipping out of her hands. “He wouldn’t do something like that.” She tried to sound as if she believed it. “Not to a friend.”

  “Forgive me, child. But you have no fucking idea what he would or wouldn’t do. You didn’t know him. I was his friend since we were both five years old. We grew up together. I knew him better than he knew himself. I was a brother to him.” He lifted his tumbler, drained it. “And then the bastard betrayed me, and all because money meant more to him than friendship did.”

  Cesare suddenly turned and without warning flung the empty tumbler into the fireplace. It exploded in a shower of glass, the unexpected sound making Chloe jump and sending her own tumbler to the floor as her fingers lost their grip. Her tumbler cracked but didn’t shatter, rolling under the sofa, but she made no move to retrieve it.

  Cesare sat back in his chair, interlacing his fingers in his lap. Nothing remained of the bitterness or his sudden vicious anger, the expression on his face pleasant. “Now,” he said, “is there anything else you wanted to know?”

  She stared at him, her heartbeat thumping painfully hard behind her breastbone, the doubt inside her becoming certainty.

  There was no denying the fury in Cesare’s eyes—that wasn’t an act. Noah had betrayed him. Noah had wanted a legacy more than he’d wanted friendship, more than he’d wanted family, more than he’d wanted anything. And she knew firsthand how that went.

  “You wanted the company, didn’t you?” she said, because it was becoming clear now. “You wanted to take it for yourself.”

  “Of course I wanted the company,” he agreed smoothly. “Like I told you, it’s rightfully mine anyway. In the early days I kept hoping your father would actually talk to me so we could sort this out like adults, come to some agreement over the boundary issue. But he refused every meeting. He didn’t want to talk and when I tried to insist, he threatened legal action. He was guilty and he knew it.”

  The smell of her spilled whiskey was making her feel ill, but she didn’t move, unable to tear her gaze from Cesare.

  No wonder Noah had lied to you and to Van and Wolf and Lucas, too.

  Of course. He must have been ashamed …

  “Why did he need to use me then?” she asked. “If everything had been totally aboveboard, there’s nothing you could have done to touch him.”

  “Well, not entirely nothing,” Cesare said slowly. “I might have tried a few things that weren’t exactly on the right side of the law. But he’d left me with no choice. He’d stolen from me and if there’s one thing I don’t like, Chloe, it’s a thief.”

  “So he was afraid of you. That’s why he took me.”

  “Yes, I suppose he was. A pretty cowardly move, don’t you think? To use an innocent child like that.”

  A flawed man. A liar. A thief. A coward. And a shitty father.

  Yet along the way, somehow, she’d learned enough to manage a massive spread like the Tate ranch. A role Noah had given her with no hesitation whatsoever, trusting in her abilities totally. He may not have been able to give her the emotional support she’d needed, but nevertheless he’d given her something.

  “You didn’t come for
me,” she said, not even realizing she was going to say it until it came out. “You left me there with him on purpose, didn’t you?”

  Cesare tilted his head, a gleam in his eye that hadn’t been there before. A cold gleam. “I couldn’t come to get you, Chloe. He would have harmed you.”

  “No,” she said, with absolute certainty now. “That’s a lie. If you’d wanted me, you would have come and gotten me no matter what he would have said.”

  Another silence fell, deep and cold as the feeling inside her. As the gleam in Cesare de Santis’s blue eyes.

  “I could have, it’s true.” His voice was steady, calm. “And I did think about it, believe me. But given the level of security at the ranch, it was going to be difficult to get you out. So I decided in the end that it would be more useful to me to have you stay where you were.” His mouth twisted in another of those terrible smiles. “My own little sleeper agent.”

  It wasn’t a shock. More like a confirmation. He didn’t want her. He’d never wanted her. And maybe a few days ago that would have secretly devastated her. But it didn’t now. Not now that she had Van.

  Chloe didn’t even blink. “What do you expect to get from holding me here?”

  “You’re a smart girl.” The terrible smile on Cesare’s face softened. “Work it out.”

  It wasn’t difficult. “Let me guess. Tate Oil.”

  “Of course.” He put his hands on the arms of the chair and pushed himself up and out of it. “I’m sorry, Chloe. I’m usually a patient man, but it’s been over twenty-five years since Noah Tate stole was what rightfully mine and I’m afraid I got tired of waiting. Perhaps if my sons hadn’t put me in such a difficult position with DS Corp last year, I might have been okay with waiting a little longer, but well”—he spread his hands—“a man needs a hobby in his retirement. And since DS Corp is no longer mine, I thought it was time to take back what always was.”

  It took some effort to keep her anger in check, but she was proud of herself that she managed it. “So I get to be your pawn now? Is that what you’re saying?”