Compromising the Billionaire_A Scandals of the Bad Boy Billionaires Novel

by Ivy Layne

  I did not like the way that sounded. “What happened?”

  Violet laid her cheek on her knees and stared across the room, seeing the past in place of our hotel suite. “I started dodging his lunch invitations and he asked me to dinner. He was subtle, but it was obvious that he wasn’t interested in hearing a ‘no’. That should have been a red flag. But I went. And like everything else, in the beginning, it was okay. A little weird, but okay. He asked about my family, and school, and how I liked working for his company. But after a while, the conversation started to shift. He wanted to know who I was dating, how many children I wanted to have. Things that were too personal for a family friend to ask about. I thought about finding another job but—”

  “School,” I finished for her.

  “Exactly. I’ll give him this, he was very smart. If he’d started the whole game the first year I worked for him, I would have been out the door. At that point, by the time I started really getting uneasy, I’d been at the company for two years and was a year into my master’s program. It seemed foolish to walk away over a few dinners and a weird feeling in my stomach when he looked at me.”

  “But you did leave,” I said, baldly, “so something happened.”

  “Something happened,” Violet agreed. She sat up and reached for her empty coffee cup, taking her time refilling it. After she took a long sip, she said, “He maneuvered me into dinner at his house. Like everything else, it seemed so innocent. He wanted to talk about a new account, and then he remembered he’d left a file at his house. Once we were there he confessed he’d ordered dinner in.”

  “Tell me you walked out, and he fired you.”

  “Not exactly,” Violet said, with a shaky laugh. “Like an idiot—like the naïve, accommodating woman my parents raised me to be—I wasted time trying to figure out a polite way to go home. Before we finished our first glass of wine, he tried to kiss me. And then…and then he wanted more than that.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Aiden

  Violet’s eyes were glued to her coffee cup, and I couldn’t read her face. My gut twisted as I asked, “Did he—”

  Before I could finish the sentence, she cut me off with a sharp shake of her head. “No. He tried. He tore my blouse, but when he tried to pull up my skirt, I kneed him in the balls and punched him. He caught me in the eye with an elbow, but I managed to get out the door. I don’t remember how I got home. My car was at the office, and he lived over a mile from my parents’ house. I must have walked. He didn’t follow.”

  “He didn’t come after you?”

  “He didn’t have to. He did one better. He called my parents. They were waiting when I walked through the door. My father was disgusted. My mother was confused. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t just let him do what he wanted to do. He was rich, and connected, and he wanted me. My father explained that they had an arrangement. I was part of it. They had business together. His friend wanted another wife. Someone young. Malleable. My father offered me.”

  “And they thought you’d just go along with it? If he wanted to marry you, why bother hiring you or sending you to school?”

  “That’s what I wanted to know,” she said. She shook her head again and took another sip of coffee, but her eyes were stormy and sad. “Apparently, he wasn’t quite ready to settle down again, but he didn’t want me wandering around out there making unsuitable connections and doing God knows what, so he and my father figured giving me a job and sending me to school would keep me occupied. As for going along with it, I honestly don’t think it occurred to either of my parents that I would defy them.”

  “They seriously thought they would just present you with a groom and you’d march right up to the altar? Have they met you?” I couldn’t wrap my head around this vision of Violet as an obedient daughter. She was too strong, too single-minded.

  Her lips curved up in a hint of a smile. “They did. Except for choosing to major in business, I always did what I was told. My brother was the rebellious one, and they cut him off when they decided he was unsuitable.”

  “What did he do? Rob a bank?”

  “He got a tattoo and a motorcycle. And then he dropped out of college.”

  “That’s it? I guess I could see cutting off the family money if he dropped out of school.”

  “No, Aiden, they didn’t cut him off financially. They cut him out of the family. They excised him like a tumor. Threw him out and never spoke his name again. He had academic scholarships and he worked. He wanted to study computer science instead of economics, and they refused to foot the bill so he paid for everything himself. But he didn’t fit what they wanted in a son and that was that. I was forbidden to talk to him, but we were close. We figured out ways to stay in touch. They might have been disappointed in him, but I wasn’t. He’s the best brother in the world.”

  “So, if they kicked your brother out of the family for buying a motorcycle and getting a tattoo, what did they do to you?”

  “I can see you’re getting it,” she said. “After days of ranting and raving at me, telling me how ungrateful I was, how I owed them, my father finally laid down the law. Marry his friend or get out. I packed a bag and left in the middle of the night. They’d confiscated my cell phone, purse, and passport. I walked to the nearest gas station and called my brother collect. It was a mess. I didn’t have my driver’s license, credit cards. Nothing. By the time I got everything figured out, I learned my parents had closed my bank accounts, taking every penny I’d saved for school.”

  “They stole your money?” I hoped I never had the opportunity to meet Violet’s parents. They sounded like a nightmare. First, they’d sold their daughter, then they’d set her up to be raped, and when she didn’t go along they stole everything she had? Everything she’d worked for?

  Something burned in my chest. Something beyond just anger. I wanted to track them down and make them pay for the way they’d treated her. Right after I found this family friend.

  “They didn’t see it that way,” Violet said. She picked a croissant off one of the plates and nibbled at the corner. “I’d opened the accounts jointly when I was a kid, for birthday checks from relatives, that kind of thing. It never occurred to me to open another one, so they had the authority to close them and transfer the money to their own accounts. I guess they saw it as a repayment for an investment that didn’t pan out.”

  “That investment being you,” I said.

  I’d lost my parents far too young, but I had almost twenty years of memories. The scent of my mother’s perfume when she hugged me. Whiskey and cigars when my father let me sit on his lap at his big desk.

  Love.

  Unconditional love from two parents who valued their children above all else. I couldn’t imagine the kind of family Violet described.

  “That investment being me,” she agreed. “My mother thought she couldn’t have children after my brother. They tried for years. Finally, she went through IVF trying to get pregnant with me. Eventually, it worked, but it was expensive. I wasn’t surprised they cleaned me out. Not that they needed the money. It wouldn’t have been about the money.”

  “No, it sounds like it was about spite. Revenge,” I said, disgusted.

  Violet lifted one shoulder, then dropped it. “That’s pretty much my parents. If you don’t get your way, go straight for petty revenge. There are no shades of gray for them. You conform to their standards or you don’t exist. I had no interest in marrying a man old enough to be my father, a man I didn’t even like that much, just to make them happy.”

  “And that was it? They didn’t come after you? Did they check to make sure you were all right?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t that hard to find. My brother was living out of state, but he dropped everything to come get me. He gave me a place to live, a job. He’s my family, not them. My guess is that they were waiting for me to come crawling back. It probably didn’t occur to them that I might leave for good.”

  “And you haven’t seen them
since?”

  “No. I wouldn’t be surprised if I never saw them again. I doubt they want to hear from me, and I don’t really want to see them.”

  “I wouldn’t either,” I agreed. She didn’t need people that toxic in her life. “But that doesn’t explain why you never went back to school. It’s been a few years, hasn’t it?”

  “It has. And like I said, at first it was money. My brother said he’d pay for school, but he was already doing enough. I didn’t want to be a burden. Then he started a new company, and I got so wrapped up in that, I wasn’t worried about school and now…I don’t know. I guess it’s time to start figuring this stuff out.”

  Before I thought better of it I said, “Winters, Inc. has a tuition match program.”

  Violet’s eyes flew wide, and she stared at me in shocked surprise for what felt like a full minute before her chest started to shake, and she burst into laughter. Just when I thought she was going to stop, she opened her mouth to say something, caught my eye, and dissolved into giggles again.

  Tears streamed down her cheeks before she got herself under control. I didn’t have to guess why she was laughing. The parallels were absurd. The only difference was, she’d come to my bed willingly. And I didn’t want her as part of some deal with her father. I just wanted Violet. Still, I could see why she was amused.

  I wasn’t surprised when she finally said, “No way in hell.” Wiping the tears from under her eyes, she let out another quick giggle. “Are you nuts? All this situation needs is me tying myself to your company even further. You need to fire me, not pay for my grad school tuition. I thought you were smarter than this.”

  “I am. Except, apparently, when it comes to you.”

  Truer words had never been spoken. All my good sense went right out the window where Violet was concerned, and I could not have cared less. Sitting here, sharing breakfast, finally getting inside her head, and learning who she was, I didn’t care about being smart.

  I was happy.

  I’d take happy over smart any day, especially if it was with Violet.

  “What do you want to do today?” I asked, hoping she’d go for the obvious change in subject. I didn’t want to talk about her family anymore, and I definitely didn’t want to talk about her job with Winters, Inc.

  She was right, I needed to fire her. I just wasn’t ready yet.

  “I don’t know, I hadn’t thought about it. What do you want to do?”

  “Are you finished with breakfast?” I asked, taking in the crumbs of her croissant on the otherwise empty plate.

  Wiping her hands on a cloth napkin, she looked down at the plate. “I’m done.”

  That was all I needed to hear. I was out of my chair and scooping her up before she saw me coming. She let out a high-pitched squeak and flung her arms around my shoulders for balance as I carried her across the living room, straight for the bedroom.

  When she got her balance she looked up at me, raised one eyebrow and said, “Really? Again?”

  I tossed her on the mattress, loving the way her breasts bounced beneath her T-shirt. “Really. Again. And again.”

  Violet had her clothes off in a blink.

  She let me take off the pink lace underwear. If I’d thought things would be different after the rush of first passion, I would have been wrong. In the light of day, now that the edge was off, we took our time. I explored every inch of her body, finding out what made her squirm and what made her scream.

  We spent the entire day in that bed. It wasn’t a race to orgasm. No one was keeping score. It was fingers and tongues and long, lazy touches. Endless kisses, slow and deep. Violet riding me until ecstasy spread across her face, my hand between her legs, and my mouth on her breast.

  Soft murmurs of sweet nothings. Napping and waking to reach for each other again. We finally surfaced when our stomachs rumbled too loudly to ignore. I ran a bath and ordered dinner after Violet told me what she wanted, and we soaked in bubbles and hot water until the waiter knocked on the door.

  Violet turned pink with embarrassment when I answered in my robe. Once the waiter was gone, she wrapped herself in her own robe and didn’t bother with clothes. We ate, steak for me and pasta for Violet, chocolate tort for dessert. The chocolate tort, we ate in bed.

  “Movie?” Violet asked.

  “I’m embarrassed to say I don’t think I can have sex again for at least an hour,” I admitted.

  Violet laughed, her breasts jiggling beneath her robe, distracting me. “Only an hour? I think we’ve had more sex in the last twenty-four hours than I’ve had in my entire life.”

  “That’s just sad, sweetheart.”

  “It kind of is.”

  “We’ll have to make up for lost time,” I said, “after we take a break. You pick the movie.”

  It wasn’t a test, exactly. More that I was curious to see what kind of movie Violet would pick. She pulled up the hotel’s basic cable channels, but I grabbed the remote and switched her over to pay-per-view. She slid me a sideways glance and said, “I’m not picking porn.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting porn, you perv,” I said, though I made myself a liar by immediately imagining watching porn with Violet.

  Later. Another time. I wondered if she’d be up for it.

  I was so caught up thinking about Violet and porn that I missed the movie she picked. It wasn’t until I saw the opening credits that I realized it was a recently released offbeat comedy I’d been meaning to see and hadn’t found the time.

  “Is this okay?” she asked, handing me the remote.

  “It’s great,” I said, meaning it.

  “It was between this or that disaster flick about earthquakes and tsunamis. I want to see that one but this screen is too small.”

  I completely agreed. “We can watch that one at home. The screen in our theater room is huge.”

  Violet sent me another one of those sideways looks and murmured, “Of course, it is.”

  I ignored her and pulled her into my side. Violet rested her head on my shoulder. She dozed off just before the end credits rolled.

  I let her sleep all night, but woke her in the morning with my mouth on hers. She turned into me as if we woke together every day, and I knew there was no way I could give her up. I sensed that pushing Violet too hard was the worst possible plan, but I could feel time slipping away.

  It was Sunday and the plane was waiting. I could talk to her in the office on Monday. We had to sort this out. She still hadn’t come clean about her reasons for taking the job at Winters, Inc. I knew enough for my own peace of mind, but I wanted to hear it from her.

  I felt like I could trust her, but I wanted to know that I could.

  I had to know that I could.

  I needed to know she trusted me enough to be honest. Until we got past that, we couldn’t move forward. And I needed to move forward with Violet.

  I saw it happen when we got on the plane. Her body, languid and relaxed, stiffened as if she’d braced for the reality of home. I meant to wait until Monday. To confront her on my territory, in my office. I couldn’t do it. We’d begun our descent into Atlanta when the words spilled from my mouth.

  “When are you going to tell me the truth?” Immediately I wished I could take it back.

  Shutters fell over her eyes. Her shoulders straightened and she crossed her legs, lacing her fingers together and resting her hands on her knee. She was perfectly composed. Impenetrable. Fuck.

  “The truth about what?”

  Her evasion got under my skin and I said, “You know what. I already know and I want to hear it from you. Why did you take the job at Winters, Inc.? What were you after?”

  “What do you mean you already know?” she asked, the first hint of emotion thawing her gaze. “What do you think you know?”

  “I know what you were up to,” I said. I’d been tracking her for weeks. She hadn’t made a move that wasn’t documented. “But I want you to tell me. I want you to trust me enough to be honest. I’m tired of this game”


  “If you’re tired of me,” she said in a frozen voice, “we can solve that easily enough.”

  “That’s not what I said. I’m not tired of you. I don’t think I’m ever going to get tired of you. I’m tired of the game. I’m tired of the lies. Just tell me the truth.”

  “Then tell me what you think you know,” she insisted.

  “I know why you took the job. I know what you were doing while you were in the company. I don’t care. I don’t care about any of it.”

  I wasn’t prepared for the gleam of tears in her eyes. “You know why I was there and you don’t care? After everything I told you, you don’t care.”

  I was missing something.

  I didn’t care that she’d been looking for dirt on me. There wasn’t any. She couldn’t hurt me with anything she’d found. But I had to be missing something because Violet looked as if I’d just stabbed her in the heart.

  “Violet. It’s okay. Just tell me who put you up to it and we can just get past it.”

  “And then what? And then we just keep doing this?” She gestured between us. “We just keep sleeping together? Is sex the only thing that matters?”

  “Yes. No. Sex isn’t the only thing that matters, and yes we just keep doing this. You and me. I like being with you. I want to get the rest of it out of the way. I want to forget about it.”

  “And it’s just that easy for you, isn’t it.”

  “I don’t see why it has to be more complicated than that,” I said, carefully. I needed to know who’d sent her to Winters, Inc., but then I’d be happy if we never talked about any of this again.

  Violet lifted a finger to wipe underneath her lashes. It came away wet and my gut clenched tight. What was I missing?

  She shook her head slowly, her eyes unbearably sad. “I can’t forget about it. I let myself get sidetracked with you and I shouldn’t have.”

  The plane bounced twice as the wheels touched the tarmac. Violet didn’t look at me. She wouldn’t look at me as we got off the plane. She wouldn’t meet my eyes in the car.