Compromising the Billionaire_A Scandals of the Bad Boy Billionaires Novel

by Ivy Layne

  I was adrift, tethered only to Chase and he’d found himself a whole new family.

  I shoved my self-pity aside, bolstered a little when Charlie said, “Mrs. W likes you. Aunt Amelia says you have starch. And you got Aiden to unchain himself from his desk and come home for dinner. I guess you can stay.” Her quirky smile pulled a faint grin from me.

  “I definitely won’t dump a bucket of water on your head,” she added, the smile flashing into mischief, making her look a decade younger. I’d bet Aiden had had his hands full with Charlie when she was a teenager.

  “You dumped a bucket of water on Elizabeth’s head?”

  “From the landing. They were on their way to a black tie dinner. She was wearing chiffon and her hair was in these huge curls.”

  I smacked a hand over my mouth, my shoulders shaking with laughter as I imagined Elizabeth’s cool, blond beauty drenched with water, her mascara running, hair flattened, chiffon dress turned to sodden rags.

  When I got my breath back I said, “Please tell me someone has a picture of that.”

  “I wish. Aiden was furious. I was grounded for a month. Totally worth it.”

  “I bet. The last time we met I was tempted to throw my champagne in her face. If she comes near Aiden again, I might.”

  “I’ll keep my phone handy, just in case.”

  The family dinner went better than I expected. Annalise had spread the word about Aiden’s attempt to bail and my dragging him home. We all marveled at how much Chase and Vance looked alike, which was only a little weird. Chase sat across from me, both of us flanking Aiden at the head of the table, and watched us with sharp eyes all through the meal. If he was looking for fault in Aiden, he didn’t find it. We were all on our best behavior.

  Gage didn’t poke at me, Aiden didn’t provoke Chase, Aunt Amelia didn’t hide any plastic insects in the salad.

  All in all, things were good. I should have been sleeping like a baby. Instead, I lay awake beside Aiden, staring at the ceiling, unable to settle my mind. When I slept my dreams were uneasy, and when I woke in the dark with a jerk, I had only memories of shadowy hallways. Of wandering in the dark. Of being lost.

  I didn’t need a psychology degree or a shrink to tell me the loose ends in my life were plaguing my sleep. I knew once things were settled—once I found a job, an apartment, got a name from the Sinclairs—I’d feel less adrift.

  Telling myself that I was doing my best didn’t help. Every day I sent out résumés, made phone calls. I went on interviews and got turned down for a job I really wanted. This time it turned out I wasn’t qualified enough, reminding me that if I didn’t get a job, I’d never save enough for tuition, and I’d never finish school.

  Every day I asked Aiden if he’d heard from Cooper, if they’d found the attorney or a name. Every day he said they hadn’t. With each day that passed, my uncertainty grew.

  Maybe they wouldn’t find anyone. Maybe the contract was just a dead end and I’d never know. Maybe I wouldn’t find a job I liked, wouldn’t be able to save enough for school. Wouldn’t get in when I applied. My grades had been good, my GMAT scores were strong, but the program was competitive.

  Aiden’s words ate at me. I was still jobless and homeless.

  Five years after my parents had thrown me out, and I had nothing to show for myself. I’d spent most of that time helping Chase build a company that no longer existed, and I’d lost a chunk of my savings when Harrison had changed the contracts and stolen it out from under us. I was back at square one. Again.

  I lay beside Aiden in bed, still and quiet so I didn’t wake him, my thoughts going in circles. I didn’t want him to know about any of it—the bad dreams, that I wasn’t sleeping.

  He wouldn’t be able to stop himself from trying to fix everything. He’d never understand that if he fixed it for me, I’d only feel worse. I just needed to hang in there and keep trying. Eventually, I’d find the right job, find a place to live, find the people behind that contract. I knew everything would work out.

  But in the dark of night, my worries keeping me from sleep, I didn’t quite believe it.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Violet

  A few days before Annalise and Riley’s wedding I sat at Aiden’s desk putting together an application for a job opening I’d found in the paper. From the brief description, it sounded perfect. A bookkeeping position, full time, but with flexible hours and the opportunity to do some of the work from home.

  If I got it, the flexible hours would let me go back to school part-time. The company was only accepting applications through the mail, and while I had cream linen envelopes to match my résumé paper, I didn’t have a stamp.

  Aiden’s desk drawers were as organized as I would have expected, each one partitioned with wood inserts to hold pens, paper clips, envelopes—anything and everything he might need.

  Except for stamps.

  I was about to go hunt down Mrs. W—if there was a stamp somewhere in this massive house, she would know—when I spotted the border of an American flag sticking out from beneath the wooden tray in the center desk drawer.

  I nudged the tray to the side and pulled at the flag, hoping it was a sheet of stamps. It was, and in my relief at finally finding what I needed, I didn’t realize the paperclip around the sheet of stamps had snagged on a stapled set of documents Aiden had shoved beneath the tray.

  I peeled a stamp from the sheet and stuck it to my envelope, setting the envelope aside. I was preparing to replace the stamps when I spotted a date in Aiden’s handwriting scrawled on the border of the pages I’d dislodged from beneath the tray.

  My birthdate—and a phone number that was not my phone number. My palms damp, my heart pounding a little too hard, I teased the papers from beneath the tray. It was a copy of the contract for my adoption.

  Why would this be in Aiden’s desk? And what was that phone number? It didn’t have an Atlanta exchange. It couldn’t be Sinclair Security. My hands trembling, my stomach a little queasy, I opened my laptop and pulled up the reverse lookup form on the White Pages website. I typed in the number and hit enter.

  It only took a second to return a result. A residential number in Huntsville, Alabama. The webpage obscured the name and address connected to the phone number. For an additional fee, I could have that and more.

  I tried to tell myself I was chasing a dead end. This couldn’t be anything important, or Aiden would have told me. He’d said, repeatedly, that they hadn’t found anything. A little lightheaded, I pushed back from Aiden’s desk and ran upstairs to get my purse.

  All it took was a credit card number and I had what I’d been looking for. A name. LeAnne Gates. An address outside of Huntsville where, according to the background check I’d acquired for a mere $12.99, LeAnne Gates had lived for the past fifteen years.

  Prior to that, she lived in a suburb of Chattanooga, not far from where I’d grown up. She’d been married and divorced, was an only child, had no criminal record, but a tidy collection of traffic violations. She’d declared bankruptcy in her early twenties, after her divorce, but had purchased a house a few years after. No record of a mortgage, and a quick Internet search showed that the property had cost over half a million dollars. It had been purchased exactly 28 years before, a month after my birthdate.

  Bile rose in the back of my throat, caustic and sour. I swallowed hard and kept looking. She’d moved again five years later, this time to a house twice as big and twice as expensive. Again, no record of a mortgage.

  The background report didn’t give me her employment history. I couldn’t tell what kind of car she drove. I could be way off base.

  But LeAnne Gates’s phone number in Aiden’s handwriting was scrawled across the contract for my adoption. A contract that paid seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a month before she’d purchased a new home for cash.

  I stared down at the angular spikes of Aiden’s handwriting.

  Aiden.

  He’d said they’d found nothing.
<
br />   Promised me they were still looking.

  And here was what I’d wanted, right in front of me, hidden in his desk drawer.

  My stomach heaved, and I swallowed hard, again. I clicked the icon of the printer, the whir and clank of the ink cartridge deafening in the silent room. Three pages slid into the tray, one by one. I folded them and slipped them into my purse, then sank back into Aiden’s chair, holding my purse on my lap, unable to tear my eyes from the slash of Aiden’s writing on white paper.

  He’d lied to me.

  I heard myself tell him that he was the only one I could trust.

  What a fucking idiot. I was so stupid. Sinclair Security was the best. Maybe they’d been hamstrung without any evidence, but now they had contracts. They had the name of an attorney. Of course, they’d been able to find what I was looking for.

  How long had Aiden known? How long had he been sitting on her name? Her address?

  My lungs were tight, squeezing my breath. My head throbbed. This was so much worse than interfering in my job search or trying to get me into graduate school.

  Every day I’d asked, and every day he’d lied.

  He knew how important it was to me, and he lied.

  I couldn’t stop hearing it echo in my head. I don’t think I trust anyone as much as I trust you.

  Had he laughed to himself when I told him I wanted us to be partners?

  It all seemed like a joke now. I felt painfully naïve.

  Falling in love with Aiden Winters and thinking he would ever consider me an equal. Thinking we could make this work. When in reality, Aiden Winters did what he wanted, when he wanted, and he steamrolled over anyone who got in his way. Including me.

  “Here you are. Do you want a glass of wine before dinner?”

  I jolted at the sound of Aiden’s voice, my eyes flashing to the clock in the corner of my laptop screen. Five thirty-five. I’d been sitting, staring into space for almost forty-five minutes.

  “Violet? What’s wrong?”

  The gentle concern in his voice was too much. I picked up the contract, damned by his handwriting and that phone number, and shoved it in his direction. “What is this?” Even to my numb ears, my voice was flat. Dead.

  Aiden didn’t take the contract. His eyes moved from the papers in my hand to my face and back. His words still gentle, placating, he said, “Violet—”

  “LeAnne Gates,” I interrupted. “Is she the one? I know you know.” I shoved to my feet and closed my laptop, grabbing my bag and jamming it in.

  “Violet, we’re still looking into it, it’s not—”

  “Just tell me.” My shriek hurt my ears. Aiden winced and reached out. Clutching my laptop bag in one hand and my purse in the other I danced back out of reach.

  “Violet, just calm down.”

  “Don’t tell me to calm down,” I shouted, sliding into full-on hysteria.

  Didn’t he know that telling someone who was freaking out to calm down was like throwing gasoline on a fire?

  If the situation called for calm, I’d be fucking calm. This was not the time for calm. “Just tell me. Is that her? Is that her phone number?”

  Aiden circled his desk, slowly closing in on me, holding his hands up, palms out. “Violet. Let’s sit down. We’ll have a drink, and I’ll explain.”

  With every word my fury grew. Where did he get off trying to handle me? I wasn’t the liar. I wasn’t the one hiding information and keeping secrets.

  It wasn’t even his business. It was my life.

  “I don’t want a drink.”

  Aiden’s heavy crystal tumblers sat beside a matching decanter on the side table, sparkling at me. Mocking me. Everything in Aiden’s life was so perfect. Arranged exactly as he liked it.

  Just like he was trying to arrange me.

  If he had to lie a little, to keep things from me, if that was what was best for me then it was okay, right?

  I didn’t plan it. My purse fell from my fingers. My hand whipped out, grabbed one of those tumblers, and I let it fly. It exploded against the wall behind Aiden’s head in a shower of glittering shards.

  The destruction soothed the rage inside me, and I snatched another, pitching it as hard as I could. I wasn’t aiming for Aiden. I didn’t have it in me to hurt him like that.

  I was cold, but I wasn’t cruel.

  The third tumbler exploded in a crash as loud as the others. I threw the last, only regretting that there weren’t any more.

  “Violet! Stop.” Aiden lunged for me. I swung my laptop case into his arm, driving him back and stepping around the desk out of reach.

  Through gritted teeth, I said, “Just tell me the truth.”

  Aiden let out a long breath. “Fine. Yes. That’s her.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Vi—”

  “How long?” I demanded, hearing myself shriek again. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about hiding my emotions, I didn’t care about protecting myself. How could I? I’d let Aiden in so far past my shell, so far past the ice queen, and the whole time it hadn’t meant anything.

  “Since the day after we visited your parents,” he admitted.

  My anger fell away, replaced by empty, gray, nothing. My eyes were dry. The words I spoke sounded like they came from someone else. “You said I could trust you. You said you loved me. Why? Why bother if it was all a lie?”

  “It wasn’t a lie. I wasn’t lying. I love you.”

  My ears were ringing. He sounded like he was so far away. I shook my head, trying to make sense of his excuses.

  “No. I don’t think you do love me. Or if you do, it’s not the kind of love I want. It’s not enough if you don’t respect me. It’s not enough if I can’t trust you.”

  Aiden reached for me again. I moved away, leaning down to scoop my purse off of the carpet.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “You at least owe me the courtesy of letting me explain,” he said, stiffly.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think I do.”

  “Violet, she’s not what you think—I was going to tell you we found her, but then I talked to her and—”

  “You called her? That’s why you wrote the number down. You called her and talked to her. You had no right.”

  The emptiness was gone. My voice cracked on the pain of his betrayal. LeAnne Gates had nothing to do with Aiden. And everything to do with me.

  “I had every right. I love you. I’m trying to protect you. I didn’t want…she wasn’t…” He took in the expression on my face and fumbled.

  “You had no right,” I whispered, unable to force more breath into my words. I walked past him, dodging when he tried to grab my arm.

  From behind me I heard him say, “You need to calm down. We can talk about this later.”

  I only nodded, the click of my heels on the stairs light and precise, a counter to the weight on my heart. I reached Aiden’s rooms and locked the door behind me. It was his house. He had a key, but the lock between us made me feel better. I couldn’t look at him, couldn’t stand the concern in those warm brown eyes I’d come to know so well.

  Dumping my purse and laptop case on the bed, I sank down, slumped, staring at the carpet between my feet. I don’t know how long I sat there, motionless. I didn’t cry. I didn’t pace, or rage, or throw anything else. I might have sat there all night, but the rattle of the door handle pushed me to action.

  “Go away, Aiden.”

  “Just talk to me. Be reasonable.”

  I didn’t answer. I had nothing to say. I thought we’d had this out already. I thought he understood. Instead, he’d only been humoring me, saying what I wanted to hear while he did what suited him. What I wanted didn’t matter.

  Numb, working methodically and quickly, I pulled my suitcase from the closet and packed. I left nothing. Not a hairpin, a sock, or a tube of lip gloss. Nothing except the lingerie Aiden bought me in Las Vegas. I left that in the drawer, untouched.

  He was nowhere in sight when I unlocked t
he door and carried my things downstairs. I almost made it all the way to my car.

  Aiden was waiting for me in the kitchen, my silver key ring dangling from one finger. “Don’t even think about it. You can’t just leave.”

  “If you won’t give me my keys, I’ll call for a ride,” I said.

  He’d asked me to calm down. I was calm. I wasn’t hiding my feelings under a shell of composure. I was blank. Empty of everything. And all I wanted was to go home.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Aiden said, impatient. “Put your things down, and we’ll go talk. If you just let me explain, I can make you understand.”

  “Understand why you lied to me? Is that what you want me to understand? How when I told you I trusted you more than anyone else you were lying to me? No, I don’t think I want you to explain that. What I want is for you to give me my keys and get out of my way.”

  “What’s going on here?” Mrs. W stepped between us, holding up a hand to keep Aiden back. Her voice was grave when she said, “Aiden, give me Violet’s keys.”

  “No.” He sounded like a sulky teenager. In any other situation, I might have laughed.

  “I will not allow you to keep her here if she wants to leave. Give me Violet’s keys.”

  Aiden didn’t move. Mrs. W snatched the keys from his hand and physically shoved him out of the way. He was too surprised to stop her.

  I took the opportunity to rush past them both, taking the keys Mrs. W held out as I went. I threw my things in the tiny hatchback of my Beetle, started the car, and fled Winters House.

  My phone started ringing before I cleared the driveway. I turned it off. There was only one person I wanted to talk to, and I’d see him soon enough.

  Chase was watching a rerun of an old World Cup game when I walked in. One look at my face—at my suitcase—and he turned off the television.

  “Vivi, what happened? What did he do?”

  At the familiar sound of his voice, my cracked heart split open. I dropped my purse, my suitcase, everything in my hands. My keys clattered as they bounced off my shoe and skidded across the floor. My eyes were wet, tears clogging my nose. I sucked in a breath, tried to speak, and choked.