by Cherry Kay
“I can’t even believe what I’m hearing,” said Tiffany. She threw her hands up in a gesture of surrender. “This is absolute madness. Have you ever just had a normal relationship with anyone?”
“I was trying with you,” he said. “I really truly was.”
Nadia scoffed at this.
“Is Eleanor responsible for what happened to Tiffany’s job?” asked Thomas, his mind beginning to put some pieces together. “Does she have an agent within my company?”
“She sure as hell does,” replied Nadia. “I don’t know who exactly it is, but from what I understand they’re right under your nose. It’s someone you trust implicitly, and that’s how Mrs. McDormand has been able to stay ahead of you all this time.”
“Are you done harassing me, then?” asked Tiffany of Nadia. “Can I expect that I won’t have to worry about you following me anymore?”
“She’ll send someone else,” replied Nadia, “but that’s the last you’ll see of me.”
“What about you?” she asked, turning to Thomas. “Can you use this to take down this Eleanor person? Can you stop her from using me to get to you?”
“Now that I know who’s behind everything, yeah,” he replied, “I can stop it.”
“Well then, could both of you kindly get the fuck out of my apartment?” asked Tiffany, her fists clenching with rage.
Thomas opened his mouth as if to protest, but then seemed to think better of it before saying nothing at all. He gestured for Nadia to lead the way out, and he followed close behind, turning to give Tiffany a pleading look before she shut the door in his face.
*
Getting shut out of Tiffany’s apartment was not how Thomas had intended his day to go. It was yet another dramatic turn of events after the pleasant evening he’d spent with Tiffany, and he couldn’t believe that he was right back to being pushed out of her life.
Under any other circumstances, he would have stayed and tried to talk to her, but if even half of what Nadia had told him was true — and he was fairly certain it was — he had to get what information he could out of her before Eleanor McDormand realized that her asset had been converted.
Corporate espionage was a brutal game that often left companies completely crippled after being taken down from the inside. It was painfully clear that someone in his upper executive team was working to undermine him at every turn, and he had to focus his energies on rooting them out before they did any more damage.
The biggest mistake Eleanor McDormand had made was going after Tiffany’s company. The move was unnecessary and sloppy from a sabotage point of view, and Eleanor’s personal revenge would cost her whatever hold she had on Thomas’s company. By making it appear as though Thomas himself had orchestrated the takedown of the marketing firm, she’d exposed the fact that she controlled one of the very few people who had the sort of signing authority necessary to orchestrate such a complex chain of events. That meant one of three people on Thomas’s executive team, and he intended to have that person dealt with by the end of the day.
Nadia joined him in the car and she filled him in on everything she knew as they drove to his office. Thomas wanted to hate her for the role she’d played in harassing Tiffany, but he reminded himself that it had only been a business transaction as far as she was concerned.
The woman was a professional, and she’d shown herself to be the type of person who was loyal to whoever paid her the best price. Thomas knew he could make the more attractive offer in the end, after all his holdings were worth more than triple what the McDormand net worth was, and he needed Nadia to serve as a double agent for a while.
It would get messy before everything was over, but he’d have his victory in the end, and he’d see that Eleanor paid for harm she’d caused.
Once inside the building, Thomas and Nadia entered his private elevator and rode to his top floor personal office. Once there, he pulled up the personnel records of the three executives he suspected and he had her go over them with him to see if she knew anything about which of them might be working for Eleanor McDormand. They went through every bit of information she had until they begrudgingly accepted that Nadia knew nothing that could connect the three men to Thomas’s competition.
“I’m going to have my assistant bring up a pot of coffee,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Do you want anything? Tea? Food?”
“No, coffee is fine,” she replied.
Thomas buzzed Vanessa on his intercom and asked her to bring up some coffee and snacks just in case they got hungry later. He stared wordlessly at the three photos on his computer screen, wondering which of these men had made a deal behind his back, and what incentive they could possibly have to double-cross him.
Vanessa arrived a few minutes later, bearing a carafe of coffee and a small assortment of muffins. She set everything up on the table and poured a cup for Thomas, stirring in a splash of cream before handing it to him on a small saucer.
“Anything I can assist you with?” asked Vanessa, her eyes wandering to where Nadia sat.
“No, thank you,” said Thomas. “That will be all for now.”
Vanessa walked back to the elevator, throwing a nervous glance over her shoulder before stepping in and pressing the button for her floor. The doors closed and the elevator whisked her downwards.
“Who is that woman?” asked Nadia.
“Vanessa?” asked Thomas. “She’s my assistant. Why do you ask?”
“I’ve seen her before,” said Nadia. “It was only for a second, but I swear it was her. She was wearing the most ridiculous outfit; sunglasses and a scarf wrapped around her head like an incognito movie star from the twenties, but it was her, alright.”
“Where did you see her?” asked Thomas, leaning forward in his chair. He hoped that he wasn’t about to hear what he suspected he might.
“Leaving Mrs. McDormand’s office.”
Thomas’s stomach sank. He didn’t want to accept it, but it made too much sense. Vanessa handled every bit of the paperwork that Thomas did. She had no real authority of her own, but she could easily produce documents on company letterhead, and he didn’t doubt that she could forge his signature with ease. All it would take was a call from her pretending to be acting on his request, and she could have his legal team put together all manner of contracts, or even have accounting route massive payments for purchases of companies.
Thomas picked up the handset on his desk phone and punched a button. “Security, please have Vanessa Myers picked up wherever she might be in the building. She’s to be brought to my private office immediately.”
Nadia stayed quiet while Thomas got up and paced back and forth across the room waiting for Vanessa to be brought up to see him. He caught himself pacing and then made himself sit down again, hating himself for being unable to hide his agitation.
The idea that someone so close to him could be working against him made him sick to his stomach, and the bitter thought that this was how he’d made Tiffany feel by betraying her only added fuel to the fire.
“We caught her on her way out,” said one of the security guards escorting Vanessa out of the elevator. “She was almost at the front doors when we got the notice.”
“So it’s true then?” asked Thomas.
Vanessa shrugged. “How much do you know?”
“At this point, I know that you’re working for Eleanor McDormand, and that you made a series of company purchases in my name so you could cripple the company Tiffany works for.” Thomas’s hands clenched into fists, his knuckles whitening from the pressure with which he held them shut. “What I don’t know, and what I can’t seem to figure out, is why you would do this to me.”
“I’d say it was the money, but we both know that’s a lie,” she spat. “I suppose I did it to get back at you for never wanting anything to do with me. How tacky is that, huh?”
“You did this because I rejected you?” asked Thomas, bewilderment showing on his face.
“You fucked so many girls, Thomas,�
�� she said, tears welling up in her eyes. “I watched you work your way through them, all the while ignoring what was right in front of you. I told myself it was different because you didn’t care about them, and that you cared about me and didn’t want to spoil what we had, but then that bitch came along and I knew; I knew you didn’t care about me.”
“Vanessa,” said Thomas, his voice soft and concerned. “I’m so sorry you felt like that. I was an idiot not to see it, but that doesn’t excuse what you did. Tiffany is a complete innocent in all of this. It’s not her fault that I don’t feel the same way about you.”
“It’s her fault for being the one to make you truly love someone for the first time,” said Vanessa, her voice cracking as the tears began to flow.
She sobbed and crumbled, collapsing to the floor in a heap of tears and sniffles. The two security guards rushed forward, and each of them grabbed an arm to pull her back to her feet.
“Call the police,” said Thomas. “And get her out of my sight until they get here.”
The security guards escorted the sobbing woman back into the elevator, leaving Thomas alone with Nadia.
“Well, that was interesting,” said Nadia.
“How could I have been so blind?” asked Thomas.
He sat on the edge of his desk and stared out the window, his mind unable to move off one particular thing Vanessa had said. He hadn’t thought about his feelings for Tiffany in quite those specific terms, and until that moment he would not have been prepared to admit that he might possibly love her.
He’d never used that word to describe his feelings for anyone aside from the more platonic family sort of love he’d felt for his parents and relatives. Even now he wasn’t sure if he could call it love, but the truth of it was there for him to face. He felt something far more powerful for Tiffany than he could ever remember feeling, and he couldn’t believe he’d screwed everything up so badly.
Thomas asked Nadia to give him some privacy, and she gladly left him alone. She seemed particularly eager to not be there when the police arrived and she wrote down a private email address where she could be contacted without Eleanor McDormand knowing about it. It had been a great victory outing Vanessa and bringing Nadia over to his side, but it felt somehow hollow and meaningless in light of his fractured relationship with Tiffany.
The police arrived shortly thereafter, and it was closing in on midnight before Thomas was done telling them everything he knew about Tiffany and her involvement in Eleanor McDormand’s scheme to take down Thomas’s company.
He further explained the trail of companies that had led to the destruction of the marketing firm Tiffany had worked for, making it clear that he had only just learned about it and that he intended to offer the former owners of the company a sizable payout to make up for the harm Vanessa had caused.
He’d been exhausted by the time he fell into bed several hours later, and sleep overtook him quickly. It was not the peaceful sleep of the deeply content, however, and he tossed and turned as his mind turned the stress of the day into a series of convoluted scenarios involving all the women in his life.
Thomas tossed and turned throughout the night, waking in the early morning with a pounding headache. He’d been deep in a particularly vivid dream, and he sat on the edge of the bed, eyes closed, trying to make sense of it all.
From what he could remember, the dream had started in one of his board rooms. The entire board of directors had been present, each of them taking their turn chastising him for his recent failures.
Instead of the business dealings they normally presided over, however, they knew about each and every one of the girls he’d slept with, and they harangued him endlessly for his treatment of women as mere sex objects without feelings of his own.
After a while, Thomas had looked around the table to see that each of the board members was actually one of the women he’d tricked into going out with him by manipulating their results on the Matchr site. He’d looked down to find himself completely naked and bound to his chair, unable to speak or move.
The women then closed in on him, attacking him with nails and fists, pulling his hair, and even sinking their teeth into his skin until he wriggled his way free of his bonds and was able to make a run for it.
He’d run through the hallways off his office, each turn leading to yet another hallway that defied the physical reality of any office space. His company’s building had become a labyrinth of sorts, and he’d run and run through the night, plain white hallway walls turning into dark leafy green hedges that soared up towards the sky.
At long last, scraped and bleeding, dirty from several slips and tumbles into the muddy ground of the maze, he’d arrived at the center of the maze to find an elevator waiting for him. The door was open and the tiny space was empty, but once he stepped into it and pushed the button to close the door and take him to his office, he saw that he wasn’t alone after all.
Wearing the glamorous dress and expensive necklace he’d bought her for their night at the opera, Tiffany stood glowering at him in judgment of all that he was. He’d dropped to his knees then, begging and pleading for her to forgiver him.
.
That’s when his dream self had said it. Despite the fact that Thomas knew none of it had been real, he’d awoken from such a vivid moment of him crying and begging forgiveness from Tiffany.
His dream self had told her that he loved her, and he’d woken to the realization that it was true.
Thomas rubbed sleep crust from his eyes and blinked at the light shining in through the window. He could speak a single voice command and have the windows automatically tint back to darkness so he could go back to sleep, but he in that moment he wanted to face the brightness of the day. He knew that he needed to atone for his actions against Tiffany, and he had the first glimmer of a thought as to how he might do that.
Chapter15
The apartment looked sad with half of it packed away in boxes. Tiffany had spent most of the night alternating between crying and punching her couch cushions or pillows in anger and frustration, but she’d eventually made herself calm down to think about everything that had happened. She went over everything that had happened in her life over the last month, starting with the first time she’d met Thomas Belmont, or rather Thomas Belton as she’d first known him.
That was already a black mark against him. As much as she wanted to accept his reasons for lying to her about his identity, she couldn’t balance his undercover prince act against so many of the other lies he’d told her. That one thing might have been forgivable, but it was just another strike against him, when combined with the way he’d cheated Matchr with a backdoor program that he’d used to cut her off from anyone else she might have been communicating with at the time.
Sure, she hadn’t really been that hung up on Luke or any of the other guys she’d been chatting with, but that didn’t mean it had been okay for Thomas to cut her off from them.
Beneath it all, however, was something bigger that helped her make her decision to stay away from the Thomas Belmont she thought she’d come to know. At the end of the day, Tiffany was a simple girl from a simple family. The idea of integrating into a lifestyle where everyone was so unbelievably rich was scary enough that she didn’t even know if she could accept that, even had Thomas not lied to her or had such a ridiculous history with women.
After thinking about it through the night, Tiffany had decided that she’d had enough of New York to last her a while. People who didn’t have money or power were so caught up in trying to climb the corporate ladder or to outdo everyone around them, and as she’d learned from her time with Thomas, those who had money and power were so twisted by it that they didn’t seem to know how to behave.
A man like Thomas had no boundaries and no one to tell him he couldn’t do anything, and so he’d used his money and influence to allow him to sleep with whatever girls he chose.
She didn’t know if she’d stay away forever, but she knew she needed to take
some time to get her emotions and finances straightened out.
She had only a few more days until rent was due, and at this point, she wouldn’t be able to pay it without seriously over-drafting her line of credit. The reality of the situation was that without a job, she couldn’t afford to stay in the city any longer, anyway.
And so she’d called up her best friend from back home and asked if she could move in with her for a while. Emily had a small apartment over her garage that she’d lived in as a teenager, and after inheriting the house, she’d never gotten around to renting it again. Tiffany said she’d be more than happy to help fix it up in exchange for a month or two of free rent, and Emily had been more than supportive in her encouragement for Tiffany to come say for as long as she needed.
It would be different leaving the city for small town life, but things being what they were, Tiffany thought perhaps that would be best. She’d have to settle for working for a much smaller and lower profile company, and she might not be working on any groundbreaking campaigns, but at least she’d be building her resume back up, and who knew, maybe she’d find a kind, good-hearted man who wasn’t lying to her about being a secret billionaire.
