Lie to Me: A Contemporary Billionaire BWWM Romance

by Mia Caldwell

  “I was drunk!” exclaimed Adam. He pointed an accusing finger at his brother. “Really drunk. Frankly, if anyone was taking advantage of anyone that night, it was you of me. Making a bet on which the future of our company hung with someone as drunk as I was? That’s exactly why you’re not cut out for this life. You should see all this as a Godsend. You don’t have to be CEO any more. You never wanted to be! You never have been, and now it’s official. You should be thanking me. This is your chance to go out and do something with your life rather than relying on me to make your money for you and then pissing it away on that ridiculous bar.”

  Nick mentally re-grouped. He had to admit, there was some truth in what Adam said. Neither of the brothers had worked to reach their positions in life but Adam had worked to stay there, and he had done a good job. Nick, meanwhile, had used his money and position as a crutch to prop up his failing business and as a safety net that allowed him to fail, or indeed allowed him to do absolutely nothing if he felt so inclined. Perhaps being forced into this position would do him good.

  Still, his righteous anger burned.

  “How did you make the deal?” It was more out of curiosity than anything else.

  Adam shrugged. “I mentioned to Jacques Jourdan that Vanessa was laid up in hospital and that she was devastated that she wouldn’t get to meet him. I didn’t even mention the deal. He was on the first plane out to Johannesburg. I do wonder if he thought he had a better chance with her if she had a broken leg and couldn’t run away – dirty old bastard. Anyway, they got on as well as predicted - like a house on fire. I ‘happened’ to drop by to visit Vanessa on the same day as Jourdan: ‘fancying seeing you Mr. Jourdan. Well as long as you’re here…’ The paperwork was signed that same day. Nice and clean.”

  Nick nodded as he took all this in. “You’re very good at your job, Adam.”

  Adam acknowledged the compliment. “Thank you. You suck at yours. Now, the question remains: are you going to honor the bet?”

  Nick leveled his gaze at his brother. “I’ll honor it, but I still want something from you.”

  “What?”

  “An apology.”

  Adam scoffed. “You’ll be lucky. I’ve done nothing to apologize for.”

  “Not to me,” said Nick. “To Zoe.”

  “That ghetto piece of trash?”

  Nick’s anger flared. “What did you call her?!”

  “Oh come on,” Adam backed away from his brother’s rage. “Don’t tell me you didn’t think the same when you saw her in the bar? That hair.” He gestured wildly to his head and rolled his eyes. “Good thing you fixed it. And god, the way she handled herself on the water? Ridiculous that you ever even thought you might win this bet.”

  Nick smiled at the memory. Then felt slightly ashamed at his part in making Zoe change herself. He missed her natural hair.

  Then stiffened. “How do you know about that?” Another thought crowded in on the first. “Why did you let the bet run? You said you wouldn’t have made the bet sober, so you must have known early on that you weren’t going to let Zoe have a fair chance. So why did you let me keep teaching her?”

  A flicker passed across Adam’s face but he did not back down. “I was going to call the whole thing off but… It was just so funny!”

  Nick stared in shock.

  “For the first day I thought: what the hell, what harm can it do? At the very least it kept you out of the way while I handled the deal. But after a few days I was resolute that we were calling off the bet. You weren’t at the bar and I heard you were giving a horse-riding lesson so I went to find you.”

  Adam grinned hugely at the memory. “I haven’t laughed so much in years. Seeing that ghetto booty try to haul her fat ass onto a saddle! I just wished I’d had a camera. And then I thought: there’s going to be so many more moments like this. Hell, I could probably start a YouTube channel: Trash Trying to Classy, or something like that. I didn’t want to miss that! So I hired a private detective to follow discretely and film your lessons. When I showed them to Vanessa - the sight of Zoe trying to be her? I really think all that laughing helped her recover faster. You can put a pig in a ball gown, but it’s still a pig. I couldn’t believe it when you started sleeping with her. Not that I blame you. We all need to slum it sometimes, right? A bit of rough every now and then – very nice. I bet she goes like steam train.”

  That he had let Adam get this far, and say this much about Zoe without doing anything about it, said less about Nick’s self-control than it did about how shocked he was. His brother’s undermining the bet and making the deal on the sly was pretty typical, but this?

  Nick was stunned to silence. But when he had finally managed to rouse himself from that, he acted quickly. In a few bounding steps he was up and across the room and punched his brother in the face.

  Adam fell back against the wall, surprised as much as hurt. “What the hell’s got into you? I’m not criticizing. Have your fun, I say.”

  “I can’t believe you would do this!”

  “Do what?” Adam was genuinely confused. “She’s just some nobody.”

  “She’s a human being!”

  “But she doesn’t matter,” Adam observed. “She’s not anyone who actually counts in this world.”

  Nick’s fist made contact with Adam’s jaw before Adam had a moment to react.

  Adam ducked as Nick continued swinging at him. “I don’t know what your problem is! The way I see it, you should be grateful; not only have I given you the chance to stand on your own two feet for the first time in your life, but thanks to me you got a few weeks of no-strings sex. Seems like we all got something out of this bet.”

  “Okay,” Nick managed to get some control over his temper – punching his brother had certainly helped. “You’re right. She was just part of the bet and, yeah, I was angry as hell when you pointed her out in the bar. One look at her and I thought: how the hell can I teach that to be sophisticated? She was just part of the bet, and the most irritating part of it. She was slow, dumb, completely ignorant of anything that could even vaguely be called class, and…”

  “Trash,” said Adam, smugly returning to his favored description.

  “Yeah,” Nick admitted. “I guess that is exactly what I thought. Nothing to look at, not worth talking to unless you want to talk about barbeque, not even a proper person, just a lump of clay I could maybe mold into something more worthwhile. If it wasn’t for the bet I wouldn’t have gone near her.”

  “So you’re getting angry at me because…?” wondered Adam.

  “Because I was full of shit,” said Nick. “I probably shouldn’t have punched you, Adam, at least not until I punched myself, because I was as much of an ass when this thing started as you are now. But I have the advantage of you – I got to know her. I got to spend time with this incredible, vibrant, intelligent…”

  “Intelligent?!” Adam interrupted, disbelieving.

  “Yes; intelligent!” Nick snapped back. “You don’t measure intelligence by whether someone has gone to Harvard or heard of the Huguenots, or if they can whistle along with Verdi – to be honest that’s pretty useless. Zoe’s got a business head that could put you to shame, so you can imagine how she makes me look. More importantly, she’s got emotional intelligence…”

  Adam shook his head. “That’s just a phrase dumb people made up to excuse their stupidity.”

  “We’ve got it the wrong way round,” Nick went on. “All the stuff we know about; it doesn’t mean anything. It has no practical application. And all this is beside the point – what matters is that she’s a good person. She’s got more human decency in her little finger than you or I have got in our entire bodies. You may know the difference between a Botticelli and a Ghirlandaio, but she knows how to treat people, and that’s knowledge that’s worth something.”

  “Not to me, it isn’t.”

  Nick, quite unexpectedly, found himself smiling. “You know, you were right: I shouldn’t have got angry. What the hell ha
ve I got to be angry about? I’m the lucky one, because I can see how wonderful she is. I’m lucky enough to be in love with an incredible woman who loves me back.”

  “In love?!” Adam couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “Yes,” Nick smiled back, a strange serenity descending over him. “And the more I think about it, the less I understand why I even came here today, or why I’m getting upset now. You cheated in our bet, you’ve screwed me out of the family company and cost me millions of dollars. So what? I’ve got Zoe. And nothing you can say or do will change that. You called her trash, and made some other comments about her that really tell me what a disgusting person you are, but in the end, why would I care? I love her. And, amazingly enough, she seems to love me. What you think doesn’t matter. What you say doesn’t matter. I wish I’d realized all this earlier, I could’ve been in France at a vineyard with the most beautiful girl in the world, drinking wine, and making love, while you toil away in an office to grab a few more dollars, as if they’ll make you happy. They won’t, trust me. How much money will ever be enough? Don’t you think we have enough?”

  The frustration was starting to show in Adam’s face. Winning was nice, and he had won, but part of the fun of winning was beating the other person and them knowing they had been beaten by a superior competitor. Nick was taking all the joy out of this for him by acting as if he had won!

  Adam tried again. “How’s that bar of yours going to do without the family money to prop it up?”

  Nick shrugged. “Badly I guess. Zoe had some great ideas, but I doubt I’ve got the money now to put them into practice.”

  “And you think that scabby little gold-digger is going to be interested in you now you’re next to broke?” Adam thrust again, seeking for some weak spot in Nick’s oddly impenetrable armor of love.

  But Nick just shook his head. “You really don’t know her. She’s not like that.”

  “They’re all like that.”

  “The women you go out with only care about money because that’s how you get them to go out with you in the first place,” Nick pointed out. “If you drive up in a car that might as well be penis-shaped and wave bunch of cash at a girl then you can’t be surprised that she disappears when the money runs out. But that’s not how it happened with Zoe. I mean, I’m not saying that a week in a vineyard didn’t help but… it was going to happen anyway.” Nick headed for the door. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to have lunch with my girlfriend. Despite all this, you will get a wedding invite and I really hope you’ll come. If only to find out about how wrong you are.”

  “I’m the sole CEO now! Don’t you forget that!” roared Adam, as if he could make it matter with volume.

  Nick nodded mildly. “You always were. You’re very good at it and I wish you all the luck with it.”

  “Stop being so damned reasonable!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry! Be angry!”

  Nick grinned. “I just can’t. I’ll send you my resignation. Unless you’d like me to write it out now? I’ve got a little time.”

  “No!” Adam would not be denied this. “You’re not resigning.”

  “I’m not?”

  “I’m firing you!”

  “Okay.”

  “At the next board meeting,” Adam went on. “In front of everyone. I will fire you for gross incompetence, for never having properly fulfilled the duties of a CEO, and for fraternizing with the staff.”

  Nick nodded. “That is all true. Perfectly fair. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a member of staff I need to go fraternize with.”

  “Of course she’ll be fired too.”

  Nick stopped with his hand on the door. “What?”

  There was an almost mad gleam in Adam’s eyes, his face split by a broad grin, as he realized that he had, finally, found a way of twisting the knife in his brother’s side. He had found Nick’s weak spot. “You can’t seriously expect that little tart of yours to keep her job.”

  “What has Zoe done?!” Nick no longer even tried to keep his cool. To him RothCo had meant relatively little, it was just a pay check he had done nothing to earn. But Zoe loved her job, he knew. Perhaps she was not one hundred percent happy working for Vanessa, but it was a good stepping stone and one that she had worked hard to earn. With her business brain and work ethic she had a great future in the company, a future that she had worked hard to earn. If Adam fired her then it was not just that she had lost that immediate future – the black mark of being fired for sleeping with a boss would keep her out of starting again at another company. This could be the end of her career in business. God knew he certainly didn’t have any business contacts to help ease her transition.

  “We have very clear rules about this sort of behavior,” said Adam. “You can’t ban office romances, but when they occur like this and when they are obviously being used for personal advancement…”

  “You know that’s not true!”

  “I know nothing of the sort,” said Adam innocently. “What I know is that two of my employees were, without my knowledge, part of a plot to deceive Monsieur Jacques Jourdan, a good friend of this company. Fortunately I was able to get to Monsieur Jourdan first.”

  As if indiscretion with a CEO was not enough to keep Zoe out of a meaningful career, Adam was adding attempted fraud. She would be lucky to get a job in the mail room of any major company.

  Nick approached his brother, not violently this time, but pleading. “Don’t do this Adam. It’s me you’re mad at, leave Zoe out of this.”

  Adam nodded to himself. “You see, you’re right: it is you I’m mad at, but I don’t seem to be able to get to you any other way. It’s a shame to drag someone else into this and destroy them just so I can hurt you but… Well, I don’t see that you’ve left me any other option. At least it’s not someone we give a shit about. Not someone worth anything. Not someone who would ever have made any meaningful impact anyway. Just taking out the trash.”

  Nick felt his hands involuntarily curl into fists but he fought back the urge to punch his brother once more. “I’ll do anything. Anything you ask of me.”

  Adam pondered. “I’ve got your stake in the company and with it all your earnings. As you’re so keen on pointing out, all I care about is money so I can’t think of anything. I mean, all you’ve got left in the world is a bar with so many debts that it is literally worth less than nothing. And of course the girl whose life you’ve just ruined. And I wouldn’t want her, even if you dipped her in disinfectant and basted her with honey.”

  “You bastard!”

  Nick lunged for Adam but this time his brother was too quick for him and skirted out of his reach around the table, laughing.

  “You know what’s funny about all this? I had no intention of doing anything like it. I mean, obviously I didn’t know you had real feelings for the girl - how could I have predicted that? Just look at her! Hell – even you thought she was a worthless piece of trash when she wandered into your bar!” Adam laughed riotously as he recalled that night. “I can still remember your look of disgust when she dribbled cheese sauce all over herself. Didn’t you call her a fat pig? It’s hilarious that this is how it ended up.”

  “Yeah, I called her names. Yeah, I thought she was beneath me – trashy -- when we made this bet. Yeah, I never thought she could ever become something classy or even moderately attractive—but you know what? She---,” Nick was shouting his outrage, but Adam’s voice broke in before Nick could say another word.

  Adam wiped tears from the corner of his eyes. He was clearly enjoying himself. “But even if I had known then I still wouldn’t have planned to go this far. If you hadn’t made your little speeches about how you could turn that ghetto trash into Cinderella, if you hadn’t acted so smug, if you had just displayed a moment’s regret over losing the company rather than acting like some sort martyr who’s so much better than the rest of the world just cause he’s making a go at his own living, then I’d have just taken the c
ompany and left it at that. Miss Blanchard may not know culture from the hole in the ground she was brought up in, but she was good at her job, I’ll admit. Not everyone can keep Vanessa happy enough to keep her from coming to me with complaints every five minutes, and I’m actually very sorry to be firing her. Still, what are you going to do? It’s not my fault you lost our bet and couldn’t keep it in your pants.”

  Nick lunged for his brother once more, but Adam had anticipated him and ducked out of the way, and Nick’s fist slammed a hole into the wall behind Adam’s head. Adam turned and looked at the broken wall dispassionately.

  Then he looked at his brother’s murderous face for moment, contempt written all over it. “Weren’t you on your way out? Lunch date or something. I’m amazed you can afford it now. Off you go. Don’t let my door hit you on the ass on the way out.”

  With heavy, murderous footsteps, Nick trudged for the door. What on earth was he going to tell Zoe? What could he possibly tell her?

  “You can tell that asinine assistant of yours that he’s fired too!” Adam called after him.

  In the outer office, Nick shambled up to Eddie’s desk, half-hating that he had to deliver this news, half-glad to have some practice before delivering the same to Zoe.

  “Eddie, I…”

  Eddie met his gaze with even more distress in his eyes than usual.

  Nick frowned. “Is something wrong Eddie?”

  Eddie’s eyes shot to his right momentarily and Nick turned to look. On a chair by the wall there was a picnic basket.

  Nick turned back to his assistant. “Eddie, what…”

  “I’m so sorry,” Eddie shook his head. “I mean… I don’t think it’s all my fault, necessarily. I mean you shouldn’t have said… I mean you didn’t know that she was… But you still shouldn’t have…”

  “Eddie!”

  Eddie met Nick’s gaze. “I’ve just never got the hang of the intercom.”

  Chapter Eleven