And then, I died

by Sage, May

  Millions. The girl actually kept millions seating in a bloody savings account at 0.9%. It was a miracle that Jace had managed to prevent himself from throttling her until she listened to what he had to say.

  He caught one word, and just laughed.

  Trust. She didn’t trust Jace to choose what was best for her fortune. What a joke.

  “Look, Beth,” he said, attempting his very best to stay calm.

  Truth was, he was pissed. If she was so carless and carefree with that sort of money, she didn’t deserve it. He would have respected her more if she’d blown the whole thing on an indulgence, or given it away to a charity.

  However, it was his girlfriend he was talking to, which meant that he had to tread carefully. He suspected that calling her a bloody idiot wouldn’t go down very well.

  “All of your money is with Warden and Colt at the minute. The fact that it isn’t invested doesn’t matter at all: if their finances dramatically collapse, you will lose the grand majority of it regardless.”

  He saw her blanch when the thought hit home. Ah. She wasn’t that disinterested, then. Her money did matter to her.

  Liam breathed out with ease for the first time since she’d handed over the statements. It wasn’t about the cash; he wasn’t sure he could found a relationship with someone who didn’t care about what was hers.

  “Funds lying like this also are at high risk: a tall brunette could get a tan, forge an ID, and come out of the bank with a cheque for your,” he said, his gaze returning on the paper, “two millions, seven hundred and twenty one thousands. If she feels like it, she could also take your five hundred grand from your current account in ten minutes, tops.”

  Beth looked like she was actually going to be sick.

  Good.

  “If you invest with Jace, your money is going to be fixed and safe from fraud for a certain amount of time. The one risk is that the amount you end up with might be lower than what you put in, but in about seven years, I haven’t lost anything. In fact, he generally quadruples what I give him.”

  It took a while, but she finally opened her mouth:

  “My entire family invested, and all of them committed suicide when things didn’t go according to plan. They also cost a lot of employees their jobs and their homes in the process. I don’t have a lot of responsibilities, but if I invest and lose it all, a lot of families will have to find new flats. I don’t want to be the next Carver to screw people around.”

  Fuck. This, guys, is why you don’t judge a fucking book by its cover.

  “But,” she added, “you have a point. I’ll make an appointment with Warden.”

  Her compliance was undeserved, unexpected, and very, very arousing.

  Beth was a strong character; she had her own opinion and didn’t easily change her mind. She hadn’t decided to give Jace a shot because Liam had won an argument, but for one simple reason: she trusted him.

  She caught his heating gaze and bit down her plump lip.

  “Charles and Vick are due in for dinner,” she reminded him, knowing exactly why he got up and strolled towards her.

  By some stroke of luck, Beth had chosen to wear a short denim skirt. That saved an awful lot of valuable time.

  He kneeled down at her feet and roughly pushed her long legs apart, before tearing the flimsy white material she wore under the denim.

  “I don’t give a damn, sweetheart,” he belatedly replied, before nestling his head right between her thighs.

  Liam didn’t consider himself a cunnilinguistic expert by any stretch of imagination. Actually, he generally made a point of avoiding it, as he rarely knew where the pussies he fucked had been; he preferred layers of latex between him and them.

  That pretty shaved pussy had been nowhere for months, at the very least. Nowhere but around him.

  He leisurely feasted on her flesh, ignoring her whimpers, her cries of distress as she begged him to stop, smiling against her as her nails bit his back. Those scratches had probably drawn blood, and he didn’t care.

  Everything in her tensed as he sucked the bundle of nerves he’d previously dismissed, pushing her over the edge.

  Taking a moment to admire his handy work, he grinned at the twitching, glistening flesh, satisfied for a quarter of a second. Then, an abrupt, violent need clenched his entrails, reminding him that while his ego had every reason to gloat, other parts of his weren’t exactly… fulfilled.

  His fingers trembled with need as he made a quick work of rolling one of the condoms they always kept handy, and in one hard push, he was home.

  He was fiercely pumping in and out of her sheath and she was matching his every move when the knocking started, and hell if he was letting it stop them. Her legs locked around his waist, conveying the same notion.

  What neither of them had expected was for Charles and Vick to let themselves into the flat.

  They should have anticipated it; the neighbours were welcome anytime and, reciprocally, Beth and he intruded on their hospitality at all sort of hours.

  However, their interruption was most undesirable right this second. Liam didn’t care either way – actually, to be entirely honest, he rather liked the idea of arousing two very pretty women while fucking his gorgeous girlfriend – but Beth was going to stop, anytime now.

  Anytime.

  Vick and Charles made it to the kitchen, and Liam, facing the hallway, got to enjoy their expression. The first was amused, excited, and fascinated, while Charles, unsurprisingly, was the picture of mortification.

  Underneath the flush and the “holy shit,” though, her eyes were distinctively animated.

  He took the whole scene in quickly before returning his attention solely on his girlfriend. She was blushing, of course, but she was also clenching around him, raising her hips to meet each of his thrust and, now that she understood he wasn’t about to stop, the legs wrapped around him rose up, spreading to settle on his shoulders.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  She was giving them a show. She was into it – into displaying – which meant that contrarily to his belief up until that point, she was everything he had ever wanted, body and soul.

  “Feel free to stay,” Liam offered without looking away from Beth. “Or proceed into the lounge. We won’t be very long.”

  

  Beth discovered a wild range of feelings within a short few weeks, and guilt was most definitely not her favourite one.

  She told herself she needed time and proof, but the truth was, Liam had every right to know and he would be profoundly pissed when he learnt she'd hidden it from him, however temporarily.

  Lucia had been a person of interest for about twenty-four hours.

  From a few amateur shots taken by the odd bystander outside of Sin, Beth had gathered the woman had been a girlfriend of William's, yet she was now seen around Mike at events such as movie premières and galas. Coincidence? Beth needed to know, so she arranged to accidentally run into her at her favourite spa.

  “I’ve asked for a full treatment. How is that difficult to understand? A full treatment, not the spa-and-massage.”

  The poor receptionist didn’t know where to look, what to say, and Beth cursed herself; she wouldn’t have had a colleague break into the system to mess up her reservation if she had thought Lucia would be such a pain to the staff.

  She quickly intervened:

  “Hey, if it helps, I’ve reserved a full for a friend and I, but Sandy can’t make it. You can always join me.”

  Twenty minutes into their bonding experience, Beth had dismissed her because Lucia was plain stupid. She talked and talked and talked of herself without the slightest respite. It had pained her to see that William had associated with a woman such as her, but other than that, the meeting had held no interest.

  Now, she recalled one particular part of the one-way conversation.

  “Do you have children?”

  “No, I...”

  “I do and she's such hard work. Seriously, she keeps me up at all ho
urs crying out. The nannies barely get any sleep. She’s such a pain.”

  She had known about the child: it had been part of the background search. A little five month old thing, of father unknown, who was raised by two full-time nannies in town.

  She'd looked at the child's picture and pegged her as Mike's. She had his nose, his blue eyes, a complexion lighter than the mother’s, and she lived near him, far from Lucia who generally spent her time trying to jump the model-actress threshold in Los Angeles.

  Beth had willingly forgotten the woman's very existence up until Cherry Crawford had used her pregnancy to attempt to make her feel jealous.

  Only then had she thought of Liam in conjuncture with children. The two notions had seemed incredibly irreconcilable: he was too uptight, too tidy and inflexible to be thought of as anyone's father...

  But that second she'd imagined a child with Liam's eyes, her mind had clicked.

  There was such a child, born in October, to a woman with whom he had had a relationship roughly nine months prior.

  Mike had planned to kill Liam and claim everything he had in the name of Liam's child. Beth fully expected Pam to come up with a paternity test run proving the affiliation. Everything tallied up: the attacks had started just as Lucia was giving birth.

  In her first study, Beth had paid little attention to the information about the child; to tell the absolute truth, she couldn't even recollect her name. Some sort of flower. Not Rose, certainly not Petunia... something sweet and graceful. She had to hand Lucia that much.

  Iris.

  “How long will you be gone?” Liam asked between the kisses trailing down her neck.

  Oh god.

  “A few hours,” she answered breathlessly. “Five, at most.”

  “I had such hopes for the day,” he hinted as his teeth grazed the lobe of her ear.

  Oh god, yes!

  “But if you're busy, I'll go to the office instead.”

  Resuming her passing acquaintance with Lucia was very easy: the woman had been in town, which meant that her Saturday morning was spent at the spa where they’d previously met, as per the course.

  Where else would a mother of an eight month old child be, after all?

  Disgust didn't even begin to describe what Beth felt towards that woman, yet she smiled and flattered with so much conviction she'd earned herself an in within the hour.

  “You'll have to excuse the mess,” the model told her as they passed the threshold of her Tribeca penthouse. “There's toys everywhere. You'd think the nanny would pick up as she goes, but apparently it's too much to ask.”

  “Reliable help is difficult to come by,” Beth sympathized, all the while shaking her head.

  Wasn't the woman more worried about the nanny actually paying attention to her child?

  Since the moment Beth had understood Mike's design, she'd come up with a strategy.

  The Bass was under strict orders, so now, they needed to stand still. They'd have to wait Mike out – until he grew desperate enough to try another group of thugs – and catch him red-handed. Hopefully, it wouldn't be long.

  There was only one factor to consider: if Iris was neglected in any way where she was at the moment, the plan had to go.

  “Violeta! Jasmin! Where are those lazy... Oh, Violeta,” she said as one petite Hispanic woman on the heavy side of curvy came in, “Where is she? Where is my daughter?”

  “Asleep, ma'am.”

  “What did we say about sleeping during the day? That's why she never finishes her nights.”

  Lucia stormed through the apartment, screaming the poor little girl's name, up until a sharp heart clenching cry rang clear through the walls.

  There went her plan. Waiting out wasn't an option, not when Lucia was mistreating Iris. They had to run their own paternity test and...

  “We do well enough,” the woman Lucia had referred to as Violeta said in a low murmur, as she read her astonishment on her face. “When Miss Fox is away. Iris is very happy then.”

  “And when Miss Fox is back?”

  “She ignores her, at best of times.”

  They were interrupted as the mistress of the house strolled in, a sobbing child awkwardly carried at arm's length.

  “There she is!” she said triumphantly.

  Beth wasn't used to children. She'd had no siblings, none of her friends were anywhere close to parenthood, save for the cousin she saw less than once a year.

  That being said, she knew this one was something else. That face, at the moment rather sad, was expressive and so damn adorable. Her deep blue eyes went straight to her and, finding herself momentarily distracted from her sorrows, she made a wonderful inquisitive sound. The “huh?” meant something along the line of “And who could you be?” mixed with a little bit of “wanna play?”

  Her plump hands reached out towards her and Beth stepped forward, taking her from her horrible mother's arms.

  Then the child giggled.

  That’s when she became real.

  Up until that point, Iris had been a complication, an issue to take care of. A pain in her ass.

  Damn if that didn’t make her exactly like Lucia Fox, but that’s how she’d felt.

  After that giggle Iris was Iris, her boyfriend’s fragile, innocent child, unknowingly at the heart of a crossfire with no one fighting her corner.

  Liam would have, had he been aware of her existence, but he wasn’t.

  So for now, Iris had Beth.

  Chapter 12:

  Proposition

  As he'd told her, he made it to the office, but he could hardly concentrate on work: all he could think of was her.

  Beth. His girlfriend. His live-in girlfriend.

  Looking back, he wondered how he'd ever thought he'd managed to avoid falling, but there he was. He'd known the exact moment when he'd looked at the bottom of the precipice and somehow chosen to take a step forward.

  It had been three hours and forty seven minutes ago, when he'd realised he'd run out of condoms.

  They'd had the talk. He knew she wasn't on any form of contraception yet.

  He'd taken her anyway, and not because he couldn't bear the thought of one morning without getting some ass – although that was a very valid point – but because the need of irrevocably keeping her in his life had been primal.

  It wasn't fair on her. It wasn't fair on them, nor on the child they might have conceived.

  But while Liam was quite ashamed of his own behaviour, he couldn’t bring himself to regret it.

  God, she’d felt so good. Molten velvet wrapped around him like a vice.

  Work! he admonished himself, forcing his attention back to his email.

  Jayne, he typed, I've run into an impasse with Dawson's. I need the team to put what they have on hold and come up with an alternative to the plasma coating for AI7 by close of business Tuesday.

  He could have written yet another impasse.

  Mike was getting ridiculously picky. He'd been a pain last year, but not nearly as much as he now was.

  In fact, it somehow seemed like he was trying to delay the start of production. Waiting for something...

  Just as Liam's thought went to one of the Dawsons, the second rang his mobile.

  As a rule, he generally sent his father straight to voicemail, but his feelings toward the man had undergone a strange, progressive change as of late.

  Somehow, and to an extent, he had reluctantly started to understand him.

  “Slate,” he said curtly.

  “William, it's Michael. I was hoping you could join me for lunch.”

  His mind automatically came up with half a dozen excuses, but after a long silence, he agreed.

  Michael was a confident, sophisticated, and rather dignified man, somewhere in his late fifties, and while nothing would have made him look visibly wary, he certainly was sweating under the collar.

  Halfway through their starters, he cut the crap and went straight to the point:

  “I'm shocked you accepted
to see me.”

  No wonder.

  Liam had never liked his father, and while he'd behaved during his eight year stay under his roof, he had done his very best to make him realise that he wouldn't accept him as anything close to family.

  “When you explained how you met my mother, I thought you were an asshole.”

  At ten, he hadn't been able to comprehend how a married man could possibly decide to go clubbing and fuck a barmaid; his excuse had seemed insufficient. What if his wife had told him she couldn't live with him anymore? He should have stayed, worked it through.

  Now he got it.

  His reaction to their fall out in April hadn't been fighting for her affection, it had been drowning. In work, alcohol, fucking his way through his acquaintances; anything able to distract him from Beth.

  That didn’t exempt Michael; Beth and he weren’t married – they hadn’t even been an actual couple.

  But still.

  “I may have judged hastily... and regardless of your history with Flora, you've done right by me.”

  If he hadn't, Liam wouldn't have attended the best schools, the best colleges, without ever having to worry about their cost. He'd won scholarships, but he knew better than to think they covered everything, yet he'd never received one single bill.

  “I should have respected that.”

  Michael took that with a silent nod and carried on his meal, before announcing:

  “You're to have the majority share of Dawson and Son when I die.”

  The wine came back up through his nostrils as he choked his way through this bombshell.

  Michael could have confessed to wearing high heels and stockings at home without causing half as much astonishment.

  “Because, William, you might not want to watch football with me on Sundays, but you weren't the one I picked up at the police station five times in two years. You never liked me, but you have respected everything I've done for you.”

  After a long pause, Michael carried on: