Betting the Billionaire (5 page)

“Sorry, that came out rougher than it should have, but I know all about you and your reputation.” She chewed the inside of her cheek. “I’ve read the papers, seen you on TV. You’re not someone I’m interested in.”

His body stiffened. “That didn’t seem to be the case last night.”

Her palms turned clammy, and her stomach did that floaty, shimmy thing again. Refusing to let on, she shrugged her shoulders and angled her chin higher. “Guess we’ll just have to chalk that up to the smexy elves’ bad influence.”

“Too bad.” He set his cup down on the table with enough force to make her wince. “You might have found there’s more to me than what the tabloids report.”

Which was exactly what she didn’t want to discover.

Her office at Jacobs Fine Furnishings would have been the safe haven she desperately needed if discovering a financial bloodbath on par with the grossest slasher movie ever was her idea of utter relaxation.

With each number in the company financials, her ulcer expanded. By the time she closed the folder holding the report, she could buy a tanker truck load of Maalox and it wouldn’t be enough to sooth the burn. She pushed the folder across the cheerful, yellow desk, needing it physically away since she couldn’t escape the bad news.

Unless she stayed, the family business was going under. Soon.

That would kill her dad. He’d built it up from nothing, starting with a workshop in an old barn on the family farm. Besides their family, the business was all Dell Jacobs cared about.

She glanced up at her dad as he sat in the teal blue, straight chair, searching his face for the hazy, confused look that had come and gone after his stroke. One side of his face fell slacker than the other, but Dell met her searching gaze straight-on, and the knots in her shoulders loosened a bit.

“Don’t you go all soft and start treating me like an invalid. I’m not dead yet.” There was enough spit and vinegar in his tone to convince her he was his normal, cranky self.

Keisha hid her grin. He was a pain in the ass, but he was her dad. “Pops, how long has it been like this?”

Dell fidgeted with a ring of plaid fabric swatches and averted his gaze locked to the oversized hummingbird sculpture hanging on the wall over her left shoulder. “We’ve always flirted with the edge a bit.”

“A bit?” Her spine snapped so straight she practically heard a boing. “You fell off the financial cliff six months ago when clients started dropping like flies. Why didn’t you tell me about the bank loan? There’s a balloon payment due in two weeks, and we don’t have anywhere near the amount of money it would take to pay. Why didn’t you tell me about this before it got to be such a mess?”

“I’m your father,” His voice turned ninety degrees until it had a hard edge. “You better watch your tone with me. I started this business, and I don’t have to justify how I run it to anyone.”

“You do when you expect me to pick up the pieces.” It wasn’t quite a yell, but the words came out louder than she’d meant, and her dad deflated in front of her. Her stomach twisted with guilt. “Pops, I’m sorry.”

His cane jiggled under his weight as he slowly stood and shifted from foot to foot. “I wouldn’t need you so badly if your cousin hadn’t left us high and dry. You’ve said no to running the company before, and damn it, I know you have other things happening in your life, but, Baby Girl, this isn’t just furniture.” Dell tapped an arthritic, gnarled knuckle on the manilla folder. “This is your heritage.”

Forget the Catholics, when it came to guilt, no one topped her dad. “Pops—“

“It’s our family legacy.” He sighed. “Doc Sorensen says if I don’t step back, he won’t be responsible for what my heart does. After the fiasco with Tyrell, I can’t trust this company to anyone else but you. “

She understood, she did, but that didn’t make accepting it any easier. “You don’t have to give me the hard sell, Pops.”

“Good, because there’s one more thing I have to tell you.” He went back to staring at the hummingbird.

“Please tell me it’s that we’ve got a rich relative who really, really wants to give us some cash.”

He shot her an ornery grin that took about twenty years off his appearance. “What’s wrong? You can’t stand a challenge?”

“Stop stalling.”

“We lost the Barrington Inn account.”

He may have said more, but white noise crackled in Keisha’s head as she processed the latest blow to the company’s bottom line. The boutique hotel chain accounted for sixty percent of the company’s revenues. Without them, they’d tank within the year. If they could last that long.

“They’ve been with us for more than a decade. Why would they kick us to the curb now?” she asked.

“Because I asked them to.” Gabe stood in her office door, his brawny, tall frame taking up much of the space. The heated anger in his eyes sucked the oxygen right out of the room. “It was the quickest way to ensure your father’s company went out of business.”

Bitterness filled Gabe’s mouth at the sight of Keisha standing behind a yellow desk uncluttered by anything except for a hot pink laptop, a jungle cat in-and-out box, and a vase filled with miniature pinecones painted dark purple. Simple, bright, and unexpected. Just like her. He ground his teeth together to stop himself from saying something stupid since it was too late not to do anything moronic.

No, you took care of that this by making a play for a girl whose father ruined your family. Way to forget your promise to yourself.

He’d spent the night with his nemesis’s daughter. And he wanted to do it again. Even knowing who she was. A direct shot to the gut wouldn’t have been as effective in knocking the air out of his lungs.

Keisha remained sitting behind her desk, a weary look drawing lines into her forehead.

Dell Jacobs turned, his cane taking the brunt of his weight, puffed his narrow chest—as much as he could—and blocked Gabe’s view of Keisha. The old man was protective of his daughter. Gabe filed away the tidbit. He never knew when some bit of information would come in handy.

“What are you doing here, Campos?” Dell demanded.

“Watching your business implode.” He strode into the room, stopping next to a small replica of a classic car, something red and sporty with fins. It reminded him of spending the night in the auto shop with Keisha. A twinge of guilt made its way across his skin.

“You’re not satisfied with trying to push me out of my own company anymore, huh?” The old man’s bravado came through loud and clear in both tone and the way he pushed up on his cane to make himself appear taller.

“No.” Gabe picked up the car, and the pointed fin jabbed the center of his palm. “Just taking your company isn’t punishment enough.”

Even breaking Jacobs Fine Furnishings into matchsticks wouldn’t satisfy Dell’s debt to Gabe’s family. It wouldn’t make up for the years his mother suffered in silence. It wouldn’t nullify the blood money Gabe had played with so carelessly never knowing where it had really come from and why. It wouldn’t absolve the sins of the slack-jawed man in front of him. But destroying the business Dell Jacobs built and loved would feel good. Really good. Of that he was absolutely confident. He had to be.

“With all of your money, why are you so obsessed with Jacobs Fine Furnishings?” Keisha circled around her desk, her full hips swaying with each determined step. “The Gabe I met last night wouldn’t be.”

Dell’s hair jerked around to his daughter. “What are you talking about?”

“He spent the night at Fix ‘Er Up.”

The old man spun around, the speed making him teeter on his unsteady feet. “I sure as hell had better have misheard you, Keisha Louise Jacobs.”

“His car broke down on the highway.” She grabbed her father’s elbow, steadying him. “I couldn’t leave him out to freeze to death.”

“Would’ve been fine with me.” The prickly bastard shrugged off his daughter’s touch.

“I wouldn’t have expected any less from you, Mr. Jacobs, after what you did to my father,” Gabe said.

Keisha rounded on Gabe, her normally expressive eyes deadened with ice-cold fury. She stomped over to him and jabbed her finger in his chest. “My dad is a small business owner in Salvation, Virginia. How in the hell could he hurt some fat daddy, Harbor City, rich dude like Cesar Campos?”

“Cesar isn’t my father.” Gabe’s jaw nearly cracked from how hard he was gritting his teeth as he fought to keep his emotions from breaking the surface. Dell Jacobs didn’t deserve to see his pain, only his fury. He exhaled a slow breath and swept Keisha’s hand from his chest. “My father was Hector Hernandez, the man your dad killed.”

Chapter Six

Every muscle in Keisha’s body quivered with barely restrained fury, and it took everything she had not to knee Gabe in the nuts so she could watch him crumple to the ground in a twisting heap. No one came into her office and called her dad a murderer. No one. Especially not Gabe Campos.

“Have you lost your damn mind?” she bellowed loud enough that his hair should have moved.

“No. I found out the truth about my father, and yours, a few months ago.” He answered her question, but his flinty blue eyes never left her father’s face. “Your secret’s out, old man.”

“I never killed anyone.” Her dad half sat, half collapsed onto the chair, an ashy pallor taking the life out of his craggy, lined face.

“Maybe not with your own hands,” Gabe growled. “But there’s blood on them just the same.”

Her dad cringed, defeat curling his body inward. “The accident wasn’t anyone’s fault.” On the last word, her dad’s voice hitched with emotion.

Keisha’s lungs clamped shut, and she stumbled back a few steps. She must have misheard him.

There
’
s no way
—

Then she noticed the resignation and remorse etched into every line on her dad’s face, and she didn’t know whether to scream or cry. A wave of icy confusion crashed over her, leaving her shaking where she stood as her knees threatened to give way.

Gabe wasn’t similarly affected. He practically grew in size as he stalked across her office. “You think a retired race car driver lost control of his car because the streets were a little rainy? Right after his business partner steals all his best clients and leaves him high and dry. Sound familiar, Dell?” He snorted dismissively. “No way. He had more than enough knowhow to make a deliberate choice look like an accident. He slammed his car into the overpass for the insurance money because you’d stolen everything he had.”

The room tilted as her head floated, barely attached to her neck. The light-headedness rocked her back until her hip struck the desk, but the sharp jab scarcely registered in her muddled brain. Reaching out for something to anchor her to the here and now, she accidentally slashed her hand through the stack of bills. They fluttered to the floor like snowflakes of doom.

“Why now?” Her father sighed. “Why after all these years?”

“Because I just found out who my real father was, and that the cash I used as seed money to make my first million came from my father’s life insurance.” Bitterness scrapped Gabe’s voice raw, revealing the unearthed resentment and pain underneath.

It couldn’t be true. There was no way. Not her dad. She held onto the belief as tight as a child’s chubby fingers wound around a balloon string. Gabe was wrong.

“Son, I don’t know what you think you know, but your dad had his own way of doing things, and they weren’t always the best options.” Soft and calm, her dad acted like he was talking to an animal that had been spooked by thunder. “It’s true we were business partners before he died, but our partnership ended weeks before his accident. I couldn’t do things his way anymore. He kept coming in half tanked. Made too many risky decisions. Borrowed money from the wrong people.”

“A likely story,” Gabe said.

Her dad shook his head. “Have you talked to your mother about this?”

“I don’t need to.” Rage shook Gabe’s voice, and the vein in his temple looked ready to burst. “You drove him to his death as sure as if it was your foot on the gas pedal.”

Unable to hold her tongue any longer, Keisha slapped her palm against the desk. “I won’t stand here and let you spread lies.”

Gabe ignored her comment, reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out a sheaf of legal papers. He dropped them into her dad’s lap. “Sign on the dotted line, and you don’t ever have to hear me say another word again.”

Blood pounded in Keisha’s ears, her pulse driven into overdrive by Gabe’s misplaced sense of revenge. She straightened her shoulders and moved to stand between her dad and Gabe. “Forget it. This is a family company. Only a Jacobs will ever run it.”

That got Gabe’s attention off her dad. When his head snapped up to look at her, every bit of the Gabe she’d met last night had disappeared into a black hole as if he’d never existed. “You’re making a big mistake.”

“You’ll understand if I ignore anything that comes out of your mouth,” she snapped.

“I’m beginning to think you have an obsession with my mouth.”

“Only smacking it shut.”

Last night, his words would have been flirty, making her stomach do the loop-de-loop. Today they were laced with fury and stung her skin as if he’d slapped her. But something else had changed over the past few hours. She’d stopped giving a damn.

Her dad’s calloused hand wrapped around hers, reminding her of what was at stake. She still gave a damn about what all of this would do to him.

“What will it take to make you leave us alone?” her father asked. His voice had regained some of its natural orneriness. The shock of Gabe’s accusation must have worn off.

“You losing everything, just like my father did.”

“And you think you’re the man to make that happen?” A crafty gleam sparkled in her father’s eyes.

“Absolutely.” Not a note of doubt colored Gabe’s curt answer.

Why should it? The rich prick was obviously used to getting his way. Still, she knew what that tone meant coming from her dad. Trouble.

“So you’re willing to put it all on the line?” her dad asked.

“What’s your game?” Hesitancy bobbled in Gabe’s voice.

She knew the feeling.

“Not a game.” Her dad shrugged. “Just a challenge.”