In His Grip: His #5 (A Billionaire Domination Serial) (2 page)

Adrian had separated himself from his father’s family, apparently going so far as to change his surname. I didn’t need to compound last night’s mistakes with the same old tired ones I’d been making since meeting Knight, even if they were the only defense I had against falling for the man.

The need to see Adrian twitched and pulsed and scratched urgently along my back and shoulders and the nape of my neck as I toweled off from my shower as quickly as I could. Down the hallway, into the living room, glancing into the kitchen. Everything so still. Adrian wasn’t here. I threaded my fingers into the damp waves of my hair to tug it anxiously back from my face, abruptly realizing I was mirroring Adrian’s habit, a tell for his growing irritation.

There’d been talk of going to the project site this morning, of Adrian and several of his staffers working on the demonstration houses they were building by hand. I threw on a simple white sundress. It felt almost wrong now, getting dressed, not being naked for Adrian even if I was about to go out into the world. A hurried glance out the front door, with a nod to the perplexed security guard, told me the golf cart Adrian always used to speed along the steep, winding paths between the resort and the project site still awaited him outside the villa. My next guess was his daily run, though it seemed late in the morning for it. If so, he’d be on his way back by now.

With my sandals dangling by their strap from my hand, I took the private path down to the beach at a fretful, jerky, barefoot jog. And even as I did, I heard that small voice inside myself chastising me for…for
wanting
so much and so hard, wanting reassurance, wanting Adrian’s forgiveness,
wanting Adrian
.

I could have screamed when I trudged through the sand, head down as I stewed over Knight, and marched straight into Penn Ellison. He was the last person I wanted to see, with the possible exception of myself in the mirror.

It irritated me no end that the scene before me was no different than it would’ve been a year ago, two years ago. Beautiful blond Penn, all blue eyes and dimples and tanned muscles from murderous games of racquetball and soccer and touch football, anything that allowed him to compete with
and beat
his brothers and his cadre of equally competitive and almost equally successful friends. He wore the same sleek blue swim trunks he had during our Fiji vacation last summer and the expensive waterproof black sports watch I’d given him a couple of birthdays back. He still had the most incredible shoulders of any man I’d ever met, perfectly defined and curved. So many nights in our bed, I’d clung to those shoulders as he ridden me and used me and called me his. Yet he had never truly been mine.

The surprise was not that he was playing to an adoring audience of bikini-clad beauties and playboys-in-training but that a certain Brazilian teen was doing such a good job of blending in with them. Luiz, dark and lean and impressively toned in his own stylishly simple white swim shorts, had managed to engage Penn so well on the scion’s skill at windsurfing that they were actually having a conversation.

It required nothing short of true talent to get Penn to narrow his focus enough that he ceased to perform for admirers and actually noticed one of the throng acting as his audience, his entourage, his subjects. How scandalized would Penn have been, I wondered, had he known the dashing young man he was impressing with talk of custom rigs and carving hard into perfect waves was the cook’s grandson and a laborer on Adrian’s eco park project as part of a court ordered community service sentence? I couldn’t help smiling and silently cheering the boy on, feeling an unmistakable kinship with another of the great unwashed masses who had bluffed his way out of the field, the kitchen, the back office into this life of power and grace.

Behind them, along the shoreline, platinum-haired Whitney Yarborough waited dutifully with a small collection of assistants propping up two windsurfing rigs. Her long hair was loose now, damp and wind-tangled, and she wore a strapless red bikini almost identical to one I owned. Was that the look I’d worn on my face when I’d been with Penn, when I’d waited patiently as he talked business with partners we’d run into at this restaurant or that boutique? When I’d sat back at parties while he regaled admirers with carefully understated descriptions of luxury getaways and dramatic recollections of behind-the-scenes maneuvering over billion-dollar mergers? Had I looked that…forlorn, wistful, adoring? That pitiful?

With horror, I found myself wondering if that’s how I looked with Adrian. I didn’t think so, not with the way he involved me in entertaining his guests or the way I had involved myself with the park project. But after last night, I wasn’t sure where I stood with Adrian Knight or how welcome I was in these aspects of his life.

When Penn tossed his head of burnished gold hair and glanced in my direction, I realized I’d missed my opportunity to escape unseen, squandered the opportunity struggling needlessly through a mire of bad memories and listless musings. It was also familiar, the way he nodded to the crowd and smiled and waved a hand at them, making them feel privileged to be dismissed with such charm. My bare toes curled into the sand that seemed to shift under me and rush in around my feet to root me in place.

“Chloe.” It was a sigh delivered with a smile and warmth I hadn’t seen since Penn had first courted me.

With distress, I thought
, that doesn’t feel right
. My name from Penn’s lips didn’t make me tremble the way it did when Adrian said it. Perhaps I was just too guarded with him now. It couldn’t even compare to the anxious anticipation of Knight glancing at me sidelong with mischief in his eyes, calling me Miss Bloom. And I wasn’t sure now if I was sad or angry or downright terrified at this change of circumstance.

“Penn,” I responded in a clipped voice.

He suddenly trailed his cool, wet fingertips down my bare arm, and I jumped and dropped my shoes in the sand. The sexy little chuckle from the back of his throat exasperated me, because I knew he was attributing my reaction to the attraction I’d always felt for him. In truth, it was my irritation at being touched by somebody besides Adrian, a realization that frustrated me even more.

“All better after last night?” he asked. It was a loaded question. Penn had always expected a caress and a smile to make things all better.

“I’m feeling okay, yes.” It took me leaning hard to one side to get my body to move, to start around and away from Penn. “But I have to—”

“Why avoid me, Chloe? It’s hardly coincidence that I’ve been looking for you for a month, only to find you here.”

So familiar. I shook my head slightly and breathed out a bitter chuckle. He was the same man I left back on the East Coast. Whenever something went his way, Penn attributed it to Fate and her unwavering blessing of the Ellison family, the elite, the deserving. When it came right down to it, he wanted to believe that luck was the demonstration of innate superiority. I supposed we all chased security in different ways.

“It is coincidence, that’s all,” I insisted gently and started away with an uncomfortable glance at Luiz, who was watching us from a distance.

Penn caught my arm with one hand and my chin with the other, making me look up at him as he bent his classically handsome face over mine. “And a coincidence that you’re bedding Adrian Alexander? Did you really come all this way to teach me a lesson with that man?”

I shook my head, flabbergasted, but I shouldn’t have been. With men like Penn, everything was about them, about how to impress them or persuade them or gain an advantage over them. “I don’t even know who the two of you are to one another,” I huffed, trying to lean away. Penn released my arm only to bind me close with his around my waist. The sensual pressure of his flesh against mine sent bolts of panic through me, mind and body.

“Really? Then I’ll tell you. He’s a cut-rate version of me, Chloe. A British accent instead of Boston, some semblance of swagger, and enough money to make up for the fact that he doesn’t really have the killer instinct in business, no matter what family he comes from. We’ve been at each other’s throats since prep school and Cornell and now and again ever since, whenever we’ve gone after the same property or contracts. How did he get you to come here, Chloe?”

I didn’t like what Penn was suggesting, that I was being played as a pawn, despite the fact that no nefarious plan had brought me to the island. Not any more than I appreciated my body’s reaction to his presence, his sculpted chest pressed against me, the familiar swell of muscles fitted against mine. My sex tingled at the sensation of Penn’s semi-erect cock nestled against my stomach, and my nipples tightened and hardened abruptly and painfully. I know he felt them, from the purr behind his smooth, bowed lips.

“Coincidence,” I insisted again, twisting my face away from his fingers. He smelled of salty marine air, orange juice, and Disaronno, and my mouth watered for a taste. But not from Penn’s mouth…

My ex-lover shook his head no, a fringe of damp hair flirting with his strong brow. “I don’t believe in that. If you didn’t know who he was, he knew who you were. How long did it take, Chloe, before he moved in on you? A couple of weeks, a few days? Was it sudden?” Penn caught my chin again, and his lips brushed corner of my mouth, making it twitch, making my traitorous body slick itself for him. “Did he sweep you off your feet?”

Penn moved in then, trying to kiss me. I was holding his shoulders again, the way I used to, but this time I was pushing him away. Pushing away everything he said, as dread gathered in my stomach, solidifying, sinking.

“Stop, Penn. This isn’t us anymore. I don’t belong to…” I knew immediately that I’d said too much.

He went stiff against me and drew his face back far enough to stare down hard into my eyes. “Don’t belong to me anymore? Is that what you’re going to say?” Instead of recoiling, he squeezed me harder against his body, and I felt his member swell and jerk against my abdomen. “You belong to him now? Is that it, Chloe?
Adrian Alexander?
” When I squirmed, Penn pulled my hair hard enough to hurt, and a gasp escaped me before I could bite it back. “You’re letting him dominate you. I can see it in your face.” He shook his head in a slow, decisive, deliberate motion. “I won’t allow it, Chloe. He can’t have you. It’s just revenge.”

“Enough.” Throwing myself backward so strongly that I almost landed in my butt in the sand, I finally broke Penn’s hold on me and stood facing him with clenched fists. I opened my mouth to let loose a rant the likes of which he’d never heard from me, but Penn sighed and held up his hands.

“Sorry,” he said, his voice much softer. “I’m sorry. I know you have reason to be mad at me, and I have no right to question you.” He shook his head and chuckled low. “Maybe if it was somebody besides Adrian Alexander. But maybe not. We had something, Chloe.”

I knew that better than he did. Or at least I’d had something for him. What Penn felt for me… I wasn’t sure even he knew that.

With a nod of my head, I motioned toward Whitney where she watched with the tide at her ankles. “I suspect she thinks you have something with her. Imagine how she feels watching this.”

Penn didn’t even bother to glance over his shoulder at her. “She knows that we are.” He cocked one sandy brow at me. “And what we aren’t. I have to wonder if Alexander has been so honest with you. We have a history of competing with each other—for everything, Chloe, including women.”

My fists hadn’t unclenched, not at the softening of his tone or the conciliatory gestures. It saved me time tensing up again now. “You make it sound like a plot. Like Adrian bought the island knowing I’d take a cruise.” Like he’d known who I was without even meeting me. Like everything he’d said and done was a ploy to score points against a man who wasn’t even my boyfriend anymore. Like…I was being used.

Penn folded his arms and nodded almost sheepishly. “I know it sounds outlandish to someone looking in from the outside.” And that
was
me, always. “And I wouldn’t suggest he plotted so much as he seized an opportunity for payback.”

“Payback?” The word stuttered out of me haltingly, and I whipped my head as a pestering breeze blew my hair across my face. Tiny stings of suspicion and fear scratched at the back of my mind like fingernails against glass. “Payback for what?”

“For doing to him what he’s doing to me now.” Penn didn’t look at me as he admitted this, his gaze skimming along the pale yellow sand. “There was a girl, back in college. He was fairly serious about her.”

“And you made a trophy of her.” Despite my determination to guard my feelings from Penn, my voice sounded dead, flat. Part of it was the fact that I’d wasted two years of my life in love with a man who could not differentiate competitive sports from personal relationships, certainly. But part of it…

What bothered me more? Was it the irrational jealousy that there was another woman out there who was Adrian Knight’s first love, or the suggestion that I was…payback for Penn having stolen her from him? I couldn’t decide. There wasn’t enough capacity left in my head for processing the confusing the swell of everything I had just started to feel for Adrian, plus the shock and bitterness and hurt of seeing Penn again so soon, let alone the terrible possibility that I meant even less to Knight than I thought I did. It wasn’t fair; I had only started to admit to myself that I wanted to mean something to Adrian.

I squeezed my eyes closed and sighed out slowly. Surely there was no way Adrian had known who I was before he became involved with me. Even after that, there was no reason for him to associate me with Penn. I had never dropped the Ellison name, and I had resisted all of Adrian’s attempts to get me to open up about that other man.

Yet there it was, that dead weight in the pit of my stomach, the feeling that said my father had abandoned me again, Penn had betrayed me, Adrian had played me.

Still, there was that sliver of pride I’d always tied around my wrist to guide me when I had been left all alone in the silence. “So you want me to believe I’ve been used. That whatever is going on between Adrian Knight and me is all about you. Never about someone like me.”