In His Grip: His #5 (A Billionaire Domination Serial) (3 page)

Penn unfolded his arms and let them fall to his side in a gesture that bordered on apologetic. “Don’t, Chloe. I know… I know we got into it after those photos came out, and you didn’t like what I said about those women meaning nothing to me. You’re not like them.”

“So you said.” Not from the wrong part of town. Not from the wrong families. The wrong names, and the wrong jobs, and the wrong lives. But I was, all those things. A Stanford law degree and a corner office on the junior partners’ floor didn’t change that.

At least not for me. And that might always have been the real issue, behind why I’d fallen for Penn despite the ethical dilemma of dating the son of a Ferris & Hale client and despite the months of suspicions there had been other women. Being Penn Ellison’s girlfriend was me proving
to myself
that I wasn’t just trash from around the block like all those women who were more important to my lothario father than my mother and I had been.

“I’m not trying to open up old wounds,” Penn said, taking a cautious step toward me and lowering his voice. “I just want you to know I always saw your value.” Again, I leaned away as he reached out to smooth my wild hair from my eyes, but I let him. “You were my good luck charm, Chloe,” he whispered, then broke into a breathy chuckle. “Especially in business, more than you know.”

My brow knitted at that peculiar remark. Penn and I had never discussed the details of our careers with one another, ostensibly shutting out the world and its pressures when we were together. It had been an especially welcome rule when one of my clients had run afoul of the Ellison family in a business deal, absorbing all the bad press and governmental fines for actions they contended had belonged to Ellison International. Thankfully, with our “no work talk” policy, there had been no temptation to ask Penn about his family’s role in the fiasco.

The bravado had drained from his expression by degrees until he stood in front of me looking serious and almost vulnerable. “When you come home, I want us to talk. Can I have that promise from you?”

Now I was the one folding my arms defensively across my chest, fingernails digging at my palms as I kept my fists closed. “I’m not sure. I’ll think about it.” I was lying, probably. “Right now, I have things to do, so please don’t push me.”

I got no argument, just that sandy head inclined in a conciliatory gesture and a shrug of those perfect shoulders and open arms. Walking away, kicking sand as I went, I tried not to concentrate on the feeling Penn was watching me go. I glanced along the tree line to find Luiz gone and along the shore to see Whitney Yarborough sitting beside the waiting rigs with her arms folded on her bent knees, her legs tucked up against her chest like a shield. She wasn’t quite quick enough with the sunglasses to keep me from seeing her gaze following me. I doubted she understood I wasn’t her competition. In her position, I would have hated me.

When I realized I’d walked the entire length of the public portion of Ilha de Flor’s beach, all in a pensive daze and never having found Adrian, I stood staring dumbly out at the water. Little dots on the horizon washed near and far, windsurfers and sailboats and jet skis. I’d never been on any of those, not even after two weeks on a luxury South American cruise or two more weeks living on a tropical island. No nature walks or bodyboarding lessons, no golfing or trips to the resort casino, no horseback riding or tennis. Just fifteen days—sixteen now—of being Adrian Knight’s submissive.

Of being…lied to?

***

Running and playing at being a pianist. These had been my peace of mind since before my university days, when I’d been the outsider at Siemer Academy, exclusive prep school to future captains of industry, among so many fellow trust fund kids who had grown up together on the East Coast. It was my first brush with Penn Ellison, constantly vying with me for sports team captain, student body president, class valedictorian. It was worse when we both ended up at Cornell. But it
had
meant I was in astonishingly good shape and could seduce most girls on campus in three songs or less.

Now, I pounded down the beach at a full sprint, pushing myself as hard as I could just to dull the anxiety. I hadn’t felt like this since I’d left London at sixteen, having made myself such a nuisance to my father that he was willing to let me move to a boarding school halfway around the world. Uncertain, unstable, lacking the focus of a real plan of attack.

Usually, I could lose myself in the deep burn of fatigued muscles and the frenzied pumping of lungs gasping for air. This morning it just kept me from hitting something…or someone. But there was no peace to be found.

When had I fallen for Chloe Bloom? When had dominating her and possessing sexually stopped being about claiming something that had belonged to Penn Ellison, about a momentary liaison with a woman of moderate social standing but far better character than I could ever possess? And what was this all about now?

I’d told myself I wasn’t going to replay that moment anymore, the instant when she had faced Penn Ellison and utterly forgotten her agreement with me. It felt like that first time I found out I wasn’t going to spend the summer with my mother’s parents at their country house because, as my elder half-brother had informed me, they didn’t want to acknowledge an Alexander grandchild anymore. Like walking into a dining hall filled with teenagers who wouldn’t speak to me the first three months I went to school with them. Like the night I’d found out what happened between Penn and Jessica. When I’d lost the only thing that mattered to me at the time to Penn Ellison. She hadn’t meant anything at all to him.

In the back of my mind, a voice whispered that the only power I’d ever held was the name Alexander. The only edge I had to draw upon were the instincts I inherited from my father’s line. When I walked away from it, I’d weakened myself.

The path up to the villa was within sight when I found them, my personal blond nemesis with his arm around the waist of my submissive as they stood groin to groin on my beach. She didn’t see me as I ran past, not any more than she’d really seen me last night on the balcony, not after Penn had entered the picture. The blood pounded in my head as I took the sand-dusted steps up toward the house two at a time. My skin flushed hot. I clenched my teeth.

In my bedroom, at the foot of my bed, I stood panting through the overpowering urge to punch the wall. I hadn’t done that since college, that night with Jessica, when I’d damn near broken a knuckle putting my hand through a piece of drywall in the fraternity house. There wasn’t going to be a repeat of that performance. If Chloe Bloom wanted out of our agreement, wanted to leave the island with Penn…

The buzzing of my cell phone cut off this thought, and in lieu of hurling the device across the room, I answered it with a terse, “Yes?”

“Are you coming to the site? Everyone else is here.”

“Gabriel,” I sighed. My project manager for the eco park project. I had forgotten we were working on the dwellings today. “Yes, yes, I’ll be there. I’m just running a little late. Thirty minutes.”

The rush proved useful. Hurrying to shower, to dress, to jump into the cart and zip along the path of that led to the garden and the building site—all without seeing Chloe—almost kept my mind off her. Now if only I could have gotten a little cooperation in that endeavor.

“Where is she? Where’s Chloe?” were Gabriel’s first words to me as I crossed the pad of graded earth to the small, elevated houses we were working on today. The young project manager was his khaki-clad, dust-covered self, about as direct and lacking in charm when it came to work as I was.

“She’s not coming today,” I huffed under my breath. Probably not any day. I quickly surveyed the wooden skeleton a half-dozen of my men were erecting by hand, sans power tools, on the raised wooden platform and grabbed a tool belt to fasten around my waist over my faded jeans and plain tan t-shirt. After glancing over the area, I looked at Gabriel. “What, no hammer?”

“Not coming? I wanted to show her the new vertical beds for the garden site. She helped me design them,” he complained as he stomped the dust off his work boots. “I think we went a little too tall, but I don’t want to change them until she and I—”

I stopped searching the area for a hammer, swatted at an irritating insect buzzing around my ear, and squared my shoulders the Gabriel. “You don’t need Miss Bloom’s approval to make changes,” I reminded him. “You need mine.” I could tell I had been a little too flat, a little too loud, with the delivery of that statement when the foreman’s posture jerked straighter and the clamor of hammer and saw dropped off to near silence.

“Of course, Mr. Knight.” I recognized Chloe’s “fuck you” tone in Gabriel’s voice and wondered at how quickly she had been able to insert herself into every aspect of this project, winning both Gabriel and Luiz over as her allies. Did everyone just instantly love her?

Like people loved Penn Ellison? Like she loved him…

It was good to be angry, all things considered. Just like my summers spent with Habitat for Humanity, I did more work than any three other men combined. Back then, it was to prove I wasn’t a spoiled, pampered son of privilege. Now it was an outlet, a focus, a distraction.

“Deus, Adrian!” Manuela interrupted my little flurry of nail-driving as she and a helper from the kitchen plopped several heavy baskets of food down onto the platform. “You are a mess.”

Manuela, on the other hand, was most certainly not a mess. Slender, petite, with black waves of silver-streaked hair curling against the top of her shoulders, Manuela had an elegance about her. Thanks to Chloe, I couldn’t help thinking of her in vintage Hollywood terms. Today she was Veronica Lake cool in a silky white blouse and slim black slacks, soft falls of hair falling over one dark eye.

I looked down at myself, at my t-shirt no mottled with streaks of dirt and sweat, and decided it was time to be rid of it. “Better?” I asked once I was bare-chested, and I couldn’t help chuckling at Manuela’s scandalized expression, no matter my mood.

She shook her head, red bead earrings clacking lightly. “Honestly, Adrian, I shouldn’t have to tell a man of your position to keep up appearances.” She was crouched over one of the baskets, as she unpacked the typical Brazilian midday feast, and she paused to glance up and cock one coal black brow at me. “You have a sweetheart to think of now. Do you want her to see you looking like a day laborer?”

Luiz, stomping across the platform, snickered and wiped his lean face with the tail of his shirt. He bent over the basket to fish out a ham and cheese sandwich made with thick slabs of his grandmother’s freshly baked bread. “You mean like me, Avό?”

She slapped at his knee. “Yes, like you. Get back. I’ll call you when it’s ready.” While she was thus occupied, I knelt and snuck a peek under the lid of a plastic dish, hoping for her risotto with shrimp. Her quick hand rapped me on the knuckles with a sharp slap. “That’s not for you. I made that special for Chloe.” Then she paused. “The girl is feeling better after last night?” When I didn’t answer immediately, Manuela’s gaze pointedly scanned the project site. “Adrian?”

“Last time I saw her, she was with him.” I didn’t look at Manuela as I said it, but I cursed the rumble of emotion in the back of my throat.

For several moments, Manuela said nothing, just continued unpacking bowls and thermoses and bags of fruit. “He’s trouble, that one. It’s in his eyes.” When she raised her face and focused her attention on me, it was with a disapproving frown. “He is not good for her, Adrian. Men like that aren’t good for anyone. What are you going to do to protect her?”

I settled onto the platform, my elbows resting on my bent knees. “Protect her? You think that’s my job? She’s an adult. She wants to be with him—”

“Adrian Knight!” I almost corrected her to Alexander. Old habits… It’d been almost a decade since the name change, but hearing it from Penn last night seemed to erase the years. “She is your woman.” But she wasn’t. “You owe her your protection.” But did she want it? Would she have it?

“Manuela, it’s…complicated.”

“It’s not,” she insisted. “Deus, Adrian, you own half the world.”

“Not quite that much.”

“Enough of it. Buildings and islands, and people all working for you and doing what you say. You can’t deal with the one girl who matters?”

I opened my mouth…and sighed and cleared my throat and chuckled uncomfortably at the scolding. Manuela really was like a mother to me, and not just because she took care of me. Upon occasion, she made me feel like a boy, a very small and foolish one.

“There’s more to it than you realize,” I told her. An innate lack of personal redeeming qualities, for starters. And a lack of the trademark Ellison dimples. A lifetime of issues I hadn’t dealt with and generations the tendencies I couldn’t overcome.

To my surprise, the matron nodded. Her dark eyes, a brown so deep they seemed almost black with highlights tinged in violet, regarded me with a knowing so clear I could believe she really did understand all those things I had never spoken. Was it just in her nature to know? Or was I that obvious?

“And there is less to it than you seem to think. You want the girl, and he wants the girl, but the girl wants you.”

“Does she?” I asked under my breath before could stop myself. This earned me another hard-angled perk of Manuela’s brow.

“You don’t think so? She lives with you. The way she gazes at you…”

“It’s not what you think.” Chloe was not my lover. She was my submissive, by verbal contract, and only temporarily. My Miss Bloom had made that clear from the beginning.

Manuela handed me a plastic cup of mixed pineapple and sugarcane juice, then sipped on her own. “Are you telling me Chloe is not your girlfriend? A… What is the word? A gold digger?”

“No. No, not at all.” I could still picture the look of anger on Chloe’s face when I’d offered her a stipend to act as my submissive. “She just doesn’t want…” I lingered over my choice of words. “Anything long-term.”

Manuela snickered against her cup. “If that’s what the girl says, she’s lying to you.”

“You think so?” I asked, no hope or heart in my voice.