Rendezvous with the Billionaire: A Billionaire Workplace Romance (12 page)

The rest of the day flew by with speculation running rampant. I managed to keep things to myself and didn't reveal anymore of Evan's secrets. By the time I got home I was ready to flee the city in sheer frustration. I was not built for blackmail and intrigue. It made me want to tear my hair out and hide under the covers for the rest of my life.

Andrea wasn't there when I got back, so I couldn't ask about the video, and I wasn't in a mood to talk to any of our other roommates. Maricela was out so I lay in my bed and stared at the ceiling. Maybe if I did absolutely nothing, all of my problems would evaporate and I'd wake up, realizing this had all been one really, really bad dream.

I let the seconds tick by, but the room didn't dissolve and my alarm didn't interrupt my reverie, failing to startle me to consciousness.

But with a more than 24 hours gone by since the nightmare began, I was starting to calm down. I was still terrified and pissed, but I couldn't stay at that emotional high I'd been at yesterday. It was exhausting and I could feel my eyes beginning to droop as it all caught up with me.

I didn't want to fall asleep just yet, though. I needed to figure out what to do next. Yeah, Andrea said not to do anything stupid, but she didn't say not to do anything at all. The biggest question I had, the one that I needed to answer before moving forward was simple: could I trust Evan?

If I was being logical, the answer was a simple no.

He hadn't done anything that told me I should trust him, and everything we'd done together had only lead to more trouble on my end. And he somehow knew Nicholas Bitterman. That thought kept rattling around in my head.

But a part of me didn't want to be logical. I wanted to throw myself down in front of him and hope that he'd help me out, see that my problems and his went together and that we could solve anything if we helped each other. Yeah, that was just me being stupid.

My phone buzzed, the ringer on vibrate. I hoped it was Andrea calling with a plan of attack.

When I checked the caller ID, it was blank. Not Andrea, but I answered it anyway. Before I could say anything, an indistinguishable voice said, "Are you alone?"

Fear iced my spine. This was my blackmailer. Did he know that I hadn't kept his threats secret? Was that why he was calling so soon after the initial threat? "How did you get this number?" Knowing my email address was one thing, that wasn't hard to guess. My phone was something else. I tried to think like Andrea, she'd want me to get as much information from him as possible. "Who are you? Why are you doing this?"

Though maybe she wouldn't want me to go at it quite so directly.

"You made your choice," he said. I thought it was a he, though the voice was so distorted I was merely guessing his gender. "Now you need to face the consequences."

I wasn't going to cry, and I wasn't going to scream. I needed to be calm or I was ruined.

When he realized that I had no response, he continued talking. "You are going to implicate Evan Daringer in the murder of Nicholas Bitterman."

"But he didn't do it," I hadn't been sure before, but instinct told me I was right. Especially if someone was going to threaten me like this.

"I don't care, Amy." Frustration laced his voice, and I was nearly certain now that this was a man. There was something about the arrogance in his tone.

"I can't lie to the police!" Except that I already had, but I didn't think he knew that. "Why do you want to send an innocent man to jail?"

"He's not innocent!" He practically yelled it. "If you knew half the things that Evan Daringer has done you'd be begging to help me! Now listen to me or I send that video out online and to any newspaper who will carry it." I could hear him panting, his breath coming out in shaky inhalations. Whatever he was using to obscure his voice made it sounded almost like radio static.

The longer he spoke, the more calm he became. And I settled into a mix of icy fear and anger. With every word he told me to say, I became certain of a few things. He didn't know that I'd been with Evan the night of the murder, he would do anything to make sure Evan ended up rotting in prison, and this last one was a hunch, but I thought he knew me. Not well, but he didn't speak to me like we were strangers.

"Now tell me what you're going to tell the cops," he instructed.

The door was closed, but I kept my voice low. I didn't want anyone overhearing what I had to say. "Evan and I have been seeing each other. One ni--"

"That's not what I said!"

I winced and closed my eyes, one tear pushing its way out. "I've been fu-fucking Evan for a month. Last week I saw a knife hidden in his desk, behind a bunch of papers. When I asked him about it, he told me it was nothing. And then I heard him talking about Nicholas Bitterman to someone on the phone. He said the problem was taken care of." I spoke faster and faster, the words all jumbled together at the end of the statement.

"That will do," he told me. "You have 72 hours. Don't tell Daringer about this, just stay the hell away from him."

He hung up and I was left holding the phone up to my ear, sitting speechless on my bed. I didn't think he would call that quickly, or that the consequences would be so bad for Evan. What had he done to piss this guy off?

I needed to call Andrea, to tell her what he wanted and to see if she knew of any way to trace the call. That was a thing, right? He and I had talked for a long time and the cops always wanted to do that in the movies. Though usually they were sitting right there in the room. I was overthinking it. I checked the call log and there was no number listed, but I'd ask Andrea and see what she knew. Maybe this would be the smoking gun, maybe it wouldn't. She'd help, she'd figure this out in time.

Because I didn't want to implicate Evan.

It was one thing to tell the cops what really happened and let them investigate, but to lie so that he could get sent to jail for a crime he maybe didn't commit? That was beyond the pale. I didn't even want to think about what would happen if the cops found out that I lied. That could be even worse than if the blackmailer released the video.

I stuck my head out into the living room to see if Andrea was back yet, but no luck. My phone rang again and I answered it, closing the door behind me and hoping that it was her.

Evan's voice greeted me on the other end of the line. Right on the heel of that last call where my blackmailer told me to have nothing to do with him. This was just great. But Evan was still my boss and I still needed to be civil.

"What's up?" I asked, keeping my tone light.

Evan waited so long to speak that I thought we got disconnected. "I wanted to know if you would like to come over to my place tonight."

It wasn't a question, and it was so unexpected that I had to spend several moments processing what he meant before I could reply. "I don't think that would be a good idea." It wasn't because of the blackmailer. Not entirely. Every time I met with Evan, things got worse, and I didn't want to keep it up. For all I knew, this time I'd end up tied up in the back of a truck and held for ransom or something.

"Please," it tore out of him, he wasn't a man prone to using the word. "I just...there are some things I want – I need – to say. And it would be better in person."

It would be monumentally stupid to go meet him not ten minutes after my blackmailer told me that I should stay away. But monumentally stupid was getting to be a theme when it came to Evan Daringer.

"Tell me where to be."

The address he gave was ridiculously nice and disgustingly expensive. Though I supposed that's what you got when you were the scion of a wealthy family. I put on my nicest pair of jeans and a good blouse. I didn't want to dress up for him, but I wanted his doorman to let me in. At least that's what I kept telling myself.

After a few stops on the train I knew I was getting closer and closer to his part of Manhattan when the stations started getting cleaner and more brightly lit. It wasn't yet that late, but it was dark enough for the fluorescent light to offer comfort and safety.

He lived in a high rise. In a penthouse in a high rise. And, unlike my place, I didn't need to trudge up the stairs to get to the upper floors. I tried not to gape when I entered the lobby. A crystal chandelier hung from the high ceiling and a fountain of freshly scented water bubbled along the edge of the room to where it ended in a small stone pool.

The floor was covered in a warm looking marble tile and each of the walls continued with the earthy feel mixing greens and golds to make me feel like I was in the middle of a forest fit for a king. I took the elevator up to the top floor and listened to the soothing music piped in on the long journey up.

Evan answered his door. He wore a comfortable looking pair of slacks and big t-shirt with a bow and arrow on it. He looked exactly like I expected someone trying to get relaxed at home would. It was the most informal I'd ever seen him, excepting the times he'd been naked. He wasn't even wearing shoes.

For some reason that made me smile.

If the lobby looked like a forest, the penthouse was meant to be the sky. The entire living room was surrounded by floor to ceiling windows that looked out over the city. If I got too close I knew I'd have a dizzying sense of vertigo. All of his furniture was in shades of pale blue and gray. The darkest thing in the room was the painting of a city I didn't recognize mounted on the wall.

But he led me out of that room and into a smaller, more intimate space. Here the couch looked like someone regularly sat on it and there was a nice big TV. The walls were still pale, but the windows only took up half of the room and shades were drawn, leaving the recessed lights in the ceiling to provide illumination.

Evan invited me to sit with a sweeping gesture and a smile. I chose one of the chairs and tried to find a balance between relaxed and not too comfortable.

"Would you like something to drink?" He asked.

Now that he had me in his lair, he didn't seem quite so eager to talk. That was just rich. The one guy I'm in a complicated not-relationship tells me he wants to talk and I race across town to see what the problem is. And then nothing.

"Beer, I guess. No, water?" I shouldn't drink around him - that was what got me into trouble in the first place.

Evan smiled but nodded and left me alone. I almost expected him to summon a butler. But being alone in a room in his house presented me with an opportunity that I wasn't going to pass up. I got out of my chair and went right for the TV. There was a shelf with glass doors where it looked like he kept a bunch of DVDs. They were mostly popular movies, action flicks and comedies, with a few titles in French and Spanish along with a language or two I didn't recognize. The collection wasn't extensive, maybe fifty cases in all, but it was comforting to see what Evan liked, especially when I saw a few of my favorites in his collection.

I'd need to open up cabinets to learn more, and I almost did until I heard him walking back down the hallway towards me. My heart kicked up at the thought of being caught prying, but I stayed where I was. If he was going to leave me alone in his place, I had a right to look at what was in plain sight just like anyone else.

Evan didn't comment when he saw me by the window. He just sat the bottle of water down on a coaster on the dark wood table and seated himself on the couch. He looked comfortable there, one arm resting on the back and his foot hitched over his knee. He smiled at me and after a moment I had to look away. Evan was being normal again, that was really not good for me.

I sat back down in my chair after scooping up the water. It was so fancy that it came in a glass bottle. This was the luxury treatment. He watched me drink, but said nothing. I wondered if he was just going to stare at me all night.

"Do you invite a lot of girls to your apartment to give them the silent treatment?" When in doubt, make a joke. After I finished speaking I remembered that he'd probably been sitting at an interrogation room at the police station all afternoon and felt horrible about myself. "I'm sorry. Did everything go alright with the cops?" I knew my life had gone to bizarro world when that statement just rolled off my tongue.

He moved his arm from off the couch and leaned forward. His smile was gone. "I was an idiot, asking you to lie for me."

That was unexpected. But he continued before I could say anything.

"I'm sorry. I get...weird about things sometimes and I don't think about how it affects people. I was wrong. And they suspect me now anyway." He didn't look me in the eye, his gaze cast down to where my sneaker tapped against the soft carpet of the floor.

I moved to the couch to sit next to him. He needed to comfort and I didn't know how to give it from five feet away. "I'm sure you've got very good lawyers to take care of that."

"You're not going to ask me if I did it?" He finally looked at me, something haunted in his eyes.

I placed a hand on his knee, patting it once. "You already told me you didn't." I'd keep believing him. "Did you want to change your story?"

His face paled, he clutched my hand and pulled me a bit closer. "I lied about not knowing Nick. I lied to you."

I stayed silent. He wanted to talk and I needed to know what he had to say.

"I knew Nick Bitterman, very well. We went to college together, high school too. Him and me, Amanda and her brother Dylan. He used to have a crush on Amanda, it never really went anywhere, but we all knew he liked her." He smiled, "Dylan used to threaten to kick the shit out of him all the time if anything ever happened, but it was all fun." He let go of my hand and looked away, "And then Amanda and I hooked up. It was never serious, just sort of happened. Nick was pissed, Dylan was pissed, and – I don't know – somehow we ended up here. Our parents all like each other, they were for the relationship, said it would be a good match. I never actually proposed, we just decided that we should probably get married."