Taken by the Greek Billionaire (17 page)

Chapter Twenty-Four

The wood was not complying with his demands. No matter how much he
rubbed it the angles were not working. Sebastian sighed and picked up another
piece of sandpaper. Though the machine specifically designed for this purpose
sat right next to him he felt the need to do it by hand. It soothed him somehow—or
at least it used to.
Tamed the beast that seemed like it was
going to explode at any moment.

“Work for me,” he whispered to the wood but it did not.

Another hour and more he spent sanding and rubbing and still at the
end he was nowhere closer to where he wanted to be, but hadn’t it been that way
all month?
Twenty nine fucking days.
Twenty nine days
walking around in a cloud of anger and loathing. How could so much in his life
have changed so quickly?

He dropped the sandpaper and reached for his beer. It was icy cold
and he shuddered as it hit his chest. But then wasn’t that encouraging! His
chest had felt pretty odd of late. Like there was something heavy sitting on
it. And he fucking knew what.

Penny.

His thief.

His fucking woman!

He’d been so angry, he thought, so angry but the anger had somehow
begun to morph into guilt and then to denial and then back again and he’d
reacted, was still reacting, in a way that made no sense. He should have pinned
her against the wall and fucked her until she spoke some truth, because the
more he thought about it the surer Sebastian was that Penny had been
lying
. Oh it had taken him a good few weeks to get there,
but little things kept occurring to him and the more he considered the more
something felt wrong.
 

Just about the money.

Not when he was buried balls deep in her. Not when she sobbed his
name or snuggled into his arms as she slept. She’d lied. He was almost sure of
it, and he’d had plenty of days to think it through once the thought had taken
root. And he needed to know why. Not just for
his own
sanity, not just because the madness was still there, but because something
else was too….

He carried the beer upstairs with him, wondering how he was going to
fill his night. Work of course as always. What else was there?

“Demetrious?”

Max’s voice caught him as he headed for his study and Sebastian
halted. He’d been giving the staff a bit more run of the house. It made sense.
If Penny had taught him anything it was his vulnerabilities.
Both
the outer and the inner.
And Max had risen to the challenge admirably.
He’d put together a new team, people who were stealthy and silent and didn’t
intrude on his privacy.

“Max?”

“I have the report for you.”

Another one.
He
scowled and took it, though part of him did not want to read it. The first
report Max had given him had been a rude awakening. He’d read the story of Penny’s
background, and her sisters and felt his heart clench and his guilt spiral. Abandoned
by her mother when she was just four years old, her father was unknown. She’d
being shunted from foster home to foster home. Difficult the reports had said.
And no one had come forward to adopt her. In the end she’d ended up in the
group home she’d spoken about. There were few of them left these days, one to
one foster care was preferred, but back them there were many and she’d spent
all her teenage years in that place. It was also where she’d met the women
she’d called her sisters.

If there was ever a group of women who could pull the blinkers over
the eyes of men such as him it was them. He’d thought that the moment he’d seen
the picture Penny had in her bag. It was still sat in his room. Her clothes,
her
under things, and the picture all sat up there waiting.

The three sisters.
Each stunningly beautiful.
Each it seemed more than a match
for him and the others. But they weren’t doing it for their own reasons, to be
rich or to loll around in the lap of luxury. They were doing it so other girls
wouldn’t have to go through whatever they had—and still he had no idea the
extent of what that might be. Was it any wonder she’d stolen from him? He asked
himself for the millionth time. That money was important to her? That she’d run
off to help her sister?

Why hadn’t he seen it?

He dismissed Max with a nod and sat himself down behind his desk.
The report was held in a brown leaf folder and he took a deep breath before
flipping it open. It was a breakdown of Penny’s project. The building she
called The Point. She’d submitted a planning application and he read through it
understanding even more as he took in the layout.
A whole
bunch of rooms, each with an en suite, a large kitchen, a large living area,
and then a playground outside.
For teenage mothers
maybe?

His chest tightened and he exhaled shakily, unaware till then that
he’d been holding his breath.

The other documents in the file were applications to open The Point
as a drop in centre for runaways and forms to register the centre as a
charitable enterprise. She and her sisters had thought it all through and the
band around his chest tightened until he had to hold a hand against it.

He thought of the moment he’d thrown her out. The look on her face,
how she’d asked him to let her explain and he’d been so angry he’d ignored it
all.
Fucking idiot
.
How he wished he could turn the clock back. Get her back in his bed, in his
arms.

Because she wasn’t a thief, she was a fucking avenging angel! And as
he looked at the plans and looked in himself he knew the truth. He couldn’t
deny it anymore. In the space of a long weekend, and all the long days since,
he’d fallen harder than he’d even thought possible. He needed his avenging
angel.
Needed her in his bed, in his arms, and in his home.
No
their
home, he amended, because it
would be impossible now not to see her in every space.

The safe room where she’d kneed him in the balls, the lobby where
he’d first caught sight of her emerald eyes. He should have known then, he
thought. Hadn’t something made him pause and wonder and want? Penny in his bed,
seated at his table, laughing in the shower—all of it ran through his mind and
he dropped the sandpaper, unable to wait a moment longer. He’d waited too long
already.

Penny was his. She was always meant to be and a month apart had not
dimmed that feeling, had not even touched the need, the desire he felt for her.

The thief
and the billionaire.
He
laughed,
the first in so many weeks. It was time, and more, to go and take what was his.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The flat was freezing cold, again and Penny practically felt like a
block of ice. Numb. Could have been because she was in a pair of shorts and a
vest of course, but she suspected not.
It’s
not the cold making you freeze.

She scowled and picked up her sketch pad, eyeing the drawings she’d
been working on for the better part of a week. Did the layout work there, for
the living area? She looked at the positioning of the huge corner couch and
considered moving it to the other wall, but then she was hoping to have a large
television there and a games console. She’d already put an application in for
some funding from a local group for that. And she could do that now
because
Sebastian had bought the
property.

Had she done so in her own name and tried to apply for funding alarm
bells would have sounded. Where had the initial investment come from? How had
they found the money to buy the building?
I
stole it
wouldn’t have gone down too well she thought, but now she could
say, a local businessman, and it was smiles all round. Then there was the
twenty three thousand pounds that had been in the envelope. In the end he’d
made sure she got exactly what he’d promised her. The full two hundred thousand
she’d stolen. Already that money was being put to use by
Lyra
.
They’d set up a temporary drop in centre in one of the empty shops on the High
Street and it was full to bursting most nights. They offered a hot meal,
somewhere to rest and talk.

It wasn’t approved by the council yet. They hadn’t even bothered to
apply for the necessary permissions if truth be told. Why bother with the
bureaucracy when people needed them, and it was just temporary.

All because of Sebastian.

She owed him so fucking much.

“Sebastian…” His name tripped off her lips and she sighed. Just
thinking his name brought back the same feelings she’d had when she stood
outside of his door in the pouring rain.
The heavy weight on
her chest, the burn in her throat.
Why was it so fucking cold?

Penny dropped the sketch pad and stood up. There was no spare money
to put the heating on so she went into their bedroom and grabbed her bedspread.
Wrapping it round her shoulders she felt marginally warmer, but knew in reality
that it wasn’t just the temperature getting to her.
Not at
all.

She sat back down on their dilapidated couch, pulling the bedspread
in tight around her and rested her head back against it. The applications were
all in for The Point and that was good. It meant along with the temporary
centre that she was kept busy, that she had lots of things to fill her
thoughts. Really there were a hundred things she should be doing before Rachel
came home.
Rachel who was in just as bad a state as she when
it came right down to it…and
Lyra
.
Well
Lyra
was another matter entirely.

Penny scowled and let her gaze wander around their flat. They’d each
come out of their missions battered and bruised.
Each raw and
needing one another more than ever.
But they had The Point. They had
what they’d worked so long for and Penny was sure that once the work began on
it she’d come out of her funk. She’d stop moping around and feeling like
something was crushing her chest. She’d be fine. She would!

Yeah you tell yourself
that.

The door opened and Penny started from her thoughts, sitting up and trying
for a smile as Rachel came in. Her sister was dressed for the cold in a
flowered, chunky sweater and a tight pair of faded blue jeans. Her blonde curls
were windswept and her face was red from the cold.

“Hey, gorgeous.”

Rachel kicked off her boots and pulled a corner of the bedspread
aside. “Let me in. It’s freezing out there.”

“You’ve been down to the centre?”

Rachel nodded as she cuddled up against her sister. Her hands were
freezing and Penny jumped. “Bloody hell,
Rach
, you’re
not wrong. Your hands are like ice.”

“Everything is like ice,” Rachel said.

“Babe…” Penny wrapped her arms around her sister and held her close.
Sure she was a mess, but Rachel was worse.
Maybe because she
was more sensitive?
Penny thought again about the moment she’d gone to rescue
her sister, the things Rachel had told her and the desire to go hunt down
Rimeria
filled her all over again.
The bastard.

Sebastian at least had been a gentleman, she thought. He’d been kind
and considerate. He’d wanted her and he’d taken her, but he’d done it in a way so
that she’d never felt used or taken advantage of.

She’d wanted him just as much. Still wanted
him…and
she missed him. She missed him so damn much. She could admit that to herself
now. Hell after almost a month she could admit everything.
That
the madness had consumed her.
That she’d drowned in him. The tender
sex…she swallowed. It was so obvious to her now why it had been something she
felt she had to run from.
The chink in the armor.
Only
it hadn’t been a chink, it had been a hole and Sebastian had made his way
through it before she’d even realized.

“Pen?”
Rachel asked.
“Did you hear what I said?”

“Sorry, babe, I was in a world of my own. What did you say?”

“I asked how you’re feeling.”

She shrugged, ignoring the lump in her throat. “Oh you know me. I’m
fine.”

“No you’re not.”

Penny sighed. “Well, no, but I will be.”

“Do you miss him?”

The lump expanded. “I don’t really want to talk about it,
Rach
. It doesn’t help.”

“It might.”

“What do you want me to say?” she asked. “That I miss him all the
time? That I play the time we spent together over and over again in my mind?
That I wake up in the morning freezing cold because he’s not lying next to me?
Is that what you want to hear?”

“Pen….”

She swallowed unsteadily and took her sister’s hand. “I’m sorry.
Sorry. I just…
I do
miss him. I want
him, but it was never going to happen,
Rach
, you know
that right?”