The Pretend Boyfriend 2 (Inhumanly Handsome, Humanly Flawed Alpha Male Erotic Romance) (9 page)

“Brian.” Her tone is urgent. She raises herself on her elbows to gaze into his eyes. “You are not your father. You didn’t do it.”

She is so beautiful with her hair mussed up like that. He wants to stroke her face, but his arm is all bunched up.

He says, “How sure are you? My father wasn’t always this way. I was told . . . a long time ago . . . that he was a very benign man. Then he got into drink, and it all went downhill from there.”

“You are not an alcoholic.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”

It’s true. This entire incident has jarred him. Shaken him more than he can ever imagine. Everything he thought he had known about himself has now been turned upside down and inside out. He feels as if he has been laundered.

“You did not rape that woman.” Her eyes are shining with some indefinable emotion. She squeezes his forearm hard. So hard that he can feel her grip on his bone.

“They think I did.”

“We’ll prove them wrong.”

“How? The evidence seems to allude that I did it. It doesn’t look good.”

“I don’t know right now,” she declares, “but we’ll find a way.”

He hugs her to his chest.

“I’m not in the right mind to think about anything,” he admits.

“You’re tired. Get some sleep.” She kisses his chest, and then she raises herself up to kiss his mouth.

A strange sensation suffuses his chest, spreading all the way around and about in fragments. He can’t describe it, but it’s as if his heart has decided to melt into a puddle which is now seeping everywhere else. His gut tightens. A choke enters his throat.

He hasn’t felt this way with anyone in, like . . . well . . . forever.

He swallows and wills it to go away.

“How did it go with Henry Moody?” he says lightly.

“I called his PA today and I have an appointment with him Friday.”

“Great.” He means it.

“Thanks to you.”

“I didn’t do anything. He just happened to be there.”

“And you just happened to suddenly be partial to opera. You’re such a bad liar.”

“I wish I was,” he says pensively, and she falls silent.

16

It is early morning. Sam knows that she has to haul her ass to the office, and she doesn’t have a clean change of clothes right now in Brian’s penthouse. But she’s glad she stayed. He needed her, as much as he doesn’t want to admit it. She hates to see him like this – a pale shell of himself.

He’s sleeping in his bed. After tossing and turning half the night, he finally drifted to sleep in the wee hours of the morning. She didn’t wake him when she crept out of his arms.

What he told her disturbed her more than she thought it would. Beautiful, brilliant, successful and sophisticated Brian. A sexually abused child. It didn’t matter if it only happened once. Brian had been physically abused for most of his childhood. And the worst scars that he retained had not been made on his beautiful body.

Over the years, he developed a caustic veneer – icy and impenetrable. He built a barbed wire fence around his own heart. He is unable to love and unable to be loved – pushing people away before they can get too close, unless he is really comfortable with them, like with Caleb.

Only he has the last part down wrong.

She loves him. More than any man she has ever loved.

She knows that now.

She watches him sleep for a while. Even in sleep, he is not at rest. His closed eyelids flit with the sleep of dreams, though in his case, they will more likely be nightmares.

Her heart wrenches.

She pads downstairs in his bathrobe before she can become fixated on watching him.

Downstairs, she surveys the carnage. The crime scene. The police have already combed the place, photographed whatever they needed to photograph, collected whatever evidence they needed to collect. She examines the broken table, trying to envision what happened. Was there a struggle? How badly were both parties hurt? Brian has the claw marks on his chest, but what happened here had to be more than just a catfight.

She treads carefully around the broken glass. Brian has no cuts on his body other than the ones on the soles of his feet. His blood smudges portions of the carpet, but that’s the only blood she can see.

She frowns. With this kind of struggle, the woman, Delilah, has to be hurt more than the police suggested. Surely the police would have picked up on that. But the police didn’t care about Brian. To them, he was just some rich schmuck who deserved to be taken down a peg or two.

Brian’s clothes are strewn on the floor. No doubt the police have gone through that, she notes in chagrin. She picks them up – a grey wife beater and a pair of crumpled jeans. They didn’t look torn. They look as if they have been slipped off deliberately. Brian said he didn’t remember taking off his clothes before he blanked out.

Sam sinks onto her haunches, trying to piece together the scene. Such a struggle. Someone had to be hurt real bad.

Maybe it was time she paid Delilah a visit.

A movement at the door arrests her. There are shadows beneath the lower edge. Several newspapers are shoved into Brian’s hallway. So he has his newspapers delivered this way in the morning.

Suspicion makes her climb to her feet to pick them up.

The headlines are about the elections. But on the front page of the
Tribune
, a news item immediately catches her eye.

‘PROMINENT BUSINESSMAN, BRIAN MORTON, BROUGHT ME TO HIS PENTHOUSE AND RAPED ME,’ CLAIMS VICTIM.

In it is a stock photo of Brian, probably taken some time ago at a businessman’s luncheon. He is in a business suit – well-groomed, impossibly handsome, and smiling smugly into the camera.

17

Brian walks into his office sometime around ten. He has tried to dress up as immaculately as possible. His hair is neatly combed and he is every inch the cool CEO as he strides with his briefcase into the reception area.

Everyone there immediately stops talking.

He has seen the headlines, of course. The
Chicago Tribune
lies face up on the receptionist’s desk, every sordid detail of what Delilah Faulkner has told to the police in print.

Brian’s pulse is racing, but he has made up his mind to act normal, as he would every other work day. This is his company after all, and to hell if he’s going to let his employees get to him.

If they dared.

“Good morning, Mr. Morton,” Alysha, the receptionist says quickly. She’s flushing a little, and she looks down, as though afraid to meet his eyes.

“Morning, Alysha.” He turns to the two copy editors who are openly gawking at him. “Don’t you have work to do? What would it take to get the proofs for the Meatgrinder account by evening? Salary cut? Bonus suspension?”

“Uh, yes, Mr. Morton.”

“Right away, Mr. Morton.”

They disappear. Brian rolls his eyes, even though he knows it’s no laughing matter. So it’s all out in the open. Guilty before proven innocent.

Now all he has to do is wait for the fallout.

Claudia, his personal assistant, comes up to him with a sheaf of papers. She stops short.

“You OK?”

“Why wouldn’t I be OK?” he says, striding into his office. “And good morning to you too.”

She has to totter on her heels to keep up with him. She has been his assistant for three years, and he likes her because she has a no nonsense attitude about her. Pretty much like Sam, actually.

“Everyone’s talking about it,” she says.

“Fuck them. I didn’t do it.”

“They are crucifying you anyway. We had a couple of calls this morning from some of our largest accounts. Burnett and Co. Addison Rouge. The mayor’s office.” She says this last meaningfully.

Hell, he’d expected this.

She says, “They are . . . concerned.”

Brian nods grimly. “And the lynch mob is all lining up with their pitchforks and flaming torches. What do you think, Claudia?”

“I think that this might be a problem for some of them.”

“I’m not talking about the clients.”

“Right.” She clutches the file, her knuckles white. “I think she’s a lying, no good schemer who is trying to get something out of you, I don’t know what. But I know you didn’t do it. What reason would you have to?”

He will admit to being pretty cut up yesterday, but he had been mulling over the whole thing with greater clarity today. He agrees with Sam. This whole thing stinks, especially when the ‘victim’ is so eager to get her story out to the press. Most rape victims would rather crawl into a hole and hide. And he’s not exactly some prominent celebrity she wants to tear down for kicks.

He has never even met her in his entire life.

Unless she’s planning to blackmail him for his money. Or more precisely, the Morton family money. But it’s already out in the open. She can’t blackmail him for secrecy. Is she planning to blackmail him then to make it all go away?

But it can’t go away anymore. It’s too public, too huge.

He groans inwardly.

What a mess.

The alternative is too awful to contemplate – that he really did rape her in his moment of genetic madness.

“Oh, and your uncle called. He said he called your cellphone but it went straight to voicemail.”

“It ran out of batteries,” he says tightly.

It’s true. In the mayhem, he had forgotten to charge it. But his uncle calling at a time like this can never be a good thing. Still, at least he called. That’s more than Brian can say about his own parents.

Anyhow, Jefferson Morton is someone you have to absolutely phone back. He has mayors and police chiefs and politicians at his beck and call. Brian sighs as he picks up the landline. Claudia discreetly closes the door behind her.

He dials his uncle’s direct line. It picks up at first ring. Figures. His uncle has caller ID.

“Brian.” The voice on the other end is a whiplash. Jefferson Morton may have had colorectal cancer, but he’s cured now and is as sharp as tack. In fact, he makes Hitler look reasonable. “What the hell have you done now?”

Brian’s defenses immediately spring to the challenge. “Et tu, Uncle Brutus?”

“I warned you about your philandering ways, but you wouldn’t listen. Now you’ve gotten into some hole that not even
I
can dig you out of.”

“So you assumed I did it.”

“I assumed you were not in your right presence of mind with all the alcohol and drugs you have been taking. You are honestly no better than your father.”

Brian bridles. He opens his mouth to say something he can’t take back, but thinks the better of it.

“Look,” he says, seething, “I may not be the nephew you’ve always craved, but I didn’t rape anyone.”

“If you did, I’d be the first to hang you out to dry.”

“You don’t control me.”

“I put you through college and gave you your start.”

“I made Vanguard into what it is today, and you can’t deny it.”

“No, I won’t, Brian. I won’t deny your brilliance, your ruthlessness, your business acumen and your innovation.”

“It comes with the I.Q. of 190.” Brian is also aware that it comes with genetics. The brilliance might have skipped his father, but it certainly is present in his uncle and cousins.

“But you also have the emotional quotient of a petulant teenager. You are an overgrown club boy who is as irresponsible to yourself as you are to others around you. I was just waiting for a day like this when you’d drag the entire Morton name – an empire I’ve worked so hard to build – into the mud. Not everyone outside this family will be so forgiving of your transgressions.”

“So you’ve decided I’m guilty.”

“I’ve decided that your sins have come back to haunt you . . . and this family. I cut your father off, but I didn’t do it with you because I thought you deserved a chance. And you are trying to fuck it up every chance you get. You’ve gone too far this time.”

“I didn’t rape that woman.”

“But you’re not sure.” His uncle’s voice turns cunning. “You can’t fool me. You think that you can just waltz through this life on sex and booze and drugs – ”

“I only do recreational drugs, never the hard stuff, and you know that.”

“Hasn’t stopped you from trying them in college, until I threatened to cut you out of my will.”

“You’re not going to use that on me again, because it won’t work. I don’t care about your money.”

“You certainly did care about it then. And you’re going to care about it again when I take Vanguard away from you.”

Brian’s mouth twitches.

Ah yes, that little caveat. The one that he had to sign even before Vanguard was incepted five years ago when he was just out of college. The one that gives his uncle the absolute power as Chairman of the Morton group to take Vanguard away from its President and CEO, no matter what that President and CEO has done to grow the company by leaps and bounds.