The TROUBLE with BILLIONAIRES: Book 2 (10 page)

A week wasn’t long enough to create a lifetime of memories. But I was determined to try.

I tugged at his briefs, moved them down his long, muscular legs until they finally fell to the floor so that I could push his legs further apart. I ran my hands along the underside of his balls, measuring their weight in my hand before I wrapped my fist around them, making him groan with a mix of pleasure and pain. Then I let go of his cock long enough to suck one, then the other, into my mouth, rolling them around until he cried out.

“Okay, you can’t do that again,” he moaned as he pulled me to my feet.

“Didn’t you like it?”

“More than you will ever know.”

He turned me, pressing me against the marble countertop. He captured my lips again and tasted himself on my tongue before he slid his lips over my chin and began to nibble at my throat. And then he was tugging at my jeans again. But again, he was struggling to get the stubborn button undone. I laughed as I reached down and released it with a quick jerk of my thumb.

“Show off.”

He pulled me to the shower, even as I was kicking away the leg of my jeans. It was a beautiful walk-in shower with brown tile that looked rough, but felt like satin against my bare back. There were three or four shower heads, each set at a different angle to create a rain effect. Water was running down over our bodies, even as he pressed me against one side and lifted me so that he could easily slide inside.

It was an interesting sensation, the feel of his movement mixed with the heat of the water. I wrapped my legs around him and buried my fingers in his shoulders, as I pulled myself up high against his body, encouraging him to hit all those delicious spots deep inside that turned my muscles to jelly and made me lose my mind.

There was no build up to my orgasm this time, no warning. I came so quickly that I’m sure I left bruises on his shoulder from the way surprise made my fingers clench. And my thighs…they were like a vise the way they clamped down on his body, forcing his movements to cease until the initial tidal wave passed. Slowly, almost reluctantly, they relaxed, and he tested the waters by rolling his hips, the movement pressing his hip bone so hard against my clit that I immediately fell off the cliff again.

I was losing my mind and loving every second of it.

Then, the cherry on top of the sundae…he bit down on my shoulder. Exquisite pain sliced through me, as he released the heat of his virility inside of me. His knees grew weak for a moment, long enough that we slid down against the tiles and ended up in a heap on the floor of the shower, the water rushing down over us with a gentle, but persistent pulse.

“Damn, baby,” he groaned when he could catch his breath, “you will be the death of me.”

I pushed a heavy, wet lock of hair out of his face. “That’s better.”

“What?”

“Baby. You can call me that instead of darling.”

He laughed, but it was belied by the sadness in his eyes. “Baby it is.”

***

We lay in bed, hours later, the super soft down comforter tucked around us. He had his hand on my hip, his cock nestled nicely in the crack of my ass, his abs against the small of my back, and his chin resting just above my head. We fit together almost perfectly, like two puzzle pieces that had finally found their mates.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Anything,” he said, his breath blowing the tangled mess of my hair.

“Why did they arrest you?”

He groaned, but he didn’t move away as I had feared he might. Instead, he slid his hand around my belly and pulled me closer against him.

“Do we have to talk about that?”

“No. But I don’t want to leave next week without knowing what’s going to happen to you.”

He bent low and kissed my shoulder. “Well, you shouldn’t worry too much. My lawyer thinks he can get the whole thing thrown out before it goes any further.”

“Good. But why did they arrest you in the first place?”

“It’s your fault, actually.”

“Mine?” I rolled over so that I could see his face. “How is it my fault?”

“You were out sick a couple of months ago, so Madison sat at your desk to answer the phones.”

“I remember that.” I touched the valley between my breasts. “I had a chest infection that I couldn’t shake. I was off for like a week or two.”

“Yeah, well, one of those days, Madison sat at your desk and found a sticky note that said, ‘Don’t trust Conrad.’ She remembered it after she was kidnapped and suggested to Rawn that it might be an indication that I was the inside man at Cepheus and someone had been trying to warn you to stay away from me.”

I reached up and ran a finger over the thin hairs that dotted his chest. “You couldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Yeah, well, Rawn apparently told McFarren about the sticky note and he told the police.”

“But it’s just a note. How do they know I didn’t write it? Or Russell didn’t do it as some sort of joke?”

“They don’t. But I do.”

“You do what?”

“I know who wrote it.”

Conrad rolled onto his back, pulling away from me. I sat up, allowing the comforter to fall around my hips, covering my back but leaving the rest of me uncovered. I ran my hand over his bare chest, his impressive abs, and waited for him to move his arm from over his face and explain what he meant.

He groaned, the kind of sound that a man who knows he’s been beaten makes. He slowly uncovered his face and looked up at me.

“You can’t tell a soul what I’m about to tell you.”

“Who would I tell?”

He cocked an eyebrow. “Russell? Rawn? Madison, or her little roommate, Annie?”

“I wouldn’t. Not if you didn’t want me to.”

He pushed himself up on his elbow and held out his other hand to me. “Pinky swear.”

I laughed. “I haven’t done a pinky swear since I was eight.”

“Pinky swear.”

I shook my head, but I hooked my pinky around his. “I swear.”

He lay back down with a sigh.

“So, who wrote it?”

“Aurora.”

As much as it should have been obvious to me—Einstein was the only person in the office who still used Post-It notes. She had several stacks of them in her pockets, in her laptop bag, and stuck inside her binder. She carried them everywhere and was constantly writing notes on them. It wasn’t.

“Why would she—”

“Because she was angry with me.”

Conrad sat up, picking up the comforter and rearranging it in his lap. He was delaying I could see by the way his jaw flexed with tension that he was formulating what he wanted to say next. And I knew it couldn’t be anything good. My heart felt like a heavy stone had just been strung around it, and I wanted to go back five minutes and un-ask my question. Maybe this was something I really didn’t want to know.

“You’ve heard of Alzheimer’s disease, right?”

I nodded. “They thought for a while that Memaw might have it.”

Conrad nodded. “It’s normally a disease of the elderly, only striking people over sixty-five. But there are documented cases of people showing symptoms as early as their forties.”

“Yeah.”

He tilted his head a little, his eyes seeming to focus on me, but not really. It was like he was miles away, or months away, remembering something that haunted him.

“Aurora’s maternal grandmother and aunt both suffered from the illness. There was a great deal of concern for her mother, and she was tested every year for a long time. And then they discovered that they could do a blood test and look for a specific gene that would suggest the possibility of her suffering from the disease, and hers came back negative. But when Aurora was tested…”

“It was positive.”

“It’s called familial early onset Alzheimer’s.”

“But Aurora can’t be older than thirty.”

“She’s thirty-two. But don’t tell her I told you that, either.” He smiled a crooked smile that might have been extremely charming under different circumstances. But then it disappeared. “It’s highly unusual for someone to show symptoms so young. So, when Aurora began forgetting things, when she became so ‘scatter-brained’—I think you called it—we all just assumed it was her dedication to her work and her penchant for forgetting to eat and sleep. But a few months ago, I got a phone call in the middle of the night. She was wandering around a park near her house in her nightgown, crying and demanding to know where Angel was.”

“Angel?”

“A cat she had when she was a teenager.”

“Wow,” I whispered, horrified at the idea of losing that much of myself just out of the blue. And Einstein…she was so brilliant. She had a mind that could have solved most of the world’s problems if she was inclined to do so. To have this happen…it was a tragedy.

“There are medications that can slow down the progression. Her parents took her to a clinic in Switzerland, and they did tests and tried a couple of new treatments that aren’t available here. It looked like it helped. The symptoms come and go. But it’s been rough, and when she struggles, she does things that aren’t safe.”

“Like?”

He shook his head. “She spends money on frivolous things. She forgets to lock her doors when she leaves home, and her house has been broken into a few times. She forgets she’s driving while she’s on the highway…things that could cause her, or someone else, to end up in the hospital. Or worse.” He stared down at the comforter, his normally tan skin a little pasty. “I talked to her parents about going to court to get power of attorney over her. That pissed her off.”

He looked at me, the hurt in his eyes almost more than I could take. I touched his hand, and he immediately folded his fingers around mine.

“She wrote a bunch of those notes…‘Don’t trust Conrad’…and left them all over her apartment. I gathered them up and threw them away because when she has lapses of memories—bad ones—she becomes paranoid, and I was afraid the notes would make it worse. And then I was at the Cepheus offices one morning, sitting at your desk while I waited for Aurora to get some notes on the 3D telescope launch, and I found another of those notes on her binder. I dropped it into your desk drawer because Madison just happened to walk up. I didn’t want her to see me throw it out and wonder why I was destroying Aurora’s notes.”

“You’re trying to protect her.”

“Yeah.”

I thought about my grandmother, of all the health ailments she’d begun experiencing over the past year or two. Her memory began failing her first. There was once a time when I would open the refrigerator and find a potted plant or the television remote in there. Or I would find the milk in the bathroom cabinet. And then she fell, broke her hip in three places and had to be in the hospital for over a month. The doctors noticed her memory lapses and tested her for everything from a brain tumor to Alzheimer’s to simple senility. They finally decided it was a side effect of a blockage in her carotid artery. But the blood thinners they gave her to clear it only caused her to bleed internally. They were afraid to try anything more aggressive. At her age, they said, it might be better to put up with the forgetfulness. Her age. She was only seventy-five. My great-grandfather lived to be a hundred and two.

I remember how angry I was that they wouldn’t even try. And then she had a heart attack.

That was when I decided it would be better to live with the forgetfulness than to live without Memaw at all.

I knew exactly where Conrad was coming from.

“Aurora was…is an important part of my life. She was my wife.”

“I know.”

“It’s not that I’m still in love with her. I just—”

“You don’t have to explain.”

He looked at me and ran his thumb along the curve of my chin. “I just want you to know that my relationship with Aurora will never again be what it was. I love her, but I’m not in love with her.”

“I know.”

He groaned. “Mellissa—”

“I know you’re not the kind of man who could lay with me the way you did tonight and still want someone else.”

“You know that?”

“I do.”

“And what about all that
we barely know each other
stuff?”

I shrugged. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there are some things that don’t take time to glean about a person. Maybe there are some things you can just know.”

He kissed me gently, his lips lingering against my bottom lip. “You are something else,” he whispered.

A thought popped into my mind as he leaned in for another, deeper kiss. I leaned back out of reach.

“What if it’s her?”

“What?”

“What if Aurora is the one.”

“The one, what?” he asked, pulling back, a puzzled frown making him more handsome than he was before—if that was possible.

I touched his chin because I just couldn’t help myself.

“What if Aurora is the inside man?”

He shook his head. “You’ve lost me, baby.”

“What if Aurora unwittingly gave information to these corporate spies? What if she was the one who told them to take me? What if she confused me with Madison, or someone else? She could have confused me for Alana, that girl who works in Todd Wilson’s office? She’s done that before, and Alana would have known about some of the things the kidnappers asked Madison about. And she would have recognized Madison, so she could have been the one who told them they had the wrong girl.”