BILLIONAIRE (Part 7) Read online

  Touching his fingers to my skin. Stripping the clothes from my body. Slowly, carefully, deliberately.

  On some deep, irretrievable level I knew this was not right. Jake shouldn’t be undressing me, and seeing me like this, undressed and passed out. With his hands on my body as he peeled off my skimpy outfit.

  I started to protest but his hands were so warm. I sighed and shivered. I was so cold my nipples were almost painfully beaded. When Jake’s hand skimmed my breasts, I gasped at the ice-scalding sensation, moaning softly as I began to wake up. My eyelids were still too heavy to open, but I could hear him clearly now.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, Lila. I just want to get you warm.” He was untying the tie that wrapped my dress, easing the prickly fabric away from my icy, sensitive skin. I could hear his breathing coming in soft bursts, and I could feel the warm puffs of air on my breasts as he revealed them. I tried to say something, to tell him to cover me, but my request came out as a gentle moan. He was removing the dress from my shoulders, unwrapping it from my hips, adjusting my body to pull the garment free.

  Until I was completely naked.

  I felt him touch me again, with a soft cloth. A towel, rubbing gently across the strands of my hair and my face. Tentatively down my neck, across my bare breasts. “I’m going to dry you off a little, okay? You’re soaked to the skin. He continued to speak but seemed to be talking as much to himself as to me. “I’m not looking. Keep your cool, man. Holy fucking hell. You are one incredibly beautiful girl, Lila. A knockout. Alexander’s scored the fucking jackpot.” The towel rubbed across my stomach. Lower. Along my hips and my thighs. He was gentle, so gentle.

  For a fleeting, dazed moment I thought maybe I’d been mistaken. Maybe it was Alexander. Maybe I’d been dreaming all along. Maybe I was still in his bed, wet from my shower. Maybe it was him who was touching me.

  I moaned again, shifting slightly, becoming restless. My eyelids were still too heavy. No, I wanted to say. It wasn’t him. I could tell. By his voice and his indecision. “Jesus H. Christ,” Jake was muttering. “If you belonged to anyone but him … damn, Jake, hold it together, boy-o. Keep your hands off. Concentrate. You need to wrap her up and keep her warm, and that’s all you need to do. Keep calm. Holy hell, keep yourself calm, man. Hold it the fuck together.”

  Jake was wrapping me in something soft and thickly cozy. I felt the light cinch of a belt around my waist, of the robe being secured. And a thick quilted comforter was draped over me and tucked in.

  “There you go,” he was saying, and he sounded relieved. “You’re all right now. You’re safe.” Safe from them and safe from me, he seemed to be suggesting. “Can you open your eyes, Lila? Can you hear me?”

  I could hear him. With effort, I began to open my eyes. At first the murky shapes seemed covered in a veil-like gauze. The room was dark, but the city light from the large windows cast a subtle glow on the interior of Jake’s apartment. I was laid out on the couch and Jake was seated on a chair he’d pulled up alongside me. I concentrated and as he came into focus, his shadowed face was concerned.

  “Hi,” I managed to whisper.

  “Hi.” He looked at me for a long moment. Then he smiled and shook his head with mild exasperation. “Shit, you gave me a scare, passing out like that. You all right?”

  “I think so,” I said, my throat parched and my voice rasped.

  “Should I call a doctor?”

  “No,” I said, attempting to sit up a little, but the room spun violently and I lay back down. “Jake?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I have a glass of water?”

  “Of course you can.” He jumped up, seemingly glad to have a concrete task to attend to. After a minute, he returned and helped me sit up enough to sip at the cool water. It tasted indescribably good and I drank all of it.

  “That’s it,” he said. “You’re okay now. You’re just fine.” I looked at his face, so like his brother’s yet also so unlike him. I pictured Jake as a child, being comforted with those very words by Alexander, once upon a time. And I missed Alexander’s stoic, unique draw that seemed to fit so well with my own layered desires. So much. God, how I wanted Alexander.

  “I carried you up here,” Jake said, and his tone was barely contrite, like he had something to feel guilty about. “You were so cold. I put something warmer on you, so you wouldn’t catch pneumonia or something.”

  “Thank you, Jake. It’s all right. I’m feeling warmer already.” It was true. The burning coldness was beginning to tingle as my fingers and toes began to thaw out. “Did you call him?” I asked softly.

  “Not yet. But I’m going to. We have to let him know where you are. He’ll be so wild with worry he might hurt himself, Lila. Not intentionally but he goes into a rage when … well, when someone he loves is threatened or lost. There’s no telling what he might do or how he might react.”

  I thought about this, closing my eyes again. I didn’t feel up to having it out with Alexander tonight, but all the anger had seeped out of me somewhere along the way of my train-wreck of a night. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for a life of independent fortitude. Sure, I could crash at Jake’s tonight, insist that Alexander be kept in the dark, and resume my quest to climb out of my hole of debt, homelessness, joblessness and loneliness by relying only on my wits and hard work and survive-at-all-costs outlook.

  What I felt like doing was sleeping.

  In his arms.

  In his bed. Under his protection and with his big, powerful, passionate body wrapped around mine. He was warm, warmer than anyone I’d ever met. And he was beautiful. So beautiful. I craved his touch and his shielding presence. My mouth felt strangely thirsty for him, like I missed his taste.

  I wanted Alexander like I wanted air and sunlight. Safety and life. I wanted to immerse myself in the haven of all that he was.

  I felt a small feathering touch on my hair and opened my eyes. Jake had absent-mindedly begun to finger a strand of my hair, twirling it gently as though fascinated. This might be another reason to call Alexander. Jake had acted honorably in the face of my full-blown distress. Unfailingly so. I also knew that he had had a lot to drink tonight, before he’d run into me. Alexander had said it and I had seen it myself: Jake was a reckless soul; he wasn’t good at toeing the line. And the way he was looking at me now, behind the mask of his self-control and his loyalty, there was more to the story. He might be acting honorably, but the thoughts flashing behind his eyes were anything but. It wouldn’t pay to test him.

  “Please,” I said. “Yes. I want you to call him. Tell him I’m here. I want to see him.”

  Jake’s touch went still. My hair fell through his fingers as he pulled his hand away, collecting himself, as though realizing his mistake. “You sure?”

  “I’m sure. I want to make sure he’s okay.”

  With that, Jake pulled his phone out of his pocket and called his brother. It took only seconds for Alexander to answer. “Hey,” Jake said into the phone. “I found Lila. She’s here. At my place.”

  Alexander

  Lila was at Jake’s?

  How? Why? There were too many fucked up questions to ask on that discovery to even know where to start.

  The only thing I was certain about was the fact that I was going to beat my brother to a goddamn fucking pulp if there was even the slightest possibility that he’d … no, it was too bizarre and downright excruciating to even fucking contemplate.

  Lila was safe, that was the main thing. She was at Jake’s and she was safe.

  What I needed was to get there. Now. The limo wasn’t far from where Jake’s apartment was located. But traffic was heavy and we were headed in the wrong direction. We were stopped at a red light.

  I jumped out of the limo and started running down Fifth Avenue like a goddamn fucking lunatic. I hate it when people run through the streets of New York City. They always look like lunatics, and they usually are. Today, I couldn’t give a flying goddamn fuck what I looked like. I just needed to see h
er. To make sure she was okay. To try to get to her before my brother’s shaky-at-best scruples broke down, if it wasn’t already too late.

  Negotiating the crowds at high speeds as best I could without fatally injuring anyone (that I know of), I ran the three blocks in goddamn world record time, possibly. I got screamed at, grabbed and even punched at one point but I hardly felt it. People didn’t like being shoved aside as a madman made his way to his star-crossed and possibly compromised lover, apparently. The throngs were waving their fists and yelling abuse at me as I turned the corner onto Jake’s street.

  The doorman of his building opened the door for me and it was a good thing he did; there was no telling what I was capable of in my current state of mind. He even said something to me, like he’d been expecting me. Go right on up, Mr. Wolfe. Your brother’s expecting you. You’re goddamn right he’s expecting me. He’s expecting my fucking fist to connect with his fucking face, is a thought that ran through my mind, but I didn’t bother voicing it. I was already in the open elevator, punching the button for the fourth floor and the apartment that I’d helped fund. A fact that had never bothered me. Until now. Until right fucking now, as I was about to find the only two people I cared about on the entire face of fucking Earth, together. I could only hope that those two people weren’t going to reduce me to a shredded goddamn mess of torment when they made some twisted announcement, or admitted some indiscretion that would rip my heart right out of my goddamn chest.

  I could handle it, maybe. I deserved it, whatever I found in Jake’s apartment.

  All I wanted was to see her.

  I pounded on Jake’s door and he opened it abruptly, causing me to almost fall into the room.

  I stood there, breathing heavily from my run, getting my bearings.

  It was dark. None of the lamps were on and the only light was cast by the glow of the city outside the expansive windows.

  She was lying on the couch, covered by a pillowy duvet. The blond silk of her hair shone white-gold in the darkness. Her eyes were open, and the green hue of them caught the light. “Alexander,” she said softly.

  I kneeled down next to her and took her cool hand. The relief I felt at that moment was indescribable. The fizzing adrenaline pumping through my system seemed to transform into pure, amped-up devotion. Fuck, how I loved her. Every cell in my body was tuned into this perfect vision I thought I might have lost forever: Lila. Her golden hair, falling in mussed-up, Aphrodite-like waves. Her soft mouth, saying my name, the sound shooting an arrow of thrilling delight into my soul like I was some twee, lovestruck romantic. Which I didn’t even mind being, not for her. Anything for her. My senses drank in every detail of her face as she watched my reaction to her. Her pink mouth. The young, flawless curve of her cheekbone. The light dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her eyebrows, like feathery, expressive blond stripes. And her eyes, teary and bright.

  “You’re here,” she whispered. She sounded so tired.

  “I’m here.”

  She reached out to touch my hair, smoothing a strand of it out of my eyes. “You’re hot,” she smiled weakly.

  “I ran to you. As soon as Jake called.”

  As I said his name, I looked up to see him standing there, next to the couch. My rage had cooled, now that I’d seen her, like she fed some sort of calming potion into me, just with her presence. “I found her at Joe’s. Just sitting there, alone, soaked from the rain.”

  I knew my brother very well. And I could detect a note of accusation in his statement: it was my fault she’d been found that way. He’d taken an interest in Lila’s well-being and protection, clearly, and I didn’t know how far that interest extended as yet, or what it meant. Either way, he was right. It was my fault she’d run. It was my fault she got caught in the rain, alone and scared.

  “You just … ran into her?” I couldn’t help asking the question. I would tread carefully but the uncertainty was burning me.

  “Pure coincidence,” Jake clarified, and I stopped myself from breathing an audible sigh of unadulterated relief. There’d been no prearranged meeting, no clandestine rendezvous that might have signalled a heart-breaking development. I could only hope. I channeled every ounce of self-control. Remain calm, I commanded myself. Everything will be fine if you keep your cool. For her. For Lila.

  “Jake was so kind,” Lila said, and the pronouncement did nothing to soothe my precarious composure. And you weren’t. She didn’t say it; I don’t even know if she was thinking it. But I was. And there was something I desperately wanted to say. It occurred to me then that I had never said those two words to anyone, possibly ever. Until now.

  “Lila,” I began. “I’m sorry.”

  Lila’s tears welled up and spilled, painting shiny lines down her face. She tried to sit up and I helped her. She seemed weak and unsteady. And I could see then that she wore a plush blue bathrobe.

  Jake’s robe.

  A shot of ice jolted through my veins but I didn’t immediately react. He would have given it to her, to change into. Her clothes had been wet from the rain. And I could see it there, the bunched-up, still-soaked scrap of the dress she’d been wearing, lying across the arm of a nearby chair.

  My focus shifted to Lila as she began to speak quietly. She sounded sad, and that defeat in her voice cut me up. I wanted to stomp on her defeat. I wanted to rip out her sadness, and make it all up to her a thousandfold. I would fix everything that had ever hurt her. I’d right my wrongs and everyone else’s. I would to give her everything I had, to charm her and win her and enchant her so I could see her smile again. Her smile was the only goddamn thing I cared about.

  “It was him,” she began slowly. She didn’t seem to mind that Jake was listening, too. Some kind of trust had built up between them that I no longer minded. There were things they had in common – devastating things. Maybe she could take comfort in knowing the few details she knew about Jake’s past. A shared burden is sometimes easier to carry. “It was the man I told you about. My mother’s boyfriend.” She paused, and I held her hand gently, wiping her tears with my fingers. And I waited. She would speak when she was ready.

  After a few minutes, she continued. “He used to lock me up. So he could … so whatever he wanted. To use as he wanted, when he wanted. So I couldn’t escape. Every night, after my mother passed out on the couch, he would come to me. That sound, of the key … the lock … it reminds me of all those nightmares.” Her tears were streaming freely now as she spoke again, those big pooling green eyes looking at me. “I just had to get out.”

  “You locked her up.” It was a statement not a question, as though all had suddenly become clear. Jake’s disgust was palpable, but he knew my history, as well as his own. He knew my hang-ups were a side-effect of his abuse and his protection.

  “You didn’t know,” Lila said to me, defending me, of all things. “You couldn’t have known that. I hadn’t told you that part.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I shouldn’t have done it. I just wanted to … keep you safe.” It was fucked up. It sounded fucked up, even the way I said it, the similarities between my behavior and some monster who’d wanted to possess her for his own pleasure and his own power. To keep her for his very own. Exactly as I had. I’d become one of the very monsters I’d been so determined to protect her from.

  “It’s not the same, Alexander,” Lila said, as though reading my thoughts. “Not at all. Not even close. But it scared me. I can’t handle it. I just couldn’t see straight, or think, or do anything. I just had to get out of there.”

  I wanted to apologize again, but the words seemed too small, too inadequate to express how much I loved her.

  “Jake found me.”

  “She was a little out of it,” Jake said. “She fainted, and I brought her back here.” I didn’t have to ask why he didn’t call me as soon as he’d found her. I remembered what Claude had said. She begged me not to. I could hardly blame her. Even so, as I held her hand and contemplated the glory t
hat was her face, I knew I wouldn’t give up trying to win her back, to convince her to forgive me if it took me the rest of my life. “She was out cold and freezing, so I got her out of her wet clothes and put the robe on her. And convinced her that we needed to let you know where she was.”

  I’ll admit it, and it’s fairly obvious by the chain of events that brings us to this point that I can be an overbearing, volatile, hot-headed asshole from time to time. This turned out to be one of those times. Jake had found Lila, given her shelter and talked her into allowing me back into her life. All those things registered as the acts of a loyal, conscientious brother, which I’d later thank him for. But the only detail I could concentrate on, however, at that moment in time was one: I got her out of her wet clothes and put the robe on her.

  He’d stripped her, as she lay unconscious. He’d seen her naked, and I had no doubt he’d enjoyed every minute of his oh-so-righteous act. My nerves were shot twelve times over by this stage, and as much as I might have tried to cling to the last vestiges of my self-control, it was a lost cause. Very carefully, I eased my clasp from Lila’s hand. I stood up. And I lunged at my brother.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d taken my frustrations out on my brother and probably wouldn’t be the last. He used me as his therapeutic punching bag on a regular basis, too, and had since he’d grown to almost my height. I still outweighed him, though. This time, he’d been expecting retribution, I could tell. He knew he was guilty. He knew he’d enjoyed salivating all over my naked girlfriend, whatever the circumstances might have been. He fell as I landed on top of him and I got a good left hook in before he punched me in the stomach. We rolled and growled and punched and knocked over a table. I got in a few more solid hits but Jake’s a scrappy fighter and we’re evenly matched. And he was as amped-up tonight as I was. We might have killed each other if it wasn’t for Lila. As soon as I felt her hand touching my shoulder, I froze, breathing hard. Jake did, too. She was too close to risk any more violence. She couldn’t be harmed.