Enticed (24 page)

By the time I stood next to Jonathan and Drew to receive our guests, I knew I glowed. I was completely sated in a way I had never been. And I knew that bastard Alex knew it the moment that he looked into my face. I felt myself blush as I glanced away. Drew didn’t help matters at all when he hooked his arm around me and pulled me close. “We’re so glad you could join us,” Drew said so sweetly I could hear the gloating undertone.

“Thank you both for inviting me to your home,” he replied knowingly. I grabbed a glass of champagne and said nothing at all.

A live band played throughout the night, where party revelers grew increasingly excited as the coming year dawned just within reach.
As we reached the countdown, Drew pulled Jonathan and me onto the makeshift stage to lead the crowd. The minute the clock struck midnight, I reached down to kiss Jonathan. The minute I stood, I was swept into Drew’s arms and his mouth landed on mine for a long, deep, possessive kiss in front of a crowd full of drunken, cheering people singing
Auld Lang Syne
.

I was so stunned I couldn’t move. The minute we broke apart I glanced down where Jonathan stared at us disbelievingly. He turned and ran from the room, which prompted me to hop as gracefully from the stage as I could to chase after him. I caug
ht up with him by the pool.

“Jonathan!” I cried, panicked to see him so near the pool that still traumatized me so.

“You lied!” he accused as he swung around to face me, tears pouring from his face. “Alex was right. You’re just here for my dad.”

“That’s not true,” I argued. “I am here for you, one hundred percent. You know that.”

“Then why were you kissing him?” he demanded.

“I’d like to hear the answer to that myself,” I heard Alex drawl from behind. Before I could dismiss him, Jonathan ran right into his arms.

“I’ll tell you why,” Drew answered as he stepped outside onto the terrace to join the fray. “Rachel and I are in love. We didn’t plan it, and in fact we fought it for a long time.” Drew walked over to where I stood. “But there’s no sense fighting it anymore, especially when everyone already accused her of such horrible things,” he added as he glared pointedly at Alex. “What did we have to lose?”

“I guess you have a point,” Alex sneered. “But you acted prematurely. Unless you plan to put a ring on Rachel’s finger, you just leveled the playing field with Elise by admitting you have a live-in lover.”

“She’s more than just a lover,” Drew informed him. “And hopefully by Valentine’s Day, she’ll do me the honor of becoming my bride.”

I gasped as I looked into Drew’s face. “Drew.”

“I’m not going to lose you, Rachel,” he said softly. “Ever.”

Jonathan cried out and tore from Alex to run back inside, no doubt to his mother. Before I could run after him, Drew pulled me back with one hand. “He’ll be fine. He just needs time.”

“He needs his mother,” Alex corrected.

“And now he has one,” Drew responded. “A real one. One who cares about him. One who is willing to d
o what is necessary for his wellbeing.” He turned back to me. “Make our family complete, Rachel. Marry me.”

He pulled a black box from his coat pocket. Every party he had offered a piece of jewelry… and now
, on party number three, it was a five-carat, asscher-cut halo diamond engagement ring.

“Or you could choose what is behind curtain number two,” Alex chided.
When my eyes met his, I could see the pain so thinly veiled by humor.

“She won’t,” Drew assured. “Rachel knows where she belongs.” He turned back to me. “Don’t you?”

I pulled away from Drew and walked away from Alex. “I have to go find Jonathan,” I said as I escaped back into the house. Only I was too late. Elise had taken Jonathan from the crowd and the questions and the chaos that Drew had caused. Senator De Havilland was quick to congratulate me with a warm handshake. “Drew told us the good news. What a wonderful surprise. You will make a fine wife, one fitting of a man who will hold public office himself one day.”

My head swirled with all this new information.
I had just made the scary decision to explore these crazy feelings a mere week before, and now I was suddenly engaged… to someone who might run for government office? In zero to sixty I went from Alice the maid to Jackie Kennedy. What the hell was happening? I mumbled some excuse and escaped upstairs into my room. Drew joined me not even ten minutes later. I was livid as he walked in without invitation. “How could you do that to me, Drew?” I demanded.

“I think we established months ago I don’t play fair. I go after what I want and I play to win.”

“Is that all I am to you? Some game?”

He walked over to where I stood next to the bed. The closer he got to me, the more my resolve slipped away. “You know better than that,” he said softly.
“If anything, you’re the one playing games. We sneak around like teenagers when we could just be honest with everyone.”

“So you take that choice away from me, just
because you don’t agree with it?”

“I am taking nothing away from you, Rachel. I’m trying to give you something. I’m trying to give you everything.”

“Yeah, I saw the ring,” I retorted as I turned away.

He pulled me back. “It’s just a ring, and a lovely one at that. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t act like I’m trying to give you
a poisoned apple.”

“We never talked about marriage,” I pointed out.

“What’s there to talk about? You live in my house, you’re raising my child. You cook for me, you even pick my clothes. You’ve given yourself to me, body and soul. Aside from the ring and a license, we’re already married in every way that counts.” He pulled me into his arms. “You need to stop looking for problems, Rachel. Allow yourself to be happy. Allow me to make you happy.”

“But Jonathan…,” I started and he silenced me with a kiss.

“Will get over it. Trust me. He loves you as much as I do. Once he sees that you will be with us forever, he’ll be overjoyed.”

“Forever,” I repeated. “That’s a pretty big promise, Drew. He already knows that doesn’t always work out. He’s scared that
my loving you will eventually drive me away like his mom.”

“Will it?” he asked.

I lost myself in those blue eyes I had come to love. “I’m still here,” I offered with a helpless shrug.

He lifted my left hand and slipped the
heavy, cool ring upon my third finger. “Then how scary can forever be?”

Before I could say anything, he
bent for a kiss that melted me down to my toes. I couldn’t resist him as he lifted me up and placed me on my bed, his lips on my skin and his hands on my body, to cement our engagement without another word.

Reporters bugged us for a week following the party, especially once Drew released a press release announcing our engagement, though I don’t remember officially saying ‘yes.’ Jonathan stayed with his mother, who once again petitioned the court for full custody. This time I got to tag along to the hearing, where the judge questioned me extensively regarding the intention behind this surprise engagement.

“Are you still being paid by Mr. Fullerton?” he wanted to know.

“He gave me my salary in advance,” I explained. “No additional compensation has been made.”

“Nor will it,” Drew supplied. “Rachel will have complete access to my income as my wife, and she will homeschool our son as part of her duty as his stepmother.”

“Were you moved in with the intention of being a bride or stepmother?” the judge persisted.

“No,” I eked out nervously. “I was Jonathan’s teacher until Christmas Eve, when Drew and I acted on our feelings for something more. But it was completely unexpected on both parts.”

Drew concurred. “I hired Rachel for her credentials, not her sex appeal. I think the court can see that I deliberately hired a woman who was not my type. I never wanted this complication, so I did everything I could to dissuade interest, up to and including hiring a woman who would never interest me sexually. My focus was my son.”

Though we had talked about our testimony prior to standing before the judge, his words still stung. He never made me feel anything other than sexy and beautiful as we pursued our intimate relationship, so I knew I couldn’t take his preconceived notions prior to hiring me personally. It still hurt to hear it, though.

“And after only six short months this woman who is so against your type is now your fiancée?”

Drew smiled. “If you could spend time with her, Your Honor, you would understand. She’s a woman unlike any other. It is because of Rachel that Jonathan has forged a stronger relationship with his own mother. Her love for my son is, in fact, what ultimately attracted me to her.” He took my hand in his as he looked down at me. “And her fire, and her passion, and her spirit. She opened up my eyes the same way she opened Jonathan’s.”

“Your ex-wife and your brother both contend that Miss Dennehy took this job with her own agenda.”

“And what is their agenda, I wonder?” Drew mused. “It’s no secret there’s no love lost between us; it was their affair that prompted our separation in the first place.”

Around and around it went. Ultimately the judge made no decisions that afternoon. He decided to keep Jonathan at Elise’s house until we reconvened two weeks later. In the meantime, Drew and I shared his bed in his room at the house, and my “duties” as teacher were effectively forgotten. When Senator De Havilland invited Drew to New York, Drew asked me to go with him. I agreed, though I was feeling a bit overrun by all the changes happening at a breakneck speed. Even my “wedding” had been fast-tracked.

Drew had been right. There was no turning back.
Once I became his, it was as if I ceased being me.

The De Havillands hosted an engagement party with all of the senator’s powerful friends, and we stayed on their property in the Hudson
River Valley of New York. I would have loved to explore it all, but Sloane De Havilland had other plans. She introduced me to many in New York high society, with a trip to Manhattan while the men jetted down to DC. I was under Sloane’s wing, and she was perfectly pleasant. It just wasn’t the way I wanted to spend my first visit in New York City, especially as Drew’s fiancée.

When we were alone, he was attentive and loving. He made my body sing with pleasure each and every night, though he often dismissed me during the day thanks to business and political obligations.
That part hadn’t changed. But it was like he was a different man when we were behind closed doors, as he silenced every concern and every protest with one more kiss or one more mind-shattering orgasm.

W
hat should have been one of the most magical and happiest times of my life kept me constantly confused. I didn’t know which way was up, and the media was absolutely no help at all. Everywhere I turned were articles about how I had landed the ultimate catch, like I was some commoner marrying royalty.

Everyone had the same question: why was the most eligible bachelor in the world marrying someone plain and common like me? I clearly wasn’t his type, and we had a full photo spread of all the actresses and so
cialites who littered his past to prove that. I was tall, full-figured, had dark hair and a smattering of unfortunate freckles across my pale skin. I dressed in discount clothing. I often went without makeup and in every way, both intentional and unintentional, was completely, indisputably ordinary.

Some suggested that I was already pregnant, but after that first spontaneous romp we had been very careful. “After we marry,” he warned with a playful grin, “we’ll let nature decide.”

Should I offer any protests, he silenced each one with a kiss. I felt railroaded and overrun on almost every issue by the time we pulled back into the drive leading up to our home.

Yet I still felt
like the outsider, though I couldn’t really figure out why. Drew had doted on me, spoiling me rotten with new clothes and new jewelry, even a brand new car. Meanwhile everything that had kept me grounded, namely Jonathan and my friends back home, had all but abandoned me. Jonathan still felt betrayed, and Nancy couldn’t understand how I went from the hired help to fiancée over a week.

I honestly didn’t have an answer for her. I was just as perplexed.

If Drew had his way, we would have married in New York. I held him off as best I could, telling him that I couldn’t marry him without talking to Jonathan. I needed him to approve or else I couldn’t do it. It prompted our first real fight and we slept apart for the first time since Christmas Eve.

By the time we went back to the court, I still hadn’t made our union
legal like Drew wanted. I knew from the way that Alex and Elise glared at me from their lawyer’s table that they didn’t particularly care about my intentions or Drew’s. They wanted to get Jonathan away from Drew and they were willing to do anything to make that happen.

I had no idea how far they were willing to go
until Alex took the stand.

“Elise and I believed from the start that Miss Dennehy was brought in to replace Jonathan’s natural mother,” he told the judge. “And now I can prove that was exactly what he did.”

I glanced over at Drew, who watched the proceedings with a clenched jaw. “What is he talking about?” I asked under my breath, but Drew gave a subtle shake of the head.

“After the New Year’s party that had upset Jonathan so badly, I accessed some of Drew’s personal computer files
through the office mainframe. Actually, I recovered them, because they had been deleted from the ghost file.”

He produced a folder. “Drew purposefully set out to find a teacher who would be particularly vulnerable to the lure of his money. We know that from several other
teachers who basically tried to extort the family, who didn’t care anything about Jonathan at all. When that approach didn’t work, Drew changed his criteria to a teacher who would be vulnerable to the appeal of family, particularly mothering a motherless child.”

I gulped as Alex went on. Every word hit me below the belt.

“Each pool of possible teachers across the nation was thoroughly vetted with extensive background checks. This included personal information, such as their family history. Teachers who had lost a child due to divorce, or preferably death, were moved to the top of the heap.”

I felt my heart immediately harden into stone.
If that were true, that would mean that Drew knew about Jason before I answered his first email. And if
that
were true, it meant his consolation when I confessed my great sin was hollow. He wanted, needed, me to have suffered this trauma, and hand-picked me because of it, so that he could fill that gaping hole with his own son, and further tear his family asunder.

I stared forward as I felt
each newly sewn seam on my rip open with every word of Alex’s testimony.

“That pool was
then thinned by which candidates did not have any current family ties, any of whom could be totally immersed into the Fullerton family as a replacement to what they lost. Candidates who lived farther away from California, who had to undergo a complete dependence on Drew for their survival, like a place to live or a staff to meet every need, were far more desirable than those who already had ties to Los Angeles. Miss Dennehy met each of these criteria, particularly as the mother of a deceased male child who was approximately the same age as Jonathan.”

I turned to Drew, who glared at his brother with palpable hatred. I knew instantly that Alex spoke the truth. And he wasn’t done.

“The final guideline that Drew issued to his vetting team was to find a woman who would more likely succumb to a whirlwind romance with a rich and powerful man. Drew wasn’t lying when he said he deliberately sought someone who wasn’t his ‘type.’” Alex paused slightly as he looked at me. “He specifically wanted someone traditionally unattractive because he thought she’d be easier to seduce, and ultimately control.”

I stared at the diamond ring on my finger, which now looked like a very sparkly ball and chain.

Alex turned to the judge with a photo in his hand. “This is my deceased wife, Nina. As you can see, the physical similarity to Miss Dennehy is striking, from her ample build to her freckles. Your Honor, I believe that he finally settled on Rachel to further antagonize me after my brief affair with Elise. Rachel Dennehy was hired to kill two birds with one stone.”

The judge looked over the folder, which clearly had the evidence to support Alex’s claims. He glanced back at both Drew and me where we sat, stone silent. I was relatively sure he could tell from my devastated face this information was all news to me. “In light of this new evidence, I remand Jonathan Fullerton into his mother’
s care full time while we investigate these claims.”

Drew hopped up. “
You can’t do that!”

“I can and I did, Mr. Fullerton.
You can play god on Wall Street, but you can’t play god in my courtroom. What you have done, if these documents are to be believed, is reprehensible. Not only did you keep a child from his mother, but you have involved this woman who has already suffered a great deal of trauma in her past. I can’t, in good conscience, allow you to keep sole custody of your son.”

Drew lunged across the desk toward the witness stand Alex was exiting. “You son of a bitch!” he cried out as he started swinging at his younger brother. A bailiff tackled Drew and pinned him to the ground so that Alex could pass. He stopped briefly in front of me. “I’m sorry, Rachel,” he said softly before he walked back to where Elise sat.

I said nothing as I rose from my chair and exited the courtroom. I stood in front of the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, fighting back tears as I tried to phone for a cab.

Drew ran out of the building to find me. “Rachel!” he cried out as he trotted over to where I stood.

“Is it true?” was all I could say.

His mouth set in a firm line. “Yes.”

“So it was all a lie?”

“At first,” he answered. “But I swear to God that it changed. Every day I spent with you, I couldn’t help fall in love with you.”

“How convenient,” I sneered.

He grabbed my arm as I turned away. “You can’t leave me, Rachel. Not now.”

“I never should have been here!” I screamed. “You knew about everything. About Zach. About Jason,” I added with a sob. I swung blindly on him with clenched fists, to punctuate every accusation. “You son of a bitch! You used me. You used my past. You used my pain, just to get what you wanted. How could you do that?”

He gulped back any retort as he withstood each and every punch.
Finally he said, “I told you I don’t fight fair. This was too important to take any chances. You want me to apologize for trying to keep my son safe?”

“No, you don’t owe me a goddamn thing,” I spat as I ripped the ring from my finger and threw it at him. “You’re a bastard, Drew Fullerton. And I never want to see you again.”

I stalked off and didn’t stop walking until I found a cab to take me to the airport. I didn’t care about my car or my clothes. Let California swallow it all up in a massive earthquake once I had gone. My dream job, dream lover and dream life had just revealed itself a true nightmare.

I just wanted to go home.