Taken by the Billionaire (11 page)

He backed away from me again, and I could not have been more thankful. My legs were shaking, and I couldn’t figure out why. I was terrified, repulsed, or maybe even turned on by Sergei’s confession, but I didn’t know which.

“That’s his
real
reason for hating me,” said Sergei, backing even further away from me. “For now, at least. Even if you reject me—even if I’m not your type at all—he’ll just make up another reason to despise me.”

With that, Sergei tipped an invisible hat to me, spun around, and disappeared into the milling crowd of villagers just as Anneke returned with the runaway vegetable. She stared up at him and then turned to me with one eyebrow raised.

“What did he want?”

“Oh, nothing really,” I signed back, and she shot me a withering glare.

“If you want me to trust you, be honest with me you stupid girl,” she signed furiously. “Don’t treat me like I’m some idiotic old hag. You are no better than my sons if you do.”

It took me a minute to recover from my shock before I could even piece together a response.

“I’m sorry.”

“Well? What did he say?” signed Anneke.

“He told me that Peter hates him because they both love me.”

Anneke sighed and shook her head, and then she looked up at me and rolled her eyes.

“Stupid boys. Stupid, stupid boys. No offense intended to you, Sarah, but they could do a lot better for themselves.”

“What the fuck?” I said out loud, feeling a wave of anger rising inside me. How dare she? Not that she could hear a word I said, of course... I glared at her to make my point and signed back to her furiously.

“Excuse me? How do you expect me not to take offense to being insulted?”

“Because I didn’t mean it to insult,” she replied. “I meant in terms of money. My sons have always wanted ‘more, more, more’ without caring about consequences. More money, more fame, bigger cars...”

She sighed as if deeply disappointed and shook her head before continuing.

“They are like that all their lives, and then suddenly Peter falls in love with one of his employees? I do not believe it for a moment.”

“Well, what do you believe then?” I signed to her, raising an eyebrow.

“You may be a very good girl—and I think you are—but knowing my boys like I do… you’re not what they
think
they need.”

“Between you and me,” added Anneke with a wink and a wry smile, “I can understand them wanting you, though.”

I responded to her compliment with an uncomfortable half-smile and I rubbed my elbow. It was starting to throb from the fall. Anneke turned to check on me, but I waved away her concern. I felt like enough of an idiot right now without getting babied in public by Peter’s 87-year-old mother.

“Let’s get a drink before we go home. You look like you need one,” she signed.

She pointed off to her left through the crowd at a sign hanging from an old, stone building, reading,“Caffe Bar Akademija.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. I was a bit uncomfortable about taking an octogenarian out for a bender.

“I’m eighty-seven. I deserve a drink for living so long,” she signed back to me with a grin, and she waved for me to follow her.

To my surprise, American pop music was playing inside as we cut through the mingling crowd and hunted for a place to sit at the bar.

“What would you like?” asked the young, well-groomed bartender in perfect English as I helped Anneke up onto her stool and then sat beside her. In the background, a male singer whined off-pitch about unrequited love as overdone guitar riffs twanged in the background, and I suddenly felt like I was back in New York.

Bartender’s kinda cute, too. Maybe I could get used to Korčula after all,
I thought with a grin, and I ordered a Cosmo.

“And for you, Miss Ibramovic?” asked the bartender politely, and he watched as she scribbled down her order, a Moscow Mule. I had no idea what it was, but I assumed it involved copious amounts of vodka.

I took a deep breath and let it out as I tried to relax, and Anneke raised her glass—a scary, greenish-white concoction with a lime slice and alcoholic vapors coming off of it that could kill an elephant from a hundred yards off—as a toast before taking her first drink. She sat back in her seat with a satisfied look on her wrinkled face.

“This seat free?” called out a slurred voice from behind me, and before I could even take my first sip, a man in a grey wife-beater sat down to my right. His face was flushed from alcohol, his eyes shining and watery, and he looked more suited for a late night at the Jersey shore than an early afternoon at the Akademija.

“Hey, sweetie,” he called out loudly and obnoxiously, his accent even more pronounced by his slurred, drunken speech, and he slapped me heartily on the butt and nearly spilled my drink. I sat my Cosmo down on the bar and turned to deal with him.

“One, I’m not your sweetie. Two, go away. Got it?” I snapped at him, giving him my iciest of glares. I wasn’t a fan of being hit on under the best of circumstances, and a drunk guy coming on to me while my elbow ached and my knee bled was certainly not my idea of a good time.

“Hey, you don’t worry. I am… I am not to bother you,” he slurred, completely skipping words in his drunken stupor. “I just thought… thought you were kinda hot, that’s all. You single?”

“Yes, and I’m staying that way,” I hissed, and the bartender’s ears perked up.

Forgot about Peter already, huh?
interjected my brain, but my tongue had already let loose the words. I’d wondered what Peter thought about our relationship, but I was surprised to suddenly realize that I didn’t know what I thought about it either.

“You sure you don’t want to come home with me? What if… what if I just picked you up and took you?” he said, standing up and wobbling drunkenly.

I shrunk away from him, and suddenly Anneke stepped in between the two of us. She flashed him a glare that would have killed kittens, and his eyes went wide. The old lady ran one finger across her throat and then pointed at him as he backed away.

“I’m sorry, Miss,” he stammered, looking in my direction. “I didn’t know you were with Anneke. I’m gone. Just finishing my drink and I’m out of here.”

“Hey, that was mine!” I shouted as he grabbed my Cosmo, downed the entire thing, and ran for the door. The bartender leapt to his feet as well, a look of shock on his face.

Just before he reached the door, the drunkard collapsed on the floor.

Serves him right, drinking that much,
I thought, and I watched with a feeling of schadenfreude as a curious crowd gathered around him.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up as he began to convulse. I looked over my shoulder to call for help just in time to see the bartender leap out the open window to my right and then bolt off down into the alley.

I turned back to the twitching drunkard and felt a cold sweat break out on my skin. He wasn’t passed out from booze… he’d been poisoned. The bartender had poisoned my drink!

I abandoned Anneke, pushed through the crowd blocking the door, and then sprinted down the alley after the bartender. He cut quickly through the crowd ahead of me, and everyone stopped as he ran, inadvertently blocking my pursuit through their curiosity.

Just figures,
I thought, panting heavily as I shoved through the crowd as quickly as I could.
You leave New York for even a second and everyone forgets how to walk.

I burst out of the crowd just in time to see the bartender leap into the passenger seat of a white, two-door vehicle. The tires squealed as it tore down the street, scattering villagers left and right as it sped off into the distance. Of course it had no plates, I thought. That’d be too easy.

I waited around on the side of the street just long enough to catch my breath and staunch the flow of blood from my knee, and then I limped back to the bar to find Anneke.

A
nneke relaxed in front of the television in her sitting room while I leaned my head against my hands at the table behind her and tried to think. It was somehow even more distracting to me to observe the old woman watching the news muted than with the volume on. The room was too quiet now, and if not for the ticking brass clock on the end-table, I might have believed that
I’d
gone deaf now too.

Who tried to poison me?
"

Someone was waiting in that white car for the bartender. That was a planned murder attempt, and I couldn’t help but believe that whoever it was would try again. My heart pounded and my head spun as I tried to sort my thoughts.

There had to be someone else involved—someone who planned the attack—but who was it? It wasn’t just the bartender.

Sergei was in town. He knew I was there.

If Sergei was telling the truth about being crazy about me, then for him to attack me made no sense. Why would he kill me if he was jealous of Peter? Unless he was lying the entire time, hated me, and wanted me dead, of course… I couldn’t rule out that possibility.

Wait… what if it was Peter? What if Peter knew that Sergei was out, and he planned my murder to frame Sergei?

I shook my head and rolled my eyes at myself. I knew I was getting into tinfoil hat territory with that one, but who else even knew I was in town today?

My head turned on a spindle and looked behind me at Anneke. She sat as still as a stone on the sofa and watched the silent newscast, paying no attention to me.

No way. There was just no way it was Anneke. She couldn’t possibly be behind it.

…could she?

Anneke led me to that bar.
She
picked it, not me, and she did seem awfully unconcerned about my near death…

Did she even understand what happened, though? She was an 87-year-old deaf woman, after all. I was giving myself a headache running through the tangled mess of possibilities, and it made me feel very uncomfortable knowing that, in the end, I was only alive by pure luck.

The black, antique-styled phone on the table rang suddenly and I nearly leapt out of my seat in surprise.

“Hello?” I asked shakily, picking up the receiver.

“Is anyone there with you?” growled Peter’s familiar voice, and my heart did a little somersault at the sound. I was ecstatic to hear his voice, and even his short, punctuated question made me feel a little safer.

“Just Anneke.”

“Okay. I want you to come upstairs, please.”

“Wait, didn’t you want me to stay with your mother in case—“

“I just sent Alex downstairs to stay with her. He can be trusted. She will be fine for a bit.”

“Okay, fine,” I answered, and I hung up the phone.

The old woman was still watching her silent newscast, and I sneaked quietly out of the room and locked the door behind me.

Alex nodded respectfully to me as I passed him on the grand staircase, and I smiled warmly back at him and handed him the key to Anneke’s sitting room. The thin, old servant seemed so wonderfully polite to me whenever I’d had the chance to interact with him, and I felt inclined to believe that he was genuinely like that and not just acting out the role for work.

I turned right at the top of the stairs and went to Peter’s room at the far end, and just as I reached out to knock, the door swung open.

Peter stood in the doorway, looking little better than I did at the moment. His dark brown hair looked like it had been neither combed nor washed that day, and dark bags under his eyes gave the impression that he hadn’t slept well last night at all. What on earth was
he
such a mess about?

Maybe that’s why he wasn’t there this morning,
I thought.
Maybe he couldn’t sleep.

He invited me in and then closed the door behind me as I passed. His bed was a mess, its blankets piled at the foot and the pillows on the floor, and it looked almost like someone had ransacked the room searching for something.

“Sarah, what happened?” he asked, looking flustered as he sat down in the leather chair by his desk. “In town. What happened today?”

“I took Anneke to the store. She wanted to get out and do grocery shopping,” I answered, sitting across from him. His briefcase was open on his desk, and my eyes instantly locked onto the gleaming black handle of the revolver sticking out of a pocket in the upright lid next to some papers.

“Go on,” he urged, taking no notice of my fixation on his handgun.

“Sergei was there, talked to me a bit, told me… well… told me a lot of things,” I stammered. I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell him about Sergei’s confession of feelings for me. I had no idea how he would take it.

“What did he say?” asked Peter in a low growl. His fists were clenched so tightly that his knuckles were white.

“He called you a miserable old millionaire and told me to watch what I was doing, or I’d get hurt.”

Peter got up from his chair and faced away from me, staring out the window at the cloudy sky.

“That fucker,” he hissed, clenching and unclenching his fists. “That stupid
fucking prick
!”

Peter practically spat the words in his rage, and I could see the back of his neck turning red as blood rushed to his head in anger. He was
terrifying
when he was angry, and I stared at his back in silence for a long time before I finally gathered the courage I needed for the question lingering on my tongue.

“Peter… is it true that you hate him because he’s attracted to me?” I asked quietly, almost dreading his answer. “That’s one of the things he said today.”

Peter took a deep breath and then released it in a long, drawn-out sigh. He turned back to me, shook his head, and sat down in his chair again.

“I hate him for so many reasons, Sarah,” he said. “I hate him because he has been a smug asshole his entirely life, because he’s tried his hardest—again, for his
entire life
—to steal from me, to malign my name to our mother, and to make it look like I’m the bad brother.”

He shook his head and took another deep breath. His face was turning red, and I could tell that he was trying to control his temper.

“I’m the one who worked hard, who tried to build something for himself and not just live off Mother’s stipend.
I’m
the one who tried to make a life for himself apart from Mother’s business, to not rest on her laurels and have an easy life of it, not him! He lived easy off of her fortune, spent his life trying to steal both my fortune and to ruin my name with her…”