The Billionaire's Mistress Complete Series: Alpha Billionaire Romance (34 page)

I’d been wearing jeans and a faded hoodie from my public high school on the other side of Philadelphia.

My mind slid back there, playing that scene out again.

Diamond took one look at me and sniffed, then glared at Kendrick. “It’s bad enough she feels she has the right to walk around this house like she belongs here, but must she dress like such a waif?”

“I’m sorry if I don’t meet your standards,” I said, interrupting before my father could say anything. “What should I wear? A maid's uniform, maybe?” Shifting my attention to my father, I swallowed hard around the knot in my throat. “If I’d known you were going to his funeral, I would have met you there. After all, I helped you figure out some of the approach, didn’t I?”

Kendrick looked at Diamond, then his other daughters. He spoke to them, but while the girls left, Diamond didn’t. Finally, he looked at me. “Allie, this isn’t the time.”

“He committed suicide.” I pressed the subject. “You told him you’d keep his company together. You lied, and he killed himself. Was
that
part of the game?”

He flinched. I saw it. So he did feel some guilt at least.

“Young lady, you will
not
speak to him–”

Kendrick touched Diamond’s arm, and she fell silent. “Allie, this is an ugly world.”

“His world was just fine until you tore it apart!” My voice cracked. “Did you have to use
me
to do it?”

He’d been teaching me about the stock market for years, and for the past few months, he’d actually been asking my
advice
, praising me when I got things right.
You’re a natural
, he’d told me.

“You made
me
part of this.”

He scowled. “You’re blowing this out of proportion, Allie. You’re not seeing things in the right light.”

“He’s dead.
He
blew his damn head off. I don’t think you’re seeing it in
any
light.”

I wasn’t supposed to leave until eight, but I couldn’t stay there anymore.

He reached out to touch my arm, and I took a step away. “Don’t touch me. You make me sick. All of you.” I looked at him and then at Diamond. “Did you all stand around chatting at his visitation, sipping wine, and talking about how sad it was…then making a date with friends to get together and have coffee? It’s your fucking fault!”

Diamond slapped me.

She would have done it again, but Kendrick caught her wrist. “That’s enough!”

“She will not speak about
us
like that. She has no right. She's not a part of this family.”

“You’re right.” Shaking my head, so furious inside, I thought I might puke. I touched my heated cheek and then looked at my father. “I'm not. And I'm fucking glad that I'm not. You’re all just a bunch of shallow hypocrites.”

I turned and walked out the door. He called my name, but I ignored him.

* * *

W
hen you play the game
, you play to win.

Jal lay on his belly, face in the pillow, all but dead to the world. His corn-silk blond hair was mussed, the muscles in his face relaxed. I let my gaze run over the smooth skin and muscles of his back even as my mind ran over what the dream-memory had brought up.

What happened to Bill Rush had gotten to my father more than he’d shown that day. There’d been an announcement in the business section a month after I walked out. Kendrick Hedges had decided on a partial retirement.

Three months after that, the “restructuring”
of Rushing, LTD was formalized, and to my surprise, it was actually closer to what I'd heard my father promise Bill Rush. I only knew about that because the news clipping was sent to me along with a letter from my father containing a few specifics not mentioned in the article, and a check for a thousand dollars.

He’d written a lot that first year. Sometimes I wrote back just to acknowledge that I'd received his letters. But I never forgot what he'd said on the day of that meeting.

When you play the game, you play to win.

I walked over to the closet and pulled out one of Jal's shirts. I smiled as the soft cotton slid over my skin, and I took a deep breath, giving myself a moment to appreciate the scent of him.

Out in the living room, I sought out the answering machine and played his message.

In this game, I don't care what I have to do to get the win. I will always come out on top. When I play the game, I play to win.

Apparently, my father hadn't actually learned his lesson with Bill Rush, because he still treated all of this – treated people's lives – like they were part of a game.

I’d probably played it five times over by the time Jal made his way down and found me. Clad in a pair of jeans and nothing else, he looked good enough to distract me for a moment. He wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me back against him.

“You can’t let this eat you up. It’s not your fault,” he said softly.

“No, it’s not.” Resting my head against his shoulder, I closed my eyes and let myself have a minute to bask in the heat of his body, the strength of his arms. Then, I turned so I could look him in the face. “But I'm sure as hell not going to let you suffer for the shit my father and his family have pulled.”

A
llie was hunched
over my computer, a determined look on her face as she worked.

And I was seriously considering hiring her. But not because I had some sort of fantasy about bending her over my desk at work...well, not only because of that.

She was fucking brilliant.

“I told you, I don’t keep anything on my laptop that could compromise any of my accounts. Too much of a security risk.”

Not that it'd stopped her from trying. All morning. Not just searching my accounts. She'd been searching the stock market, looking for something, anything, that could give her a hint about what her father was doing.

Hours of almost non-stop work, and now, she was getting a headache, I could see it.

“I know.” She groaned and rubbed at the back of her neck. Shaking her head, she leaned back and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes for a minute. “I need to access the system from the firm. That's the only way I'll be able to find what I need.”

“We can go in tomorrow.”

“Today,” she insisted.

“Tomorrow,” I said firmly. “I’ll have one of my top accountants meet you, and you all can start looking for…” I shook my head. “Whatever it is you want to find. Maybe you should give up on styling hair and try your hand at forensic accounting.”

She gave me a half-hearted smile. “Yeah, right.”

One of these days, she'd accept the fact of how amazing she was.

I leaned over her and reached for they keyboard to close things down. She caught my wrist before I could, her eyes narrowing. “Hey, I’m working.”

“No. You’re done. I know you’re trying to help.”

She tugged on my wrist again, and I missed the icon I needed, hitting a folder on the desktop instead.

Bending over her, I kissed her. She bit my lower lip, and my blood raced south. Under my hand, I felt keys clacking, and I shifted my hand away from the keyboard, bracing it. “You’re done working for now.”

“Maybe…” She smiled against my lips. “Maybe you could distract me, and I’ll forget about it.”

That sounded good to me.

But as I straightened up, her gaze slid past me and fixed on the screen. For a second, her gaze came back to mine.

Then it went back to the screen, and she kept staring.

“Who…” She licked her lips. I might have bent down and followed the same path with my own tongue, but the expression in her eyes had me pausing. “Jal, that picture. Who is that?”

* * *

I
was wrong
.

We ended up going into the firm after all.

Now, as I stood in the office belonging to one of my execs, I couldn't help but marvel at how much my life had changed in just a few short weeks. I'd gone from being excited about fatherhood while loathing the idea of marriage, to knowing that I did eventually want children, but only with the woman poking around on the computer in hopes of breaking the password.

“I’m not a hacker,” Allie finally said, throwing up her hands. “I can’t figure out what to do. I barely knew the guy, other than to say he was tight with Kendrick. Had this stupid poodle. Loved that weird thing. Mistress FiFi.”

She looked at me, her eyes widening before she bent back over the computer. A few seconds later, she whooped.

“Don’t tell me it was Mistress FiFi.” I shook my head. “No dumbass would use that.”

“It’s Mistress FiFi…backward.” She grinned.

“Shit.” It occurred to me that maybe I should come down on the guy for being a dumbass, but either we were intruding on his privacy for no reason, or it was a good thing he
was
a dumbass. Still, I made a mental note to send out a company-wide email reminding people about the guidelines for passwords.

“Why exactly are you so sure he’s somehow involved in this?” I asked as I moved to stand behind her.

“I've just got a feeling.” Her mouth twisted in a sour frown as she navigated the mouse around, clicking on the email. She read a few, shaking her head, then continued, “He used to work with my…with Kendrick. He was let go. I only know about it because Diamond raised hell about him coming over to the house once. There was something shady about the circumstances under which he left the firm, but Kendrick said he had his uses.”

“That doesn’t make sense.” Arms crossed over my chest, I looked around the room. “My background checks are thorough. If there were something that would have caused him to be terminated, it would have shown on a background check.”

“Only if he was caught.” She glanced up at me. “And this was like fifteen years ago. I just never forgot the man’s face. He looks like a rat.”

He did.

The office belonged to a Gary Hammerstein, and Hammerstein most definitely looked like a rat, a narrow, sharp face, hair thinning on top and a grayish pink complexion. His eyes were small and beady. I remembered that the few times I’d met him, he’d always had a nervous, jittery sort of air, but I’d been told he was good at what he did. A lot of people who made their living behind computers weren't that socially adept.

My eyes landed on the one personal touch in the office. “Son of a bitch.” Scowling, I grabbed the picture and showed it to Allie. “Do you know this guy too?”

Allie glanced at it and shook her head. “No. Should I?”

“He left the company where your dad works a few years ago. I hired him away, actually. Kendrick took it with pretty good humor, but now…” I fought the urge to throw the picture against the wall. “He’s the one who recommended Hammerstein.”

Allie lapsed into silence when I started to pace, and the only noise was that of her fingers on the keyboard for several minutes.

“He keeps his passwords saved on the computer so I can get into everything, but I’m not finding anything,” Allie said finally. “But…”

I turned and looked at her.

She leaned back, her lips pursed as she stared at the computer. “He deletes his internet history. Completely. For somebody who's lazy enough to use his dog’s name for a password, and doesn’t log out of his work email, that seems a little…odd.”

Odd. Yeah. I'd say suspicious.

“I’m calling my tech man in.”

Letting her head drop back to rest on the padded, pillowed chair, she studied me. “Is that legal?”

“He signed a contract when he came to work here. As the CEO, if I have any reason to suspect suspicious or possibly illegal activity, I can search the offices, computers, rip up the damn carpet if I want. And he knows it.” Phone already in hand, I stared at the computer as though that alone would force it to divulge its secrets. “And the bastard knows it. That’s why he’s wiping the Internet history.”