The Billionaire's Ruthless Revenge (4 page)

“That is an incredibly baseless accusation,” he murmured, his appearance of calm nonchalance at odds with the tornado of feeling that was humming around them.

“Is it? You married me, someone who basically acted like your groupie. God, I loved you so much. I was a pathetic, needy, stupid idiot to think you’d love me back.”

“I loved you,” he responded sharply, not knowing why but instinctively understanding it was vitally important that she didn’t doubt that.

“You loved how I made you feel,” she corrected vehemently. “You loved the way I loved you. Anyway,” she shook her head. “I came here to talk about Adam. If you’re not going to be reasonable then I might as well just go.”

“Reasonable?” He refuted loudly. “You’re asking me to cover a felony. You’re asking me to dig your brother out of a hole – of his own making – yet again. You’re not just asking me to let him have an extra week’s annual leave, or to get him a better company car. Jesus, Annabelle, do you have even the slightest idea how the real world works?”

She flinched and spun away from him. Her handbag was on a chair across the room. She walked to it quickly and slipped it under her arm. “No.” She didn’t meet his eyes. “That was always our problem, wasn’t it?”

Her cryptic remark only served to fuel his frustrations. “If you walk out of here now the next call I make will be to the police.”

She gasped. “You’re a bastard.”

“Yeah. Guilty as charged.” His smile was arrogant.

“What do you want from me?”

“It’s what you want from me,” he replied, stalking to her like an animal of prey hunting its dinner. “And what you have to trade in return.”

“Trade?”

He reached out and took her handbag from her, placing it deliberately on the chair. “Trade,” he confirmed with a lazy nod.

“I don’t have anything. Except gratitude, and you know you’d have that.”

“I want your gratitude as much as I want your apologies.”

“What then?” She fidgeted with her fingers and his eyes slowly watched the nervous gesture. Her fingers were bare. No jewellery. Not the big clunky costume jewellery she’d always adored. And not the twelve carat diamond he’d proposed to her with either.

A blade of cold finality sliced through him. “I want you.”

She frowned. “You want me to what?”

He shook his head, his lips lifting in apparent amusement at her misunderstanding. “I want you to move back in.”

The silence was suffocating. Only Annie’s rushed breaths punctuated it. “You must be kidding?”

“Must I be?” He shrugged with sardonic boredom. “Why?”

“Because we’re getting divorced.”

“No, we’re not,” he clarified. “I have no intention of signing those papers, Annabelle. You are my wife.”

A shiver ran down her spine. “You say that in the same way you might say I’m your prisoner.”

He shrugged. “If that’s how you’d prefer to think of yourself.”

Her jaw slackened. “How dare you?”

He laughed. “There was a time when marriage to me was the pinnacle of your desires in life.”

She rolled her eyes but her words were halting. “That was a lifetime ago.”

“Two years,” he corrected, putting his hands on her hips and drawing her closer to his body. She suppressed the moan at the intimate closeness. How could her body still cleave to his as though it was her home?

“I can’t do it,” she said shakily. “It took every bit of my strength to leave you. I can’t come back.” She lifted her hands to his chest, meaning to push him away, but her fingers splayed against the wall of muscles. “If you cared for me at all you wouldn’t ask it of me.”

He studied her for so long that she wondered if he was actually listening to her. She didn’t speak, wary of saying anything that might undo whatever argument she’d launched that had caused him to understand her position.

“I will think about helping Angus because he is my brother-in-law. As you say, family is everything.” He dropped his head so that his breath fanned her temple. “But he is only my family if you are my wife.”

“I don’t understand why you’d want this?” She pleaded after almost a full minute had passed.

“Because, Annabelle, we made a commitment and I don’t intend to shirk that.”

“I can’t do it,” she said weakly. The six months she’d spent away from him hounded her. She groaned. Memories of the grief she’d endured on her own, the loneliness and desperation, the worry and agony, it was all there. It was a wound that he was provoking anew.

“Then don’t,” he shrugged.  “The choice is yours.”

She paced to the windows and stared down at the beautiful twinkling lights of Manhattan. “You’re saying that if I move back into your home you’ll fix everything with Adam?”

His lips lifted in a sneer but mercifully she didn’t see it. “I personally think your brother is beyond fixing, but yes. I’ll do my best to smooth out this present situation.”

Annie swept her eyes shut on the wave of emotions. It wasn’t a choice at all then, was it?

“Fine.” She turned around, her expression so haunted that he felt a barb of responsibility flex in his heart. “But you should know that this is all kinds of wrong, Kyle. I ... will never forgive you for this.”

––––––––

“I
can live with that,” he said finally. “As long as you’re still able to play the part of my wife, I don’t much care if you hate me.”

“The part of your wife?” She repeated, sitting down in one of the leather couches that fronted the windows. She curled her legs beneath her again and Kyle suppressed that same burst of familiar affection.

“Yes. My wife. In every way.”

Her stomach rolled. Their sex life had been the only good thing about their marriage in the end. It had been beyond good. It had been mind-blowing. Every single time they’d been together, which was often, Annie had wondered if she were falling apart at the seams. Desire flushed her system now, and her treacherous body began to quiver with the hope that relief was finally at hand; that the Kyle-drought might be about to come to an end.

“You really want a woman in your bed you had to blackmail there?” Surely he had many viable alternatives to the wife who didn’t want him? Her heart hammered as she thought of the women she’d seen him with. The women he’d been with in the past who were unashamedly still a part of his inner-circle. It was just the society he was a party of – sex was as meaningless as sharing a bottle of wine. If he dropped all of the women he’d slept with he’d have no friends.

His laugh was soft; it sent a tingle of unwanted desire to the tips of her toes.

“Oh, I don’t think you’ll feel blackmailed,” he promised sinfully. “Come here.”

“Why?” She asked, her heart thumping as she unfurled her legs and walked across the room. He was the moon to her earth; she revolved around him and always would.

His lips lifted in a small smile. “Because I’ve missed you,” he said simply, and his hands moved with slow determination over her dress.

Kyle had to refrain from making yet another appalled comment about her figure. As his fingers ran over her back he felt ridges of bone and it gnawed at his chest. But when her lips lifted to his, he forgot about his guilt and his worry and his anger, and he felt only need.

“I hate that you make me feel like this,” she condemned, as he crashed his mouth to hers. He took the words. He took them into his mouth and he kissed them back to her. He hated her too. He hated her for promising to be with him for the rest of their lives and then leaving when her mind changed. He hated her for making him trust and believe in happy families after all he’d been through and then ripping it away from him. She’d betrayed him, and Kyle Anderson didn’t have forgiveness in the face of that betrayal

But God, did he want her.

His hands fumbled for the zip of her dress and then eased it down her back impatiently. When the dress opened, he let his fingers run over her flesh, right down to the curve of her butt. He pulled her close so that she could feel the force of his erection.

“You will move in tonight,” he said, breaking the kiss with effort.

“Tonight?” She blanched. “I can’t tonight.” She needed time – just a little – to process this development and arm herself for what he was suggesting.

He was about to deliver a withering remark but something in her expression silenced him. “Tomorrow,” she promised with such sadness in the single word that it took his breath away.

“Fine,” he muttered, as though it barely mattered to him. “Though I have a trip tomorrow.” The idea was perfect. He slid the zip back upwards, covering her slim body with regret. “You’ll come with me.”

“A trip?” She frowned. “Where to?”

“Aspen.”

Her eyes flashed with doubt. “No.”

“No?”

“No.” She swallowed. She couldn’t go back there. The place they’d spent their honeymoon had seemed like heaven on earth. Until their second trip. By then, she understood the fatal flaws in their marriage, and the ritzy paradise only served to underscore them.

“You know, you’re really not in a position to argue with me over something so trivial.”

Her eyes were awash with emotion. “Aren’t I?”

“You are depending on my goodwill to save your brother from a lengthy prison sentence and possible deportation. Not to mention a criminal record that will make him unemployable in his field. I think the smartest thing you can do, Annabelle Anderson, is to say
yes
to me as often as you can.”

The hurt was almost unbearable. Who was this man? Was it really the same guy she’d married? How had she not noticed this side of him before?

“So this second coming of our marriage will be exactly like the first then,” she murmured softly. “It’s your way or the highway?”

He resented that description too, but he wasn’t about to get pulled into a battle of semantics as to their past. “You agreed to this knowing my terms.” He took a step backwards and studied her critically. “You look awful, Annabelle. I expect you to start taking care of yourself again.”

“Yes, sir,” she simpered, though his statement hurt. She knew what she looked like. She hadn’t even realised how much weight she’d lost until her clothes had stopped fitting and her hair had begun to thin.

“I mean it. You look terrible. If I didn’t know better I’d say you were sick.”

It took every single ounce of her acting skills not to react to his assessment. She wasn’t sick. Not anymore. Though she’d carry the wounds of their loss for the rest of her life. “I’m not sick,” she said when she could trust her voice not to shake too much. “Besides, I thought you liked women who were reed thin.”

“Not you,” he said instantly. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“I’m sorry my appearance is so disgusting to you,” she responded waspishly. “You don’t have to touch me if you find it such a hardship.”

“I’ll survive,” he snapped, for the statement was so ludicrous that he could offer little else. His whole body was aching to possess her. He didn’t care what she looked like; he never had. Their connection was beyond the superficial, beyond the physical. He shook his head.

You’re perfect, but I’m worried about you.
The words crashed around his brain but Kyle Anderson could never have uttered them.

“A car will collect you tomorrow morning. Give Maria your address on the way out.”

“I ...” Was she being dismissed? Her eyes clouded over as she waited for something, anything, that she could take from the conversation that might salvage her wounded pride.

There wasn’t a damn thing. Nothing, besides the thin hope that her stupid brother wouldn’t go to prison. “Thank you,” she said simply, and scooped her bag up once more.

“My pleasure, Mrs Anderson.”

* * *

I
t had only been six months and yet she’d forgotten the tiny stamps of luxury that were the hallmark of the self-made tycoon’s existence. They were small things that she would never have noticed nowadays.

The driver, always ready to help, to smooth the stress out of any situation. Annie had been pulling her own suitcase down the steps, swearing under her breath at the bitterly cold morning when a pleasant voice and a kind smile had drawn her gaze to the familiar Jaguar and the man she’d come to think of as a friend during their relatively brief marriage.

“Cage,” she returned his smile gratefully as he bent and lifted the case like it weighed nothing.

“It’s good to see you again, miss.”

“You too.” She’d learned early on not to keep asking him to use her maiden name. Cage Reynolds was old-school. He stuck to the rules of servitude even though that hadn’t sat well on Annie’s egalitarian shoulders.

There was also the comfort of the well-appointed vehicles. They were all like this; detailed perfectly so that they smelled like leather polish and roses. She settled back into the seat and inhaled the fragrance, ignoring the ghosts of the past.

There was, of course, the private jet which brought with it expedited everything. No toiling in the main departure hall waiting to go through security with the Everyman. No, not for Mr Kyle Anderson. And nor for his wife, Annie thought with a wry grimace as she was waved onto the tarmac.

The jet was the last word in glamorous wealth.

As always, a black carpet with the Anderson logo was rolled down the steps and onto the runway. She walked towards it, glad for the enormous sunglasses that shielded a third of her face. Was he watching her from one of those round windows?

She plastered a smile on her face as she greeted the captain and first officer, then Trinity, a woman she’d met several times before. She was his primary cabin attendant, though Annie knew there to be a team of eight.

When she’d teased him for such overt extravagance as this beautiful plane he’d pointed out that he used the jet several times a week, and that beyond that it was at the disposal of his executives for a number of reasons.

Annie had felt chastened and gauche then, as she had often during their marriage.

But she had never felt more childish and unsophisticated than when she’d begged him not to make her spend yet another night sitting opposite one of his past lovers. He’d acted as though her insecurities were naïve and inconvenient and his insistence had, in the beginning, always convinced her to put her instincts aside. But in the end, it had become too much. How many dinners and charity galas and functions had she attended and had to suffer through a stunning woman fawning over her husband?

Her step faltered a little as she entered the jet. She blamed the memories.

How could she not feel them whirling around her now? The past was everywhere.

She kept her glasses in place as she scanned the plane, not wanting to reveal the exact moment her eyes landed on him. He was staring at her, his expression impossible to understand. As she came closer, he stood out of habit.

One of his foster parents had been a pastor. They’d ingrained old-fashioned manners into Kyle, though their methods of ingraining the behaviours was strangely at odds with the gesture.

“You’re late.”

She frowned. “Am I?”

“It doesn’t matter. Sit.”

She swallowed. “So no second thoughts then?” She asked, choosing a seat diagonally opposite his.

He smiled at the gesture, showing how small it was. If she wanted to be as far as possible from him then that was her prerogative. Soon they would be in Aspen, in their own suite, and sharing a bed. It was simply a matter of biding his time.

“Did you speak to Adam?” Her eyes were the most amazing shade of violet, but he couldn’t see them beneath the goggles she’d chosen. He reached across and pulled them from her face before retaking his own seat.

“No.”

“You didn’t?” Her hands froze, midway to belting her lap sash in place.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It will wait.”

“No,” she groaned, fiddling with her fingers in her lap. “It won’t. I need to know that it’s dealt with.”

“You cannot ever know that for a fact. No matter what I do, he will always be at risk of reoffending.”

“That’s why you need to talk to him,” she pleaded. “Make him understand what the risks are. I’ve tried but he ...”

“Doesn’t listen to you,” Kyle finished with a curt nod. He’d seen for himself the unsatisfying dynamic between the twins.

“Champagne, sir.” Trinity smiled at the couple as she placed a tray down in front of Kyle. It boasted two flutes of champagne and a small grey box.

“Here.” He passed the box to her with such a lack of ceremony that she snapped it open without even looking at it.

But when her eyes did drop to see what she’d been handed her breath snagged in her throat. “My ring.” She ran her finger over the enormous diamond with a sense of disquiet. She snapped the lid shut. “I don’t want it.” She passed it back to him, but he didn’t move to take it.

His face wore a dark scowl of disapproval. “Have you already forgotten what I said about arguing with me?”

“This isn’t trivial,” she responded flatly.

“Wear the damned ring.”

“No. I don’t want it. I can’t.” She placed it onto the table between them and stared obstinately out of the window. The sky was bleak and grey, which suited Annie perfectly.

“What the hell? You used to love this thing.”

She kept her lips pressed together. He was wrong on that score, but Annie wasn’t sure she could tell him that. It seemed ungrateful in the extreme to criticise a ring that had probably cost more than most people’s houses.

“It used to mean something,” she said finally, her words soft.

“Yeah. It meant that you were my wife. And that’s what it means now.”

“I am not going to put it on,” she snapped caustically. “It suffocated me in the end, Kyle. I can’t do it.” And when she turned to stare at him he saw that her eyes were red-rimmed as though she’d been crying all night.

She really did paint a pretty pathetic picture, with her pale skin and tiny frame, and now those enormous eyes shimmering with sadness.

“You can have a different ring, but you will wear one. We are married. This is not a joke. This is not temporary.”

“You don’t wear one,” she blurted out, her cheeks glowing red with the anger and offense she’d felt throughout their marriage. “You want to brand me but you won’t wear something that says you’re married to me.”

His laugh was unexpected, as he pulled a hand through his hair. “I hate jewellery. I hate having anything on me. You know I practically hate clothes.”

Now her cheeks glowed for a different reason. That was true. Kyle always slept naked, no matter what the climate. He was totally unashamed of his body; and why would he have been? He was glorious. A testament to fantastic genetics, good diet, and an active lifestyle.

“I feel the same about my engagement ring,” she said stiffly. “It’s no different. I hate it. Do we really need rings to say that we’re married?” Her eyes blinked up at him with such an expression of innocence that he wondered if she recalled him having said as much to her when she’d first tentatively approached the idea that he might like to wear a wedding band.

With a sound of exasperation he slipped the ring back into his pocket. “We can talk about it later.”

And though it was childish and silly, Annie had a flutter of pleasure at having achieved what she considered to be a very small victory over her husband.