The Billionaire’s Secret Heart (A 'Scandals of the Bad Boy Billionaires' Romance) (6 page)

I
floated through my Monday
, buoyed on a high of fantastic sex and lack of sleep. Other than checking my phone too often, I tried to put Holden out of my mind and concentrate on school. He didn't call or text all day. By dinner, I put my phone away so I'd stop checking, only to miss his call. I called him back and left a voicemail. I knew it was way too soon to expect daily contact, but I missed him. Annoyed that I was so attached after one date, and afraid I was going to morph into a meme of an overly attached girlfriend, I told myself to chill out and focus on my own life.

For the most part, it worked, though every time my mind drifted to Holden, I swear my nipples perked up, and I had to fight the urge to press my legs together. One weekend, not even forty-eight hours, and he had my body trained. Tuesday passed without a call or a text. By Wednesday morning, I had a hollow feeling in my chest and Emily had stopped asking if he'd called. After a rushed lunch, I headed to the Sonification Lab to meet with my group, resolutely not looking at the bench where I'd seen Holden just a few days before. I ran into Darren just inside the doors and walked up to the lab with him, groaning in annoyance when he asked, "How's Prince Charming?"

"Fine," I answered, not planning to go into the sad detail of my love life with Darren. No way he needed to know that I'd slept with Prince Charming the night we'd met and again on our first date, and now, he wasn't calling. It wasn't exactly an original story. I don't know why I'd thought it was going to be different for me.

"I didn't think he'd be your type," Darren said, an odd intensity in his voice. I looked at him, suddenly uncomfortable. He'd asked me out earlier in the year and I'd turned him down. I'd done it gently, but I hadn't thought dating someone on my project was a good idea. Things could get intense, and bringing a personal relationship into it didn't seem smart. That, and I wasn't attracted to him. At all. He was nice enough, but I liked a guy who showered more than twice a week. I know, my standards were too high.

"I don't think I have a type," I said, trying to end the conversation.

"I guess he's every girl's type," Darren went on, as if I hadn't spoken. "Rich."

"I don't care about that," I protested. "And it's not like there's really anything going on. We only went out once."

"Did you see the paper this morning?" he asked, his voice expectant.

"No, why?"

"Let me see if I can find it," he said, taking his phone out of his pocket and tapping on the screen as he went on, "I never look at this crap, but my roommate's girlfriend loves the Style section, and she left it open this morning." He tapped a few more times, then held the phone up in front of me. "Here."

It was a picture of Holden, his arm around a gorgeous, very busty redhead, smiling down at her with clear affection. The date on the article was the day before. The headline said something about the Winters family and a charity event. I bit my lip, forcing back the stab of pain, and shrugged, pretending a nonchalance I didn't feel.

"We only went out once," I said, using every ounce of self-control I had to hide the nausea turning my stomach inside out. I barely heard Darren as he said,

"Well, you know who he is, right? He's got a different girlfriend every week. He and his cousin are huge players. My roommate's girlfriend couldn't shut up about it. I guess she knows someone who dated him and said he's amazing in bed, but an asshole otherwise. You're better off without him."

"I guess," I said, shrugging again. I would have bet everything that Holden wasn't an asshole. Maybe there was another explanation for the picture. I wasn't going to condemn him based on a picture in the paper. That would be foolish. If he called, I'd let him tell me about the redhead.

If he called
.

With each hour that passed, Holden calling was looking less and less likely.

I followed Darren to the lab, ignoring him talking about Holden and his cousin, nodding along like I was listening. I didn't have the energy to tell him to shut up. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth to object to everything he was saying, I would start to cry. I was not going to cry in the middle of lab. I could at least wait until I got home and crawled into bed with a sappy movie and some ice cream.

I headed straight for my workstation and went back to poring over the code I'd written, trying to isolate the bug, while Darren and Angie worked on tweaking the glasses. When Darren asked to use my phone for a test, I handed it over, saying only, "Use the newest version of the app. I updated it when I got here."

I wasn't paying too much attention to what they were doing until I heard Angie shout, "You got it! You got it!" Tearing my eyes from the lines of code on my screen, I watched as my phone connected to the glasses with a wire and began to vibrate in a pattern when Angie turned the glasses until they faced an obstacle. I hadn't found the problem with the Bluetooth, and we were nowhere close to working out the patterns for different obstacles, but the spatial field recognition was working.

Mesmerized by the sight of months of work coming to fruition, I almost forgot my recent heartbreak. Almost. Beneath my excitement every time the phone buzzed, that hollow place in my chest echoed at me, reminding me that I'd lost something I didn't even know I wanted.

I stayed later than the rest of the team, ducking their attempts to get me to join them for a drink. We had a lot to celebrate, but I wasn't in the mood. I spent another hour squinting at the screen until my head was pounding before I gave up and dragged myself home. As much as I loved her, I was grateful Emily wouldn't be there. She had her weekly gaming meet with her team, the one night of the week they put aside their projects and played together. I knew she wouldn't be home until well after I was asleep.

My head throbbed each time my feet hit the pavement. By the time I opened my apartment door, all I wanted was to close my eyes. I dropped my phone and bag in the kitchen and headed straight for bed, peeling off my clothes once I shut my door behind me. As soon as I was down to my t-shirt, I crawled between the covers and let my eyes shut, willing myself to sleep.

Sleep didn't come. Instead, now that I was away from curious eyes, the hollow place in my chest expanded to my stomach, leaving me feeling as if all the happiness had been sucked out of me. Stupidly, I didn't care about our triumph in the lab. Alone in my bed, I longed for Holden with an intensity that was absurd, considering how little time we'd spent together.

Funny, you'd think it would be the orgasms that would be on my mind. I'd never had sex like that, and I probably never would again. Holden had known my body better than I did, and he'd made every part of me sing for him.

But I didn't miss the sex. Well, I did, but it wasn't what made hot tears seep from beneath my closed eyelids. No, that came from remembering the way his fingertips had traced over my back as we'd lain together in his bed. The way he smelled, woodsy and male. The way he'd understood my problems at the lab and commiserated without trying to solve them for me. The way, aside from my mentioning his family, we'd fit so well together. He'd managed to push every sexual boundary I had, yet make me completely comfortable otherwise.

When I'd left his bed Monday morning, it had never occurred to me that he would blow me off. I was tempted to think there was some comical misunderstanding going on, but he had my number and knew where I lived. Even if that picture of him with the redhead was a mistake, I'd left him a message two days before and he'd never called back. He didn't have amnesia, and if he'd been in some horrible accident, I would have known. It would have been all over the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
. I was going to have to face facts. Holden had gotten what he wanted from me. We were over. He wasn't going to call.

As that depressing knowledge sunk in, I began to sob in earnest. Curled up in my quilt, I cried myself to sleep, hoping I'd be able to wash Holden out of my heart with my tears. I had a terrible feeling it wasn't going to be that easy.

I
sat
at my desk in the back office at Mana, scowling at the accounting program on my screen. Neither of us really enjoyed accounting. Normally our club manager handled the books, but he was on vacation and I was in such a foul mood, Tate had banished me from the club.

He may have had a point. I'd been at the bar, waiting for a beer, and had shot down a co-ed so hard, she'd gone back to her friends in tears. Maybe I'd been a little harsh, but her bleached hair had reminded me of the sunlit streaks in Josephine's dirty blonde. Beside the memory of Josephine, the co-ed had looked like a plastic doll in her short, low-cut dress, her fake boobs and fake hair all shouting, "Look at me!"

When she'd put her hand on my crotch and called me by name, I'd told her to get her hands off my cock and go slut it up somewhere else. Not the most gentlemanly response I could have given, I know. The co-ed had burst into loud sobs, running off with an exaggerated flounce that had almost tossed her tits out of her dress. Tate, standing at the other end of the bar, had grabbed my beer from the bartender, shoved it into my hand, and said, "Go back in the office before you scare away any more paying customers."

I was too pissed off to argue. I tried to tell myself I didn't know what was wrong with me, but that was a lie. I knew exactly what was wrong. Fucking Josephine. Or, more accurately, not fucking Josephine. She'd left my bed Monday morning, and that was the last I'd seen of her. Four days with no Josephine. I'd called her Monday night, and she'd called me back, leaving a halting message asking me to call her. That was the last I'd heard from her.

The mess at work that had kept me busy all day Monday had gotten worse by Tuesday. I'd been stuck in conferences until Tuesday night and had gone straight home to pass out. I didn't get clear of it until Wednesday afternoon. Since then, I'd called her five times. Nothing. I'd texted her. Nothing. I knew the crisis at WGC had delayed my call long enough that she would be pissed, but I'd more than made up for it since. I'd left messages asking her to call. Five of them. It was more than clear that she was done with me.

Fuck her
. At the thought, I groaned, putting my head down on my desk. I wanted to. I really did. If only it were as simple as a fuck. I didn't need Josephine to get off. The problem was, I wanted her for so much more than that. I remembered the co-ed at the bar and glared at my computer.

Most of the women I met were like her, thinking because my family was rich and prominent, they could lead me around by my dick. The women who pursued my older brothers and cousins were subtler, better at the game. Tate and I got the young ones, the stupid college girls who thought a tight body and a willingness to fuck were all that it took.

Unfortunately for them, Tate and I had earned our reputations. We'd fucked more than our share of greedy girls hoping to latch onto our cocks and win a shot at the easy life. I wasn't interested. I'd seen my oldest brother, Aiden, through an unhappy marriage. Elizabeth was, on the surface, the polar opposite of the blonde at the bar. Aiden's ex-wife was cultured, elegant, and ice-cold. She'd been born to marry a man like Aiden, groomed to run an estate like the one we'd grown up in, taught from birth how to catch a man like my brother. In her heart, she was no better than the girl I'd insulted. The packaging might be more refined, but Elizabeth was like all the rest, hoping to spend her life enjoying Aiden's wealth while she led him around by his dick.

It could have worked if Aiden had lived a different life. He'd married Elizabeth, I think, under the assumption that she was the kind of woman he was supposed to marry. On the outside, she wasn't much different from my mother. Tate's mom had been a doctor, but my mother had been raised, like Elizabeth, to marry wealth. She was known for her parties, her charity balls, and lunches at the club.

The rest of the world never saw how much she loved her family. She'd loved my father to distraction, and she'd always had time for her children. When my aunt and uncle had died, she'd taken in Gage, Vance, and Tate with open arms, treating them as if they were her own.

My Mom had been pure love, and I think Aiden had hoped that, somehow, Elizabeth had the same inside her. When he'd realized that she didn't, and never would, he'd divorced her.

Aiden wasn't going to settle for less than what our parents had, and neither was I. I'd been bored with easy sex and grasping women for a while. Josephine had seemed like the answer to a prayer. Too bad I wasn't the answer to one of hers.

I'll admit, I was taking her brush-off with little grace and a lot of sulking. I'd always been on the other side, though I never said I'd call when I wasn't going to. But I'd slept with women and then blown them off. It's pretty much all I'd done until Josephine. I couldn't quite believe she was doing it to me.

The door to the office cracked open and Tate stuck his head inside. "Is it safe to come in, or are you going to make me cry?" he asked.

I grunted in response, hoping he'd take that to mean he should leave. It was not my day. He came in and shut the door firmly behind him.

"Are you going to sulk in here all night?" he asked, sitting on the edge of the desk. I didn't answer. "Did you at least get through the receipts?" I continued to ignore him.

"Why don't you just go over to her place and ask her what's up?" he asked in an overly reasonable tone of voice. I glared at him.

"Because I'm not going to beg," I said, hearing the false bravado. I was a mess, and I worried I was precariously close to doing exactly that. "Would you go ask some girl why she hadn't called?" I asked.

"Hell no," Tate said. "But I never give a fuck about the girls I date. Well, not true. A fuck is all I give. I'm more than happy for them to ghost on me. Anyway, I thought Josephine wasn't 'some girl'. I thought she was different."

I shrugged. I knew if I said what I was thinking, that I'd
thought
she was different, that she wasn't just
some girl
, I'd only sound even more pathetic. Briefly, I thought about dumping the accounting, going out to the bar, and getting wasted. Maybe picking up some random girl and fucking her.

The thought left my mind as soon as it entered. I was sulking, but I wasn't an idiot. If there was a chance of working things out with Josephine, I wasn't going to ruin it by fucking someone else, especially when I didn't want another woman. I could still get wasted, but I closed down that idea as well. All that would get me was hung over and more miserable than I already was.

"I have to get through this shit," I said, shuffling through the receipts in front of me and hoping Tate would take the hint. He did, clapping me on the back once before leaving.

"She's just a girl," he said, shutting the door behind him. Narrowing my eyes at the accounting program on my screen, I blocked out thoughts of Josephine and forced myself to get to work.