The Price Of Scandal(101)

His brow furrowed.

“You’re asking quite complex questions when I’ve got more alcohol than blood in my veins.”

“It’s not that complex.”

“It is when you assume they’re independent of one another. I let you down,” he said. “I underestimated the threat. I didn’t protect you from it. And I allowed myself to be put into a position that made it look as though my loyalty was divided.”

“Lita.” I said the name without any of the emotions I felt.

“Is a manipulative psychopath who is so envious of you she won’t stop until she destroys you. And you believed her over me.”

Maybe the man was due a small apology.

“Do you still?” he asked darkly.

“Still what?”

“Do you believe that I came on to her? That I was the mastermind behind it all? That I never cared for you?”

I wasn’t ready to address all that. There was work to do. Revenge to be had.

“Let’s keep this professional for now,” I told him. I slid the contract to him on the table.

“Professional?” It was his turn to scoff. “You want to talk business?”

“It would seem that you didn’t hold up your end of the bargain, Mr. Price,” I said, uncapping a pen. I laid it on top of the contract. “I have some papers for you to sign.”





47





Derek





The woman was a mercenary. And that mercenary was merrily making herself a cup of coffee while I read through her blasphemous contract.

The contract that gave Emily Stanton fifty percent of Alpha Group.

I’d lost the bet. I’d guaranteed her the IPO, and instead she’d be losing everything in another—I glanced at the clock on the console table—four hours.

I’d failed her. She’d lost. And yet…

I watched her wander back in from the kitchen. She sank down on the end of the couch and pulled her feet up under her. I didn’t see grief or fear in those eyes that haunted my soul. Denim and platinum.

I saw fire.

“Well?” She arched a slim eyebrow.

Wordlessly, I reached for the pen.

This contract would bind me to her and vice versa. There was nothing that would stop me from making that happen. I’d fight my way back into her heart, her bed. And this partnership gave me a foothold. She couldn’t just walk away now. The contract was my hope, and she’d handed it to me.

If this was what it took to prove my loyalty, my heart, then she could have everything I owned.

“Wait,” she said, stilling my hand with hers. “There’s something you need to know first. Those headlines about my twenty-first birthday. They’re true.”

“I find that hard to believe,” I rasped.

She pulled back. “It’s important to me that you know the truth first.”

“And it’s important to me that I sign this without knowing the truth. You’re stepping all over my grand gesture here.”

“How can you have a sense of humor at a time like this?”

“It’s part of my considerable charm,” I said, scrawling my signature across the first page.

“Dammit, Derek,” she sighed. “You can’t perform a grand gesture when you don’t know everything. This might make you change your mind.”

A part of her expected it to.

I kept signing. “Tell me your secret,” I said.

“Lita wanted to go out for my twenty-first. She didn’t like that I was planning to stay in. ‘You deserve to have a little fun, Lady Stanton.’”

I winced, recognizing the button pushed.

“‘He’s cute,’ she told me. ‘Go be a normal human being. Get drunk. Have a one-night stand with a stranger.’ I was young. Drunk. And entirely too easily influenced by my friend.” Emily said the word bitterly.

“I didn’t do that sort of thing. And for good reason. But that night, I felt more like being a Lita Smith than an Emily Stanton. And for good reason. I was getting into his car when a female bartender had hauled me back out of it. ‘Trust me, sweetie, you won’t like yourself when you wake up in the morning.’”

She scrubbed her palms over her knees.

“The bartender tried to talk him into taking a cab home. There was a struggle for keys, but in the end, he drove off. I found Lita inside. She’d seemed almost angry that I hadn’t gone with him. ‘You’re just too good for your own good,’ she’d complained. I felt like I’d let her down, so I bought her another round. That’s how I usually made things up to Lita. I bought her things. She liked presents. And I liked having a friend.”

My heart broke a little more for the lonely girl in the lab coat.

“By the time I was home throwing up while Lita watched, I couldn’t even remember what he looked like. To my mother’s horror, a few pictures had ended up in gossip rags. The worst of which showed me dancing on a bar at a drag club in South Beach. But the bigger scandal never became public knowledge. Until now,” she said, leveling me with her gaze.

“I didn’t find out until days later that the guy I didn’t go home with died. He’d driven through a DUI checkpoint, led police on a chase, and lost control of his car. He crashed into a concrete embankment and died on impact.”