The Pretend Girlfriend (A Billionaire Love Story #1)(106)

"What do you think it is?" Gwen said.

"Murder. Has to be murder," B replied.

They didn't have much longer to speculate. Aiden and Samuel returned shortly. Aiden fidgeted with the button on his jacket, his eyes looking elsewhere, while Samuel still clutched that iPad. The information broker looked awfully pleased with himself, and Gwen wondered just how much Aiden had paid for the secret.

"Would you like to stay for a drink?" Samuel offered as he sat down and retrieved his martini, "I make the most delicious White Russian..." he leaned in, "The secret's in the cream you use."

"And how much will that secret cost?" Beatrice said, eating the act up.

Gwen grimaced. This guy was such a skeezeball. The way the man's lips curled after he said cream made her stomach turn.

Before Samuel could reply, Aiden cut him off. "No. We should be leaving."

Gwen accepted his outstretched hand while she mounted the couple steps leading up from the sunken couch. They started to leave until Gwen discovered that Beatrice still sat down with Samuel.

"B! Come on"

Her friend shrugged. "A drink does sound good about now..."

"Don't you want to know the secret?" Gwen said, nodding her head towards Aiden, who waited close to the door.

A battle played itself out across B's face. The siren call of a family secret proved irresistible in the end. "See you another time?" B said to Samuel.

"Indeed," the cryptic creep replied.

Gwen never felt so glad to leave a place. Not even when she ran out of Henry's office. She wanted another shower as soon as they got back to their room.

And Aiden stayed silent until they climbed into a cab. Silent and distant, stuffing his hands into his pockets on the elevator ride down and watching the floor counter without seeing it.

"So what is it?" Gwen said. When Aiden didn't reply, she poked him in the ribs and asked again. He jerked and looked at her like she'd just woken him from a deep sleep.

"What is what?" he asked.

"The secret, of course," B said, "What do you think she meant? The color of the sky or something?" She rolled her eyes.

Aiden pulled out his phone, opened a document, and handed the device to Gwen. Her hands shook so much she could barely hold onto it as she angled it so both she and Beatrice could see. What was written within? Murder for hire contracts? Secret correspondence with persons of interest? Confessions to some heinous crime?

"What is this?" Beatrice said.

Gwen agreed with the sentiment. The documents she scrolled through, passing her finger over the screen, meant nothing to her. There were numbers. Lots of numbers. Some of the documents looked German, and others French.

Frustration boiled inside her. How anticlimactic, she thought. "Aiden? What are these? What does it all mean?"

"Many of them are tax documents," he said, "Others are for bank accounts over in Switzerland and a few other places." The way he said it made it sound like they should gasp in shock or something.

Instead, the women gave him a matching pair of blank stares.

"Henry has been..." he glanced around, looking for the right metaphor, "...Cooking the books for Carbide Solutions. Making it look like the company earns more than it does. He also happens to be diverting a large amount of funds into a group of numbered bank accounts."

Tax fraud and embezzling? That was the big secret? Intellectually, Gwen knew that it really was a big deal. It was just that the soap opera-enjoying part of her felt let down by the banality of the secret.

"So... you're going to Capone him?" Beatrice said.

Aiden squeezed the bridge of his nose and then chafed at his eyes. "I don't know... Samuel was right. This is enough to put Carbide Solutions out of business. And definitely enough to put Henry in prison for a long, long time."

Gwen grasped Aiden's misgivings. If for some reason Henry didn't just accept the blackmailing right away, or thought Aiden was bluffing, it meant the end of everything they'd both worked so long and hard to build. It wouldn't be just a company they'd be destroying, it would be the foundation of the lives.

"Are you sure we should do this?" Gwen asked. She wanted Henry to leave them alone, but the cure was worse than the disease. She didn't think she had it in herself to utterly decimate someone's life like that. Not even if the life in question was Henry Manning's.


"I say take him down!" Beatrice interjected with her usual gusto and cutthroat attitude.

Aiden took the phone back and scrolled quickly through the documents again. He breathed in a deep breath, his shoulders rising, then let it out rush from him, blowing his cheeks out. "I do, too."





Chapter 33


The more thought Gwen put into it, the more she hated this idea.

They'd managed to get back to their hotel room without running into more cameras and reporters. Beatrice had taken one look out the window, spotted the bar, and told them since they'd denied her a drink back at Samuel's penthouse, she was going over to grab one now.

That left Gwen and Aiden alone. He sat in the wingback chair, obsessively scrolling through the documents sold to him as though he still couldn't quite believe the contents contained therein.

"Are you sure this is what we should be doing?" Gwen said, finally giving voice to her anxieties. "I mean, we managed to get back to the hotel without a problem. Maybe they're starting to get bored and lay off?"