The Pretend Girlfriend (A Billionaire Love Story #1)(43)

Grabbing her cell, she thumbed the button on the touch screen to answer. At the moment, her guilt over hurting Aiden outweighed her anger at what happened last night, and she just wanted to apologize. Actually, it was kind of sweet of him to get in touch with her. She imagined him up all night, worried about leaving her in that state...

"Hey, Aiden, look, I just wanted to say," she started.

"Miss Browning?" a woman's voice interrupted.

"Who is this?" Gwen said, taking her phone away from her ear to check the call display. It just said Private Number.

"Is this Gwen Browning?" the woman asked.

"Yes. Who is this?" Gwen repeated.

"I'm calling on behalf of Henry Manning. He would like to see you at his office straight away."

"You're kidding," Gwen said. She sat on her bed and rubbed at her eye, trying to get rid of that sharp pain.

"There is a car waiting for you downstairs."

"Listen, I don't care..."

But the woman hung up on her. Gwen bit back a few choice words. Her first thought was to just go back to sleep. But when her head hit the pillow, she couldn't stop thinking about that awful interview, and how Henry Manning was behind the whole thing.

It felt good to be angry with him. Justified, even. So Gwen rolled out of bed again and got ready, intending on going to see the high and mighty Henry Manning just to tell him where he could shove all of this nonsense.

Sure enough, when she got downstairs a glossy black Town Car waited for her. The driver didn't say anything when she climbed into the back seat, instead just throwing the car into gear and starting towards Manhattan.

At this early hour, the city was quiet. A few yellow cabs roamed the streets like scavenging seagulls, looking for whatever scant morsels they could find.


The early morning sun glinted off the river as they passed over the bridge, making it look like the water burned.

The Town Car took her well into the business core. The skyscrapers loomed high overhead like foreboding titans and the formerly intense fire of Gwen's anger cooled in their shade.

She began to think that maybe it would be a good idea to call Aiden. That coming to face Henry by herself wasn't the best decision.

But then the car stopped at the curb in front of a high-rise that seemed made of glass. The topmost section of the building looked bathed in fire as the morning sun came over the horizon. A security guard opened her door. He wore some kind of black army vest over a blue shirt, and kept his hair cropped short like a soldier.

"Miss Browning, please come with me," he said. It was less a request than a direct order couched in the guise of a request.

Gwen followed him. He led her to a bank of elevators inside a massive lobby. Gwen imagined that it was usually full of people, but at the early hour they were the only ones aside from another guard sitting behind the desk in the center of the room. Their footfalls echoed, and the air conditioner was set a couple degrees cooler than Gwen found comfortable.

She followed the guard into the elevator. He prodded the button for the top floor. From there, he escorted her into a large reception room. Enormous art prints from various Italian Renaissance masters took up the walls, and overstuffed leather sofas surrounded several modern, irregularly shaped coffee tables.

A pretty woman somewhere in her thirties, her hair up in a bun, waited at the desk. "Gwen Browning?" she said. It was the woman from the phone call. The one who'd hung up on her.

But Gwen felt much too cowed to confront her about it. The opulence of the place just overwhelmed her. And she didn't think those paintings were prints. The one behind the receptionist looked like the real thing. She could see the little ridges in the paint from where she stood.

"Yes," Gwen answered. She felt so small and insignificant. But that was probably the point, she realized. Everything Henry Manning did was to manipulate things to his advantage.

"Mr. Manning will see you now. Please go straight inside." Another one of those orders pretending to be a request.

Gwen screwed up her courage and walked towards the doors. Before she could grab the handle, they swung in of their own accord, the motors nearly silent.

Henry Manning's office looked surprisingly small, until the ceiling (or lack thereof) caught her attention. Glancing upward, her breath caught. There was a ceiling, all right. It was just about thirty feet up, and all glass.

"Gwen, thank you for coming. Take a seat, won't you?" Henry said.

He waved at a plush chair at his desk.

"No thanks," Gwen said, her triumph at this small defiance far too much.

He also offered her his hand, and she almost took it before remembering that particular trick. The one Aiden had used on her own father. He smiled at her refusal.

"Right to business then, I take it?"

"I don't have any business with you. You need to understand something," she started, trying to breathe some heat back into the dying embers of her anger.

"No, that's right. You're only business is with my son. But you see, his business is, quite literally, my business." He spread his arms apart, indicating Carbide Solutions, "And if he hopes to truly inherit it from me someday, he has to stop these little games. Like the one he's playing with you."

"We're not-" Gwen started.

"Just stop that. We both know the truth. Do you really think he could get a contract like that done up without me finding out about it? My son has real potential. He also just has it in his head that he needs to fix the company's image. And he's trying to do that with all this pointless charity, and with you. Yes, you. You're a part of that image he wants to project. Nothing more."