Billionaire In Hiding: The Complete Series (Alpha Billionaire Romance Western Love Story) (82 page)

I thought of Aria and how much I cared
about her. It was true. I cared for her almost more than was acceptable, which
is why I hated feeling like she was some kind of a manipulative scammer. She
wasn’t and I knew that, but I still could not shake off this feeling. I
wondered, had she known about her dad and my bank beforehand, would it have
changed how receptive she was to the contract? Would she have still agreed to
take so much money from me?

She had been desperate in the situation.
There was no doubt about that. The fact that she had agreed to the contract to
begin with meant that she was willing to go through some lengths for her mom’s
hospital bills. But would this have made things different? Changed her mind?
There really was no way of knowing as it was already too late now. I had
already made half the payments. Shaking my head, I sighed deeply as I saw
Aria’s head wrapped around my door. How long had she been standing there?

“Do you have a minute?” she asked me
nervously.

“Sure, come on in,” I said, despite still
feeling some irrational anger towards her family and Aria too. “What can I do
for you?” I asked bitingly as she sat across from me. “Besides what I have
already done, I mean.”

Aria looked taken aback. She opened her
mouth and closed it again, as though unsure how she was going to communicate
with me.

“I don’t…I mean I just came in to check
if,” she paused momentarily and added, “You have been acting rather strange
since last night.”

“Oh, is that right?” I asked, getting more
and more annoyed. “How so?”

“Well first of all, you ran out of my
mom’s house without so much as a warning and a very poor excuse,” she snapped.

“Don’t take that tone with me. Not when
your family—” I stopped mid-sentence. “Nevermind.”

“You overheard us last night, didn’t you?”
she asked, looking resigned all of a sudden.

I shrugged. “I wasn’t eavesdropping. You
and your mother simply weren’t as quiet as you obviously thought you were.”

Her face took on a deep shade of red as
she looked away from me, breaking eye-contact. “Well, if you heard everything,
you must have also heard that I had no idea that South National Bank had
anything to do with my father’s bankruptcy. And that as soon as I found out, I
had the full intention of telling you!”

“But you didn’t, did you?” I demanded
angrily.

“Yeah, because it would have been so easy
to tell you considering you stormed out of my mother’s house last night and
haven’t spoken to me since!”

She was right. I hadn’t even given her a
chance to come clean about the whole situation since I had been so angry. Why
should I give her a chance? Why should I give her anything more when I had
already given so much to her family? A fresh surge of anger began to bubble up
inside me so I reached for the stress ball, hoping Aria wouldn’t notice.

“Why are you so angry with me?” she asked
after a few minutes of complete silence where neither of us so much as looked
at one another. “I’m sorry, Zayden! Had I known about this at any point before
the contract, I would have made full disclosure before letting you…I’m just…I’m
sorry that you had to suffer financial loss because of my father. As a direct victim
of his shenanigans, I can safely say I understand how you must be feeling right
now.”

“Oh, have you lost five hundred thousand
dollars to a man only to later find out you were paying his ex-wife’s hospital
bills in order to help out his daughter who you had just happened to fall for?”

“That’s oddly specific. I’m going to go
with no.” She attempted a weak smile, trying to change the mood of the
conversation. It worked slightly as the look on her face made me want to kiss
her. But I was still angry and looking at Aria’s face, I wished I wasn’t.

“Look, I know you didn’t know about any of
this,” I said, exasperated with her, the entire situation and myself. “But it
doesn’t change the facts, does it? And I can’t help feeling…and I’m sorry for
what I am about to say, Aria, because it’s really not your fault directly… but
I can’t help feeling like I’ve been scammed by your family.”

She looked like I had just slapped her
across the face as tears began to visibly surface in her eyes.

“You don’t know how much your dad cost me.
And on top of that, I am paying for your mother’s hospital bills…like what the
actual—”

“But I am paying you back for it,” she
snapped, fighting back tears. Aria was never one to show weakness, that much
had been firmly established. “I am not sure you have actually read this
contract you keep referring to because if you had then you would remember a
very important clause at the end of it, which I might remind you. I insisted we
add to the contract and even refused to sign the whole thing without the clause
that states as soon as I graduate from college, I will begin paying you back
for the hospital bills in installments. Or have you forgotten that entire
encounter where this deal would not even have existed if you hadn’t agreed to
let me pay you back!”

“I haven’t forgotten,” I said, getting
more annoyed. “But that still puts me at a loss of, let’s see, about five
hundred thousand dollars!”

“There is nothing I can do about that!”
she exclaimed, clearly starting to get very frustrated. Her answer pissed me
off too. What did she mean she couldn’t do anything about it? It was her
father, after all, who owed me the money. And after all that I had done for her
and after finding out what her father caused my bank, she could just sit there
and act all helpless like there is no way for her to rectify the situation?

“Yes there is,” I said, more out of anger
than anything else. “You can pay me back the five hundred thousand dollars
after you graduate too. Installments are okay.”

For the second time that afternoon, Aria
looked like I had slapped her across the face, which was unfair from where I
stood, considering I was just asking for my own money back. And not even right
away.

She looked like she had been searching for
an appropriate response for a while when she finally just said, “Wow.” She was
clearly dumbfounded.

“Just because I don’t actually need the
money, Aria,” I prodded after her lack of response. “Does not mean it is okay
for people to run off with what is mine, no matter the circumstances. I don’t
care how rich I am or how much money I have, I am not okay with any business I
run facing any sort of a loss. It’s part of being a businessman. If I didn’t
learn to care about every single penny that flowed towards me where my
businesses are concerned, I wouldn’t be as successful as I am today. So you
have two options from here on. You can take this personally, get really
offended and start another fight, which you know how that is going to end. We
have already been through that motion. You’ll get angry, show me a lot of
attitude and haughtily walk out of here only to return in a couple of weeks
when your mom’s hospital bills are due because you realize in the last minute
that you need me more than you care to admit. Or, we could go for the simpler option,
which is you take this with a stride – just like one business oriented person
to another – and agree to pay me back and we move on, picking up where we left
off. So which option will it be then?”

Instead of speaking, she allowed the tears
to fall freely. This made me even angrier. It was easier to be a stern asshole
when she was snapping back with all her might. Her tears just made me feel
guilty, which was not something I deserved or needed to feel in the current
situation.

“Aria, say something,” I said in what I
thought was a much gentler tone.

She, however, continued to stare at me
with tears covering her entire face, making me wish I could punch a hole
through the wall.

Chapter
6

Aria

I couldn’t believe what Zayden had been
saying and wished I could stop the damn tears from pouring all over my face.
The last thing I needed was to show weakness in this situation, yet I felt
completely lost in terms of words to produce from my mouth. Scammed. He had
said he felt scammed. That I had somehow, unintentionally scammed him!

My gut felt like it was falling low on a
downward spiral of a dangerous roller coaster when I had heard him use that
word. How could he? In the time we had gotten to know each other, he had most
certainly gotten some idea of the kind of person that I was? If not, then this
whole relationship itself was a scam. After how much I had insisted that he add
the clause about me paying him back to the contract, how dare he question my
character.

He had overheard the whole conversation
between me and mom, which meant that he knew very damn well that I was
completely clueless about this and intended on telling him everything. He found
out as soon as I found out.

It was not good enough though! None of it
was apparently good enough for him. He had decided what I was doing was my
fault even when I wasn’t and demanded payment – literal and figurative – even
though he knew the insinuations would hurt me. It wasn’t that I minded the idea
of paying his bank the money my dad owed it. After all, if things all went as
planned, I was going to be successful in a couple of years and it would only
make me feel good to know that I cleared up the mess my dad left behind. This
was regardless of whether I had ever found out South National Bank’s
involvement. No, the money was not what hurt me so much. It was the fact that
he sat there, looking me straight in the eye and asked me to pay him that money
as though I had personally stolen it from him.

The fact that he could make me feel so low
made me furious!

To think I was coming to believe our
relationship had been making progress. Maybe it had. To Zayden’s credit he had
gone out of his way to make me feel like our relationship was, at last, real,
even going so far as to asking to meet my mom. Obviously, when he had asked for
that he wasn’t expecting all these revelations and neither was I. It wasn’t
some trick or an effort to make me feel as shitty as I was feeling right now.
He was genuinely interested in my life and getting to know my mom.

I tried imagining myself in his place when
he overheard the conversation, from the point of view of a guy who had just
gone against all his reservations and jumped into a serious relationship with
me. After all that he had been doing for me these past few months, a part of me
understood why hearing about my dad must have completely ticked him off. His
running off last night was completely justified. I would have run out of there
myself if I could have, given what I had heard.

I couldn’t run every time things didn’t go
the way I wanted to. Perhaps it would take more time to earn Zayden’s complete
respect and if I wanted to keep this relationship, I was going to have to be
okay with that. As angry as I was, I was not willing to give up what we had
built over the past few months. It would be much easier and respectful to just
agree to pay him the money that my dad owed.

“Option two,” I spoke after what felt like
an eternity, wiping off my tears. “One business-oriented person to another, I
will pay you every single penny back. Happy?”

“Far from,” he snapped, somehow looking
even angrier for getting what he had wanted. He had expected me to put up a
fight, or argue in some way, or most likely of all, walk away. I had thrown him
off with my response, undoubtedly, and it felt oddly like the ball was in my
court all of the sudden.

“But well, good,” he said, standing up
from his chair. “That’s settled then. Is that all you wanted?”

“Are you kicking me out?” I looked at him
quizzically, now beginning to feel amused.

“I don’t know, last time I checked, it was
still my office.”

“So you are kicking me out?” I pressed,
trying not to laugh out loud.

“I have a bank to run, Aria, so if there
isn’t anything else you need from me today—”

“My paper,” I cut him off. “Remember the
paper I was telling you about? That you so nicely volunteered to help work me
on? Well, the deadline for that is coming up, so I was wondering if you were up
to helping me out?”

“I seem to be making a career out of helping
you out.” He snarled at me trying to look menacing, but simply appeared comical
to me.

“I mean you don’t have to help me. I was
just reminding you because you volunteered.”

He sat back down and played with his
stress ball for a bit before speaking. “We will do it tonight,” he eventually
said. “Now for the rest of the day, please just let me be okay?”

“Gladly.” I smiled and walked out of his
office.

---

Later that night, I told the whole story
to Nick and Stacey, who for some reason found it hilarious and burst into a
chorus of laughter.

“Oh my supportive best friends,” I said
sarcastically. “It wouldn’t be so funny if you were in my place, would it?”

“No,” Nick said, trying to straighten up
his face. “It wouldn’t at all. And it’s not funny that this is happening to
you, Aria. Not at all!”

“That’s not the impression one would get
based on your uncontrollable laughter,” I snapped.