Devotion - Billionaire Contemporary Romance Novel (26 page)

Phillip narrowed his eyes, challenging her.  His hands constricted around her waist and pressed her body deeply into his own—an unspoken reminder of every forbidden touch and view she had permitted him. “You were never certain?” he mocked her. “Perhaps because you preferred it that way.” 

Without warning, Isabel drew back her hand and slapped Phillip’s chiseled cheek.

Bastard
. 

The sound of the impact cracked like stone.  Phillip clenched his jaw, absorbing the sting of her rage without raising his eyes.

“What I prefer is not to be turned into your casual whore.”

She drew up her hands around the sapphire and diamond necklace, clawing to remove its noose around her neck. She flung it into his hand and rushed off the dance floor.  But Phillip faster and stronger.  He seized her wrist and pulled her back into his body—one final time.

“Isabel…do not do this.” His voice dropped with rigidity, attempting to control her as emotions surged within his own raging heart. “Do not leave like this or it will be the end of everything.” He asserted it like a threat—a warning that she was jeopardizing more than simply her pride.

“The end of everything?”  she repeated, her eyes storming like a gale across black waters, threatening to sink them both. “You mean the end of my employment with you?  The end of our efforts together to restore The Old Main Post Office? The end of everything that we’ve worked on together for the past five years?”

“The end of everything… between us.” He pinned her wrist against his chest.

“And what is that Phillip?”

She waited again, gazing into his struggling eyes.  She just wanted him to say something, anything that would reverse the anxiety in her heart.  Instead, his stoic silence confirmed everything she feared most—that everything that had transpired between them meant more to her than it did to him. 

“It is not the end of anything between us because there was never a beginning,” she muttered with cold brutality.  She tried to pull away again, but like so many times before, he forced her into submission.  Their eyes locked as the uneven noise of the chattering crowd and the swinging beat of the live band fell to a surreal hush. 

As if he was testing her resolve, Phillip lowered his chin along her neck, taking in her scent as his lips grazed her skin.  In bitter protest, Isabel shut her eyes and turned away her cheek, attempting to dismiss the physical intimacy that they had shared.  He could physically force her to submit to him, but he could no longer force her to make eye contact with him, just as he could no longer force her to believe in their perfectly manufactured charade. Suddenly, Phillip tossed down her wrist and backed away with a resentful glare, consciously acknowledging her contempt by allowing her to abandon him.

Overcome by her impulsive need to flee, she strode off the dance floor as bitter waves of injustice coursed through her heart.  The swirling lights distorted her vision and filled her with nausea. 

“Isabel!”

She stopped and spun around defensively when the masculine voice hollered out her name like a battle cry.  With his coat draped over his arm, Eliot Watercross emerged from the shadowed wings of the lobby.

“I’m just about to head out, but I certainly can’t leave without saying good night to the most important woman in the room.”  He approached her; his greedy green eyes passed over her body.  “It looks like you’re preparing to rush away like Cinderella into the night.”

She averted her gaze and shivered, as if an invisible draft swept through the cavernous lobby.  He responded by slipping his heavy wool coat over her bare shoulders, capturing her like a prize.  She feigned a smile in appreciation and gazed at the shimmering gold revolving doors, wondering why she didn’t push forward and complete her escape.

“My driver is waiting outside.  I’ll give you a ride.” His finger flirtatiously lifted up her chin, calling attention to her teary eyes and quivering lips.

Had he seen her interaction with Phillip?
 

“No, thank you.  I’m fine.”  Neither one of them was convinced that she meant it. Presumptuously, he reached out and traced her neckline down to the tip of her breastbone.  “Perhaps sapphires aren’t your favorite gemstone after all.”

Isabel closed her eyes, accepting his touch.  But she only felt doubt.

The sensation of being watched tingled across the nape of her neck.  She glanced back at the inebriated laughter of all her guests and spotted Phillip surveying her from the distance.  His searing eyes seized onto Watercross, then back onto her.  She held his gaze, waiting and waiting and waiting… testing if he would try to stop her from leaving through the revolving doors, testing if he would try to stop her from leaving with him. 

Phillip stared at her, coolly, impassively, telling her she was free to come and go as she wished.  His pride would never allow him to make a public scene in order to keep her there.  He made no effort to chase after her or assert his feelings or emotions, not even when Eliot Watercross placed his forearm around her waist and guided her towards the doorway. 
No, he would never admit it
.  Not even then was she anything more to Phillip than an expendable guest.

“Thank you, Eliot,” she said, allowing her embittered gaze to confirm Phillip’s worst assumption about her. “I would be happy to accept a ride.”

Eliot nodded and ushered her into the grand revolving door, forcing the inevitability of her decision to leave the gala with the one man who had aimed to ruin everything true and honorable about the night.  

Chapter Fourteen

Phillip Spears aimlessly gazed out of his office window on Monday morning—certain that his life had changed forever.  Seated at his desk, canted towards his unobstructed view of downtown Chicago, he peered out at the ornamental peaks of all the skyscrapers, noting all of the properties he had intentionally purchased to restore to their full historical glory.  They were symbols, not only to his dedication to preserving some of the most influential architecture in Chicago, but also symbols of his success as a self-made man in a foreign land.

             
It all meant nothing in the end
.

His buildings, his reputation, his passion for a city that had been his adopted home for the past twenty years, none of it mattered—
none of it
—unless she chose to walk into the office. 

Phillip settled his gaze onto the statue of Cyrus, the Roman goddess of fertility. 
Faceless
, he thought.  She had been erected atop one of the most iconic buildings in the center of downtown Chicago’s financial district, but sculpted by the artist without a face, just so wealthy egotistical men who observed her from the adjacent skyscrapers could imagine whatever expression they wanted her to possess.

Lecherous men like him
. 

He pitched forward in his swivel chair as a debilitating ache throbbed throughout his chest.  Paralyzed, silent, and barely breathing, he waited for the surge of regret to release its constriction of his heart.

He glanced at his watch. 
Fifteen minutes late
.  He gazed at his office phone. 
She still hadn’t called
. 

He had considered calling her.  Every hour, the impulse swelled in him to dial her home phone number.  But he had resisted every time.  He had already played the role of intruder.  Now, he was forced to accept the role of penitent, forced to accept his punishment—he would have to wait and see if she would choose to come to him.

He cast his eyes onto his office door, bidding it to open.  Over the weekend, he had played out all the possible scenarios in his mind.  Her anger and contempt for him he could handle—would handle—even console, if she would allow him a moment of forgiveness.  Her deliberate absence, on the other hand, he would not be able to endure. 

Open, open, open
…the wait was killing him; the wait and the uncertainty that she would possibly choose to stay away from him—possibly and intentionally.  He pushed the fear from his mind, but anxiety bled into his heart like a seeping sickness, slowly crushing his desperate fantasy of a reconciliation between them. 

He anxiously stood from his chair, stuffing his hands into his pockets.  He had endured many hardships in his life, but not seeing her again, not having the chance to express everything that raged in his heart was more than he could bear.  He shut his eyes and reflected on some of the hardest moments in his life, attempting to summon the inner strength he needed to quell his emotions.  They included the endless struggles as a young man growing up in the poor, industrial town of Jarrow, England: the premature death of his father in a mining accident, the despair of his mother and her inability to provide for him and his younger brother, and his subsequent decision to leave school at the age of fifteen to go work in the mines to earn a living wage for them.  Sometimes, he still felt the invisible, haunting sensation of coal grime under his fingernails, inspiring the recurring memories of his childhood fraught with poverty and despair.  For two long years, he worked underground for eight hours a day, six days a week, with nothing more than the weak glow of his helmet light. 
That’s where he had developed his unnatural affinity for darkness
, he thought, turning down the blinds and reducing the sunlight within his office. 

When the mines closed, he was forced to scrounge for odd jobs at the shipyards, eventually making a name for himself as a rigger for any captain willing to take him onto his schooner.  It was there that he quickly learned what separated leaders from modest men.  Captains were revered not only because they knew more than anyone about their ships, but also because they commanded the fidelity and dedication of their crew.  It was not the high wages or fancy words that turned sailors into mates.  It was their love of the sea and their love of their captain who united them. 

Loyalty and devotion
, he whispered to himself.  And it was that spirit of brotherhood that kept Phillip sailing with the best shipmasters until they encouraged him to go back to school to become the captain of his own schooner.
Couldn’t be a master of men without a proper degree from the Queen
, they all told him.  Had it not been for the captains at the shipyard who were willing to take him under their tutelage, it was a certainty that he would still be stuck in Jarrow—without worth or wage.

Loyalty and devotion. 

Phillip paced around his office like a man caged by his own remorse.  Had he betrayed her loyalty and devotion to him?  Or had he simply attempted to honor her in the only way he knew she would accept him?  He aimlessly gazed down upon the marble chessboard on his desk at the polished figurines.

In the end, she had felt deceived by him.  And to her, that was all that mattered.

Had he merely been a lecher and Isabel his whore, then he could accept her contempt for him.  But had that been his intention?  Perhaps initially—when he first chose to send her the pink roses and initiate their meeting at the Peninsula Hotel, when everything was unknown and uncertain, and his years of yearning and unbearable repression clouded his judgment and overpowered his guilty conscience. 
He could not risk her rejection
.  And so, he invented a way to achieve her consent—at all costs.  And yes, he had deliberately altered his accent like a con artist, perpetuating a myth of himself. 
It was more natural to seduce her behind the myth of her mysterious admirer
, he thought,
than behind the myth of her stern, reserved boss
. 

Her stern, reserved boss
.  Yes, that was equally a myth because there was nothing reserved about the fantasies and desires he had harbored for her every day for the past five years.

And yes, it was true.  He had consciously changed his accent, and in her eyes, that made him guilty of misleading her.  But it was not the first time he had altered his accent to hide the real version of himself.  It had been the same at university.  His attendance at Newcastle had taught him early on how to hide his lower-class roots, learning to manipulate his own speech by suppressing his working class Geordie accent and elevating his cadence to proper Queen’s English.  But
he
never really changed; he simply learned how to become a chameleon, mimicking his classmates and their educated lifestyles and mannerisms. 

Even back then
,
he was a charlatan
. 

Beyond economics and calculus, university taught him how to master the art of impersonating someone else for the sake of gaining respect and prestige.  While at Newcastle, he had learned to discipline every spontaneous gesture of the teenager who had toiled in the mines and shipyards, and in turn, successfully converted himself into a cautious, reserved, educated, and exceedingly insular imposter.  There were no rewards for a slip of the Geordie tongue or an off-color sailor’s remark; there was only awkward judgment and aspersion which only taught him the merits of repressing everything…even the very core of his own soul.  Slowly, every natural mannerism of his body and every inflection of his voice receded from the forefront of his persona, a subservient shadow bowing behind his new identity—the ambitious university graduate from Newcastle who went on to receive a Fulbright scholarship from Harvard Business School, and eventually to make his fortune investing in real estate in America.

The American Dream…
Phillip Spears had lived it without being an American and he never forgot that fact because it still felt like a shameful secret—his grueling life of poverty before America.  After Harvard Business School, there was no reason to embrace anything except his ambition—an ambition that led him to Chicago and into various real estate ventures during the booming years of the hottest real estate market in a century.  Buying properties, flipping properties, over and over again until he was eventually able to purchase his first downtown skyscraper.  After that, everything changed.  His net worth quadrupled, his network of colleagues turned from wealthy to elite, and he was forced to reaffirm—again—the myth of a man who flawlessly belonged among them.  And soon, it became easy to pretend he had never been a man without means because Phillip Spears—the billionaire real estate investor—was truly the only persona that ever seemed to matter. 

Except to her. 

While closely working together as employer and employee, business owner and assistant, Isabel never questioned him about his background or his net worth.  She simply showed up every day, determined to prove her own worth by doing her best job for him.  During the business day, she attended every meeting, accompanied him to inspect real estate leads, and served as his gatekeeper from everyone who wanted his time and attention.  At the end of the day, she was often the last one in the office, reviewing his emails, returning phone calls on his behalf, scheduling his appointments for the following week.  And often on the weekends, at his urging and insistence, she accompanied him to business dinners and fancy galas, and soon, whether either one of them chose to acknowledge it or not, it became almost impossible to maintain a perfect separation between their personal and business lives. 

And slowly, she saw through him. 
He felt certain of it
. 
She had been the only person who had sensed there was more to him than he ever cared to admit.  She was the only one who noticed that he preferred a simple beer over a four-hundred-dollar bottle of wine; how he often used the wrong forks during the wrong times while dining at the most prestigious five-star restaurants; and how he rarely swore—not because he didn’t have it in him, but because it made him uncomfortable when his loss of control made his English accent cruder in a way that seemed curiously different.  And he felt certain that she had sensed how he was smothering himself with his own protective pride.  But an unspoken understanding had grown between them.  Beyond their guarded glances and business banter, he knew she respected his privacy, and in turn, he had grown accustomed to revealing that he was a man of self-worth beyond his net worth through private moments—moments while sitting together in his office, dancing together at a gala, or traveling together in his car.  He knew there had been moments when he captured her curiosity and inspired her long inquisitive glances, especially when he betrayed his appreciation, fueling the undercurrent of unity between them—an intense connection that neither of them was willing to name except through silent glances of allegiance.

Her loyalty and devotion to him
—it was the only authentic relationship he had left in his life, and now, he could not bear the thought of being forced to surrender it.  Especially forced to surrender it by her deliberate absence.

He stared at his office door.
  Open, open, open…

He pressed the intercom button on his phone’s handset.

“Lucy, has Isabel arrived yet?”

“No…still not yet, Mr. Spears.”

He cut off the line.  It had been the third time he had checked in with Lucy this morning.  He was growing impatient—and desperate.

Without warning, his office door flung open.

Norton stopped short inside the doorway. “Good Lord, Phillip… please try not to look so exquisitely disappointed to see me.”

Phillip rubbed his face and exhaled the pain in his chest.  He turned away and fumed while peering out across the cityscape, a preoccupation intended to hide his anxiety.  “No, it’s not you, Norton.  I assure you.”  His voice was flat and unconvincing.

Norton advanced into his office without an invitation and followed the dull swath of light seeping through the blinds and encaging the floor with prison bars. “Well, I’ve come to congratulate you.  The gala was an impressive success.”

Phillip nodded, but his mind was clearly elsewhere. 
Yes, it was true
.  He had gotten everything he wanted out of the gala.  Everything except the most important thing to him—
that, he had lost
. 

“You’re waiting for her, I presume.”

Phillip glanced up at Norton who removed his shoes and leisurely reclined across the couch.  As an actuary, Norton was brilliant at assessing business risk.  But as a man of eighty-eight years who had fought in a World War and buried not only a beloved wife but also an adult daughter stricken with cancer, Norton had endured the joys and sorrows of life in a way that made him perceptive beyond compare.  Phillip had forgotten how good his longtime friend was at reading people—and their private emotions.

“I presume you saw the slap,” Phillip replied.

“Many of us saw the slap.” Norton repeated, stretching his long frail legs out across the sofa like he was relaxing within the comfort of his own living room.  “It was hard to miss, and yes…I had an enchanting view of it from the front of the flaming fondue tower.” Amused, he scanned Phillip’s cheek.  “I’m surprised she didn’t leave a mark.”