The Scandalous Billionaires Collection (56 page)

His concern was sweet but also intense. Bella
wanted to feel relieved but the truth was that even he couldn't
protect her from her own past, her own deeds and stupid
mistakes.

And why did he always have to take control as
though she were a lost little child?

"You don't need to know. I'm a big girl and I
can take care of myself."

"It's not that simple Bella, there are board
members, shareholders and other stakeholders in Demovic who now
have an interest in your well being. If
you
have a problem,
then
we
have a problem too."

"Board members? This is about shareholders
and board members? I thought it was me you were worried about?"

"I am worried about you but there are other
concerns as well. You chose to be involved with this family which
leads to consequences that you may not have been aware of
initially. That's not your fault, but that's not the issue. The
point is that you need to accept those consequences now and loss of
privacy is one definitely high on the list."

Bella was terrified and incensed.

"I didn’t choose anything here. All I did was
accept an invitation to go and meet with the family my best friends
are marrying into. I certainly didn't anticipate being swept off my
feet by a complete stranger."

There was a moment of silence.

"I remember kissing you alright. Did I sweep
you off your feet as well?"

"That was a bad choice of words. You didn't
sweep me off my feet, it just felt like that."

"Well I'm glad it was good for you too."

"Stop it Mr. Demovic."

"You always revert back to the 1950s when you
get embarrassed don't you. Suddenly I'm Mr. Demovic again."

"I'm not embarrassed,
Harrison
, I'm
just getting tired of all this."

"Thanks for at least calling me Harrison, I
feel younger already. Invigorated even."

This was going nowhere and it could never,
ever go anywhere.

Bella decided that she needed to end it now,
fast, before things were set in motion that they would all regret.
She had never felt so strangely attracted to a man she hardly knew
before and she knew it had to end before she inevitably began lying
to herself that somehow it could possibly work between them.

"I'm hanging up now Mr. Demovic. You have no
right to stick your nose into my private affairs and besides, there
is
no problem. I knew you would be calling, Suzy warned me
and she told me that she had given you my number." She thought
fast. "People like you just can't take no for an answer. I'm sure
it must be driving you mad that you came onto me in your big fancy
home and the little poor girl dared to turn you down. Well here's a
newsflash; not everyone is quite so crazy to get into bed with you
as you might think."

"Getting into bed with you wasn't on my mind
before Bella, but it sure as hell is now."

The huskily spoken words stopped her
momentarily in her tracks, her thoughts thrown wildly off
course.

"I don’t know who you think you are." She
finally spluttered. "But you seem to think you own everything and
everyone around you. Well I can assure you that you don’t own me
and you never will. Goodbye Mr. Demovic."

There was a silence. It was her cue to put
the phone down. It would take a moment, just the touch of her
fingertip to the end call button and that would be it; the
alternate reality where they went on an extravagantly romantic date
together and then he whisked her away to his private island and
then they got married and had lots of beautiful little kids
together…

Oh my God Bella Wilson, just stop it
now.

It would all end with the silent swipe of a
smart phone button and with it the other part as well where all of
her friends and all of his family learned about her prison record
and the stupid mistakes she had made as a teenager. There would be
no public and general humiliation, she would keep her job with the
temping agency and maybe, just maybe she would be able to hold on
to her precious, hard won, ordinary little world just the way it
was.

She raised her thumb over the button and
inhaled deeply.

"I know all about you." Harrison's deep voice
intoned through the phone lines. "Bella, it’s okay. There's no need
to be afraid."

Her thumb froze, numb with shock and
fear.

Of course it wasn’t that simple. What had
that powerful looking woman said at the party?
Mark my words, it
never pays to keep secrets from a Demovic boy.

"Bella, if you're thinking of hanging up then
you are about to make the worst decision of your life."

She waited, her breath shaking in her throat.
Since she had left the penitentiary four years ago she hadn't seen
a single person from her old life or spoken a word to anyone. She
had had to lie in order to get every job she had held since then
due to the giant hole in her resume where her time in prison should
have been listed. Melissa had been like a big sister to her and
Suzy like a kid sister. Those two wonderful women had immediately
accepted her into their world and helped her to start a new life in
New York City, far away from all the people who knew who she was
and what she had done.

Now that was all coming an end because of
this obsessive, controlling, insanely determined billionaire who
needed to do a background check on anyone who set foot in his
precious family home.

"You're still there so I'll take it that
you've made your decision already and that it's the right one.
Trust me, Bella, you didn’t need to keep this a secret from me or
from anyone else. You don't know me, you don’t know us, but if
you'll give me a chance then you might be surprised at what you'll
find out."

Her body strained with a visceral desire to
throw the phone across the room. She felt her abdomen tighten, her
grip tighten, vice-like around the phone and her breath became
labored.

"Do I have a choice?" She said.

"Everything is a choice Bella, you don’t need
me to tell you that. My car will pick you up at 8pm tomorrow. If
you accept the invitation I'll be honored. If my car arrives
without you in it then I'll take that as your final answer."

The weird, lopsided feeling of not-quite déjà
vu was profoundly disorienting; Zach had pursued Suzy and Bella
hadn't been able to understand why her friend had been running away
from such a gorgeous man to begin with. Now here she was in the
same crazy, upside-down situation with the single sexiest guy she
had ever laid eyes on blackmailing her into a date and promising to
erase her deepest held fears in the blink of an eye.

If anyone can do it surely Harrison
Demovic…
She stopped the thought dead in its tracks. This was
exactly what she had to guard against; convincing herself that
anything was possible between them.

Still she couldn't say no.

Stall Bella, stall.

"So I have until tomorrow?" Her voice was
shaking.

"To decide if you want to go on a date with
me." He made it sound like the simplest, most innocent thing in the
world. "That's right. There's nothing else going on here Bella.
Just a date between a guy and a girl, a man and a woman; two
consenting adults. I like you, I'm attracted to you and I want to
get to know you. That's all. No big deal."

Consenting adults? Consenting to what
exactly?

Harrison sounded calm. He almost always did
and particularly when he was about to destroy a business competitor
or gain a huge, long sought after victory. It was the calm of
someone watching another person's destiny play out according to his
plan. He listened to the young woman's breath and gauged her level
of agitation. Was she ready? Would she accept? He knew she wanted
to run like hell but she was going to say yes anyway; he could feel
it and he was intensely excited. The hunter in him knew when the
prey was ready to surrender and this particular pursuit was as good
as over. He hadn't looked forward to a conquest so much since he
could remember. In fact, it was entirely possible that he hadn't
ever had something quite like this before. There was something
unique here, something terrifyingly different. Harrison Demovic
blackmailing a girl into dating him? Was this for real? The thought
was disturbing and exciting but part of him knew it was the right
thing to do. Bella was afraid of her past and he was an expert in
making the past disappear. When she eventually realized that, then
her incredible gratitude and relief would transform into the most
incredible night of bed shaking sex of his entire life.

God this was going to be good.

"Okay Mr. Demovic, you'll know by tomorrow.
Good night."

The call ended and he stared at the phone in
disbelief. No-one, but no-one in the vast world under his control
ever dared to hang up on him like that, not even his two older
brothers.

A slow smile formed across his handsome face
as he thought about how sweet and salacious his final 'revenge'
would be on this girl who showed him so little respect.

He was going to bone her within a hair of the
edge of her life.

The truth was however, that it had nothing to
do with disrespect at all; Bella had just so desperately needed to
get off the phone with him that she had entirely forgotten to say
goodbye. If she had known how shocking it was for the billionaire
she would never have dared. She would have called him back to
apologize and ended the call all over again, this time with decorum
and politeness.

As it was she was so distraught that she sank
back into her threadbare couch without a thought for Harrison
Demovic and waited for her heart to slow down and her breath to
even out. She looked at her watch. She had twenty-four hours to
make her decision.

Twenty-four hours to be with her friends for
the last time.

Twenty-four hours to get out of town.

It was the only solution; there was no other
way.

She lay down painfully onto her side and
sobbed quietly into the night.

Hours later the messages on Bella's phone were
accumulating. She presumed that Harrison had been a complete
bastard and told both Suzy and Melissa that she had agreed to go on
a date with him and now they were pestering her with calls to offer
to help, lend clothes, do a damn makeover or whatever else they
could think of to make it a night to remember.

It was either that, or he had told them the
date was in doubt and they were calling to make her change her mind
and say yes to Prince Charming.

Is it so God damn important for me to go on
a date with this guy?

Eventually she gave in and began listening.
Sure enough her friends wanted her to have a makeover party for her
big date. Harrison the manipulator was pulling out all the stops.
Clearly he was a man who wasn't afraid to bend the rules when it
came to getting something he wanted.

Then the messages began to become concerned;
why wasn't she picking up? Was she okay? Please call back.

Then there was the inevitable; what has he
done to you?

The concern of her friends was only adding to
the pressure. At the back of her mind, gnawing away at her, was the
menacing call from a man she didn't recognize threatening to ruin
her life with the truth. In the intervening hours she had managed
to convince herself that maybe it had just been a crank call and
that maybe there was nothing to worry about after all. Harrison
claimed he didn’t care about her past and when she played their
conversation back in her mind he hadn't gone into any detail about
what it was exactly he knew about her. In fact, he hadn't mentioned
anything about her prison record at all. It was possible that he
hadn't been talking about that at all; he could as easily have been
referring to the fact that she was just an ordinary girl from a
poor background who did temping work while he was a super rich
member of the elite and about ten leagues above her in the singles
dating game.

Could that be? If she ran away now then it
could be the biggest mistake of her life.

She spent the rest of the day avoiding her
friends and then in the evening decided to get dressed up as though
she would attend the date. At the same time she also packed two
small suitcases with just her most personal and essential
belongings. Although she still hadn't made up her mind what to do,
even the act of preparing to leave was heartbreaking and unreal.
She had spent the last four years in living happily, anonymously in
New York City and didn't need for anything to change. The bad
memories of her childhood and of all the times she and her mother
had moved together, running away from her mother's past, were still
painful. Now it looked like history would repeat itself only this
time the broken life and the secrets were all hers.

She wiped a tear away as she tightened a belt
around the larger of the two bags. It didn't matter. None of it
did. All that mattered was to protect her friends from anyone who
tried to harm them or the Demovic family. Their joint wedding day
was in just a few days time and she didn't want there to be any
scandal to mar the day. Whoever it was who had called her the night
before still hadn't revealed the short term engagement of Suzy and
Zach to the press, but it was surely only a matter of time.

She looked at the one small picture she had
of her mother, taken before all of their problems had begun. It was
the one picture where they both looked young and happy, without a
trace of all the pain that was to follow in the years to come.

She wiped away more tears.

Screw you Harrison Demovic. What do you know
about life? What do you know about the decisions ordinary people
have to make? All you've ever known is wealth and privilege.

Her phone rang and when she glanced at the
number her stomach twisted into a now familiar knot of anxiety. It
was a cell phone and not one she knew. She picked up and
waited.