Boss With Benefits (Billion-Dollar Bet, #2)

CHAPTER TWELVE

T HE NIGHT ON the beach was something of a turning point as far as Ella was concerned. She had no idea why Adam had chosen to suddenly lower his guard after days of keeping it firmly in place, but she didn’t much care. All that mattered was that this affair of theirs was now about as different to her last relationship as it was possible to get. There was balance. There was mutual respect and developing trust. There was also fun, because quite apart from the physical pleasure Adam continued to give her, he was also proving a most excellent host.

One afternoon he took her back up in the plane and patiently answered her many questions about the shipwreck, the islands, the resorts and the structure of a blue hole.

Another they went snorkelling, which was something she’d never tried before, European city breaks not really lending themselves to the activity. As impressive as the Caribbean was from the air, from beneath it was breathtaking. Just when she thought she saw the most beautiful creature on earth, along came another. Shoal after shoal of brightly coloured fish darted through coral the colour of amethyst, emerald, amber. A ray glided gracefully by not six feet away from her. One turtle that hung around for a while was half her size.

The following morning, Adam put her into one of the single sculls he kept in the boathouse, fitted himself into the other, and tried to teach her to row. Scything through the crystal-clear water, his upper body muscles rippling with every stroke he took, he made it look effortless.

It wasn’t.

‘Do you do this a lot?’ she said, frustratingly unable to find any sort of co-ordination.

He rested his arms on his up-bent knees and watched as she went round and round in circles. ‘I used to back in the UK. Now I have a machine in my apartment.’

‘Handy.’

‘In more ways than one.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Lately, it’s borne the brunt of my extreme sexual frustration. I must have rowed the length of the Mississippi since I met you. The morning after we first kissed, I completed ten thousand metres in thirty-nine minutes and twenty-four seconds. It was a personal best.’

Thirty-nine minutes and twenty-four seconds of bunching muscles and bronzed glistening skin? she thought, gritting her teeth as she accidentally loosened her grip on the oar and down went the blade. That, she’d liked to have seen.

‘You just caught a crab. You won’t make any progress if you don’t concentrate.’

‘Then you should put on a shirt.’

He just grinned, dazzlingly, at which point she promptly fell in. While she dashed water from her eyes, he paddled over. In revenge, she wobbled his scull until he toppled in too, a move she paid for with a long, hot kiss that had them dragging the boats up onto the sand, then rushing into the boathouse and tumbling onto a pile of tarpaulin.

Happily, conversation was no longer a one-way street, in either direction. There seemed to be nothing he didn’t want to share with her. It was as if he’d kept everything bottled up for years, and now that he’d popped the cork he had no intention of sticking it back in. He told her more about his ancestry and his sister, with whom he was hoping for a better relationship. He detailed all the challenges he’d faced after taking over from his father, which sounded as though they’d been equally as tough careerwise as anything she’d undergone.

Because it was clearly a difficult subject for him, she didn’t press him on his mother’s death and the role he perceived he had in it, at least not initially. However, she became increasingly troubled not only by the thought that he blamed himself but also by the fact that he believed reacquiring Montague’s would absolve him of his guilt.

She wasn’t quite sure why she felt this way. She realised it wasn’t up to her to persuade him to see the situation in any way other than his, yet she was filled with the urge to try, because for some reason it just didn’t feel right. But how could she broach the subject? It wasn’t something she could just drop into conversation, and it was the one topic he hadn’t brought it up again.

The opportunity to do so arose the evening after the morning they’d spent rowing, when Adam took her by motorboat to a long curving beach on the northwest side of the island.

The sun had recently set and the darkening sky was streaked with orange, pink and red. As he switched off the engine and they glided through the shallows and onto the sand, she could see that a table had been set up beneath the spreading branches of what he had informed her as he’d driven her around the island a couple of days ago was a fofoti tree. It was draped with a white cloth, and on it were laid two places facing out to sea, complete with what she later discovered to be bone china crockery, polished silver cutlery and sparkling crystal glassware.

All around flickered dozens of candles and fairy lights wound through the branches above. To one side was a firepit in which bright flames danced. Two rows of tiki torches lined a path from the landing point to the table, and as he alighted to pull the boat farther up the shore, she thought that she’d never seen anything like it before. It was the sort of scene that sold holidays. It was the definition of paradise.

It was also extremely romantic, which meant she ought to be clambering back onboard and demanding he speed her back to the villa as fast as he possibly could, because what exactly was going on here? She wasn’t remotely interested in romance. She’d always avoided it like the plague because raised hopes and false expectations would do no one any good.

But instead, her heart was racing, her throat was tight and she was thinking that, whatever the reason for this intimate dinner à deux, would it really be such a bad idea to enjoy it? She’d never been wined and dined by a gorgeous man who repeatedly rocked her world. She’d never been wined and dined at all. And how many hopes and false expectations could be raised in a paltry couple of hours when neither of them wanted anything more? None. So when Adam raised his arms to lift her off the boat, she willingly went into them.

‘This must have taken a lot of effort to organise,’ she said, her heart beating a little faster than normal once they’d walked between the torches and sat down at the table.

He reached into a cool box and extracted the ingredients for two pi?a coladas. ‘Not particularly,’ he said, mixing the drinks with impressive skill. ‘We’ve exhausted the sights here, and I thought that since I couldn’t take you to Aruba for fear of discovery, I’d transport Aruba to you.’

Determined to keep a lid on the wild tangle of emotions swirling through her, Ella swallowed hard and sought to keep things light. ‘Is this how you seduce all the women you bring here? Because you needn’t have bothered, you know. That horse has bolted.’

‘I’ve never brought anyone here.’

She shot him a smile. ‘Not even one of your many, many dates?’

He raised one dark eyebrow in her direction and handed her a glass. ‘You read the article.’

‘Along with half the female population of the country, it would seem.’ She took a sip of her drink through the straw, the delicious flavours of rum, pineapple and coconut exploding on her tongue. ‘I can see why you were concerned about the effect of all that gossip on your reputation and why you were so keen to stop it.’

‘I couldn’t take the risk of it upsetting the holders of the Helberg shares that I’ll still need to acquire after taking Zane’s and Cade’s on Labor Day.’

This was the opening she’d been waiting for, she realised with a skip of her pulse. The chance to offer him a different version of events, perhaps. ‘I know you’re convinced that you’ll win it,’ she said, ‘but what if reclaiming Montague’s doesn’t give you the absolution you’re after?’

‘It will,’ he said, without even a second’s hesitation. ‘It has to. I’ve lived with the guilt of being responsible for my mother’s suicide for fourteen years. It’s crushing. It’s stopping me from pursuing a relationship with Charley. This is my one shot at redemption. I’ll never get another.’

‘I’m not sure you even need it.’

Momentarily stunned into speechlessness, Adam set down his drink and stared at her as if she’d sprouted horns. ‘Of course I need it. You even know why.’

‘I think you’re wrong,’ she said, more certain of it than ever. ‘I don’t think you’re responsible for anything at all. Obviously, no one knows the workings of your mother’s mind at the time, but you said yourself that she was fragile. If she went to Northumberland straight after having Charley and left her behind in London, it’s possible she may even have had postnatal depression.’

He sat back, his expression unreadable. ‘What makes you the expert?’

Ella ignored the note of warning that tinged his voice because she was on a roll. ‘Clearly, I’m not,’ she said, wishing he’d give her a chance at least. ‘Especially when it comes to maternal instincts. But that doesn’t sound like normal behaviour. It sounds as though her marriage made her miserable right from the start. Do you know if she’d tried it before?’

‘No.’

‘So she might have done. She might also have called a dozen people before you who didn’t pick up either. And even if you had saved her that time, she might have succeeded another. If what happened to her is anyone’s fault, it’s your father’s. I really don’t believe it’s yours.’

‘Well, I do.’

‘I think it would help if you tried to let the guilt go.’

‘I think we should agree to disagree and talk about something else.’

Adam got up to prod the fire, and the conversation did indeed turn to something else, because even she could see that she was banging her head against a brick wall. But it stayed with her nevertheless. Even though she thought him deluded, he was clearly tormented by what he believed to be the truth, and her heart continued to break for him. Whenever she remembered all he was doing to assuage his conscience, she couldn’t help but worry. If only he’d take on board her points. But this was evidently a red line for him, and there was nothing more she could do.

It hadn’t escaped her notice that since the night he’d decided to open up to her, she too had been experiencing a new dimension to their affair. Whenever she had a moment to herself, she kept replaying the intimacy of what had happened in the hammock after he’d finished talking. The minute she’d turned on her side and he’d wrapped himself around her, she hadn’t just felt wanted. She’d also felt safe and protected, which was unexpected, because she was used to providing her own safety and protection. Even more bizarrely, she hadn’t wanted to shake him and the feelings off. She’d wanted to pull him and them closer. Then, as they’d rocked together, slowly, steadily, her heart had swelled until it seemed too big for her chest.

But this didn’t unduly trouble her. Nor did her growing fascination with him or the connection that was developing. However great this affair was turning out to be, she wasn’t remotely concerned that she wouldn’t be able to walk away from at the end of it. Her promotion still flashed as bright and shiny as ever. Her career was still her number one priority. This was still just a celebration of her promotion and a bit of fun until real life called. And that was the way it would stay.

To Adam’s gratification, opening up to Ella had been a truly excellent idea. She was no longer holding anything back. The tension had gone. The sex was even better than before. Their goals were once more realigned, the equilibrium restored, and it was all deeply satisfying.

They shared the values of hard work, determination and integrity. Right from the start, she’d kept him on his toes. And she seemed to get him—their difference of opinion about his role in his mother’s death notwithstanding, because he would never agree that he wasn’t at fault for that. His mother might have been suffering from depression. She might have called someone else that night who hadn’t picked up either. She might have tried it before and maybe she would have tried again, even if he had saved her. He’d never know. All he had to go on were the facts, so he could never just ‘let the guilt go’ as Ella had suggested.

They even had the same approach to relationships, as he discovered over a platter of lobster at lunch one day.

Having once done a course on dining etiquette which had covered crustacea in week three, Ella picked up a claw and carefully bent back the thumb to pull out the cartilage before cracking the shell and neatly extracting the flesh. He, on the other hand, simply twisted the body from the head and then bashed it with a hammer.

‘That’s what I’d quite like to do to my ex,’ she mused as the shell shattered and he pulled it apart.

‘So would I.’

‘But then I only have myself to blame.’

‘How?’

‘It was my fault for reading more into the relationship than there was there. I completely forgot my rule to keep things casual.’

‘Are you not a fan of commitment?’ he asked, now applying the hammer to the claw in a move that would no doubt appal her course instructor.

‘I’ve fought too hard for my independence to let myself rely on someone else, and I’ve worked way too hard to sacrifice everything I’ve achieved for the demands of a husband and kids. I have a plan to reach the top, and I won’t let anything get in the way of that ever again. Not even myself.’

‘That makes sense.’

‘What’s your excuse?’

Adam swapped the hammer for a fork and thought he couldn’t even begin to answer a question like that. How could he tell her that he was a control freak with a fear of his world disintegrating if he relaxed his iron grip on it? How could he explain that rampant desire and volatile emotions threatened that control, so it was easier and safer to steer well clear? He’d have to explain why he’d made an exception for her, and he definitely couldn’t answer that, because he didn’t know why.

‘I just don’t have the time,’ he said instead with a nonchalant shrug. ‘I have too many responsibilities as it is. There aren’t enough hours in the day to maintain a relationship as well.’

That seemed to satisfy her, judging by the thoughtful tilt of her head and then the nod. ‘Well, it’s good to know that our expectations are the same.’

‘It certainly is.’

The more time he spent in her company, the more he came to realise that he didn’t just enjoy the sizzling chemistry that showed no sign of burning out—he liked her. A lot. He admired her willingness to give everything a go and then put one hundred percent effort into it. He could listen to her talk about herself for hours. He’d never thought of auditing as a particularly exciting field, but she did. Her face lit up when she expanded on the subject, and so suddenly and unexpectedly, he found it fascinating too. When she told him more about the trailer park, he wondered what his company did to help the disadvantaged in life and whether it could do more.

Their affair was soon coming to an end, and that had always been the plan. But now he couldn’t quite recall why. It felt wrong. He wasn’t nearly done with her. She wasn’t out of his system at all. His desire for her had not waned, and although their conversations had sometimes lasted long into the night, he was certain there was still much left to learn.

So, why couldn’t they continue this back in New York? Not forever, of course, but perhaps until it petered out of its own accord. Night after night, he lost control with her and the world hadn’t imploded. Indulging the still raging desire he had for her had led to no recklessness here, and he saw no reason why it should anywhere else. He didn’t know what he’d been so afraid of. They had a good thing going, and it felt wrong to bring it to an unnatural close.

As he stood in the kitchen and fried up some plantain for breakfast, Adam wondered what Ella would think of that plan. If he’d read the situation correctly, he suspected her expectations might have moved in that direction too. Every now and then, he’d caught her looking at him in a way that suggested that she wasn’t done with him either. He would ask her and find out. Once he’d answered this call.

In the back pocket of his shorts, his phone rang and vibrated. He turned off the gas and pulled it out. It was Maggie, his secretary, on the other end of the line, who he hadn’t heard from since he’d left the city, other than receiving an email about some upcoming travel plans that he’d yet to open. Strange how all that seemed very far away.

‘Good morning,’ he said, and thinking that if Ella agreed to extend this affair of theirs, it could turn out to be a very good morning indeed.

‘I apologise for disturbing you while you’re on vacation,’ said Maggie, sounding not quite as thrilled with the day as he was. ‘And I hope you’re having a lovely time. But I thought you’d like to know that I’ve been sent a photo by one of my contacts at Blush magazine. Of you and a woman who is not Annabel St James disembarking the plane in Aruba. It’s due to go live on the website in an hour.’

Because his thoughts had been so wrapped up in other things, it took Adam a moment to process the information. Once he had, he went very still. His pulse spiked and his blood ran cold. White noise rushed through his head and his stomach heaved.

‘Send it to me,’ he said, his voice sounding to him as though it came from deep under water.

‘I just have.’

Numbly he switched apps and opened up the picture. He and Ella were walking down the steps of the plane. They weren’t touching. They weren’t even looking at each other. But something about it nevertheless suggested intimacy. They were far too close to each other for him to ever be able to pass it off as anything professional. And there was no mistaking it was them. The focus was that sharp.

As the implications of what he was looking at sank in, an icy sweat coated his skin. His breath stuck in his lungs. He felt sick. Dizzy. As though he were about to pass out. With superhuman effort, he forced himself to exhale and get a grip. ‘Put a stop to it.’

‘It’ll be pricey.’

‘Whatever it takes.’

‘Consider it done.’

He cut the call and put the phone down, and it was then that the numbness vanished and all hell let loose. His vision blurred and his heart crashed wildly against his ribs. The strength drained from his limbs, and he had to sit down before he collapsed. All he could think was that if this photo had appeared in the public domain and caught the eye of Cade and Zane he’d have lost Helberg in an instant. Montague’s would have been gone. Redemption would have been history. Everything he’d been working so hard for recently, over.

How the hell could he have let it happen?

How could he have lost control of the situation so badly?

Because he’d been overwhelmed by chemistry so powerful he hadn’t been able to resist its allure, that was how. Because he’d been arrogant and reckless in assuming he could have both Helberg and Ella. Because somehow he’d managed to forget that from the moment they’d met, the second their eyes had met in that bar, she’d repeatedly had him throwing caution to the wind.

At what point had he completely lost his mind?

What the hell had he been thinking ?

This affair should never have happened, he thought, his breathing harsh and choppy. He should never have succumbed to temptation. Fourteen years ago, in the aftermath of his mother’s death, he’d sworn to avoid the kind of desire that wreaked destruction and ruined lives, and he’d stuck by it. But he’d broken those rules, and bent many more for the sake of a fling with a woman who he’d even recognised was dangerous.

And as for extending it, was he mad? How would that even have worked? How had he thought they’d be able to continue seeing each other under the radar in a city of twenty million? Labor Day was still three weeks away. They’d have eventually been caught by someone . Blush magazine would have had a field day. To the world at large, he’d have cheated on Annabel and his reputation would have taken a huge hit, which would have displeased both his board members and the Helberg shareholders. And it wasn’t as if he could have simply fixed up a three-way meeting between Annabel, Cade and Zane to clarify the situation. They’d never have let him get away with it, even if they had believed him.

The truth was, since he and Ella had arrived on this island, he’d barely given the bet a second thought. He’d barely given anything a second thought. His laptop had been gathering dust. He’d let numerous calls go to voicemail. For the first time ever, he’d put the executive team he’d created in charge, and he hadn’t even wondered whether they were doing a good job of running the company in his absence. He’d been wholly wrapped up in Ella, in some sort of a make-believe bubble with her, so far from reality that they might as well be on another planet.

Well, that bubble had burst. Reality had stormed in like a horseman of the apocalypse, and here was the chaos he’d feared. He’d put a stop to this particular photo, but he couldn’t risk another. He’d had a very close shave, and he wouldn’t put in jeopardy everything he was trying to achieve again.

When he thought of Montague’s in the hands of Zane or Cade, his heart practically stopped. If that happened, he’d never get justice. He’d be carrying the guilt he felt over his mother’s death for the rest of his life. His sister would remain at a distance forever, and he simply couldn’t allow it.

So forget how much he liked Ella. Forget the incredible sex and the appreciation he had for their conversations. She turned him into the man he’d fought hard to erase, the man he didn’t wish—and could not—afford to be. She had to go, and she had to go for good.