To Trust A Billionaire (The Billionaire's Baby Series, #4), page 1
To Trust A Billionaire (The Billionaire’s Baby Series, #4)
Ava Claire
Copyright © 2016
Cover by RBA Designs
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The Billionaire’s Baby Series
To Want A Billionaire, #1
To Need A Billionaire, #2
To Crave A Billionaire, #3
To Trust A Billionaire, #4
To Love A Billionaire, #5
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E-book License Edition Notes
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to an online retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
Table of Contents
Copyright Page
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
The Billionaire’s Baby Series
About the Author
Chapter Eighteen
“You would have been proud. I hear he put up quite the fight.”
Jacob.
They had Jacob.
My mind should have flown to that dark, familiar place.
The night I was taken.
I knew what it was like to be snatched away. To put up a fight and realize quickly that the game was rigged...and you didn’t stand a chance.
I should have gone back to a place filled with unsettling memories of my world going blurry. The out of body experience that hit me like a bullet to the chest because my limbs were no longer responding to my commands. Panicking as the very act of breathing became an Olympic level feat.
The pieces of the puzzle had scattered that night as I tried to grasp the fact that something was wrong. When I realized that the strange blonde server that had followed me into the bathroom that night wasn’t what she seemed. That she wasn’t going to help me, because she was the reason I was collapsing in the first place.
It would have been natural to be dragged back to the night that took away my peace of my mind. The night where I learned that freedom wasn’t guaranteed. How important it was to live each moment like it was your last, because all it took was an enterprising lunatic to turn everything upside down.
Instead, I was left trembling in Sophia’s, clutching the phone to my ear like Angelique’s next words would be, ‘Just kidding!’ or some equivalent. Her silence was my answer, my confirmation that this was real. That my husband had been kidnapped...and I knew Jacob well enough to know that they’d have to beat him half to death before they could make him bend to their will.
Once my mind wrapped around this brutal new reality, I didn’t relive my own kidnapping, choking on the dread that was lodged in my throat. Wondering what they had him bound with. What weapons they were threatening him with.
My mind flew to one of the best days of my life.
The day I met Jacob Whitmore.
I relived the moments, still getting my bearings, still trying to accept the fact that I was in the Whitmore building in the first place, headed to an interview for my dream job. I’d second guessed myself for a minute, lost in a sea of people who looked just as glamorous and formidable as they did on the TV screen, then put all that aside and raised my chin.
Before I could march towards the elevator like I belonged there too, like the job was in the bag, some suit clad man nearly knocked me to the ground. I’d hurled a snide remark at his muscled back, not expecting him to stop.
He’d not only stopped, but did one better and turned around—and I came face to face with billionaire Jacob Whitmore.
His blue eyes had come alive, sparkling with some indignation that I dared to take that tone with him...and something else that made my stomach flutter: curiosity. Like something inside him connected with something inside me and whispered, “Pay attention...this moment will change your life forever.”
And now...
My throat closed, panic wrapping around my vocal chords and squeezing until tears sprang to my eyes.
I faced Alicia, blinking rapidly because I’d almost forgotten about her altogether. From the way her lips were moving, the volume lost somewhere in my breakdown, she hadn’t forgotten about me.
My nostrils flared as I gave my head a shake, trying to dislodge the images that cut through my mind.
Jacob, staring deeply into me, eyes flickering with lust as his lips curled into a smirk...a smirk that was ripped from his face as some unknown fist sailed towards his jaw.
“An important call, eh?” Alicia leaned in, her stormy eyes narrowing with thinly veiled annoyance that I’d be so rude as to answer the phone during our impromptu lunch date.
I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t tear myself away from the horrific images that were now seared onto my brain. My heart dropped as I imagined his blue eyes swollen shut. Watched the blossoming of red as blood vessels exploded from the onslaught of the blows.
“Jacob...” I croaked, a sob clawing its way through the zen music that taunted me, like Angelique Entoine hadn’t just dropped a nuke that obliterated everything. Wooden flutes and the dribble of water across smooth rocks didn’t belong in this nightmare.
“Jacob?” Alicia parroted back, picking up her mug.
I frowned, watching her move in slow motion. When had the waitress brought over drinks?
How was the world still turning while my husband was...
Was...
Alicia pursed her lips and took a sip that made me want to slap the mug right out of her hands. “I’m sure he’s annoyed that I’m in his general vicinity,” she huffed. “Please inform my son that I will get his wife and child back to him-”
“Jacob was taken, Alicia!” I shrieked. I almost yanked my hands to my ears because I heard my shrill voice echoing over and over again. It was a brutal crescendo that everyone in the building heard based on the way everything around us fell silent. “One of my clients...” I couldn’t even say Angelique’s name without gagging, so I just skipped to the point. “They’re holding him at your house!” The name that I’d been trying desperately to ignore, the person that I refused to allow to keep me shackled in fear, did just that.
My next sentence came out in tortured bits and pieces.
“Eichmann...has...Jacob.”
I expected Alicia to leap from her chair, her usual composed exterior splintering into a million pieces. I expected questions, sputtering from her lips like the broken teeth Jacob was probably losing as we sat here in this stupid cafe.
I got nothing.
No blinking.
No heat rushing to her cheeks.
No toppling of furniture or ruining of her perfectly assembled outfit.
No questions.
Nothing.
~
“Fuck this!” I spat, lugging myself to my feet. I booked it out the door like a woman possessed. I ignored the annoyed leers from the other patrons in Sophia’s. I really didn’t care that we were still waiting for our perfectly curated meal from the perfectly hipster cafe.
I spilled onto the sidewalk, disturbing the flow of traffic and garnering a few choice words from my fellow pedestrians. I would have been just as annoyed if someone shoved past me, wide eyed and shrieking for a taxi, but I still gave as good as I got. Most of them dropped their snarl when they saw me, or peeped my belly, and the others just scurried in the opposite direction like I was a madwoman.
“TAXI!” I hollered, my shrill plea filling my ears. The frantic key tore my vocal chords in two. It didn’t compare to the thunder of my heart. The terrifying pulse was like my heart had been ripped from my chest and held against my ears. A living, throbbing personification that things had officially gone from bad to ‘Holy shit’.
Angelique was Eichmann’s daughter...and they had Jacob.
Tiny, irrelevant facts zipped in and out of my head as I started flailing, still trying to hail a cab. It wasn’t lost on me that any other time of day, the abundance of taxis seemed to be staggering, yellow lined up and zipping past, as much a part of the city as the concrete and glass. Today, everyone, taxis and people, passed right over the sobbing, pregnant woman like they had places to go and couldn’t be bothered.
“T-Taxi!” The fact that yellow kept streaking past me just made me flail and cry even harder.
“Miss?”
“TAXI!” I screeched at the top of my lungs and waved my hand wildly up and down, slicing the air like a blade.
Like the blade that could be slicing through Jacob.
I almost threw up a middle finger when a cab slowed, the driver gave me a once over, then he gunned it, leaving me in his dust.
“TA-”
“MISS!”
There was something in the word that matched the urgency of my ignored pleas for someone, anyone, to help me.
My follow up screech stalled on my tongue.
I whipped my head to the right, sure that if I saw a camera, a scowl, or anything unhelpful, I would truly snap, fallout be damned. Instead, I came face-to-face with a woman with the kindest brown eyes, standing beside a cab where the driver looked on, annoyed at us both.
She glanced at my belly and swept her fingers through her salt and pepper hair. When she lifted her gaze back to mine, locking her wrinkle lined eyes on my brown ones, it was like she got it. She knew that this was an emergency.
I didn’t even have to say the words.
She stretched her arm towards the open door. “Take mine. I’ll grab the next one, dear.”
A new wave of tears bolted down my cheeks and I almost hugged her neck. “Are you sure?” I was really hoping it wasn’t some mirage conjured up by my increasing panic. I took a hesitant step towards the Good Samaritan. The cabbie, while annoyed at being held up, at least wasn’t ignoring my existence.
The woman flashed a smile and nodded. “You take care of yourself.” Before I could thank her again, she leaned in and gave the cabbie a terse word or two about paying it forward, then blended into the wave of people bustling on the sidewalk.
Wiping my face and inhaling snot and relief, I slid into the backseat. I grabbed the door, but a hand gripped it before I could pull it closed. A manicured hand, with a glittering diamond bracelet wrapped around the dainty wrist.
Alicia barked out her address and scooted into the backseat beside me. My face looked like it was literally melting and I could barely stop shaking long enough to buckle my seatbelt—and she looked as regal and put together as she had when she sashayed into the cafe.
Not a single tear in sight.
Like we were headed to the spa and not...
And not...
I squeezed my eyes shut, but my imagination was my own worst enemy. All the worst case scenarios had been branded on the back of my eyelids. Jacob, his face a mess of bruises and blood. Jacob, barely able to look at me because his eyes were swollen.
Jacob, dea-
I cut that thought off before it reached my lips.
I wouldn’t say the D word.
I couldn't.
Alicia settled in the seat beside me, rubbing her hands together gingerly like she was imagining all of the contaminants she was being forced to endure, not the fact that her son was being forced to endure God knows what.
I couldn’t take one more conjured up image of my husband’s broken body, but I could absolutely call Alicia on her infamous BS. She hadn’t said a word, hadn’t moved a muscle when I told her that Jacob had been taken. But riding in a cab got a reaction out of her?
“What are you?”
I didn’t expect an answer, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping for one. Hoping for some clarity. Hoping that I was wrong, because in my mind, only a heartless monster could hear that their child had been kidnapped, in the grip of a man who was notorious for torturing those who crossed him for weeks before finally putting them out of their misery...and have literally nothing to say.
With Jacob, I could see through the mask. Love had shown me that there was so much beneath the wall he put up. I knew the history that led to him building that wall in the first place. The role the woman who was sitting beside me played.
The woman who was currently holding a compact and powdering her nose.
There was no way she hadn’t heard me, but I repeated myself anyway, fury bubbling inside me and overflowing like lava from my lips. “I said, what are you?”
The only reaction I got was from the cabbie, whose eyebrows shot to the ceiling.
Alicia snapped her compact closed. “Leila, I am still in possession of all of my faculties. I heard you.”
I gripped my seatbelt, my throat tightening, my gut twisting, my anger doubling, tripling in size. I’d never wanted to get physical and smack someone so badly.
Before I unloaded on her, I drew a jagged breath or two and pulled my hands to my belly. Usually, remembering the baby, remembering that we had something so much bigger than all of this, was enough to calm me down a few notches. But that led to remembering Alicia’s words from a few minutes ago; wanting to be a part of the baby’s life, wanting to start fresh and get to a brighter place so we could all get along for the sake of the family. It was all lies. And knowing that now made me want to throw open the door and dropkick her out of the cab. Our family was under siege, and she was acting like she couldn’t care less.
“Let me get this straight: I tell you that Eichmann has Jacob, at your home. I appropriately flee the cafe, trying to get to my husband as quickly as possible. You chill for a few more minutes, then breeze over to the cab I found and slide in like everything isn’t falling apart. And now, you’re making sure you don’t have a hair out of place and freshening up your makeup while your son, your flesh and blood, is hurting?” I threw up my hands, feigning confusion. Like I was begging for some celestial guidance. The sad truth was, I knew all too well how the pieces fit. There was no caring human beneath Alicia’s cold beauty.
I wrapped my arms protectively around my belly, knowing now that this woman, this monster, would have nothing to do with our baby. I wouldn’t let her poison it, teach it that pain and vulnerability and just giving a damn about someone other than yourself was weakness. I would die before I let her continue that Whitmore tradition.
Like she was privy to my internal promise, she finally showed the slightest chink in her armor. With a huff, she flicked her fingers through her flaxen locks, her agitation so palpable that it rushed over me like a scrub brush.
“Are you assuming because I’m not crying a river that I don’t care that my son’s in harm’s way? That I don’t care that you’re dragging my grandchild into harm’s way?”
I blinked, then scanned the area around me, making sure that I was still in the cab, pointed towards the Whitmore Estate. I pinched my arm to make sure I was still awake. I almost asked the cabbie, who was already tuned into our conversation whether he wanted to be or not, what the time and date was, just to be sure. Clearly, I’d entered some alternate reality where up was down, right was wrong, and I was the villain in this story.
She was trying to suggest that I was overreacting? Being irresponsible for rushing to my husband’s aid?
“Are you fucking kidding me?!” The screech was back and I almost thought the windows would shatter. I didn’t pull out the f bomb often, but I’d used it twice in less than thirty minutes. It was a visceral word that set my tongue on fire, but it matched the anger that was boiling inside me. “I’m ‘crying a river’ because I just found out that the love of my life is in danger. Because he was taken.” Even though we were in a cab, hauling ass towards the Whitmore Estate, I felt like I was snatched back to the past. Back to the motel room, where my freedom was taken from me. Where I wasn’t sure whether I’d make it out alive. “The only thing I had to cling to when I was tied up with a maniac was Jacob. I clung to love. Maybe ‘family’ is a concept that you’re unfamiliar with, but where I come from, you take bullets for the people you love. You do everything you can.” I swiped two scalding tears from my cheeks. “And you better believe you cry some Mississippi River level tears, because that’s human. And that’s what you do when you care about someone.”
“And you don’t think I care about Jacob?” Alicia fired back, her charcoal gray eyes smoldering. “That I wouldn’t take a bullet for my son?”
“Not if it means messing up your dress,” I answered brusquely, not backing down from her glare. Not an inch.
I expected more of the same, for Alicia to double down and continue to pretend like it was normal to just shrug in these extraordinary, terrifying circumstances. And then she had to go and make me wonder if I’d judged her too harshly. For the briefest moment, it was like the curtain was yanked down and I felt the rod clanging when it crashed to the floor. The painful rays of the sun showed me something besides the carefully painted portrait Alicia Whitmore wanted the world to see.
“You...” She gnashed her teeth, her chin trembling so hard that I felt the ripples tear through me.
Whatever word she meant to say after the ‘you’ was left unsaid, but I knew all too well what she wanted to say.
“Bitch?” I snorted, rolling my eyes and turning my focus outside the window. Of course what was underneath the ice was more cruelty. “You can do better than that.”
“Do not insult me with that garbage,” she hissed, pulling my attention back to her because apparently, Alicia Whitmore still had some surprises up her sleeve. “You are a lot of things, Leila. That is not one of them.” Her nostrils flared, her emotions getting the best of her because whatever she’d smoothed on those cheekbones was no match for the heat that was eating up every inch of her face. “What I was going to say was, you don’t know me.”
