Because of His Fortune (For His Pleasure, Book 25) (4 page)

“Hey, wait a second, Grace.
 
Don’t just leave like this,” Liam said.

But she was getting out, dragging her
purse with her, still feeling tears at the surface, ready to spill out and she
didn’t want Liam to see her crying uncontrollably.
 
“Don’t show up at my home unannounced
ever again!” she shouted, as she leaned in through the open door.

Her ears were ringing from rage and fear
and sadness, as she slammed the door shut on Liam’s pale, somewhat shocked
visage.

She started to run away from the limo,
not wanting to give him a chance to come after her, especially because a large
part of her was hoping he would—but ultimately, knowing he wouldn’t.

It was easier to do things on her own
terms.

In the end, it was easier to break things
off with Liam and tell herself that this was for the best, that she truly
wanted to stop seeing him—than it was to admit that maybe Liam didn’t
care about her all that much in the first place.

Grace wasn’t too far from the office, so
she sped up her walking pace until she was speed-walking, and made her way
there on foot.
 
It took her about
twenty minutes, but it helped to burn off the restless, anxious energy, and it
also allowed her to focus outside of herself.

She watched shopkeepers opening their
stores, and people going in and out of the coffee shops, the bakeries, and
other folks heading to work in their suits and skirts and talking on their cell
phones.

Everywhere around her was bustling, real
life—it wasn’t stopping.
 
It
wasn’t faltering even a little, and somehow it comforted Grace to see
that.
 
To smell the exhaust fumes
from the busses, and trucks and cars, to hear the honking, to read the billboards
and smell the quintessentially New York air.

When she finally got to her building and
went to the suite where she worked with Easton, Grace felt a little more in
control of her faculties.

In point of fact, she wasn’t late at
all—she was earlier than she needed to be.

Walking inside and putting her purse down
on the desk, she looked around at the pristine, modern office and felt a twinge
of pride.

She’d somehow made it to this point and
she hadn’t backed down from the challenge, no matter how hard Easton had pushed
her to fail.
 
And she didn’t intend
to ever give him the satisfaction of quitting, either.

As she took her seat, Easton came out of
the bathroom and saw her, and his brow creased.
 
“I thought you weren’t coming in until
later,” he said.
 
His red tie stood
out in stark contrast to his dark, immaculate suit, which was literally without
a wrinkle anywhere to be seen.

She felt shabby in comparison to her
boss, with her pantsuit that had probably cost less in totality than his left cufflink.
 

“You were right that I needed to get
myself together and prioritize better,” she said, raising her chin and looking
him directly in the eye.

He nodded appreciatively at this.
 
“I know,” he said, the ghost of a smile
on his face, and then he walked past her.
 
“Good job on those files you input yesterday, by the way.
 
I spot-checked them and you had almost
no errors.”

“Thank you,” she replied, smiling a
little in return.

Easton stopped and looked at her.
 
“I sent you some audio files from
meetings I’ve had these last few weeks that I need translated into
minutes.
 
Once you’re done, send me
the minutes and I’ll look them over and send you back any edits before you
archive them.”

“Okay,” she said, her chest puffing out
with the first sensation of pride she’d had in a little while.

Finally, it seemed at her lowest
moment—she’d gotten a little good news.
 
Easton trusted her work, at least a
little bit.
 
Enough to give her more
to do.

Maybe things were turning around.

Grace turned to her work and kept her
mind off Liam Houston, although it was proving to be easier said than done.

She kept remembering him last night,
drunk, crying and sinking to the floor, and how they’d huddled together like
two refugees in a burned-out bomb shelter, just trying to survive the
night.
 
And then, later on, in bed,
she’d held Liam close and comforted him until he’d gone to sleep.

She’d thought it was a turning point for
them, but it had turned out to mean nothing to Liam.

And
now you’ve got to try and let him go.

He
doesn’t want you to be part of his life, and it’s time you took the hint.

Grace pulled up one of the audio
recordings that Easton had sent to her over email.
 
There were about ten of them, and the
first one was two hours long.

She put in her headphones and pulled up a
Word document.
 
The meeting was
between Easton and the head of the Public Relations Department and someone from
Compliance.
 

Half of the subjects they discussed, she
couldn’t even understand, because every other word was an acronym of some
sort.
 
There was so much jargon, and
it was effortless for these people, but Grace didn’t know what they were
saying.
 
They referred to different
projects, clients, and other meetings from the past.

It was difficult to try and create
meeting minutes that would make sense to anybody, when she wasn’t sure she
could make sense of it herself.
 

Her spirits began to sag as she realized
that she would likely need to ask Easton for help on the task.

Sweat began to bead on her forehead and
she swiped it away with the back of her hand.
 
She’d listen to a few seconds of the
recording, rewind, listen again, and then see if she could figure out what they
were talking about, at least enough to write something in the meeting minutes
document she was creating.

There were times when she almost thought
she could tell what was being discussed.

Mostly, she wasn’t certain.
 
The progress was painfully slow.

Still, she was making progress—even
if it was like water dripping on rock and slowly eroding it.
 
Sentence by sentence, she tried to get
through her first recording, leaning towards her screen and focused like a dog
staring at a particularly juicy bone.

“Knock, knock, knock!” someone called
out, and Grace startled, glancing up to see her brother, Scott, coming through
the door to the suite with a big grin on his face.

She pulled the earbuds out of her ears
and sat back in confusion.
 
“What’s
going on?” she said.
 
“What are you
doing here?”

Scott was holding a coffee carrier with
two cups stuffed into it.
 
He pulled
out one of the cups and put it down on the desk in front of her.
 
“I was in the neighborhood and I thought
I’d swing by and bring you a cup of coffee and say congratulations on the new
job, Grace.”

Her brow furrowed as she took the cup of
coffee and sniffed at it.
 
“Oh,” she
said.

“It’s not poison,” Scott snorted.
 
He took the other cup out and then
tossed the empty coffee carrier into the trash basket by her desk.

Grace took a sip of her coffee.
 
It was way too sweet, but she smiled and
thanked her brother anyway.
 
“That
was nice of you, Scott.”
 
She sipped
again and then looked up at him skeptically, unable to escape the feeling that
he had an ulterior motive for stopping by.
 
“So what brings you to the neighborhood?”

He lowered his voice, leaning against her
desk and confiding to her in a whisper: “There’s a woman, a very famous lawyer
in the area—she wants to meet me to see if I might be a good fit to help
plan her daughter’s upcoming nuptials.
 
If she picks me, it could be a real feather in my cap.”

“That’s awesome, Scott,” Grace told
him.
 

She turned back to her computer.

He stayed with his butt perched on the
corner of her desk, his arms crossed, cup of coffee dangling precariously in
one hand.
 
Scott glanced around the
office.
 
“Real swanky digs,” he told
her.

“I’m too busy to appreciate it,” she
replied, hoping he’d take the hint.

He didn’t, of course.
 
“So,” Scott continued, “have you heard
from Liam Houston recently?”

Grace felt herself freeze at the mention
of Liam’s name.
 
She didn’t want to
hear his name, think about him, and she certainly didn’t want to discuss him in
Easton’s outer office.
 
Not after
the trouble she’d gotten in with Easton over her contact with Liam and how it
affected her job performance.
 

“No, I haven’t heard anything from him,”
she said, not looking at her brother.
 

She was about to tell Scott that she really
needed to get back to work, and then she planned to put her earbuds back in and
ignore him.
 
He could sit and preen
all day long but she wasn’t going to keep playing games with him.

Scott stood up abruptly, reached in his
waistband and pulled out a rolled up newspaper, unfolding it and slapping it
loudly onto her desk.

Grace jumped a little from the slap the
paper made as it hit the desk.
 
She
stared down at the newspaper uncomprehendingly.

It was a New York Herald.

The headline, in bold print, said
DYNASTY: THE NEXT GENERATION
, and
beneath the headline, a subtitle read:
The
sudden death of matriarch and mogul Anne Houston leaves future of real estate
empire uncertain

Grace read the headline and then looked
at Scott.
 
“I don’t get it,
Scott.
 
Am I supposed to know
something about this article?”

“You told me you haven’t heard from Liam
Houston,” her brother said, his tone like acid now.

“I haven’t.
 
And it’s really none of your business.”

“Oh, you haven’t?” Scott said, stabbing
his index finger at the grainy black and white picture beside the article.
 

In the picture, Liam was walking toward
the hospital, and in the corner of the photograph, Grace was visible—she
was partially in shadow and her face was almost turned away, but it was
obviously her.

Somehow, a paparazzi must’ve been lurking
nearby and snapped a picture of them walking into the hospital together the
previous day.

Grace felt a surge of fear and paranoia
as she realized that her face was being seen by hundreds of thousands of
readers in the greater New York area.
 
“Okay,” she said, “I did go to the hospital with him, Scott.”

“You just lied to my face,” her brother
said, shaking his head in disgust.
 
 
“You have no remorse—you just lie
whenever it suits you.”

“Scott, I’m at work—“

“I know,” Scott said, taking on that
snotty tone she knew so well.
 
“And
we both know how you got this job.”

“You need to leave.
 
Now.”
 
She picked up the coffee he’d brought
her and dumped it into the trash.
 
“And don’t bring me anymore morning coffee just so you can have an
excuse to give me the third degree.”

“That coffee was from the heart,” he
said, picking up the paper and his own cup of coffee, holding it out of her
reach.
 
“And I have every right to
expose your lies,” Scott told her.
 
“Your behavior affects me, too, you know.”

“No it doesn’t, Scott.
 
Liam’s mother died, so you don’t have to
be afraid that she’s going to attack you anymore.”

“You think that’s what this is
about?
 
You think that’s why I came
here?”

“I don’t care what it’s about.
 
I’m going to live my life regardless of
your opinions.”

“I’m worried for you, that’s why I came,”
he continued.
 
“You’re naïve, Grace,
and you don’t have any idea what’s in store for you.”

“I know a lot better than you think,”
Grace said.
 
“Now you have to
go.”
 
She turned and looked towards
Easton’s office door, her voice lowering.
 
“I’ll get in trouble if we keep talking about personal stuff.
 
This is my work, Scott.
 
You should know better than anybody how
sacred that is.”

Scott was about to make a retort when the
door to the suite opened again, and this time, a woman was walking through the
door.