She wrung her hands together. “In fact, I’m trying to figure out how we would have even come in contact. And why did you give my father money? Was it a loan?”
He leaned forward and stared at her so hard Layla felt like he was running an unseen lie detector scan over her. “You’re serious,” he said. “You don’t remember me or anything that happened while you were here?”
“I tried to ask my father, but he just kept saying it was better that I didn’t remember. He died a few months ago.”
Layla paused, waiting for him to extend his condolences but he said nothing. “I suppose you two weren’t friends, then.”
“No, we weren’t friends.”
Layla hated this, hated being at such a disadvantage. She kept asking questions, but his answers only confused her more. Plus, the way he was looking at her set something akin to terror off in her heart. Run! her primitive instincts screamed at her, but another part of her insisted she get her answers no matter how much he scared her.
“Did we know each other?” she asked again.
“What do you want?” he asked. “Why are you here?”
With trembling fingers she pulled the receipt out of her purse. “I found this,” she said, forcing herself to hand him the piece of paper.
He snatched it, looked at it, looked back at her, then tossed it on the desk. “Yes, and…?”
His officiousness began to annoy Layla and her fear ebbed away, replaced by anger. “You know, you don’t have to act so hostile,” she said. “I’m just trying to figure this all out.”
More fists pounded on the office door. This time a male voice called out, “Security! Open the door! Mr. Sinclair, are you all right?”
Nathan Sinclair stared at her for a few hard beats, then surprised her by calling back, “Yes, I’m fine. Go away!”
There came many seconds of confused silence, then the guard asked, “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. Now go away. I can handle her myself, and I don’t need your services.”
Layla cocked her head and gave him a censorious look. “You could be a little nicer. He’s only trying to help.” She called out to the security guard, “I’m so sorry for any trouble I caused you. Thank you for doing your job so well. Mr. Sinclair really appreciates it.”
“No problem. Let me know if you need anything,” the man on the other side of the door responded.
“We will. Thanks again,” Layla replied. She turned back to Nathan with a smile. “Pittsburghers are so friendly. I’m really loving it here.”
Nathan Sinclair narrowed his eyes at her, putting her in mind of Clint Eastwood in those westerns her father used to watch. “Are you serious?”
“Yes, Pittsburgh is great.”
“I mean about the security guard. I could have handled that situation without your interference.”
Layla couldn’t believe he was even arguing this point. “Thank you is the least we could say. He came all the way up here.”
“Yes, because protecting me is what he gets paid to do. You don’t have to thank people for doing their jobs.”
“No, you don’t have to,” Layla said. “But it’s a nice thing to do.”
He folded his arms, his face becoming a work of stone. “You’re still doing that, I see.”
“Doing what?” she asked.
“Pretending to be nice. You’re still keeping up with the good girl act.”
“It’s not an act as far as I know…” Layla took a tentative step toward the desk. “…but was I mean to you? Is that why you don’t like me?”
“No, I dislike you for other reasons,” he said. He picked up the receipt again. “This is money my father, the late Nathan Sinclair Sr., paid your father because he was threatening to sue our family.”
“Threatening to sue you for what?” Layla asked.
“Those stairs you fell down were at our house. He said you would go to the press and say you were pushed if we didn’t pay him.”
Layla clutched a hand to her heart, hearing this. She wished she could say she was surprised. But her father had always had loose moral codes when it came to feeding his gambling habit. She could easily see him blackmailing Nathan Sinclair Sr. for a large amount of money, then gambling it all away on the New Orleans riverboats. She’d managed to eventually move out and make a fresh start in Dallas after her accident. But even after she moved, her father’s many debts continued to haunt her. And three months after his funeral, she was still cleaning up his messes.
“I’ll pay you back,” she told him.
“What?” he said. His hard expression shifted from anger to curiosity. “How?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “In installments?”
Now he laughed, but it was a mean, dark sound, steeped in frank disbelief, which pissed Layla off. “I will pay you back. It might take a while, but I will. I’m sorry my father blackmailed yours.”
He just shook his head, his eyes laced with disgust. “Like I said, still pretending. You’re such a sweet girl, so good. That’s what you’ve always wanted everyone to believe, isn’t it?”
She stepped closer to his desk, her chin going up. “Listen,” she said. “I told you I don’t remember you.”
“Convenient,” he said, snarled really.
“It’s the truth,” she said, voice raised. “So either tell me how we know each other and why you’re so angry at me or zip it.”
Layla couldn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth. To a certain extent, he was right about her. She tried her best to be nice, to be polite, to be all the things her father hadn’t been. She had even gone into a helping profession. But there was something about Nathan Sinclair that upset her equilibrium. She didn’t want to be nice to him. In fact, he irked her so bad, her palms itched to slap him.
Seconds ticked by as they took each other’s measure. Him challenging her with his stare, her refusing to back down by lowering her eyes.
She thought she’d won the stare-off when he turned away from her. But then he grabbed a file folder out of one of his desk drawers, dropped the receipt into it, and said, “Fine, I’ll expect you the second Friday of next month with the first installment.”
She blinked. “You want me to deliver the check here?”
He held out his hand. “Right into my palm.”
“I mean, couldn’t I just deposit it into a bank account or something? Or maybe mail you the check?” The same instinct that had told her to run was now telling her she did not want to confront this man again. That she should do whatever it took to keep her distance.
He sat back down and steepled his hands in front of him.
“I like to look into my enemy’s eyes when it comes to payback—even if in this case, my enemy is literally paying my family back. You’ll come here, to this office, and hand me each check directly until you’re done paying back every cent. Those are my terms. Either take them or you can—how did you put it? Zip it.”
His tone was soft, but his eyes brooked no argument, and Layla knew he wouldn’t be convinced to modify his so-called terms. His face was beautiful, but she could now see there was something very cruel inside of him. For some reason, he wanted to watch her suffer under the burden of repaying her father’s debt.
“Fine,” she said. She schooled her face into a emotionless stare. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing the anxiety now churning in her stomach as she tried to figure out how to pay him back as quickly as possible. “I’ll see you in June.”
“Fine,” he said. “You may go now.”
With that, he took his laser gaze off of her and turned it to his computer.
“Thank you for meeting with me and for not handing me over to security,” she said, because it was the polite thing to say. And she was determined to remain polite even if Nathan Sinclair couldn’t appreciate such niceties.
He didn’t answer, just typed on his keyboard, signaling he had already dismissed her before she was even out the door.
“Bye,” she said, feeling silly now, but unable to stop herself from issuing one more small courtesy.
Again, he didn’t answer. So she left, already piecing together a plan to get more hours at her physical therapy center. She’d work double shifts every day if it meant paying back that blackmail money sooner rather than later. Even though she still had a lot more questions, she had never wanted to be done with anything the way she wanted to be done with Nathan Sinclair.
***
Nathan waited ten minutes after the door clicked behind Layla to pick up the phone and buzz Kate.
“Yes, Mr. Sinclair?” she said, picking up immediately.
“That investigator we used for the Columbus lawsuit…”
“Spencer Greeley?” she said.
“Yes, contract his services. I want him to get everything he can find on Layla Matthews. And I especially want access to her medical records.”
She paused, obviously wondering what this was all about, but she was too professional to ask outright. In the end, she simply said, “Yes, Mr. Sinclair. I’ll get right on that.”
Nathan usually hung up after issuing his orders, but this time he stopped himself and said, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” his assistant replied, sounding rather startled.
He gritted his teeth and hung up. Layla Matthews had only been back in his life for a few minutes, but she was already disrupting it in ways he didn’t like. Again. With her innocent doe eyes and the luscious curves hidden underneath those hideous scrubs… he couldn’t help but want to pull them off, just to see how much that body of hers had changed in the nine years since they’d seen each other last.
He didn’t know what her game was, or why she had come back to Pittsburgh, but he planned to find out and neutralize her before his brother returned. Just a few minutes ago, he had been furious with Andrew for skipping town, but now he could see what a stroke of luck that had been. If he played the situation right, he could get Layla Matthews to leave Pittsburgh before the ball, before Andrew came back, and before she figured out she and his brother used to be in love.
CHAPTER THREE
BY THE TIME the second Friday of June rolled around, Nathan began to see what a bad idea it had been to insist Layla meet with him in person to hand over her first installment. At the time, he’d done it to make her uncomfortable, him batting at her in their game of cat and mouse. But that had been before Spencer Greeley sent in his report and he’d discovered everything Layla had told him that day she barged into his office had been true.
According to Greeley’s findings, after her fall and subsequent forty-eight-hour coma, Layla woke up unable to remember her accident, or anything that happened in the year prior to it, including moving to Pittsburgh to attend college, and meeting her boyfriend, Andrew. And since Andrew had never visited her in the hospital, there had been no reason for her to seek him out. His brother had been forbidden to see her by both their father and the family lawyers after Henry Matthews had threatened to sue them.
“Layla wants to sue you all,” Henry had told Nathan, Andrew, and their father nine years ago when he visited the Sinclair mansion, ostensibly to let them know she had come out of her coma. They’d invited him to meet with them in the study, where Henry had confessed with much false handwringing that Layla wanted to sue the Sinclairs.
“She says maybe she was pushed down those stairs,” Henry said. “I told her that couldn’t be. She fell face forward, you see, and the doctors think she just slipped. But she told me to come here and tell you that. She thinks maybe you’ll give her something to make sure this story don’t get out.”
Their father had not suffered this foolishness for long. “How much does she want?” he asked. He tended to be decisive and to the point when it came to business decisions. It was a quality Nathan had inherited from him, which was why his father had named him CEO in his will instead of his brother.
Henry named the price, and his father wrote down a number three times that amount on a piece of paper, which he slid across the desk.
“That’s what we’ll pay you. Once. I’m not as nice as my son, Andrew, here. Tell your daughter if she ever comes near him or tries to blackmail my family again, I won’t hesitate to ensure it’s the last time she does it. Do you understand?”
Henry’s voice shook when he answered, “I understand. Layla don’t have a bank account. Could you make that check out to me?”
Nathan had known Layla’s father was a slime ball just from that one exchange, but according to Greeley’s report, he’d been even worse than Nathan thought. He had gotten a job in New Orleans that would let him add his nineteen-year-old daughter to his insurance, then he had blown the money their father had paid him to gamble on the riverboats.
From what Nathan could tell, Layla hadn’t seen a dime and had even taken out loans to complete her masters in physical therapy. He read through the report, which detailed how she grew up, with an itinerant gambler for a father, hopping from Las Vegas to Reno to New Orleans until she eventually landed at Carnegie Mellon, where she met his brother, only to lose any memory of having attended the prestigious university or her relationship with Andrew less than a year later.
Anyone else would have felt sorry for her, reading over this tragic backstory. But no one else knew the Layla Nathan knew. Not even his brother had known what she had really been like.
He could still remember the first time he saw her. He had been partying the night before and had woken up in some strange girl’s room on the other side of town, so hung over he’d barely managed to crawl out of bed and into his Ferrari to get himself home to the family mansion. He didn’t live in the main house like his brother, but had taken over the one-bedroom guest cottage out back, which unfortunately was gated off and could only be accessed by walking through the mansion.
He’d snuck in through the kitchen to avoid his parents, who, back in those days, needed very little prompting to start asking when he planned to do something with his life and why he couldn’t be more like his brother. But when he walked in through the back door, he found a large-eyed black girl with closely-cropped hair and a pretty face, sitting at the kitchen table, a chemistry textbook spread out in front of her.
“Hi,” she said, giving him a toothy smile after he came stumbling in. “You must be Nathan.”