Sold To The Enemy: The Billionaire's Acquisition

The door shut. Footsteps moved off down the hall.

Jenna stayed where she was, knee in Chloe's back, breathing hard through her nose. "You stupid little—"

Chloe retched.

It wasn't acting. Her stomach turned inside out and everything in it came up onto the hotel carpet, hot and sour, and she couldn't stop.

"Ugh. Jesus, Chloe." Jenna's weight eased off her spine.

"Water." Chloe's throat felt scraped raw. "Please. Jenna. Water."

Jenna laughed. "Begging? Now? Bit late."

But the knee lifted.

Chloe turned her head. Through the curtain of her own hair: the low table, and on it the champagne flute, empty, a film of white dried at the bottom. Beside it, a water glass, half full.

Jenna was pushing herself up, picking at her ruined dress with a hiss of disgust.

Chloe's arm swung.

Her palm caught the water glass. It went off the edge and burst on the floor — ice water and shards across Jenna's dress and her bare shins.

Jenna screamed.

Chloe was already moving. She got her feet under her on the third try and ran for the door, half blind, one hand on the wall.

Behind her, Jenna shrieked her name, then Chase's.

The corridor was long and empty and lit like an aquarium. Chloe ran. She didn't know where she was going. She only knew it had to be away.

Red sign. EXIT.

She hit the bar and fell into a stairwell, concrete and cold and echoing, took the steps two at a time and didn't count them. The side door at the bottom opened onto the street.

Rain. A wall of it, October cold, hitting the pavement hard enough to bounce.

It went through her dress in two seconds. Her heels slid on wet stone; she kicked them off and kept going, barefoot down Fifth Avenue, gutter water to her ankles.

No purse. No coat. In her hand, a dead phone she'd snatched off that table on the way out, and she couldn't remember deciding to.

Jenna would have called Chase by now. Chase had a car, a driver, and men who did what he asked.

Think. She needed somewhere the Carlisle name meant nothing and the Sterling name meant nothing.

There was nowhere. Not in this city. Not for her.

Headlights came around the corner — two hard white eyes through the rain. A black Maybach, long and low, coming fast. Not slowing.

She didn't step back.

She stepped forward, into the middle of the street, into its lane.

Brakes screamed. The grille stopped a foot from her knees and the wash of air knocked her onto her back in the gutter. Water went up her nose, down her dress, into her mouth.

The rear door opened.

An umbrella snapped. A man stepped out, shoes landing in the filthy water without a sound, and didn't look at her.

"Remove her."

It hit her like a shove.

Chloe got up on her knees. Rain plastered her hair to her face. She looked up.

Grey eyes. Not blue — grey, the color of a February sky, flat and assessing, taking her in the way a man takes in a stain on his carpet.

She knew that face off the cover of every business magazine in the airport. The Beaumont heir who never gave interviews, who had shown up to the Carlisle summer gala exactly once and left before dessert.

Julian Beaumont IV.

Carlisle money and Beaumont money had been trying to bury each other for forty years.

Reaching for him was like grabbing a live wire in a flood. He was also the only thing in this city Chase Sterling couldn't touch.

She got her feet under her and walked straight at him.

"Mr. Beaumont." Her voice shook and she hated it. "I know who you are."

His jaw moved. Impatience.

"My name is Chloe Carlisle."

That landed. Something shifted behind the grey — not interest, not curiosity. Something colder than either.

"A Carlisle."

She bit down on the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood, because if she stopped now she was dead, or worse than dead, and everyone in New York would call it what Jenna had planned to call it.

"One night," Chloe said. "Let me stay with you tonight. In exchange—"

She made herself say it straight, looking right at him.

"I'll give myself to you."

The rain hammered the umbrella. The driver didn't move. Somebody behind her let out a breath.

Julian Beaumont looked at her for a long moment: the ruined dress, the bare feet bleeding on wet asphalt, the green eyes with something feral in them.

Women had offered themselves to him before. Never like this. Never with the arithmetic showing.

"Get in."

He turned and got into the car.

Chloe's legs gave. A bodyguard caught her by the elbow and she crawled in after him, dripping onto leather, into warmth that smelled of cedar and money.

Julian didn't look at her. He spoke to the driver.

"Clinic."

"The—" She swallowed. "Clinic?"

He turned his head. There was nothing personal in it. That was the worst part.

"I don't touch anything I haven't had inspected. Before we do business, you get examined."

Chloe's face went hot. Then cold.

She had thought she was ready to be humiliated tonight. She hadn't been ready for this one.

She looked down at her hands, at the water pooling on the floor of his car.

"Fine," she said.

The Maybach pulled into traffic and left the rain behind.

Julian closed his eyes and did not speak to her again for the rest of the drive.