Sold To The Enemy: The Billionaire's Acquisition

The garage was under a brownstone with no sign on it. The elevator went down.

A doctor with grey hair and no expression took blood, took swabs, and had her lie back on a table in a room that was all white glass and steel. Julian sat in the corner in a leather chair, one ankle crossed over the other, watching her the way a man watches an appraisal.

Chloe kept her eyes on the ceiling.

The doctor straightened. "She's clean. And—" a glance at Chloe "—it's her first time."

Julian's gaze came up to Chloe's face.

For half a second he looked like a man who'd been handed the wrong file. Then it closed, and he looked at her the way a buyer looks at a horse that turned out better than the catalog said.

He didn't take her to a hotel.

The penthouse occupied the top four floors of a tower on Central Park West. From the elevator you could see the whole park, black in the rain, and the city laid out past it.

Julian pointed at a door. "Wash."

The shower was a wall of hot water. Chloe stood under it until her skin went red and her fingers wrinkled, and then she caught sight of herself in the mirror and didn't recognize the girl there — too pale, a bruise coming up along one cheekbone, eyes like something that had been dug out of the ground.

She cried then, quietly, with the water running, the way she had learned to cry in that house. Nobody heard. It cost her nothing.

This is the price, she told herself. Just remember the price.

When she came out in a robe that swallowed her, he was at the window with his back turned. He turned around and came to her.

No kissing. No pretense of wanting her. It was as warm as a signature.

She bit down on her lip and made no sound, and when the blood came she used it, and she went through the two names in her head the way other girls went through a prayer.

Chase. Jenna.

Chase. Jenna.

By the time it hurt less, the sky was grey.

He got up and showered and came back in a fresh suit, the knot already perfect. He crossed to the heap of wet silk on the floor that had been her dress, picked the phone out of the pocket, and didn't look at it.

He opened the window and dropped it.

It turned over twice against the sunrise and was gone.

Then he took a sealed phone box out of a drawer and tossed it onto the bed.

"That number is mine. Use it if you need me."

From the same drawer, a black card with no name on it. He set it on the nightstand.

"PIN is six zeros. A bonus. For the first time."

Chloe pulled the robe tighter.

"I don't want your money."

He stopped, one hand still on the drawer, and looked at her properly for the first time since the street.

"What do you want?"

She made it sound like a business proposal, because business was the only language he had answered in all night.

"A place to stay. Two days. Somewhere nobody from my family can walk in."

She held his eyes.

"And a doctor. A good one. One who doesn't ask questions."

His eyebrows moved a fraction.

"I have to go home exactly as I was," Chloe said. "Intact. If I don't, none of this was worth anything."

He understood. She watched it happen — the boredom going out of his face, something sharper coming in behind it. He'd worked out that she wasn't hiding. She was reloading.

It was the first thing about her he'd found interesting.

"Fine."

He took the black card back, made one phone call, and spoke for ninety seconds in flat sentences with no please in them.

The next morning, in a clinic with a different name and no windows in the waiting room, a surgeon she never met put her back the way she had been.

She spent the next two days in a furnished apartment with a lock on the inside of the door, in jeans and a sweater someone had left folded on the chair, both too big, both clean. Nobody came. Nobody called.

On the morning of the third day she took a cab to the Carlisle house.

The door opened and the housekeeper said, without raising her eyes, "Your mother wants you in the study."

Eleanor sat behind the big desk with her hands flat on it. She had not stood up.

"You've been gone three days."

Chloe kept her eyes down. She had rehearsed this in front of the bathroom mirror for two days, and she said it exactly as rehearsed.

"I drank too much at the party. I was sick. I went to a friend's house on Long Island to sleep it off. My phone died."

Eleanor said nothing for a while.

Then the study door opened.

"Chloe." Chase came in fast, his face arranged into relief. "Thank God. We've been out of our minds. I've had people calling hospitals."

He reached for her.

She stepped past him.

His hands closed on air. The relief slipped half an inch, and she saw what was underneath it. Then he turned to the desk.

"Aunt Eleanor." His voice went grave and concerned. "Now that she's back — for her own sake, we should settle this quietly. There will be talk. Three days, no word. If we can say there's been a medical exam…" He let it trail off, modest. "Dr. Hayes is the family physician. It would put the whole thing to rest. For both our families."

The silence after that was long.

Chase wanted her opened up on a table in front of witnesses. He wanted proof his plan had worked — and if it hadn't, he wanted proof of that instead.

Eleanor looked at Chloe. Chloe looked at the floor.

"Chase is right," Eleanor said. "Send for Dr. Hayes."

Chloe's nails went into her palms. Her face did nothing.

Chase was watching her, waiting for the breakdown. For tears, for a scene, for anything he could hold over her later.

"Fine," Chloe said.

He stopped moving.

Dr. Hayes came with her black bag and her old hands and a face like a closed door. In the small room off the study she unwrapped the instruments one at a time.

"Lie back, dear."

Chloe lay back and shut her eyes.

The door closed. Everything she had left in the world was riding on a surgeon Julian Beaumont had hired with one phone call, in a room she had not been allowed to see, and she would not know if he'd paid for the best until this woman opened her mouth.

Dr. Hayes snapped on a glove.

In the study, she could hear Chase pouring himself a drink. He sounded cheerful.