The Undercover Billionaire Page 12

He hadn’t been fine with scaring her earlier, no matter that fear was a useful tool and blah de fucking blah. And he wasn’t fine with it now.

  She was Olivia, and no matter that he’d destroyed their friendship, he still liked her. Still didn’t want to hurt her.

  And now you’re pissed that she’s not going to give you a blow job.

  Yeah, that too.

  He could feel the lingering warmth of her across his thighs, and the touch of her fingers on his chest, and his dick ached like a bastard. He’d never thought about her in that way before, yet now he could think of nothing else but having her lips wrapped around his cock.

  “Fuck,” he muttered under his breath, because the obvious conclusion was that he’d gotten impatient and scared her or something. Except he couldn’t think of what it was that he’d done except tell her what he’d wanted a couple of times, then put his hands behind his head so he wouldn’t reach for her.

  Olivia appeared again in the bedroom doorway and waved the mini bottle of gin she must have taken from the minibar. “Here. Do you want anything with it? I think there was some tonic water, but I’d have to go check.”

  “I don’t want any gin.” He knew he sounded grumpy and sulky, but didn’t give a shit. “I want you to tell me what went wrong.”

  She moved to the side of the bed and put the bottle on the nightstand. “I just … changed my mind, okay? Have the gin instead.”

  “What is it with you and the gin? Are you trying to get me drunk or something?”

  Her cheeks colored and he could see by the way her gaze flickered that that’s exactly what she’d been trying to do. “I just thought you might like some.”

  Yeah, right.

  Not that it mattered if she was trying to get him drunk. It wasn’t as if she could escape easily, not with the code to the door lock on his phone. Anyway, although he was tired and muzzy around the edges from the scotch he’d had, the sexual frustration she’d left him with was likely to keep him from getting any drunker.

  “I don’t,” he said shortly. “At least tell me I didn’t do anything to you.”

  Her gaze flickered again. “It wasn’t you. It was me. That’s all you need to know.”

  It should have been a relief to hear that, but for some reason, it wasn’t.

  “Okay. Good to hear.” He folded his arms. “Maybe you could go help yourself to all that food. I need some time-out.” He didn’t bother to hide the pissiness in his tone, even though he knew it was making him sound like an angry little boy. He was tired and sexually frustrated, but what he really wanted from her was the truth. And she wasn’t giving it to him.

  It made him even angrier that he knew he had no right to demand it from her either.

  The expression on her face was impossible to read, but he thought he saw something that looked like hurt flicker in the depths of her blue eyes. Then it was gone. “Fair enough,” she said and turned, disappearing through the doorway, her white nightgown flowing out behind her.

  Fucking pull yourself together.

  Wolf muttered another curse, then despite his better judgment, already impaired by the other spirits he’d downed—not to mention the demands of his sadly ignored dick—he grabbed the bottle of gin off the nightstand and unscrewed the cap. Taking a healthy swallow, he reached for his phone and glanced down at it, sorting through the various emails he’d received, all of which were bullshit.

  Five minutes later, he’d finished the bottle and his annoyance was fading. The warm glow already in his stomach glowed even warmer, and he couldn’t resist closing his eyes for a second, his brain helpfully feeding him images of Olivia sitting astride him, looking at him with that hot blue flame in her eyes.

  He liked that, liked it very much, and pretty soon he had fallen into a weird dream where she was constantly touching him, yet never getting any closer to the place he really wanted her to touch. And every time he tried to grab her hand and show her, he kept grabbing at empty air instead.

  Consciousness arrived some time after that, along with a disgusting-tasting mouth, a headache stabbing him behind the eyes, and a hard-on that wouldn’t quit.

  Groaning, he groped around for his phone to check the time, because he’d been certain he’d been looking at it just before he passed out.

  But it wasn’t there.

  Wolf cursed, forced his eyes open, and looked around on the bed. He seemed to have got himself tangled up in the comforter, but after a second or two of untangling, it was clear the phone definitely hadn’t gotten caught up in the fabric. It wasn’t on the nightstand either.

  Shit. What the hell had he done with it?

  Muttering more curses and scrubbing at his hair, he hauled himself off the bed and went out into the living area, only to find his phone sitting on the coffee table.

  Weird. He could have sworn he’d had it in his hand before he’d nodded off.

  Moving over to the coffee table, he picked the phone up and pocketed it, belatedly realizing that the room was strangely quiet. Not to mention empty.

  He looked around, his headache pounding. “Liv?”

  There was no answer.

  What the fuck?

  His stomach dropped away as he turned around a second time, searching the room again, just in case he’d missed anything. But she definitely wasn’t there.

  He went back into the bedroom, pushing open the door to the bathroom.

  It was empty.

  Growling, he made another meticulous, fruitless check of the entire hotel room, but she wasn’t there.

  Somehow, Olivia had gotten out.

  Fury gathered inside him. How the fuck had she done it? The door had been goddamn locked from the inside, there was no way she could have unlocked it. No way in hell.

  Unless she accessed the code on your cell phone.

  Oh Jesus Christ. She’d asked him about the door, about how it had been locked, and he’d told her because she’d sounded worried about it. And there was no way could she have used that against him because she would have had to know his code. No one knew his code.

  Yeah, so how the hell did she get out?

  Snarling, Wolf grabbed his phone from his pocket and looked down at it, unlocking the screen with his thumb. The app he’d used to override the room lock was open.

  Holy shit. She must have guessed his code.

  Beneath the fury—mainly directed at himself for once again screwing things totally like the giant fuck-up he was—something inside him went quiet and still.

  His code was the date Noah had adopted him, and for some inexplicable reason, she’d remembered it. How? No one knew that date except Noah and his brothers—and his brothers wouldn’t remember, and Noah was dead.

  You told her. Remember?

  He blinked, staring down at the phone in his hand.

  Fuck, that’s right. One of those evenings in the library, talking with her while he’d waited for his meeting with de Santis, and she’d seemed very quiet, very withdrawn. So he’d asked her what was wrong and her blue eyes had filled with tears, and she’d told him that it was the anniversary of her mother’s death.

  She’d looked so sad and small that he’d pulled her into his arms for a hug before he’d even thought about it. Then she’d laid her head on his chest and cried silently, shaking. Her grief had shocked him, especially since she’d always seemed so self-contained, and he hadn’t known what to say. He’d never had to comfort anyone before.

  So he’d said the first thing that had come into his head, about how his mother had had to give him up for adoption, because she was homeless and hadn’t been able to afford to take care of him, how even though he didn’t remember her, he wished he did. He didn’t mention that his mother was still alive and that Noah was trying to find her. He’d simply wanted Olivia to know that he understood her feelings of loss. Then he’d babbled on about how he’d committed the date of his adoption to memory as a way of honoring her, and he’d said it out loud, sharing it with her as she’d wept.

 
He’d never thought she’d remember it. He’d never thought she’d even heard it. But she had heard and she had remembered.

  And now he was well and truly fucked.

  Shoving the phone back into his pocket, he headed toward the door, then stopped. There was no use going after her. She was probably long gone by now, back home to her father no doubt. She’d tell him what had happened, warn him that Wolf was coming for him, giving him a whole lot of time to protect himself and making blowing him away a hell of a lot harder.

  “Fuck!” Wolf turned and kicked the armchair, which happened to be the nearest piece of furniture, shoving it into the coffee table and knocking that over too. Magazines spilled everywhere, the champagne flutes rolling onto the carpet.

  He was very tempted to keep going, to pick up some more stuff and hurl it around the room, but that wouldn’t solve anything. He had to pull himself together, calm the fuck down, and decide what his next move was going to be.

  Taking a couple of deep breaths, he forced his tense muscles to relax, got his raging heartbeat under control.

  His brain should have been thinking about May and figuring out what alternatives there were if de Santis knew he was coming, but all he could seem to focus on was Olivia. On the distress that had crossed her face as she’d sat astride him on the bed earlier that morning. On how she’d remembered a date that he’d told her only once, years and years ago. On how she’d outsmarted him—her, the sheltered daughter of a weapons billionaire with no physical skills to speak of, getting away from a hardened Navy SEAL with eight years military experience.

  He could almost admire it if she hadn’t fucked with his plans so completely.

  Let her go. You can’t reach her now. De Santis will make sure she’s untouchable anyway.

  Wolf growled deep in his throat. So what was he left with? He needed that info on May to take that particular asshole down, and he needed de Santis’s schedule in order to get around de Santis’s own insane security. And he didn’t have either of those things.

  Which left him with only one option: taking Olivia back.

  She’d have warned her father, no doubt about that, which meant his plan to take de Santis out while the element of surprise was still on Wolf’s side was well and truly fucked. But maybe he could use Olivia as bait to lure de Santis out. Then take him down. Yeah, that might work.

  There are alternatives to Olivia. You had some backup plans, remember?

  But he didn’t want the backup plans. He didn’t want the alternatives.

  He wanted Olivia and he was fucking going to have her.

  And no one was going to get in his way.

  Including himself.

  * * *

  “And you really didn’t get a glimpse of him?”

  Olivia met her father’s intense blue eyes and slowly shook her head. “No. He put a hood over my head so I couldn’t see anything. I tried, Dad. I really tried. But there was nothing I could do about it.”

  She wasn’t quite sure why she was lying to her father about the reason for her disappearance from her room the night before, especially when she’d been so desperate to warn him about Wolf’s intentions to take him down.

  Yet when the moment came to say it, somehow she couldn’t.

  Perhaps it had been the date that had been the code to unlock the door.

  When Wolf had finally fallen asleep and she’d grabbed his phone—cautiously picking up his big hand and pressing his thumb against the button to unlock the screen—she’d initially had trouble finding the app. He’d hidden it in an apparently innocuous folder, which had taken her a little while to figure out. Then, when she’d opened it, she’d keyed in a code that she thought would work—his birthday—only to find that it wasn’t right and she was only allowed three tries before the app deleted itself.

  Then she’d cursed herself because of course it wouldn’t be his birthday. It had to be something less obvious. So she’d thought and thought, trying to figure out what number would have meaning for him.

  She didn’t know why the date of his adoption had occurred to her. Perhaps it had been the memory of the hug he’d given her all those years ago, and how he’d told her about his own mother, who wasn’t dead but who was just as lost to him as her own mother was lost to her.

  Whatever, the date had popped into her head and she’d put it into the phone with shaking fingers.

  And heard the door unlock.

  She’d felt a surge of some emotion she didn’t recognize sweep through her in that moment, though it wasn’t the triumph that she’d expected. It had been more like … regret. Which didn’t make any sense.

  She hadn’t stuck around to figure it out though, moving quickly to the door and pulling it open. She’d moved fast, expecting him to wake up and come after her with every step, but the alcohol must have put him out completely because she reached the first floor without him appearing.

  At the check-in desk, she’d made up some story about losing her room key and could she borrow the phone to call a family member. Then she’d paced nervously around the foyer, keeping an eye on the elevators, waiting for her father to send someone to pick her up.

  Now she was back in the familiarity of the de Santis mansion, showered and changed out of that damn nightgown, sitting in one of the armchairs in the living room being interrogated by a furious Cesare.

  And he was furious. She could always tell because his eyes went flat and cold.

  He stood in front of the fireplace, his hands in the pockets of his dark suit pants, radiating an icy anger that frightened a lot of people, but didn’t frighten her because she knew it wasn’t her he was angry at.

  He was angry at Wolf, even though he didn’t know it had been Wolf who had taken her.

  She still couldn’t think why she hadn’t told him. Why hadn’t she mentioned that Wolf had been playing both of them all along and he was intent on taking her father down. That, at the very least, she should mention.

  Yet she couldn’t seem to get the words out. The code that had unlocked the door was stuck in her head, the date of his adoption, in memory of his mother who’d had to give him up, unable to afford to look after him, and all she could think about was the fury in his eyes as he’d told her that Cesare was the reason his father had died. Cesare had had him killed.

  Family had always been important to Wolf, and even more so because the family he’d had was so dysfunctional. She knew how he grieved for the one he should have had, because she’d sensed it. Had heard it in his voice the few times he’d spoken about it.

  No wonder he’d been so furious. He’d lost that family and clearly blamed her father for it, believing completely in the lie that Cesare had had his father killed.

  The day he’d told her about his mother, when he’d put his arms around her and held her as she’d grieved for the loss of her own, she’d put her head on his chest, feeling the reassuring strength and warmth of him ease the pain inside her. And he’d talked about his mom. He’d only been three when he’d been adopted, so he had no memories of her.

  She’d heard the grief in his voice, heard his pain, and maybe that’s when she’d fallen in love with him. Or at least, what she’d thought then was love. She never got to talk about her own mother—her father had forbidden all mention of her—but Wolf had asked about her and so Olivia told him of her mother’s unhappiness. Of how she’d hated leaving her home in Wyoming to come to New York, but had tried to make the best of it for her husband’s sake. How she’d become an alcoholic and how desperately Olivia had tried to make her happy. Because her father and brothers ignored Olivia, but her mother never had.

  Except nothing had worked, and in the end her mother had taken an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol and had been found dead in her bed the next day.

  Wolf had told Olivia it wasn’t her fault, and there had been such conviction in his voice that part of her even believed it.

  Yes, maybe then she’d loved him. And even though he’d somehow taken on board some lies ab
out her father—lies that Noah Tate had clearly fed him—she couldn’t bring herself to tell her father.

  Grief and anger had clearly been driving Wolf, and even though it was obvious he’d meant what he’d said about taking down the de Santis empire, maybe he’d change his mind later.

  Maybe she should leave off telling her father right now, give Wolf some time to calm down. He’d reflect on it, see it wasn’t a good idea. And maybe she could even help, find some evidence that Cesare had nothing to do with Noah Tate’s death.

  Why? Afraid of what Dad might do when he finds out Wolf wants to hurt him?

  Of course she wasn’t afraid. Her father was a cold man who’d done some shady things in the past, but all of that was behind him. He’d never do anything to hurt Wolf, not even if he knew that Wolf wanted to bring him down.

  But still. Maybe it would be better to wait. At least until there were some signs that Wolf was indeed moving to take down the de Santis empire.

  “You’re sure he didn’t harm you?” her father asked. “Not in any way?”

  It was obvious what he really meant, and Olivia felt her cheeks get hot. “No. Like I said, he didn’t touch me.” No, she was the one who’d touched him.

  And then lost your nerve.

  She ignored that.

  Her father remained motionless, staring at her, his gaze oddly sharp. “And he didn’t tell you what he wanted?”

  “He didn’t say a word to me. I assumed you would get a ransom demand or something.”

  Cesare was silent a moment. “I find it very odd, Olivia. That someone would kidnap you out of your bedroom, hold you blindfolded and tied up in a hotel room, then vanish.”

  Her father was adept at sniffing out a lie—as a businessman it was a useful skill, and over the years he’d honed it. But she too had her own strengths, and hiding things she didn’t want him to know about was one of them. Usually it involved never letting her feelings show since he didn’t like emotional displays, but it certainly came in useful when she didn’t want him to know that she was lying to him.

  She met his gaze guilelessly. “I’m not sure what to tell you, Dad. I know it’s strange and I can’t explain it, but that’s what happened.”