DEFY (The Billionaire's Rules, Book 8)

DEFY (The
Billionaire’s Rules, Book 8)

By Kelly Favor

© 2015 All Rights Reserved

Ivy couldn’t believe what she’d done.

She couldn’t believe that she was staring
into the cool, calculating eyes of the powerful CEO, the man who’d taken her
virginity, who was now her husband—and openly challenging him.

Cullen seemed as though he was trying to
gather his thoughts, perhaps gauging just how serious Ivy was.

She crossed her arms and calmly met his
gaze, trying not to give anything away.
 
The truth was, Ivy was furious.
 
Finding out that Cullen had been married previously without ever having
shared that information with her…

Realizing that he’d had another
engagement, another pre-nup or post-nup or whatever they wanted to call
it—was humiliating.

“I don’t think we need to go into all the
details right now,” Cullen told her cautiously.

“Now is exactly when we need to go into
all of the details,” Ivy retorted.
 
She turned to Larry the lawyer, who was anxiously stroking his wispy
goatee as he sat a few feet away with the contracts in front of him.
 
“I really think we need privacy to have
this discussion,” she told Larry.

“If I may be so bold—“ Larry began.

“You may not,” she cut him off.
 
“Just go.
 
I need to speak with my…” she almost
said ‘husband’ but couldn’t bring herself to speak the word.
 
“I need to speak with Cullen, just the
two of us.”

Larry sighed and looked at Cullen, who
gave a tired shrug in response.
 
“Go
on,” Cullen said.
 
“Wait in the
hotel restaurant, have a coffee or something.”

The bespectacled lawyer got to his feet,
gathering the contracts and stuffing them quickly back into his valise, while
Cullen watched him, shaking his head.

After the little man had gone, Ivy turned
to Cullen.
 
“Don’t give him a hard
time for blowing your secret,” she said.
 
“If he hadn’t blurted out that you’d had a contract like this in the
past, I’d still be in the dark.
 
And
that would be wrong.”

Cullen ran a hand through his thick, dark
hair.
 
“I can see that you’re
upset.”

“About my current husband having been
previously married?
 
Just a tad,”
she replied sarcastically.

“I wasn’t married,” Cullen said.

Ivy blinked.
 
“I don’t understand.
 
You weren’t married?”

He shook his head.
 
“We were going to be married, and we had
a pre-nup drawn up, but it never got signed.
 
We never had a chance.”
 

Ivy frowned.
 
Some of her anger was dissipating as she
realized that perhaps she’d overreacted.
 
“Who was she?”

Cullen went to the room service tray and
poured himself another cup of coffee.
 
“Her name was Jillian Andrews.”
 
He lifted the cup, but didn’t drink from it.
 
“And she was my patient.”

Ivy stared at him.
 
“The patient who died?”

He nodded.
 
His eyes were strained and she could see
that this topic was immensely painful.
 

For a moment, she felt a surge of
jealousy so powerful that it almost doubled her over.
 
Cullen Sharpe was still in love with
this woman, this dead woman.
 
Her
memory haunted him.

Cullen finally sipped from the cup and
then slowly wiped his thumb across his lower lip.
 
“I performed a surgery on Jillian to
remove a tumor in her brain,” he said, looking away from Ivy and out the window
now.
 
“That was how we initially
met.
 
It was a fairly routine
surgery.
 
I was able to remove the
entire tumor, and the prognosis was very good for her recovery.”

“I thought you said she died during
surgery.”

“The first one was a success.”
 
His blue eyes were as cold and withdrawn
as perhaps she’d ever seen.

Ivy sat down in a nearby chair.
 
She felt clammy and slightly ill.
 
“When did you begin seeing each other?”

“It happened as I continued to follow her
progress post-surgery.
 
She became
my submissive.”
 
Cullen was still
looking out the window, and so he didn’t see Ivy’s pained expression as he told
her this ‘minor’ detail.

Ivy felt her stomach tightening into
knots.
 
“So you were…teaching
her?
 
The way you teach me?”

He nodded.
 
“Yes.”

Swallowing back the bitter taste of his
confession, Ivy took a long slow breath.
 
“And you were in love with her?
 
With your patient?”

Cullen finally looked at Ivy again.
 
The light streaming through the window
illuminated his gorgeous features, showed the perfection of his skin.
 
And yet he was somehow terribly cruel in
his beauty, Ivy thought.

“I was in love with her,” he admitted.

Ivy’s lips tightened.
 
“And you would discipline her?
 
Spank her?
 
All the things you do to me?”

Cullen nodded again.
 
“Yes.”

“Tell me the rest of the story,” Ivy
said, her heart beating fast.
 
“Tell
me what happened.
 
I deserve to know
the truth.”

He turned his face towards the window
again, looking outside as he spoke.
 
“We kept the relationship a secret.
 
It was wrong to become involved with a patient, of course.
 
But we were making plans for me to hand
her treatment over to a colleague, and once that was done, we could be public
with our relationship.”

“Which colleague?” Ivy asked.

Cullen glanced at her, expression
somewhat alarmed.
 
“Excuse me?”

“I said, which colleague were you going
to hand her case to?”

He made a strange face.
 
“Why does that matter?”

Ivy glared at him.
 
“Somehow I feel like it does.”

He sighed, shaking his head.
 
“I’m starting to think that you’re just
fishing for ammunition.”

“And I’m starting to think that you’re
afraid to tell the truth because of how it might make you look.”

Cullen’s nostrils flared.
 
“You’re verging on a level of disrespect
that I don’t tolerate, Ivy.”

She got to her feet and faced him.
 
“Tell me who was going to take over her
case.”

“Xavier Montrose,” Cullen said, his teeth
grit.
 
It was as if speaking the
name was physically difficult for him to do.

She felt somehow vindicated by this
admission.
 
“But he never did take
over her case, did he?” Ivy pressed.

Cullen shook his head and his eyes grew
distant once more.
 
“The scans had
come back clean for nearly a year, and I was confident that Jillian was out of
the woods.
 
I’d never have handed
her case to another physician otherwise.”
 
He frowned a little.
 
“And
then one morning, she complained of a migraine headache to me.
 
I was concerned, but told her not to
worry.
 
A few hours later, I was at
work and I got a call that she’d been taken to the ER.
 
She’d had a seizure while shopping for
groceries.”

 
“That’s horrible,”
Ivy
said, empathetic despite her growing unease.

“They performed a scan and found that
there were two new tumors in her brain.”
 
Cullen seemed to be reliving the experience as he retold it.
 
His body was stiff, as if his mind had
traveled to another place and time.
 
“We needed to perform two different surgeries to remove the two tumors,
as they were located in different areas of the brain.
 
Each surgery would require months of
recovery.
 
At that point, I knew
that I couldn’t afford to hand her care over to another physician.
 
Not with her life hanging in the
balance.”

Ivy watched him, her heart breaking for
him, and for Jillian—but also for herself.

Seeing the man she had fallen for talking
so earnestly about his past love was a terrible feeling.
 

“And then what happened?” she asked
softly.

Cullen sighed, running a hand through his
hair again.
 
“What happened is that
we did the first surgery and it went well.
 
But her recovery was difficult.
 
The other tumor continued to grow.
 
And Jillian’s behavior
changed,
became erratic.
 
It happens when there’s significant
brain trauma.
 
She was on seizure
medication, having memory issues and mood swings.
 
She became very hostile at times.”

Ivy wanted to go to him, take him in her
arms.
 
Yet another part of her
wanted to scream at him, to demand how he could have kept all of this from her.
“Were you still planning to get married at this point?”

Nodding his head, Cullen smiled briefly.
 
“Perhaps selfishly, I insisted that we
set a wedding date, even as our relationship fractured.
 
Jillian was struggling emotionally, and
the seizure medication wasn’t always helping.
 
She had more seizures.
 
The tumor was growing fast, and so I was
forced to schedule the next surgery sooner than I’d have liked.
 
I should have known I was too close to
it all,” Cullen said.
 
“But I was
desperate.
 
I had the sense that I
was watching a slow motion train wreck and there had to be something I could do
to stop it.”

“And you
had
to be the one conducting her surgery?”

“I didn’t trust anyone else to hold
Jillian’s life in their hands.”
 
He
stared at Ivy as if challenging her to disagree.
 
“I’m the best brain surgeon in the
world,” he said.
 
“I’m not about to
let someone else crack the skull of the woman I lo—“ he stopped in
mid-sentence.

“Go on,” Ivy told him.
 
“You can say it, Cullen.”

“I was talking about the past, Ivy.”

She shook her head.
 
“You weren’t, actually.”
 
She smiled sadly.
 
“And we both know it.”

Cullen licked his lips and grimaced.
 
“Whatever you’re trying to prove, it’s
not true.
 
What happened to Jillian
is all behind me now.
 
She’s
gone.
 
Why are we rehashing this?”

“None of it is in the past, Cullen.
 
You’re still having nightmares about
it.
 
Why is that?”

His jaw set.
 
“Everyone has regrets.
 
Maybe I have more than some.
 
But I won’t apologize for the things
I’ve done to help those closest to me.”

“I don’t expect you to.”

“It seems that you do.
 
You think I owe you an explanation for
the death of the woman I loved.”

“I think I should know about it, yes,”
Ivy said, laughing that he could be so clueless.
 
“And even now, you’re trying to avoid
the subject.”

He threw up his hands.
 
“You want me to pull my guts out in
front of you?
 
Is that what would
make you feel better?” he said, his voice rising.
 
“You want to hear that in my arrogance,
I insisted on conducting Jillian’s final surgery?
 
And that I made a
mistake—a simple mistake—that cost her everything?
 
That cost a human being her life?” he
said, and now his cheeks had turned red and there was a vein steadily pulsing
in his temple.
 
“I watched her bleed
out, Ivy.
 
I killed the woman I
loved and there’s nobody else to blame for it.
 
I did it,” he said pointing at
himself.
 
“Me.”
 

Ivy looked at him and he stared back at
her with a gaze that burned with anger.
 
She didn’t know if he was angry with her for making him discuss his
past, or if he was mad at himself.
 

Perhaps both.
 

“I just wish you’d told me that you were
planning on marrying her,” Ivy said.
 
“That you loved her.”