Lie to Me: A Contemporary Billionaire BWWM Romance (16 page)

He was not sure how long he sat there in rigid, impotent frustration before his phone started making a series of odd noises.

It stopped and, a few seconds later, the soft tap at the door was once again followed by Eddie’s head. “I really don’t think that intercom is working.”

Nick pressed a button on his phone and spoke. “I think it is, Eddie.”

He could hear his own voice coming from the outer office.

“That’s funny, that is,” mused Eddie.

“Was there something?”

“Your brother… That is to say, Mr. Rothberger – not you, Mr. Rothberger, Mr. A. – is outside. Should I show him in?”

“Please.” Nick composed himself and drew a deep breath.

Adam entered with a smug smile on his face. He waited until Eddie had shut the door then turned to Nick. “Thanks for showing up to work.”

“What the hell, Adam?!” Nick’s plan to remain calm was not off to the best of starts. “What the hell?!”

Adam shook his head. “Boy, are you a bad loser.”

“I didn’t lose!”

“I have compelling evidence that says otherwise.” He waved his cell phone at his brother.

“You cheated!”

“In what way?” asked Adam.

“You never gave me a chance!” Nick yelled back. “If you’d let Zoe speak to Jourdan then…”

“Then RothCo would have lost a valuable contract,” Adam snapped back. “I’m not letting that happen just to spare the feelings of some girl you’ve shacked up with.”

“Why would you even make the bet if you didn’t intend to let her go through with it?!” Nick’s voice was strangled. His ire and indignation on Zoe’s behalf were rising. He would circle back round to the ‘girl you’ve shacked up with’ part of that sentence but for now he wanted to know why all this had happened.

“I was drunk!” exclaimed Adam. He pointed an accusing finger at his brother. “Really drunk. Frankly, if anyone was taking advantage of anyone that night, it was
you
of
me
. Making a bet on which the future of our company hung with someone as drunk as I was? That’s exactly why you’re not cut out for this life. You should see all this as a Godsend. You don’t have to be CEO any more. You never wanted to be! You never have been, and now it’s official. You should be thanking me. This is your chance to go out and do something with your life rather than relying on me to make your money for you and then pissing it away on that ridiculous bar.”

Nick mentally re-grouped. He had to admit, there was some truth in what Adam said. Neither of the brothers had worked to reach their positions in life but Adam had worked to stay there, and he had done a good job. Nick, meanwhile, had used his money and position as a crutch to prop up his failing business and as a safety net that allowed him to fail, or indeed allowed him to do absolutely nothing if he felt so inclined. Perhaps being forced into this position would do him good.

Still, his righteous anger burned.

“How did you make the deal?” It was more out of curiosity than anything else.

Adam shrugged. “I mentioned to Jacques Jourdan that Vanessa was laid up in hospital and that she was devastated that she wouldn’t get to meet him. I didn’t even mention the deal. He was on the first plane out to Johannesburg. I do wonder if he thought he had a better chance with her if she had a broken leg and couldn’t run away – dirty old bastard. Anyway, they got on as well as predicted - like a house on fire. I ‘happened’ to drop by to visit Vanessa on the same day as Jourdan: ‘
fancying seeing you Mr. Jourdan. Well as long as you’re here…
’ The paperwork was signed that same day. Nice and clean.”

Nick nodded as he took all this in. “You’re very good at your job, Adam.”

Adam acknowledged the compliment. “Thank you. You suck at yours. Now, the question remains: are you going to honor the bet?”

Nick leveled his gaze at his brother. “I’ll honor it, but I still want something from you.”

“What?”

“An apology.”

Adam scoffed. “You’ll be lucky. I’ve done nothing to apologize for.”

“Not to me,” said Nick. “To Zoe.”

“That ghetto piece of trash?”

Nick’s anger flared. “What did you call her?!”

“Oh come on,” Adam backed away from his brother’s rage. “Don’t tell me you didn’t think the same when you saw her in the bar? That hair.” He gestured wildly to his head and rolled his eyes. “Good thing you fixed it. And god, the way she handled herself on the water? Ridiculous that you ever even thought you might win this bet.”

Nick smiled at the memory. Then felt slightly ashamed at his part in making Zoe change herself. He missed her natural hair.

Then stiffened. “How do you know about that?” Another thought crowded in on the first. “Why did you let the bet run? You said you wouldn’t have made the bet sober, so you must have known early on that you weren’t going to let Zoe have a fair chance. So why did you let me keep teaching her?”

A flicker passed across Adam’s face but he did not back down. “I was going to call the whole thing off but… It was just so funny!”

Nick stared in shock.

“For the first day I thought: what the hell, what harm can it do? At the very least it kept you out of the way while I handled the deal. But after a few days I was resolute that we were calling off the bet. You weren’t at the bar and I heard you were giving a horse-riding lesson so I went to find you.”

Adam grinned hugely at the memory. “I haven’t laughed so much in years. Seeing that ghetto booty try to haul her fat ass onto a saddle! I just wished I’d had a camera. And then I thought: there’s going to be so many more moments like this. Hell, I could probably start a YouTube channel: Trash Trying to Classy, or something like that. I didn’t want to miss that! So I hired a private detective to follow discretely and film your lessons. When I showed them to Vanessa - the sight of Zoe trying to be her? I really think all that laughing helped her recover faster. You can put a pig in a ball gown, but it’s still a pig. I couldn’t believe it when you started sleeping with her. Not that I blame you. We all need to slum it sometimes, right? A bit of rough every now and then – very nice. I bet she goes like steam train.”

That he had let Adam get this far, and say this much about Zoe without doing anything about it, said less about Nick’s self-control than it did about how shocked he was. His brother’s undermining the bet and making the deal on the sly was pretty typical, but this?

Nick was stunned to silence. But when he had finally managed to rouse himself from that, he acted quickly. In a few bounding steps he was up and across the room and punched his brother in the face.

Adam fell back against the wall, surprised as much as hurt. “What the hell’s got into you? I’m not criticizing. Have your fun, I say.”

“I can’t believe you would do this!”

“Do what?” Adam was genuinely confused. “She’s just some nobody.”

“She’s a human being!”

“But she doesn’t matter,” Adam observed. “She’s not anyone who actually
counts
in this world.”

Nick’s fist made contact with Adam’s jaw before Adam had a moment to react.

Adam ducked as Nick continued swinging at him. “I don’t know what your problem is! The way I see it, you should be grateful; not only have I given you the chance to stand on your own two feet for the first time in your life, but thanks to me you got a few weeks of no-strings sex. Seems like we all got something out of this bet.”

“Okay,” Nick managed to get some control over his temper – punching his brother had certainly helped. “You’re right. She was just part of the bet and, yeah, I was angry as hell when you pointed her out in the bar. One look at her and I thought: how the hell can I teach that to be sophisticated? She was just part of the bet, and the most irritating part of it. She was slow, dumb, completely ignorant of anything that could even vaguely be called class, and…”

“Trash,” said Adam, smugly returning to his favored description.

“Yeah,” Nick admitted. “I guess that is exactly what I thought. Nothing to look at, not worth talking to unless you want to talk about barbeque, not even a proper person, just a lump of clay I could maybe mold into something more worthwhile. If it wasn’t for the bet I wouldn’t have gone near her.”

“So you’re getting angry at me because…?” wondered Adam.

“Because I was full of shit,” said Nick. “I probably shouldn’t have punched you, Adam, at least not until I punched myself, because I was as much of an ass when this thing started as you are now. But I have the advantage of you – I got to know her. I got to spend time with this incredible, vibrant, intelligent…”

“Intelligent?!” Adam interrupted, disbelieving.

“Yes; intelligent!” Nick snapped back. “You don’t measure intelligence by whether someone has gone to Harvard or heard of the Huguenots, or if they can whistle along with Verdi – to be honest that’s pretty useless. Zoe’s got a business head that could put
you
to shame, so you can imagine how she makes
me
look. More importantly, she’s got emotional intelligence…”

Adam shook his head. “That’s just a phrase dumb people made up to excuse their stupidity.”

“We’ve got it the wrong way round,” Nick went on. “All the stuff we know about; it doesn’t mean anything. It has no practical application. And all this is beside the point – what matters is that she’s a good person. She’s got more human decency in her little finger than you or I have got in our entire bodies. You may know the difference between a Botticelli and a Ghirlandaio, but she knows how to treat people, and that’s knowledge that’s worth something.”

“Not to me, it isn’t.”

Nick, quite unexpectedly, found himself smiling. “You know, you were right: I shouldn’t have got angry. What the hell have I got to be angry about? I’m the lucky one, because I can see how wonderful she is. I’m lucky enough to be in love with an incredible woman who loves me back.”

“In
love
?!” Adam couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“Yes,” Nick smiled back, a strange serenity descending over him. “And the more I think about it, the less I understand why I even came here today, or why I’m getting upset now. You cheated in our bet, you’ve screwed me out of the family company and cost me millions of dollars. So what? I’ve got Zoe. And nothing you can say or do will change that. You called her trash, and made some other comments about her that really tell me what a disgusting person you are, but in the end, why would I care?
I
love her. And, amazingly enough,
she
seems to love
me.
What you think doesn’t matter. What you say doesn’t matter. I wish I’d realized all this earlier, I could’ve been in France at a vineyard with the most beautiful girl in the world, drinking wine, and making love, while you toil away in an office to grab a few more dollars, as if they’ll make you happy. They won’t, trust me. How much money will ever be enough? Don’t you think we have enough?”

The frustration was starting to show in Adam’s face. Winning was nice, and he had won, but part of the fun of winning was beating the other person and them knowing they had been beaten by a superior competitor. Nick was taking all the joy out of this for him by acting as if
he
had won!

Adam tried again. “How’s that bar of yours going to do without the family money to prop it up?”

Nick shrugged. “Badly I guess. Zoe had some great ideas, but I doubt I’ve got the money now to put them into practice.”

“And you think that scabby little gold-digger is going to be interested in you now you’re next to broke?” Adam thrust again, seeking for some weak spot in Nick’s oddly impenetrable armor of love.

But Nick just shook his head. “You really don’t know her. She’s not like that.”

“They’re
all
like that.”

“The women you go out with only care about money because that’s how you get them to go out with you in the first place,” Nick pointed out. “If you drive up in a car that might as well be penis-shaped and wave bunch of cash at a girl then you can’t be surprised that she disappears when the money runs out. But that’s not how it happened with Zoe. I mean, I’m not saying that a week in a vineyard didn’t help but… it was going to happen anyway.” Nick headed for the door. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to have lunch with my girlfriend. Despite all this, you will get a wedding invite and I really hope you’ll come. If only to find out about how wrong you are.”

“I’m the sole CEO now! Don’t you forget that!” roared Adam, as if he could make it matter with volume.

Nick nodded mildly. “You always were. You’re very good at it and I wish you all the luck with it.”

“Stop being so damned reasonable!”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry! Be angry!”

Nick grinned. “I just can’t. I’ll send you my resignation. Unless you’d like me to write it out now? I’ve got a little time.”

“No!” Adam would not be denied this. “You’re not resigning.”

“I’m not?”

“I’m firing you!”

“Okay.”

“At the next board meeting,” Adam went on. “In front of everyone. I will fire you for gross incompetence, for never having properly fulfilled the duties of a CEO, and for fraternizing with the staff.”

Nick nodded. “That is all true. Perfectly fair. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a member of staff I need to go fraternize with.”

“Of course she’ll be fired too.”

Nick stopped with his hand on the door. “What?”

There was an almost mad gleam in Adam’s eyes, his face split by a broad grin, as he realized that he had, finally, found a way of twisting the knife in his brother’s side. He had found Nick’s weak spot. “You can’t seriously expect that little tart of yours to keep her job.”

“What has Zoe done?!” Nick no longer even tried to keep his cool. To him RothCo had meant relatively little, it was just a pay check he had done nothing to earn. But Zoe loved her job, he knew. Perhaps she was not one hundred percent happy working for Vanessa, but it was a good stepping stone and one that she had worked hard to earn. With her business brain and work ethic she had a great future in the company, a future that she had worked hard to earn. If Adam fired her then it was not just that she had lost that immediate future – the black mark of being fired for sleeping with a boss would keep her out of starting again at another company. This could be the end of her career in business. God knew
he
certainly didn’t have any business contacts to help ease her transition.