In His Grip: His #5 (A Billionaire Domination Serial) by Erika Masten Page B

battered upright piano or from The Doors album she’d had since she was a teenager. It was “the going away song” that meant my father had left her again—left us. After everything she’d given up for him: her education at Juilliard, her family, all the security and opportunity that she’d been born to in a wealthy household.
    Her childhood memories had been filled with European boarding schools and world travel, riding lessons and extravagant parties, glamour and a carefree joie de vivre that stemmed from knowing that everything she wanted was ever at her fingertips. Mine…gloomy rooms and threadbare furniture, thrift store clothes that never quite fit, and that old piano playing out the scenes of heartbreak, bittersweet reunion, and heartbreak again. Over and over. She had been the only source of light, the sun in that dingy apartment, that dingy life. With her warm smile and unwarranted optimism, her passions and hopes and anguishes wrought upon ivory keys. And now I was hearing that song from Adrian’s fingers, when I was the cause.
    Fifteen days… For the first time in more than two weeks, I slipped into the bedroom by way of the patio shutter to avoid walking through the living room and slid into Adrian’s oversized canopy bed without him beside me. I slept like I ceased to exist, never moving, not dreaming, and certainly not resting.
    In the morning, with the golden sunlight that seemed so particular to Brazil sifting through the wooden slats of the shutter wall, I found Adrian’s side of the bed still bare, the cream-colored sheets unwrinkled. I sucked my bottom lip to keep it from trembling and wondered where he’d slept. Had it really been so easy to shatter the tenuous balance we’d found with one another over the past several days? One glance at Penn Ellison. One ill-conceived moment of cowardice. One lie, about who I was to Adrian Knight, about what he meant to me.
    My limbs felt leaden as I shuffled along the luxurious wooly rugs and textured concrete floor into the bathroom and stumbled gracelessly into the shower. With the water coursing over my face and clearing my head, I replayed the scene from the night before in my mind. That moment when Penn’s luminous blue eyes had met Adrian’s… The way the dashing blond heir’s expression had brightened decidedly, so unexpectedly, at the sight of me… And the way the two men had spoken to one another, sparing behind a thin veil of civility.
    Alexander. Penn had said Adrian Alexander , not Knight. Where had I heard that name before? I sifted mentally through more uncomfortable details from the unexpected collision of the double lives I’d been leading, and then it came to me. Alexander Engineering & Construction. It was a British company—no, an empire based on commercial development, large scale project management, and contracts covering everything from oilfield services to emergency military support, all delivered with a mixture of stunning success and questionable business practices that bordered on criminal.
    I hesitated where I stood under the rushing stream of warm water and thought back over everything Adrian had said about his father’s family. Very bad men with too much money they put to no good use. I knew from industry articles in newspapers and journals that AEC or one or another of its subsidiaries had run into legal problems every couple of years. The allegations included everything from the abuse of substantial contracts for providing emergency support to military units stationed all over Eastern Europe and the Middle East, to the use of shell companies in the Caribbean, to outright bribery of government officials worldwide.
    Dread settled over me, spreading along the back of my scalp and running down my neck and spine as surely as the water from the shower. Those were the people Adrian came from? Exactly the sort I resisted taking on as clients back at the firm, even to the detriment of my career? My mind buzzed with a whirl of