Page 64 of Quarantined with the Billionaire

And what did it have to do with the mysterious Madeline?

Or Kate, for that matter?

Swallowing, I stood behind him as he turned to look at me. God, he was beautiful, even looking tortured like he did now. The way the dim light caught his dark pupils inside the deep blue irises along with the way the shadows contoured his face punctured me in the heart, reminding me that the love I was feeling for this man was growing minute by minute—and I needed to steel myself, because what he was about to show me was going to wreck me.

I just knew it.

It would destroy whatever we had already built, and I needed to put on some armor to try to protect my fragile heart.

He, too, had been assessing me. “You haven’t already been in here?” Once again, his inflection made it sound like a question, but his expression told me he already knew.

I had no earthly idea what he hid behind that door.

As he turned the knob and pushed against it, I held my breath, expecting the worst. Now, I wondered why I hadn’t even walked around the house to see if there was a window in this room, why I hadn’t dared peek from the grounds.

But I knew why. As much as I was growing to love Maddox, I was also afraid to see inside him. I’d barely started to like him when I fell in love with him. What existed deep inside the man in his darkest recesses might completely turn all those emotions around.

When he flipped on the light switch, my senses were assaulted and I almost felt disoriented. It was a sea of pink, but what caught my eye first was the gorgeous chandelier in the middle of the room—lights and silver balls cascaded down in a circle and it wasn’t until I took in the rest of the space that I realized the chandelier was shaped like a mobile.

A baby’s mobile.

My breath caught in my throat as I looked around the rest of the space. There was a crib placed between two windows. A pink dresser, an overstuffed chair with an ottoman, a rocker. A lamp. Two little chairs and a tiny table in front of one of the windows with a floral display on top.

The room smelled a little stuffy and stale—but it reeked of sadness.

My voice could barely be heard, but I thought I understood now. “Madeline’s room?”

Maddox didn’t answer, instead taking another step inside. His brow was furrowed as he grappled with emotions that I couldn’t name, and I decided to let him go at his own pace. As much as I wanted to snoop around and try to figure it out myself, I was going to have him lead the way.

If he could.

“I’d met Kate after I’d lost all my money the first time. I’d re-evaluated where I was going and I and a couple of guys had gone to a bar downtown. She was our waitress. She caught my eye and flirted and, well, it wasn’t long before we’d started dating. When she moved in with me, I paid for her to go to school but she hadn’t been serious about it. Told me she wanted to get married and start a family. I thought I wanted that, too.

“But we fought. God, did we fight. All but knock-down, drag-out. She liked it. She loved riling me up, pissing me off. I know now that it was just a good way to get me out of the house for a while and, as I began building my business, figuring out how to make money, she got nastier. I thought I was in love, so I put up with a lot. Finally, though, I couldn’t do it anymore, and I suggested that maybe we separate.

“That was when she got pregnant. How could I kick out the mother of my child? How could I leave her penniless? I couldn’t, but I could ask her to stop drinking. She wouldn’t, so I tried to get her to go to rehab. At this point, I’d been dreaming of a baby girl for months, growing more worried that Kate’s drinking was stopping my child from growing in her womb properly, and I’d contacted several lawyers to find out how much control I had over the situation. We’d had a particularly nasty argument, and I’d told her if she wouldn’t stop drinking, I was going to have her locked up in a rehab facility, whatever it took. She threw her empty rum bottle at me.” His eyes connected with mine then. “It broke against the fireplace in your bedroom—after hitting me square between the eyes. She ran out of the room and was peeling her car out of the driveway before I could even try to stop her.”

Oh, shit. I knew where this was going.

“She crashed her car into a concrete barrier after merging onto I-25. The authorities called me and I rushed to the hospital. She was in critical condition, heading right into surgery. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt that sick in my life, and I felt like it was my fault. If anything happened to the baby, that was on me.” I wanted to protest, to assure him that wouldn’t have been his fault, but there would be no convincing him. He’d lived with this for a while now and had long since assumed all the blame.

He walked across the room to the dresser, and I got the feeling he hadn’t entered this room in years. That little baby had meant the world to him. Picking up what looked like a tiny pink brush, he held it between his finger and thumb and twirled it, emphasizing how miniscule it was. “This’ll tell you what a bastard I am. When the doctor came out to talk to me and said Kate’s condition was stable, I instead asked about the baby.”

“Baby? The only person in this accident was your wife, sir.

“No, I mean the baby she was carrying.

“Carrying?

“She was pregnant.”

Maddox settled onto the ottoman, and I couldn’t just stand there staring down at him. I knelt beside him on the floor, gently touching his knee—but it was as if I wasn’t even there.

“That news came as a shock to the doctor—which didn’t really surprise me at the time, because Kate was so damned thin. But he broke the news to me that she wasn’t pregnant. I grasped at straws. Maybe she’d miscarried. But no. She had never been pregnant. It had all been a lie. Had her brain been so alcohol-addled that she didn’t realize I’d figure it out eventually? Was she enjoying watching me blow money converting that room for no reason at all?”

Maddox’s left hand was squeezed into a fist, his words tight as he forced them out of his mouth. “Kate actually recovered pretty quickly. She’d broken some bones and needed physical therapy, but she managed just fine. I waited to talk to her about it until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I’d wanted to wait until she came home, but I couldn’t trust her. And instead of apologizing, she blamed me. She didn’t even try to blame it on her addiction. Somehow, it was all my fault. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t easy to live with. I was married to the business I was growing, hardly ever home—and home even less once we started fighting. Part of me believed it was all my doing.

“Until she went after me, guns blazing. Not only had she ripped a fictional child out of my arms, she wanted it all. And her lawyers drummed up the story that Kate had been the reason my business was so successful. Behind every successful man and all kinds of garbage and she went for the throat. I realized I’d have to fight dirty, too, so I hired the most ruthless attorney I could find. And this guy didn’t just stop at how she behaved at the end of our marriage. He dug into her past and absolutely destroyed her. At the end, she was broken.”

Maddox was silent for a while, but I kept my hand on his knee, listening to his soft breathing. “I gave her millions in the end. I was going to give her a mere one million—enough to either settle somewhere comfortably while earning a living or to crash and burn. But after I saw the damage we’d done, I gave her way more than she deserved. Well, I guess you could argue that…but it was guilt money. I kept my business. I kept the house. But I’m afraid I took her soul in the bargain.”

He wasn’t going to tell me more, so I didn’t want to dig. Knowing now what I knew of Maddox, I couldn’t believe he would intentionally try to ruin her. His lawyer? Possibly.

And maybe, if I stood by his side, I could help him come to terms with his past.

One thing was for certain—he had a lot of healing to do.

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