Page 2 of Bought

I watched the crowd, looking for him, hoping he was here, but as the room filled up and there was no sign of him, my anxiety gripped a little tighter. Then he suddenly appeared, and I knew I needn’t have worried. He was easy to spot, half a head taller than everyone else, coming in with his two friends, Atlas Blackwood and Caleb Cross.

The three of them were the richest, most powerful men in the city, and Arcadia was owned by Caleb. He and Atlas were both handsome and intensely charismatic, but I only had eyes for the man who’d be buying me at some point this evening if I was lucky.

I already knew what he looked like. I’d spent long nights studying the photos in the file my contact had given me. The reality, though, was a whole other thing.

He was tall in his perfectly tailored dark suit, six-four at least, and broad too. Short, ink-black hair cut close to his skull, and straight black brows. A sharp, proud nose and carved mouth. His face was all edged planes and fierce angles, beautifully put together, but so stern. An avenging angel’s face. He looked as if he never smiled. He looked as if he’d made being judge, jury, and executioner his whole life’s mission.

It was his eyes that did it. A deep, electric blue and so cold, a frozen gas flame. A stare full of knives with blades so sharp they could slide between your ribs before you even felt it.

Tennyson Fox. Billionaire CEO of Fox Tech. My friend Isabel’s father. Enemy of one of the most powerful families in the country, and buyer of my virginity if the evening went the way I was assured it would.

I sat in the shadows, protected from the crowd, and he shouldn’t have been able to see me, yet somehow his frozen blue gaze found mine all the same, sending a shiver straight down my spine, and making everything inside me tighten.

I did not like the sensation, whatever it was. Didn’t like that it was to do with him either. Men were the worst, and I didn’t let them affect me, not ever.

That included tonight. Because tonight, whether Tennyson Fox knew it or not, I was the one in charge.

My plan was to play up the air of fragility I supposedly projected, be the blushing virgin he no doubt expected, and hook into his white knight instincts to ensure that he saved me from the slavering horde.

So really, what I should have done was to look shyly away from that intense cold stare. But the electric jolt that had gone through me the moment his eyes met mine had gotten my back up, and made me want to lift my chin, stand my ground. Fight. Because as always with men, showing weakness was a bad idea. Some men didn’t like to be challenged and I had the sense that Tennyson Fox might very well be one of those men.

Donny certainly was. Donny, who wasn’t a pimp because I wasn’t a sex worker, but whose function was pretty much the same in that he passed on jobs to me and took a cut from my subsequent earnings as a ‘finder’s fee’.

He was an asshole who’d been trying to get me to sleep with him for the past couple of years I’d been working for him, and after the last time I’d refused, he’d kicked me out of the apartment he’d provided when I’d first started working for him.

I’d now stopped taking jobs from him and had been doing fill-in shifts at a bar called Stan’s to get by. Jay, the bartender, who was actually not a creep had offered me his couch and since I had nowhere else to go, I’d taken it. But I didn’t feel safe there either. Nowhere did. Which was why when I’d been contacted out of the blue by the woman who’d hired me for this job, once she’d mentioned the money, I’d taken it, no questions asked. And I’d been serious about it. I’d read everything in that file, and everything I could find online.

I knew he was the CEO of Fox Tech, a massive tech company that was making inroads globally. I knew he and Caleb Cross had grown up on the streets together and that while Cross had fallen in with a bad crowd, Fox hadn’t. He’d been formally adopted by an old man called Sir George Wyndham, who’d given him a home, before leaving Fox all his money when he died.

But that was just the publicly available information.

In that massive file, I’d also discovered that he’d once loved a woman called Juliana Hamilton, a member of one of the richest, most powerful families in the country. He and Juliana had a baby together — my friend Isabel — but Juliana had died during the birth and the Hamiltons were furious about it. They held Fox responsible for the death of their princess and they wanted revenge.

It was the Hamiltons who’d hired me. They wanted me to collect a specific piece of information so they could take him down and take him down hard.

I was on board. Revenge was a motivation I could really get behind, especially after asshole Donny, and what would I give to get some revenge on him?

Fox had sat down in one of the armchairs close to the dais, while Blackwood took a couch, leaning over to speak with the pretty woman sitting next to him. Cross put a hand on Fox’s shoulder and leaned down to say something, and Fox glanced away from my alcove, releasing from the tractor beam of his stare.

I took a breath and gave myself a little shake, shoving away the unsettled feeling in my stomach. So, he was way more good-looking than I’d expected. So what? So, he rescued virgins like he was some fucking saint. Who cared? He was just a man, and I knew what men were like, what all men were like. Nasty, brutish predators the lot of them. And money and power only made them worse, rotten to the core. He wasn’t any different.

It wouldn’t bother me at all to take Tennyson Fox down. In fact, I might even enjoy the hell out of it.

Out in the crowd, Cross turned and left while Fox sat in the armchair, staring at the empty dais, the look on his face unreadable.

A thread of worry twisted in my gut, no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, but this time it wasn’t for me, it was for Isabel. Who was currently out in the main part of the club and who’d probably seen her father and his friends come into this little room.

They clearly hadn’t seen her, which was a relief since she’d been trying to avoid Cross and her dad while attempting a night out sans the security detail that her father had put on her in a bid to keep her safe from the Hamiltons. They were trying to make contact with her, and Fox was having none of it.

Pity he didn’t know about me.

Part of the Hamiltons takedown strategy for him had also involved getting close to Isabel— their granddaughter — and so they’d somehow gotten me a position at Cross International, no idea how and I didn’t ask.

Anyway, Cross was Caleb Cross’s company and Isabel was interning there, and the Hamiltons had wanted ears on the inside, someone to get close to her and funnel what information I could find about her and her father back to them.

Yeah, I was their mole. Isabel had no idea who I really was and while I didn’t feel great about passing information on, especially after I’d gotten to know her, this was the job I’d been hired for. Besides, the Hamiltons weren’t going to hurt Isabel. She was desperate for more information about her mother’s family, so it wasn’t as if I’d led her to her death or anything. I might have spent the last five years getting Donny to hire me out to people who wanted my particular set of skills for various shady jobs, but I tried not to take the ones that involved hurting people who didn’t deserve it. And Isabel had become a friend, which had made things problematic for me. Still, I wasn’t in a position to refuse.

I needed the money.

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