Sold To The Enemy: The Billionaire's Acquisition

"Did she drink it?"

The voice came through a door Chloe didn't recognize.

She tried to lift her arm. It didn't move. Her fingers twitched once against a cushion that smelled of someone else's perfume, and went still.

Her tongue felt thick. She swallowed and tasted champagne gone flat and bitter at the back of her throat.

"Every drop," a woman said. "I poured it. I watched her finish the glass. Happy?"

Chloe knew that voice the way you know your own pulse.

Jenna Schaefer. Her maid of honor. The friend who had hooked the back of her dress at the final fitting and told her the neckline made her look like she belonged in the Carlisle family.

Her eyes came open a crack.

A coffee table. An ice bucket, the bottle inside still sweating. And on the wall beside the bed, arranged on a rack like tools in a workshop - handcuffs, a coiled whip, and three things with buckles she had no names for.

Her breath stopped.

The St. Regis. Her engagement party had ended two hours ago in the ballroom three floors down, with Chase holding her hand for the cameras.

Jenna had walked her out. "You're white as paper, babe. Come on, lie down for ten minutes."

The champagne. Jenna had poured it herself.

From the hallway, a man's voice. Impatient. "How much longer?"

"Ten minutes." Jenna's heels clicked on the carpet. "The boys are downstairs in the bar. I told them to be creative."

A pause. Chloe heard the wet click of a tongue against teeth.

"Think about it," Jenna said. "Adopted. No blood, no backing. By breakfast every phone in Manhattan has the pictures, and the Carlisles can't get the engagement annulled fast enough to save the name."

Chase laughed. Not nervous. Pleased.

"And nobody points a finger at me," he said. "That's the whole design."

A lighter flicked.

"My office," Jenna said. "Sterling PR, second floor, the corner one. You said it was mine."

"Paperwork's on my desk."

"God, Chase." Jenna actually giggled. "You're a prince."

Bile rose in Chloe's throat.

Not an affair. Not even the girl. This was a purchase order, and she was the thing being paid out.

"Once the Carlisles cut you loose," Chase said, "I can put a ring on Kayla without anyone calling me a fortune hunter."

Kayla.

Kayla Carlisle, produced six weeks ago at a Foundation dinner in a white dress Eleanor had picked out herself, with a DNA report in a leather folder on the table beside her.

Six weeks of Eleanor's new, careful, measuring looks at Chloe across the breakfast table.

All of it - the drug, the men, the cameras - so that Chase Sterling could walk away clean and marry the daughter with the real blood in her.

The same man who had gone down on one knee on Fifth Avenue last spring and promised to spend the rest of his life keeping her safe.

Something hot went through her, sharp enough to cut the fog.

Her hand closed. Nails - the manicure she'd chosen for the party - drove into her own palm.

Pain. Real, immediate, hers.

Her head cleared a fraction. Enough.

The voices in the hall stopped. Heels came back across the carpet.

Chloe let her body go slack. She slowed her breathing the way she'd learned to in that house as a child, when listening was safer than being seen.

The lock turned.

Light sliced across the floor and Jenna walked in, phone already in her hand.

She leaned over the couch. Perfume, heavy and sweet. A fingernail tapped Chloe's cheek.

"Out cold," Jenna murmured. "You're going to be so enthusiastic tonight, Chloe. You have no idea."

She straightened and started typing.

Chloe's eyes opened to slits.

The low table beside the sofa. On it, a squat metal sculpture, the kind of abstract thing hotels buy by the crate. Heavy.

Jenna pocketed the phone. "All right, sweetheart. Let's go get your-"

Chloe threw herself off the couch.

Her legs didn't work right. She went down on one knee, caught the edge of the table, and her hand closed on cold metal.

Jenna spun.

Her mouth opened. "You-"

Chloe swung.

The drug made it slow, a swing through water. Jenna stepped aside the way you'd step around a child, then shoved her, hard, with both hands.

Chloe hit the carpet.

Before she could roll, a knee drove into the small of her back. Fingers fisted in her hair and slammed her face down into the wool.

"Fight back?" Jenna hissed into her ear. "Really? You?"

The carpet burned her cheek. She couldn't get air. Couldn't move.

Two knocks at the door. Heavy ones.

"Jenna?" A man's voice. "You said ten minutes."

The knee didn't lift. Jenna's breath came fast against Chloe's ear.

"Second door down on the left," Jenna called, and she sounded delighted. "Wait for us there, boys. She's already warmed up."

The door shut. Footsteps moved off down the hall.

Jenna stayed where she was, knee in Chloe's back, breathing hard through her nose. "You stupid little-"

Chloe retched.

It wasn't acting. Her stomach turned inside out and everything in it came up onto the hotel carpet, hot and sour, and she couldn't stop.

"Ugh. Jesus, Chloe." Jenna's weight eased off her spine.

"Water." Chloe's throat felt scraped raw. "Please. Jenna. Water."

Jenna laughed. "Begging? Now? Bit late."

But the knee lifted.

Chloe turned her head. Through the curtain of her own hair: the low table, and on it the champagne flute, empty, a film of white dried at the bottom. Beside it, a water glass, half full.

Jenna was pushing herself up, picking at her ruined dress with a hiss of disgust.

Chloe's arm swung.

Her palm caught the water glass. It went off the edge and burst on the floor - ice water and shards across Jenna's dress and her bare shins.

Jenna screamed.

Chloe was already moving. She got her feet under her on the third try and ran for the door, half blind, one hand on the wall.

Behind her, Jenna shrieked her name, then Chase's.

The corridor was long and empty and lit like an aquarium. Chloe ran. She didn't know where she was going. She only knew it had to be away.

Red sign. EXIT.

She hit the bar and fell into a stairwell, concrete and cold and echoing, took the steps two at a time and didn't count them. The side door at the bottom opened onto the street.

Rain. A wall of it, October cold, hitting the pavement hard enough to bounce.

It went through her dress in two seconds. Her heels slid on wet stone; she kicked them off and kept going, barefoot down Fifth Avenue, gutter water to her ankles.

No purse. No coat. In her hand, a dead phone she'd snatched off that table on the way out, and she couldn't remember deciding to.

Jenna would have called Chase by now. Chase had a car, a driver, and men who did what he asked.

Think. She needed somewhere the Carlisle name meant nothing and the Sterling name meant nothing.

There was nowhere. Not in this city. Not for her.

Headlights came around the corner - two hard white eyes through the rain. A black Maybach, long and low, coming fast. Not slowing.

She didn't step back.

She stepped forward, into the middle of the street, into its lane.

Brakes screamed. The grille stopped a foot from her knees and the wash of air knocked her onto her back in the gutter. Water went up her nose, down her dress, into her mouth.

The rear door opened.

An umbrella snapped. A man stepped out, shoes landing in the filthy water without a sound, and didn't look at her.

"Remove her."

It hit her like a shove.

Chloe got up on her knees. Rain plastered her hair to her face. She looked up.

Grey eyes. Not blue - grey, the color of a February sky, flat and assessing, taking her in the way a man takes in a stain on his carpet.

She knew that face off the cover of every business magazine in the airport. The Beaumont heir who never gave interviews, who had shown up to the Carlisle summer gala exactly once and left before dessert.

Julian Beaumont IV.

Carlisle money and Beaumont money had been trying to bury each other for forty years.

Reaching for him was like grabbing a live wire in a flood. He was also the only thing in this city Chase Sterling couldn't touch.

She got her feet under her and walked straight at him.

"Mr. Beaumont." Her voice shook and she hated it. "I know who you are."

His jaw moved. Impatience.

"My name is Chloe Carlisle."

That landed. Something shifted behind the grey - not interest, not curiosity. Something colder than either.

"A Carlisle."

She bit down on the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood, because if she stopped now she was dead, or worse than dead, and everyone in New York would call it what Jenna had planned to call it.

"One night," Chloe said. "Let me stay with you tonight. In exchange-"

She made herself say it straight, looking right at him.

"I'll give myself to you."

The rain hammered the umbrella. The driver didn't move. Somebody behind her let out a breath.

Julian Beaumont looked at her for a long moment: the ruined dress, the bare feet bleeding on wet asphalt, the green eyes with something feral in them.

Women had offered themselves to him before. Never like this. Never with the arithmetic showing.

"Get in."

He turned and got into the car.

Chloe's legs gave. A bodyguard caught her by the elbow and she crawled in after him, dripping onto leather, into warmth that smelled of cedar and money.

Julian didn't look at her. He spoke to the driver.

"Clinic."

"The-" She swallowed. "Clinic?"

He turned his head. There was nothing personal in it. That was the worst part.

"I don't touch anything I haven't had inspected. Before we do business, you get examined."

Chloe's face went hot. Then cold.

She had thought she was ready to be humiliated tonight. She hadn't been ready for this one.

She looked down at her hands, at the water pooling on the floor of his car.

"Fine," she said.

The Maybach pulled into traffic and left the rain behind.

Julian closed his eyes and did not speak to her again for the rest of the drive.

The garage was under a brownstone with no sign on it. The elevator went down.

A doctor with grey hair and no expression took blood, took swabs, and had her lie back on a table in a room that was all white glass and steel. Julian sat in the corner in a leather chair, one ankle crossed over the other, watching her the way a man watches an appraisal.

Chloe kept her eyes on the ceiling.

The doctor straightened. "She's clean. And-" a glance at Chloe "-it's her first time."

Julian's gaze came up to Chloe's face.

For half a second he looked like a man who'd been handed the wrong file. Then it closed, and he looked at her the way a buyer looks at a horse that turned out better than the catalog said.

He didn't take her to a hotel.

The penthouse occupied the top four floors of a tower on Central Park West. From the elevator you could see the whole park, black in the rain, and the city laid out past it.

Julian pointed at a door. "Wash."

The shower was a wall of hot water. Chloe stood under it until her skin went red and her fingers wrinkled, and then she caught sight of herself in the mirror and didn't recognize the girl there - too pale, a bruise coming up along one cheekbone, eyes like something that had been dug out of the ground.

She cried then, quietly, with the water running, the way she had learned to cry in that house. Nobody heard. It cost her nothing.

This is the price, she told herself. Just remember the price.

When she came out in a robe that swallowed her, he was at the window with his back turned. He turned around and came to her.

No kissing. No pretense of wanting her. It was as warm as a signature.

She bit down on her lip and made no sound, and when the blood came she used it, and she went through the two names in her head the way other girls went through a prayer.

Chase. Jenna.

Chase. Jenna.

By the time it hurt less, the sky was grey.

He got up and showered and came back in a fresh suit, the knot already perfect. He crossed to the heap of wet silk on the floor that had been her dress, picked the phone out of the pocket, and didn't look at it.

He opened the window and dropped it.

It turned over twice against the sunrise and was gone.

Then he took a sealed phone box out of a drawer and tossed it onto the bed.

"That number is mine. Use it if you need me."

From the same drawer, a black card with no name on it. He set it on the nightstand.

"PIN is six zeros. A bonus. For the first time."

Chloe pulled the robe tighter.

"I don't want your money."

He stopped, one hand still on the drawer, and looked at her properly for the first time since the street.

"What do you want?"

She made it sound like a business proposal, because business was the only language he had answered in all night.

"A place to stay. Two days. Somewhere nobody from my family can walk in."

She held his eyes.

"And a doctor. A good one. One who doesn't ask questions."

His eyebrows moved a fraction.

"I have to go home exactly as I was," Chloe said. "Intact. If I don't, none of this was worth anything."

He understood. She watched it happen - the boredom going out of his face, something sharper coming in behind it. He'd worked out that she wasn't hiding. She was reloading.

It was the first thing about her he'd found interesting.

"Fine."

He took the black card back, made one phone call, and spoke for ninety seconds in flat sentences with no please in them.

The next morning, in a clinic with a different name and no windows in the waiting room, a surgeon she never met put her back the way she had been.

She spent the next two days in a furnished apartment with a lock on the inside of the door, in jeans and a sweater someone had left folded on the chair, both too big, both clean. Nobody came. Nobody called.

On the morning of the third day she took a cab to the Carlisle house.

The door opened and the housekeeper said, without raising her eyes, "Your mother wants you in the study."

Eleanor sat behind the big desk with her hands flat on it. She had not stood up.

"You've been gone three days."

Chloe kept her eyes down. She had rehearsed this in front of the bathroom mirror for two days, and she said it exactly as rehearsed.

"I drank too much at the party. I was sick. I went to a friend's house on Long Island to sleep it off. My phone died."

Eleanor said nothing for a while.

Then the study door opened.

"Chloe." Chase came in fast, his face arranged into relief. "Thank God. We've been out of our minds. I've had people calling hospitals."

He reached for her.

She stepped past him.

His hands closed on air. The relief slipped half an inch, and she saw what was underneath it. Then he turned to the desk.

"Aunt Eleanor." His voice went grave and concerned. "Now that she's back - for her own sake, we should settle this quietly. There will be talk. Three days, no word. If we can say there's been a medical exam..." He let it trail off, modest. "Dr. Lang is the family physician. It would put the whole thing to rest. For both our families."

The silence after that was long.

Chase wanted her opened up on a table in front of witnesses. He wanted proof his plan had worked - and if it hadn't, he wanted proof of that instead.

Eleanor looked at Chloe. Chloe looked at the floor.

"Chase is right," Eleanor said. "Send for Dr. Lang."

Chloe's nails went into her palms. Her face did nothing.

Chase was watching her, waiting for the breakdown. For tears, for a scene, for anything he could hold over her later.

"Fine," Chloe said.

He stopped moving.

Dr. Lang came with her black bag and her old hands and a face like a closed door. In the small room off the study she unwrapped the instruments one at a time.

"Lie back, dear."

Chloe lay back and shut her eyes.

The door closed. Everything she had left in the world was riding on a surgeon Julian Beaumont had hired with one phone call, in a room she had not been allowed to see, and she would not know if he'd paid for the best until this woman opened her mouth.

Dr. Lang snapped on a glove.

In the study, she could hear Chase pouring himself a drink. He sounded cheerful.