An Accidental Date with a Billionaire

“Not even when I’m judged as guilty, and you are, too, by association?”

He opened his mouth, closed it.

Bad public opinion could be catastrophic to his company.

Damn it, he’d worked hard to get where he was, and he had done so by keeping his hands and his nose clean. To be attached to a family that had done the complete opposite…

What would it do to him?

“Exactly,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.

“No one would know who you were,” he hurried to assure her, his words as hollow as his heart, because they weren’t enough.

“Yeah, because it was so hard for you to figure it out,” she shot back.

Swallowing, he tried to reach for her hand again. “We don’t even know what he found out. For all we know there’s nothing of your past in there.”

Again, she jumped out of his reach, not welcoming his touch. “You’re still pretending you didn’t read it?”

Her rejection speared him through. “Sam—”

“Fine. I’ll play along. Let’s pretend that you didn’t read it.” She gestured to the envelope, crossing her arms so tight she should have cracked. “Do it now. See if you got your money’s worth.”

He shook his head, his heart twisting.

“Open it, or I walk out right now,” she said, hands fisted.

He took a step toward her, anger rushing through his veins at her ultimatum. He tried to calm it, tried to shut it down, but it ignored his commands. “That’s not fair.”

“Life’s not fair,” she countered. “See what he found. Maybe you’re right and my secret is safe.”

Jaw tight, he snatched it up angrily, ripping the papers out of the crisp envelope. He skimmed the words, hoping to find no details of her life, for her sake, but the cover page alone summed up everything she had already told him, and then some. His heart sank.

“Well?”

For the first time in as long as he could remember, he was at a loss for words.

She laughed, clearly not needing any. “See? Told you.”

“Still, no one would know who you are or care enough to dig into your past.”

She rolled her eyes. “Every single woman in your circle feels like they have a claim on you, and I assure you they would investigate my past even faster than your detective the second you claimed me as yours in public. Why do you think I told you that we wouldn’t work?”

“Fuck that and fuck them.”

“So you’d be okay with publicly attaching yourself to a family of embezzlers,” she asked, searching his face for something he wasn’t sure she really wanted to find. “You’d go to a ball with me, even knowing everyone would find out the truth, and hold your head high, even though your investors might bail because of me? Even though, if the truth came out, I could affect your company, your life, your choices?”

“I…” He trailed off, his throat aching with the words he wanted to say but couldn’t.

She stared at him, tears welling in her eyes.

It wasn’t that he was ashamed of her, or that he wouldn’t be just as proud of her as he was before the truth came out. It was that he was a business owner, with hundreds of people depending on him for his livelihood, and she asked him a serious question that required thought, something he couldn’t rush through, damn it.

This decision would impact more than just himself, so he owed it to his employees to give them more than a split second before promising himself away to the daughter of two criminals.

“This is why I refused to get attached or to open myself up, but you just kept pushing for me to let you close, even though it was a horrible idea,” she said, swiping her hands under her eyes. “You just kept being you and making me fall for you.”

“Sam,” he said, too little, too late.