Trusting the Billionaire

Chapter Five: Unexpected encounter

By the weekend, Audrey was so tired and frustrated from working on different solutions, but none of them were as good as Marshall's investment. His would be a swoop-in solution, while the others would drag on, and Bellamy Trust might not even make it through the deadline set by the Central Bank.

She called Tracy, her best friend, to pour out her frustrations. The two of them had been close since second year in college, and fortunately, Tracy had gotten a job in the same city Audrey worked in.

The moment Tracy heard Audrey's voice crack over "I don't even know what to do anymore," she dropped whatever she'd been doing.

"Say less," Tracy said. "I'm coming over. And then we're going out."

"Tracy, no, I have work tomor—"

"Audrey Bellamy. You have been living inside boardrooms and spreadsheets for a year. A billionaire wants you to pretend to be his fiancée so he can swoop in and save your father's bank, and you called him ruthless to his face. You have been slaving away for the past year trying to find a solution. This is not a weekend kind of problem. This is a get-dressed-and-forget-your-name-for-three-hours kind of problem."

Audrey laughed despite herself, the first real laugh in days. "I hate that you're right."

"I'm always right. Wear the wine dress. I'll be there in forty minutes."

By the time Tracy arrived, Audrey had gone through every argument for staying home and lost each one to the exhaustion sitting behind her eyes. She let Tracy zip her into the dress, an emerald green, cut to skim every curve she usually hid under blazers, and didn't recognize the woman in the mirror. Not the CEO. Not the daughter trying to save her father's legacy. Just Audrey, for one night.

"There she is," Tracy said, satisfied, tugging one more inch off the hem. "The woman I actually recognize."

---

Marshall had told himself he wasn't going to think about her tonight.

He'd been telling himself that since Francis, his best friend, had shown up at his penthouse uninvited, dragging him out the door with the argument that he'd been insufferable all week and needed air that didn't smell like his own office. He hadn't wanted to go. But staying home meant staying alone with the memory of her voice, "ruthless, selfish, cold, exactly what they say about you," looping in his head like something lodged under his skin.

So he went. They met others from their social circle. He let his friend order bottles he barely touched, laughed at jokes he barely heard, and told himself the noise of the club was doing its job.

Then he saw her.

For a second, his mind simply refused to place her—the woman near the bar with her head tipped back in laughter, auburn hair loose over bare shoulders, a green dress moving like liquid every time she shifted her weight—and then it clicked, all at once, and something in his chest dropped like a missed step on a staircase. Audrey.

He had seen her twice before now. Across his office table, arms crossed, armored in navy and gray. In the elevator, jaw tight, refusing to look at him. He had thought, even then, that she was beautiful; he wasn't blind, and he wasn't in the habit of lying to himself about things that were simply true. But he had filed it away as an observation, something noted and set aside, the way he'd note the quality of a suit or the view from a boardroom window. Useful information. Nothing more.

This was not that. This undid the filing system entirely.

It was the way the light caught the curve of her throat when she laughed. The bare stretch of her legs beneath a hemline that ended somewhere his mind kept circling back to and refusing to leave. The looseness in her shoulders, the ease in how she moved, nothing like the careful, controlled woman who measured every word before she let herself say it to him.

He wanted, absurdly, to know what she sounded like when she laughed like that at something he'd said. He wanted to cross the room, put his hand at the small of her back, and feel whether her skin was as warm as it looked under those lights.

He took a slow pull from his glass instead and told himself to stop staring. He lasted two minutes before he was staring again.

"Earth to Marshall." Francis waved a hand in front of his face, then followed his line of sight and smirked. "Oh. Oh. Who's that?"

"No one," Marshall said, too fast, and turned back to his drink. It didn't help. Nothing in the glass was as interesting as the woman by the bar, and some traitorous, ungovernable part of him kept dragging his eyes back to her every time he told himself not to look.

---

"Come dance with me," Tracy said, already pulling Audrey off the barstool.

"Tracy, I really don't—"

"You promised me tonight was about forgetting, not thinking. Dancing is very good at the forgetting part."

Audrey let herself be dragged, mostly because arguing took more energy than she had left. The floor was crowded, bodies moving under shifting light, and for a few minutes it actually worked. She stopped thinking about Marshall King's cold blue eyes laying out his terms like a merger clause, stopped thinking about the bank, about her father's name on the door, about anything at all.

Then, somewhere in the middle of the song, she felt it—a prickling awareness crawling up the back of her neck, the unmistakable sense of being watched. Not the ordinary drift of eyes across a crowded floor. Something more deliberate than that, something that found her and stayed. She turned her head instinctively, scanning the crowd, half-convinced she'd imagined it.

She hadn't managed to place the feeling before a hand closed hard around her waist from behind.

She jolted, every muscle going rigid at once, her pulse spiking so fast it left her lightheaded. For one disorienting second, she thought—hoped, absurdly—that it was Tracy. Then the grip tightened, pulling her back against a body that wasn't Tracy's, and warm breath landed against her ear. "Relax. Just one dance."

"Let go of me." She twisted hard, but his arm didn't loosen, and panic flared bright and sudden in her chest, the club noise receding into a dull roar, her own heartbeat the only thing she could hear. She shoved against his chest and got nowhere. "I said no."

The hand was gone before she finished the sentence.

She heard it more than saw it—a sharp crack of knuckles against bone, a grunt of pain, the stranger stumbling back into the crowd clutching his jaw. Marshall stood where the man had been a second earlier, chest heaving, one hand curled tight enough to whiten the knuckles, eyes locked on the stranger with an intensity that made the people nearest them step back on instinct.

"Touch her again," Marshall said, low and flat, "and it'll be more than your jaw."

The stranger took one look at his face, decided the night wasn't worth it, and melted back into the crowd, one hand still pressed to his mouth.

"Are you all right?" Marshall's hand was at her elbow now, steadying, his eyes moving over her face like he needed to confirm it himself, the anger still simmering just beneath his skin.

Audrey pulled her arm free the moment she'd found her footing, her heart still hammering. "I had it handled."

"You didn't look like you had it handled."

"I don't need you playing hero, Mr. King. Especially not you." The words came out sharper than she meant, all the frustration of the last week riding out on the back of them. She turned to walk away, toward the bar, toward air, toward anywhere he wasn't, and he followed.

"Audrey."

"Don't." She kept walking. He kept following, unbothered by the two failed attempts she'd already made to lose him in the crowd, and by the time she reached the bar, he was still half a step behind her, infuriatingly unshaken, his knuckles already reddening.

Tracy appeared out of the crowd a moment later, flushed and delighted, her eyes landing on Marshall with obvious appreciation. "Well, hello. And who is this?"

Audrey exhaled slowly, resigning herself. "Tracy, this is Marshall King. Mr. King, my best friend, Tracy." Her voice was flat, the introduction dragged out of her rather than offered, and she didn't bother softening the edge in it.

"Marshall King," Tracy repeated, delighted, shaking his hand a beat too long. "As in King Capital? As in—" She glanced between them, clearly putting pieces together she already half knew, and had the good sense not to finish the sentence out loud.

"That's the one," Marshall said, easy and unbothered, offering Tracy the kind of smile that had closed a hundred boardrooms. He didn't hold Audrey's tone against her. If anything, some part of him thought she'd earned the right to it—he'd attached strings to a deal that was beneficial to both of them. He wondered how he was going to get her to accept sooner. Yes, he knew she would come around, but when, he couldn't say. He could just lie low, waiting like a tiger ready to pounce, but seeing her tonight had unraveled something in him.

It was hard to focus on Tracy at all. Every time his eyes drifted back to Audrey—the flush still on her skin from the dance floor, the strap of her dress sliding slightly off one shoulder, the long, bare line of her legs under the hem of that dress—something in his chest tightened in a way that had nothing to do with contracts, shareholders, or Halden Cross. He'd always known she was attractive. He hadn't been prepared for this. For the sudden, physical urge to reach out and run his hand along the smooth skin of her thigh, just to know if it was as soft as it looked.

He caught the thought before it went any further and made himself look away, jaw tight.

She hadn't agreed to anything. If he so much as touched her the way he wanted to right now, she'd bolt—and she'd have every right to. Whatever this pull was, it would have to wait. He'd handed her a business proposal wrapped in cold, careless words, and it had cost him whatever ground he might have had.

He wasn't going to lose more of it tonight.