Her Mate's Scandalous Betrayal

Episode 5

JAMES

Despite the fact that she was gone, swallowed up by the elevator, her presence still saturated the air around me, rooting me to the spot and giving my legs a paralyzed effect as the blood roared inside my skull.

I could still smell her, a maddening and intoxicating blend of dark vanilla, expensive silk, and the raw, undeniable scent of a woman in her prime.

My hands curled into tight fists at my sides, the leather of my custom suit pulling tight across my broad shoulders as I fought the urge to rip those metal doors open and drag her back down to me.

She was a f*****g goddess.

The woman who had just walked out of that boardroom was not the broken, weeping girl I had so ruthlessly discarded five years ago, but a terrifyingly gorgeous, powerful force of nature.

Every single inch of her had demanded my absolute attention, from the arrogant tilt of her chin to the way that tailored dress clung to the lush, heavy curves of her hips.

My body was aching, thrumming with a primal, aggressive need to claim her, to push her back against that boardroom table and remind her exactly who she belonged to.

"James?"

The hesitant voice broke through the violent haze of my thoughts.

I turned my head slowly, my jaw locked so hard my teeth ached, to see Lucas stepping up beside me.

My Beta looked nervous, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his slacks as he watched my face for any sign of an impending explosion.

"Are you okay, man?" Lucas asked, keeping his voice carefully low in the echoing expanse of the corporate lobby.

"Did you see her, Lucas?" I asked, my voice coming out as a rough, gravelly rasp that barely sounded like my own.

God damn…

"I saw her," Lucas replied, shifting his weight uncomfortably on the polished marble. "She completely iced us out, James. She didn't even give the proposal a second glance before shutting the whole thing down."

"I don't care about the damn proposal," I growled, stepping away from the elevator and pacing a tight, restless circle on the floor.

"She acted like she didn't even know me," I continued, the memory of her cold, indifferent gaze slicing through my chest like I’d been literally stabbed. "She looked right through me like I was just another faceless suit trying to beg for a fraction of her time."

"She has to know it's us," Lucas argued, his brow furrowing in confusion. "Chestnut Corporation is plastered all over the briefing documents."

"She knows," I said, stopping my pacing and looking back at the reflective surface of the elevator doors.

"How are you so sure?" Lucas asked.

"Because right at the end," I murmured, a slow, dangerous heat beginning to simmer in my blood, "right before those doors closed, I saw it. I swear I saw it. Her mask slipped."

"What did you see?"

"A flash," I told him, a dark smirk pulling at the corner of my mouth. "A split-second flash of recognition in those beautiful green eyes. She remembers everything, Lucas. She knows exactly who I am, and she is playing a very dangerous game by pretending otherwise."

I shook off the lingering paralysis, the sheer shock of her transformation burning away to leave behind the cold, calculating instincts of a billionaire CEO.

I did not get to the top of the New York financial world by accepting defeat, and I sure as hell was not going to let the only woman I have ever truly wanted walk out of my life again.

"Get Miller," I commanded, my tone shifting instantly from a wounded ex-lover to a commanding Alpha.

"Right now?" Lucas asked, startled by the sudden change in my demeanor.

"Right f*****g now, Lucas," I snapped, adjusting my tie and striding back down the glass-lined hallway toward the boardroom we had just been thrown out of.

I pushed the heavy glass doors open, finding my pitch team packing up their briefcases with defeated, miserable expressions on their faces.

"Nobody packs up," I barked, my voice cracking through the quiet room like a whip.

The entire team froze, their hands hovering over their laptops and documents as they turned to stare at me with wide, fearful eyes.

"Take a seat, Miller," I ordered, pointing a heavy finger at my lead acquisitions director.

Miller scrambled to pull his chair back out, dropping his leather portfolio onto the polished mahogany table.

"Mr. Chestnut, I apologize for how that went," Miller stammered, his face pale under the harsh fluorescent lights. "She was completely unreasonable. She didn't even review the financial projections."

"I don't care what she reviewed," I told him, bracing both of my hands flat on the table and leaning over him, letting my sheer physical size dominate the space.

"We are not walking away from this," I stated, my voice dangerously soft and completely unyielding.

"But sir, she explicitly denied the partnership," Miller protested weakly, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead.

"Then we force her hand," I replied smoothly, my mind already spinning a massive, inescapable web around her company.

"How do we do that?" Miller asked, pulling a fresh legal pad toward him and clicking his pen.

"I want you to draft up aggressive new proposals by the end of the day," I instructed, my brain rapidly calculating the market vulnerabilities of her new clothing line.

"What kind of proposals?"

"Everything," I commanded. "I want you to look into aggressive restructuring. Find out who her primary textile suppliers are and buy them out by tomorrow morning."

"Buy out her supply chain?" Miller gasped, his eyes going wide with shock at the sheer financial scale of my demand.

"If we own the fabric she needs to manufacture her line, she will have no choice but to sit across the table from me again," I explained coldly, feeling a dark thrill at the thought of cornering her.

"That will cost hundreds of millions, Mr. Chestnut," Miller warned nervously.

"Do I look like I care about the money?" I growled, my patience wearing dangerously thin.

"No, sir," Miller swallowed hard, scribbling frantically on his notepad.

"I also want you to research hostile leverage," I continued, pacing slowly behind their chairs. "Find out what banks are holding the commercial mortgages on her flagship retail stores. If we can buy up that debt, we control the ground she walks on."

"Hostile leverage, understood," Miller nodded rapidly.

"And draft up exclusive contracts that offer her completely absurd, unbeatable profit margins," I finished, stopping at the head of the table. "Make the numbers so obscenely high that her board of directors will legally force her to take the meeting with us due to their fiduciary duties."

"You want to trap her," Lucas observed quietly from the doorway, having caught the end of my ruthless instructions.

"I want her back in my orbit," I corrected him, staring blindly out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the sprawling New York skyline. "And I will use every single dollar to my name and every dirty trick in the corporate playbook to put her exactly where I want her."

"We will have the new drafts on your desk by six o'clock tonight, Mr. Chestnut," Miller promised, his team already opening their laptops back up and frantically typing.

"Make it five," I ordered, turning on my heel and walking out of the boardroom without looking back.

Lucas fell into step beside me as we walked out of the massive glass building and stepped onto the bustling, noisy sidewalks of the New York morning.

The crisp morning air did nothing to cool the burning heat under my skin, my entire body still wired and tense from being in the same room as her.

My black SUV was idling at the curb, the driver standing at attention with the rear door pulled open for us.

"You're going to extreme lengths for a clothing contract," Lucas mentioned casually as we walked toward the waiting car.

"It was never about the clothing, Lucas, and you know it," I muttered, adjusting my cuffs and preparing to climb into the leather interior.

"I did a little digging while you were terrorizing Miller in there," Lucas said, pulling a sleek silver tablet from his inside jacket pocket.

I stopped on the sidewalk, the sounds of blaring taxi horns and rushing pedestrians fading into the background as I turned to look at my Beta.

"What did you find?" I asked, my voice tight with a sudden, gripping anxiety.

I needed to know if there was another man. I needed to know if some other Alpha had been putting his hands on her perfect curves, smelling her sweet scent, kissing those soft lips. The mere thought of it made a violent, possessive rage flare up in my chest.

"She's completely single, man," Lucas assured me, reading my darkening expression perfectly. "According to every society column and financial profile, she has been totally untouched since the day she left the Pack."

A massive wave of relief crashed over me, easing the brutal tension in my shoulders.

"Good," I breathed out, a satisfied smirk returning to my face.

"But there is a catch," Lucas added cautiously, tapping the screen of his tablet and holding it out toward me.

"What catch?" I asked, my eyes dropping down to the brightly lit screen.

"She has a kid, James," Lucas said quietly, his voice barely audible over the roar of the city traffic. "A little girl."

I stopped dead on the concrete sidewalk.

The entire world seemed to tilt violently on its axis, the ground dropping out from beneath my expensive Italian leather shoes.

I stared at the high-definition paparazzi photo on the screen.

It was a picture of Georgia walking through an airport, looking stunning in sunglasses and a trench coat, but my eyes were entirely locked on the small child holding her hand.

The little girl had rich, golden-blonde hair and a soft, rounded face with puffy, adorable cheeks.

But it was her eyes that made the breath completely vanish from my lungs.

They were large, doe-like, and a striking, brilliant shade of icy blue.

My exact, striking blue eyes.

"No," I whispered, the word tearing out of my throat like a jagged piece of glass.

"Look at the date on the birth records I pulled," Lucas said, scrolling down the screen to show me a scanned document.

My highly trained, analytical brain did the math in a fraction of a second.

Five years ago.

She had the child roughly eight months after the day I ordered her to pack her bags and get the f**k out of my house.

The shock physically knocked the wind out of me, a heavy, invisible fist slamming directly into my solar plexus.

I staggered back half a step, my hand flying out to grip the cold metal frame of the SUV door just to keep my heavy frame upright.

A horrifying, sickening realization settled deep into the marrow of my bones, turning my blood to absolute ice.

I had thrown my beautiful, loving mate out into the cold, ruthless streets with absolutely nothing to her name, while she was carrying my unborn pup in her womb.

No.