Tamed by the Ruthless Billionaire

Chapter Five -Defiance

Elena

The black card came on a silver tray on Thursday morning brought by someone I have not met yet, along with a note written in handwriting so neat it looks like it was printed: No limit. Use it.

I find Cassian in his home office an hour later. A room I have stayed away from until now is filled with wood and old blueprints on the walls diagrams of a factory floor that I know, after looking again, is Drake Steel before it was Drake Tower. He is on a call speaking in the short way he uses for business, talking about a defense contract and a delivery schedule, and he holds up one finger without looking at me. Wait. And I wait, until he finishes the call with two words and puts the phone face down on the desk.

"The card," I. Put it in front of him. "I don't need it."

He looks at the card at me and something in his face gets tight like a fist. "Every account in this house uses that card. Housekeeping. The car service. Your own wardrobe, once the tailor arrives on Monday."

"I don't need a tailor. I have clothes."

"You will be photographed forty times a week starting Saturday. You need clothes that can handle that."

"Then bill it to the account that handles staff wardrobes and let me use my money for everything else." I push the card another inch toward him. "I told you on the balcony. I have my income. I'm not using yours."

"This isn't a discussion."

"Everything with you is a discussion, Cassian. You just don't like it when I win."

That hits somewhere I can see. A muscle moving at the corner of his jaw the same sign I'd started to notice over four days of watching him the way he watches me. The movement is sharp enough that I understand, for the first time since the ballroom, that I might have actually gotten to him.

"You think this is about control?" he says.

"Isn't it?"

"It's about the fact that in six days you become my wife and my wife does not run out of money because she was too proud to use mine." His voice hasn't gone up. Something under it has a current hot under still water. "Do you have any idea what happens to a man in my position if the press finds out his wife is living from freelance invoices while he's worth eleven billion dollars? Do you know what that does to me to this company to every board member deciding whether I'm stable enough to keep expanding into contracts?"

"So, this was never about me at all." I hear my own voice go quiet, the calm I use when I'm angrier than I want to show. "It's about how it looks."

Something flashes in his eyes. A flash of something that might in a man have been closer to pain. But he stops it before I can be sure I saw it at all.

"Keep the card" he says. "Use it. Not. It stays in your purse starting Saturday because when the cameras are on us, you will look like a woman who has everything whether or not you touch a cent of it."

"Fine." I pick the card up if only to end the conversation and put it in my back pocket like it means nothing because to me right now it doesn't. "For the cameras. Nothing else."

"Nothing else," he agrees, and something about the way he says it. Low and a little rough. Makes me think we've just had two arguments layered on top of each other and I only understood the one about money.

I leave his office without another word. It isn't until I'm back in the east wing alone that I let myself notice my hands are shaking. Not from fear. From something to the adrenaline of having won for the second time in five days an argument, with a man who apparently isn't used to losing them.