My hottest Billionaire a Boss

Six

‘I bought him out.’ Stark and flat, the statement still had the power to stab like a brutal

sword, slashing through everything she had believed—everything she’d

hoped was going to come true.

‘I bought him out—paid off all his debts, got the creditors off his back

and gave him a breathing space.’

‘Youbought him out? But you couldn’t—there’s no way…how…’

‘You shouldn’t live in the past, Princess,’ Edward drawled softly, getting

to his feet and crossing to the table to refill his glass. ‘People change. I

am no longer the stable boy you thought you could have a sordid little

fling with. In fact I never was.’

‘What…?’ Liza began, but he ignored her interjection, cutting straight

across her attempt to say something, ask just what he meant.

‘I am more than capable of buying out your father and saving him

from ruin three times over if I wanted to.’

‘You make it sound as if you did him a favour, but I can’t believe that.

You’re not that sort of a philanthropist. You don’t do things out of

generosity—selfless charity. There had to be something you got out of it

too.’

‘Oh, there was. I can assure you that I got everything I wanted—

everything and more.

Now at last she could see his face in the light from the window and what

she read there made her heart quail inside her chest. Her breathing

snagged again as she met his cold eyed, harsh-faced expression and saw

the way that his eyes burned with icy anger, with the darkest searing

contempt she had ever seen.

‘And…and that was…?’ she managed, snatching in her breath on a raw

painful gasp.

‘You’re standing in it, Princess.’

The long-fingered hand that held the glass gestured in an arc that took

in the whole room, the long, polished wooden floor, the huge marble

fireplace with another set of leather armchairs and chesterfields

standing before it, the range of bookcases on every wall, crammed to the

edges with reading matter. And then, with his eyes fixed on her face so

she knew he saw every tiny flicker of reaction, every tremor that

crossed her features, the wide-eyed stare of blank disbelief and shock,

he gestured again so that this time the movement widened enough to

encapsulate the whole of the house, the grounds beyond—and the miles

and miles of Manorfield estate as well.

‘I’ve wanted Manorfield since the time I first saw it when I came here

4 years ago. I was determined never to give up until it was mine.

Jety’s gambling, his debts, played right into my hands. I bailed him out

to the price of the estate.’

‘I don’t believe you—I won’t believe you. If you’d owned Manorfield then

you’d have been here like a shot. Jety still lived here—he was still

running the estate.’ ‘Because I let him. Because it suited me. Jety was an older man—I

wasn’t going to throw him out on the streets, even if he had been happy

to treat me that way. And, besides, he knew what was needed here—he

knew how to handle things. That also suited me. So I let him stay on.’

Edward paused, took a slow sip of his drink and swallowed it down, his

eyes still holding her shocked blue ones over the rim of the fine crystal

glass.

‘If he’d lived longer, I’d have let him stay on a while. But not any more,

Liza. That concession was for Jety only—it ended when he died.

Once that happened, Manorfield was mine and all mine. The will your

father made has no validity—none at all. There’s nothing for you to

inherit, you see. He couldn’t leave you anything because he didn’t own

anything—barely even the clothes that he stood up in. All the rest was

mine.’

He paused, took another swallow of his drink and, as he did so, Liza

felt the first terrible tremors of shock, the trembling of her limbs that

made her grateful for the fact that she was sitting down.

Tell Miss Liza the position she’s in…

The words swung round and round in her head, gaining a terrible extra

significance with each repetition. She knew now with a dreadful sense of

inevitability just what was coming. And she knew that there was no way

she could stop it. She could only sit there and try to control her reactions as she waited

for the axe to fall.

He took his time about it. And she knew that was because he was

enjoying every moment of this.

‘The truth of the matter is, my dear Liza, that you can’t inherit

Manorfield or any part of it because I own it all—the house, the farms,

every last single blade of grass. They are all mine. And you are left with

precisely nothing. Not even a home. Because the House is mine and

I intend to live here from now on.’

‘No…’

Liza could only sit and shake her head, struggling, wishing, hoping that

by denying Edward’s arrogant statement she could make it into a

nightmare, make it unreal. This couldn’t be happening—it couldn’t…

But even when she looked at Hilton for help she knew that she was not

going to get it. Jety’s solicitor was sitting at the desk, the papers in

front of him, and the expression on his face, the way that he had done

nothing to contradict Edward’s cold-hearted declaration left her without

a single hope in her heart.

Everything that he had said was the truth. Every last appalling fact. And

now she knew just why his arrival had filled her with such a sense of

creeping dread. Why she had known as soon as he’d walked into the room

that he was here to do something dreadful, something that would destroy

every trace of her peace of mind, The man she had called the Angel was back in her life—and it

seemed that he had taken it over and turned it upside down. And it would

never be the same again.

Liza sighed deeply, turned over for what felt like the millionth time

that night and buried her face in the pillows.

‘Oh, that was horrible!’ she said aloud as she struggled to surface from

the dark, clinging sleep that had held her. ‘Horrible!’

She had dreamed that the Angel was back in her life and that he…

She came fully awake in a rush, the total recollection of what had

happened hitting her hard.

It hadn’t been a dream—a nightmare of the darkest, most terrible kind.

It had all been appallingly, dreadfully real.

Twisting over and sitting up in the bed, she pushed her tangled hair back

from her face and stared unseeingly at the opposite wall as she forced

her reluctant mind to review all that had happened yesterday afternoon.

She had thought that the day was going to be hard enough when she

would have to say goodbye to Jety, but she had barely got through the

ordeal of the funeral when the emotional grenade of Edward’s

announcement had exploded right in her face.

Edward. The thought of his name reminded her that somewhere in this house

Edward had spent his first night as owner of Manorfield. She had no idea

where he’d slept; she had gone to bed, exhausted and miserable, leaving

him to select a room that would be his. No doubt Jack or Rish

, the housekeeper, would have made sure that that new owner

had clean sheets and towels and all the comforts he needed. Liza had

been beyond that.

Quite frankly, Edward could have slept on the floor for all she cared. It

seemed that whenever he appeared in her life he brought chaos and

destruction with him and yesterday’s announcement meant that

everything she had dreamed of for her future had been snatched away

from her. Then, when she had believed it just couldn’t get any worse, it

had turned out that it could.

Liza’s eyes clouded as she recalled how Hilton had gone into long,

complicated details about exactly how much debt Jety had managed to

run up in the last two crazy years of his life. The size of his debts had

appalled her, leaving her mind reeling at the thought that anyone could

gamble those sorts of amounts on any one race, let alone do it again and

again and again.

The end result was that she was left with nothing. Edward had not been

exaggerating when he had declared that he now owned everything, right

down to every last blade of grass. Everything that Jety had talked

about leaving to her had been swallowed up by his gambling. Liza told

herself that she ought to be grateful that she at least had her clothes,

because there was little else she did own.

And now Edward had moved in. He had had his case in the car and, as

soon as Hilton had left, he had brought it into the house, obviously meaning to set himself up as lord of the manor without a moment’s

hesitation.

That was when Liza had had enough. It had been the sight of that

case that made her give into the need to escape and hide away in the

sanctuary of her bedroom. There, at least, she was safe from the

oppressive, intrusive presence of the Angel.

But for how long?

Throwing back the duvet, Liza forced herself out of bed and went to

the window. Usually the long smooth lawn that stretched away from the

house towards the lake, with the shrubberies on either side, made her

heart lift just to see it. Even in the dark days after Jety’s death she

had still loved this view because it was something she felt she still

shared with her father and could go on remembering him by. But this

morning everything was spoiled. The peaceful, beautiful scene no longer

brought the accustomed sense of ease but instead added another twist

of the knife in her already aching heart.

She had lost so much in the past years. First her mother, shockingly,

then Jety, and now she had lost Manorfield—and with it her home.

After today she would have nowhere to live. Edward would surely want

her out as soon as possible. He had planned on getting his hands on

Manorfield. Now that he had, he wouldn’t want her around.

After all, hadn’t he made it plain that a large part of the cruel delight

he’d taken in letting her know that he had acquired the estate was

accentuated by the fact that he had taken it from her ? And, by doing so,

he had had his final revenge for the way she had treated him seven years

before. No, she was not going to dwell on the past. She would think of better

things—more positive things. And there were those in her life. For one

thing,Rick was coming back today. She was meeting him for lunch.

Just the thought lifted her heart, straightened her shoulders, made her

feel she could face the day.

Face Edward.