Wild Billionaire Romance - Chapter 65: Chapter 65

PROLOGUE: MEREDITH
“Ha! You’re the one who walked out, and I was left to pick up the pieces.”
I regretted my outburst immediately.
I shouldn’t have said all that. But I just couldn’t believe my eyes.
After all this time, I was sitting in the same room with him.
Josef Aziz.
The man who broke my heart. Only, he wasn’t the same man I knew.
This Josef looked harder, older, a little scary, to be honest.
His thick hair was the same rich mahogany color I remembered. He wore it shaved on the sides and long on top, carefully combed away from his chiseled face. The full beard was new.
Meticulously trimmed and combed, it did nothing to detract from his appearance. No other man affected me the way he did.
I wonder if it is as soft as it looks. I wonder if he’ll let me touch it.
Oh my god! Stop it.
Fifteen years ago, Josef Aziz was the most mesmerizing man I’d ever met. Larger than life, he’d exuded a confidence I could only have ever dreamed of possessing.
Unfortunately, all of that still held true today.
Josef was every bit as intriguing now as he’d been before. The suit he wore was tailored to fit his muscular body. They didn’t make jackets with shoulders that wide off the rack. A man his size, with the obvious wealth he now had, would definitely have a private tailor see to his needs.
He looked good. Rich. Handsome. Fool that I was, I imagined what his wife or girlfriend looked like.
She would have to have been equally stunning. A man like that did not have to settle. Someone tall, thin, well-dressed—the total opposite of me.
Why that thought should send sharp slices of pain shooting through me was something I didn’t want to look closely at. Hurt and jealousy had no business at this meeting.
But the past was a tricky thing to let go of. I clasped my hands together beneath the table, trying for a calm I didn’t feel.
Once upon a time, I’d been in love with Josef Aziz.
Foolish girl that I was, I thought he loved me, too. But that had been a lie.
Fifteen years hadn’t dulled the pain of his rejection and abandonment.
God, he’d walked away so easily. I wanted to hate him for that. Maybe I did.
I wished I had a better story about how I spent my life after he left. I wish I could just brush it off and say it was all forgotten now. Bygones and all that.
But the hurt was as fresh now as it was then.
How did a woman get over the first and only man to break her heart?
Was there a secret society? A book of how to instructions?
Goddamnit.
I wanted to slap his face. I wanted to kiss his lips. I wished I could close my eyes and count to ten, but I couldn’t break eye contact.
He was staring at me. Looking for something. I wasn’t sure what.
The night I’d learned of his betrayal was ingrained in my brain for eternity and each horrifying image was replaying itself like one of those little tourist flip books you bought at a museum or gift store.
Yes, I’d thought about him over the years. But I never expected to see him again.
What am I doing here?
I inhaled a deep breath and squeezed my hands on my lap beneath the wide boardroom table. I couldn’t afford to show weakness. Not where he was concerned.
But tell that to my heart.
It seemed that useless muscle was doomed to repeat past mistakes.
Oh, it quickened the second I recognized him. Stuttering in my chest like it had a mind of its own.
Why should he still affect me after all this time?
Squeezing my hands again, to the point of pain, I gritted my teeth, betraying no emotion.
Josef’s dark gaze zeroed in on me. He was every bit as intense as I remembered.
The only difference was I could no longer tell what he was thinking. And the not knowing was driving me mad.
My gut twisted, every instinct I had screamed at me to get the hell out of there. To run while I could. To get away from his maddening presence and the pain of our past that kept slapping me in the face every second that ticked by.
And yet, despite my natural instincts for self-preservation, I couldn’t move. It all seemed surreal.
I’d just been notified Franklin, the man I’d once thought was my father, had just gotten out of surgery.
He’d been moved to the Intensive Care Unit after a heart attack sent him to the hospital late last night.
But Franklin Gray was not my father by birth.
Yes, it was his name on the birth certificate. And yes, I suppose he’d raised me after my mother’s death.
Well, not really him, more like the nannies and bodyguards he’d hired to watch over me.
Including Josef.
I had a rather complicated history.
My mother was already pregnant when she conned Franklin, a well-known tycoon, into marrying her.
But anyone with eyes in their head would know I wasn’t his. Both my mother and stepfather were thin, tall, with dark hair and brown eyes.
I was barely five foot three, curvy as fuck, with bright red hair—the bane of my existence—and green eyes surrounded by copper eyelashes. I had a smattering of pale freckles across my nose and shoulders and on my stomach. I absolutely abhorred them when I was a child.
The point was it was obvious he was my stepfather, not my bio dad whose name I still didn’t know. But the embarrassing truth of it was I didn’t know he wasn’t my father until the day I turned eighteen.
I closed my eyes tightly, pushing away that terrible memory.
Franklin Gray might not have donated any biological matter to my birth, but he was all the father I’d known at the time. I had no idea who my real father was. His identity was a total mystery.
The trick my mother played, hoping to pass me off as his daughter backfired. He found out and treated her differently afterwards. It proved too much for her to handle.
Goddamnit. I hated it when those thoughts consumed me. Grief over my parentage was something I’d spent years in counseling sessions to come to terms with, and I was in a good place now.
Really, I was.
But sometimes I wondered if I wouldn’t have been better left in a firehouse.
Yeah, it was unkind, and I probably sounded like a spoiled little brat, but I had my reasons.
No one knew what happened the night I turned eighteen. No one but me and the old man currently in the ICU.
Josef had already abandoned me when my father drunkenly tore my shirt and slapped my face, calling me a whore and threatening to take what I’d already given to another man.
I’d wanted to hit him back. But I was afraid. So, I ran outside into the night blindly.
Not far, of course. How could I?
I wound up in one of the guesthouses on our property, and that was where I’d stayed.
The funny thing about traumatic events, like your stepfather slapping you and touching you inappropriately, was that sometimes you doubted yourself.
Sometimes your mind played tricks on you, and you wondered if all that really happened. It was like an out-of-body experience.
Did Dad really say I was a whore? Just like my mother.
Did he slap me across the face?
Did he really tear my shirt and grab me?
And even after all that, did I really just not say anything back?
Self-loathing had me swallowing, but I managed not to puke all over the pristine boardroom.
A man walked in, handing Josef a folder, and placing one in front of me as well.
“Take a moment to look over the numbers, Meredith,” Josef said, his voice grave.
I pretended to read over the papers Josef’s team of lawyer sharks had prepared, but I was stuck back in time.
I’d had to wait until early the morning after that scene with Franklin before I could bribe a maid, Gretchen was her name, to pack a small bag with my clothes, my license and passport.
I also asked her to get the few pieces of my mother’s jewelry I had on my dresser, the small picture I had of her by my nightstand, and my wallet, which held a couple of hundred bucks and a few credit cards.
She did it and I handed her a stack of twenties after she met me on the edge of the property where another member of the house staff waited with a car to drive me to the airport.
I flew to Europe on my eighteenth birthday. I spent the first few months frugally backpacking across the continent.
Yeah, I supposed I went a little wild. I started using my mother’s maiden name as my own. Meredith Blake, not Gray.
And I didn’t return to the states. Not for years.
When I did come back, I went to a small suburb outside of Washington, D.C., I found a cheap apartment and I got a job. I started working at a women’s shelter, which had only just recently expanded, bringing me back to New Jersey a few months ago.
I should have known better than to come back to my home state. Franklin found me weeks after I’d returned and sent a private investigator to request a meeting.
I’d refused, and my father, er, stepfather left me alone. I thought that was that.
And it was.
Until last night.