Sin and the Millionaire Read online

  “It’s a shame your wife wasn’t of the same opinion.”

  “No, she used the publicity to try and further her career.”

  Duncan really deserved a good cuff in the head for getting involved with her in the first place. “Why on earth did you marry her?” She slapped a hand over her mouth. Had she really asked that out loud?

  “It’s okay. I asked myself that.”

  “Ever answer yourself?”

  He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. He looked like he was debating something. Maybe admitting he was a dumbass and allowed all that plastic beauty to cloud his supposed big brain? Then again, he was a guy. But why marry her?

  “This is hard for me,” he finally said.

  “What? That you couldn’t see past her boobs? You’d have to carry binoculars for that.” Now she was just being petty again…and mean… and yes, a little jealous. But his wife had suckered punched him. Lizzy had seen the aftershocks, so she needed to be nicer. She pushed her chair back and stood.

  “Again, sorry. I’m sure she had qualities I never saw and you did.” She went over to one of the sofas in the office and sat, wanting space between them before she admitted the next thing she was going to say. “She hurt you. And I didn’t like seeing you upset.” From the very first she’d liked Duncan. He was brilliant and impressed the hell out of her. To be humiliated that way must have been embarrassing. “I feel a little protective, where you’re concerned.” Their friendship hadn’t really kicked off until after Victoria’s duplicity was revealed, but Duncan was a good guy, and good guys didn’t deserve crappy wives.

  “Why? Because she kicked the puppy?” he said defensively.

  It took a few seconds for her to understand. “No,” she told him. He saw himself as a wimp? “You’re the Einstein of business. Being tricked by her must have been… ego crushing.”

  “What’s worse? Being seen as a pansy or being too stupid to see past her manipulations?”

  “She was a beautiful woman.” She motioned to his laptop. “And really good with getting people to love her.”

  “Yes. But that’s not why I married her,” he said, as if bracing himself for her reaction to his true confession.

  Was she a superstar in bed? She did not want to hear that. The idea of them doing it made her sick to her stomach.

  “I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten anything since last night. How about we go into the kitchen and I’ll make us something? Come on.” He motioned for her to follow as he left his office.

  It was obvious he was avoiding her question, which made her all the more curious. “Do you want me to cook?” she asked, allowing him to lead the way. The kitchen was a chef’s dream, especially since he’d given her carte blanche in redesigning it. He’d spent a fortune.

  “Nah, it’s the least I can do after dragging you into this.” In the kitchen, he pulled out two small flat skillets and a frying pan and set them on the stove.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” She’d never had anyone cook for her and it was a little… odd.

  “I’m not you, but I’ve been on my own since I was eighteen. I can cook the basics,” he assured her.

  From the refrigerator he pulled out a carton of eggs, a butcher-wrapped package marked as bacon and the cheddar cheese. Aside from a piece of fruit, she never ate breakfast, so this was a treat. She watched as he grated the cheese, scrambled the eggs, added salt, pepper, and with an impish grin, a splash of hot sauce.

  “Aren’t you daring?” He looked so cute that she couldn’t help but smile.

  “It’s really great on mac and cheese,” he said with a knowing grin.

  “The box kind or from scratch?” Just how good could he cook?

  “Please, I’m rich. I don’t eat box anything,” he said, opening the bacon and filling the now-hot pan.

  “Please yourself. When it comes to cooking, you are the laziest guy I know. You order from me at least three or four times a week and I bet you eat out the rest of the time.” When his wife lived in the house, they would entertain so often, Lizzy often joked about being their private chef. After he’d kicked Victoria’s sorry ass out of the mansion, Lizzy was there even more. She had begun to think that boy genius didn’t know how to turn on a stove. Not that she was complaining. She liked cooking for him. She liked watching him eat her food even more.

  Duncan didn’t say anything, and she worried that she’d somehow inadvertently insulted him. Before she could apologize, he spoke.

  “I was lonely. And you didn’t ask questions about Victoria and you seemed to genuinely care how my day went. I assumed that it was your way of asking how I was doing.”

  She shrugged. “The last thing you needed was another person meddling into your personal life.” You couldn’t turn your head without seeing his and Victoria’s faces somewhere. She’d felt bad for him. And had he really admitted to hiring her as an excuse for company? Was that flattering… or sad?

  “Well, thank you for that. You made coming home easier.” He smiled and poured the egg batter onto the two skillets.

  “So you never answered me. Why did you marry her?” They were so opposite. He couldn’t have been dumb enough to be taken in by her beauty. At least, she hoped not.

  “I, uh, I didn’t date much before Victoria.”

  She waited for him to elaborate. When he didn’t, she cocked her head trying to get him to finish the sentence.

  “I didn’t have much experience,” he said by way of explaining.

  She started to laugh. “Are you going to tell me she took your virginity?” When he didn’t say anything, her mouth fell open. “Oh.” Seriously? “Umm.” At a loss for words, she glanced away, afraid she might embarrass him even more than his wife had.

  Guys were different. Things like this weren’t exactly locker room. And while Duncan never came off as a beat-your-chest kind of guy, admitting he’d married his first couldn’t have been easy. Lizzy and Duncan might be different on so many levels but it seemed like on one, at least, they were unfortunately the same. They’d both been taken in by their firsts. Both had left them humiliated. His, however, had ended in a messy divorce, while hers left her owing a loan shark, with few choices on how to pay him off that didn’t involve her dying or prostitution. Remembering soured her mood.

  “I’m sorry it didn’t work out better for you.”

  “What doesn’t kill you… I actually owe her a thank-you. The pending divorce changed me, and not for the worse.”

  Lizzy had seen that with her own eyes. He’d gone from a soft-spoken and reserved, almost-too-shy geek, to a take-charge, no-nonsense, soon-to-be-bachelor that every woman talked about. Would she be the woman she was today if Kyle hadn’t left her holding the bag? She didn’t think so. She may not have enjoyed her time as a stripper, but it had brought Maggie into her life and Maggie had given her a career as a caterer. Lizzy had worked her butt off to get what she had now, because she wanted to show Maggie she’d been worth the effort her boss had gone through to give Lizzy a better life. She’d owed it to Maggie, and stuff like that Lizzy didn’t mind owing. Just like she was going to prove to Duncan he hadn’t been wrong in asking her to invest with him, in their company.

  She still couldn’t get over Duncan’s confession. It was none of her business but she couldn’t help herself. “You can tell to shove my nose somewhere else, but… Well, I’m trying to understand. How old were you when you married her?”

  “I wasn’t the forty-year-old virgin, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said, flipping over the sizzling bacon. “I actually met her years before we starting dating. I was twenty-two. Still a little old to be… inexperienced, but my focus was on building my career, my empire. Girls, women saw me as a brother, not a boyfriend. Then one day I was attending a function held by Google and I met Victoria. She was a top model at the time and I was one of the top entrepreneurs under twenty-five. I couldn’t believe she was even talking to me. I could barely hold a coherent thought in my head. She would never admit to
me what possessed her that night, but before I knew it, I was in her bed. We didn’t see each again until five years later. She had started her acting career and my new social media app had put me on the Forbes top ten list.”

  “Let me guess, love at first billion?”

  He gave a self-depreciating laugh. “I think a part of me always knew she married me for my money. Why else would a woman like her marry me?”

  “Stop that.” Victoria was too dumb to know what she had.

  “Oh, I know. I’m a nice guy. I give to charity. I work hard. I don’t kick puppies. But let’s be honest. I’m more Big Bang than Bruce Wayne.”

  “Hey, Leonard would be super cute if he was a foot taller, and in a fight, Batman is no match for Superman.”

  This time his laugh was genuine. She liked his laugh.

  “I’m no superhero.”

  “No, you’re not,” she agreed. “You’re real.”

  “And you’re very sweet,” he said.

  “Look at us. The stripper from across the border and the funny duck who showed the world just what they could do.”

  “So, you agree that my telling you Victoria taking my virginity was very personal?”

  “Yes. And I thank you for trusting me,” she said, waiting to hear the thunk from the other shoe.

  “Explicitly. But I think you owe me one.”

  “Fair enough. I was seventeen.”

  “Seventeen?”

  “When I lost my virginity.”

  “Oh. Thanks, but that’s not what I wanted to know. And in all seriousness, you can shut me down if you want…I’m curious about when you started stripping. And why?”

  Lizzy fell silent. Maggie’s business partner was the only person Lizzy had ever told the full story to. Alice had this way of being totally honest with you. If you didn’t want to know if your butt looked fat in your jeans, you didn’t ask Alice. When she’d first gotten into he catering, it was Alice who’d given her financial advice. Lizzy had thought it only fair that she tell Alice what Kyle had done to her. Did she trust Duncan enough to tell him? Yes, she realized, she did.

  “It happened before I came here, back in Sudbury. I was young and in love with a jackass, as it turns out. My mother was useless—too many drugs and too many men—so I’d left home. I was doing all right, making enough to pay my board and feed myself. I even managed to put some away. Then I got lucky, really lucky. I won the lottery. Fifty thousand dollars. I knew I had to invest it, but first I had to get it. I was underage but my boyfriend wasn’t. He claimed the ticket.”

  “Wow, you trusted him?” he said, popping four pieces of bread in the toaster.

  “I was young and stupid.” So very stupid. “But he brought me the money. It was my bright idea to buy the chip wagon.”

  “Chip wagon?”

  “Sorry. It’s a food truck for French fries. We sold hot dogs, burgers, drinks and fries. Lots of fries. For the first six months, things were good. Then winter hit and we had to park the truck. To make a long story short, my boyfriend gambled what money we’d made and then some. And I mean and then some. He borrowed money from the kind of people who break your legs if you don’t pay them back.”

  Duncan set two plates on the island. “How much are we talking about?”

  “Sixty thousand.”

  He let out a low whistle as he slid one omelet onto Lizzy’s plate, then another on his own.

  She leaned forward and inhaled. The omelet was a little brown on the ends but it smelled divine. “Yeah, that’s what I said. I had no choice,” she said, straightening. “I had to sell the chip wagon. But when I tried to do, I discovered I no longer owned it.” She’d been so in love, she’d ignored the signs, and when they came back to bite her in the ass, they’d taken a big ol’ chunk. Or she hadn’t been smart enough to see what had been happening in front of her eyes. “He’d used it for collateral.”

  “He’d given your business to this loan shark?” After dishing up the bacon and toast, Duncan took a seat next to Lizzy.

  “Yup.”

  “So are you telling me you started stripping to pay off his debt?”

  “I had no choice.”

  “He forced you?”

  His expression changed into something she’d never seen on him and it threw her for a few seconds. Thinking that she’d gotten it wrong, that he hadn’t looked like he wanted to kill someone, she quickly put his mind to rest.

  “It wasn’t like that, exactly. Shortly after I found out about the chip wagon, he got arrested and left me holding the bag. This loan shark didn’t care that I hadn’t borrowed the money. He saw us as a couple and it was enough for him. I was getting ready to run when he made it very clear what he’d do to me if he caught me. Then he offered me a job in one of his places. I sucked it up and paid him off in a year and left. I had a friend in Reno and I decided life was better outside of Canada. Then I heard about Maggie and the rest, as they say, is history.” She cut into the cheese omelet and ate. “Hey, this is good. Want a job? I know this fantastic caterer,” she said, trying to use humor to shake off the unsettling unease of Duncan’s reaction.

  She’d have expected that from any decent guy who thought a woman had been forced into something not of her choosing, and Duncan was a decent guy. But it was like seeing the wolf inside your dog. Cool, but scary.

  Duncan didn’t blink, his face unreadable. “You seem so…blasé about it. He may not have physically forced you, but you were forced nonetheless.”

  “I’m not blasé.” She set her fork down, needing him to understand. “But it’s a part of my life. I can sulk over what happened and what I had to do to stay alive, or learn from it and move on.”

  “And have you? Learned from it?”

  “I take the fool me once shame on me approach to life. Kyle may be the one who tricked me but I’ll never put myself in that situation again. I never mix business and pleasure. If I hadn’t been dating Kyle, I’d have paid better attention to my bank account.”

  “You trusted the wrong person.”

  “Thanks for reminding me,” she said, wondering why he was the one getting upset. She’d messed up her life. And she’d also been the one to fix it. “I’m over what Kyle did. But I’m not going to forget it. Now can we change the subject? How about we get back to your wife?” Her murder and future implications of their lives should be their focus.

  “Yeah… sure. I didn’t offer you a drink. What can I get you?” Not waiting for her to answer he went to the fridge and opened it.

  “I’m happy with water.” Duncan’s abrupt change of subject threw her. Why did she suddenly feel clueless?

  Chapter Four

  Duncan retrieved two bottles of water from the fridge and told himself to get his act together. He was a smart man and he had a major portfolio to prove it. He could do this. He could make her see he wasn’t this Kyle jerk. I am smart, he repeated to himself.

  He set the waters on the island and grabbed a piece of bacon off the plate, taking a bite. “I like yours better.”

  “That’s because I bake it with maple syrup and you have a sweet tooth.” She too took some bacon.

  He shook his head. “I don’t eat candy.”

  “What’s that jar of caramels on your desk?”

  “I keep that there for meetings. People are more at ease when you offer them something they’ve never had and those caramels are from a little shop in Paris,” he said with a smug grin.

  “Yeah, I’m calling bull on that one. I’ve seen you scarf down three desserts. Honestly, I don’t know how you manage to look so hot.” Picking up her empty plate, she took it to the sink, leaving him stunned at the table.

  “I work out,” he said. “And thank you.”

  She nodded. Had the crime scene outside the window caught her attention or had she realized she admitted too much? Did he dare hope? Then again, finding him attractive didn’t mean she wanted a relationship.

  “We should check a few more e-mails,” she said. “Maybe take a cl
oser look at the ones at the time you caught her cheating.”

  He picked up his own plate and brought it to the sink. “That’s a good idea. Let’s go then.”

  She looked up at him, giving him an awkward smile. Did he dare hope?

  Back in his office and thirty minutes later, they stared at the computer screen, having yet again found nothing.

  “Something’s not right. Wouldn’t your wife have had a private account? She couldn’t have been that self-centered.”

  “She could have, but I think you’re right. Her manager, her agent, they must have sent e-mails.”

  “Could she have a separate one?”

  “Damn, I forgot.” He punched in a new address, reversing Victoria’s name from first to last, then he used the same password. “Bingo. When we were dating I kept getting her e-mail address wrong. In my companies we use last name first, to distinguish a business account from personal. Victoria had laughed, said her name was too famous to risk mucking up her account. I told her it wasn’t wise to mix her personal e-mails with her public ones. For once in her life she listened to me.”

  On the screen were messages from her manager, the subject headings lists of events she’d been scheduled to attend, and ones she’d never make it to. Scrolling down, he found ones from her evil lawyer, a few from her agent. And the list continued like that. Nothing personal popped up. They’d hit another dead end.

  “Wait,” Lizzy said, taking over the laptop and clicking on the Deleted folder. It was empty. “Wow, I didn’t think she’d be smart enough to delete incriminating evidence.”

  “It was worth a shot.” Scratching his head, he looked at the empty Deleted folder. How could he have made millions on the Internet and still be dumb enough to forget the obvious? He clicked her Sent folder. Harris’s name jumped out at him.

  “Don’t jump the gun,” Lizzy said, having seen what he saw. “Maybe he was telling her to back off.”

  “You don’t believe that.” He didn’t. Was he wrong to think the worst of Harris? He opened one of the many e-mails. Nope.