Page 19 of Beauty and the Billionaire

During that first day of work, I found little that was noteworthy, but I soon learned that Julian, Nicholas, and Maxwell were the only people in power. Together, they owned three-quarters of their investment firm, making decisions onvirtually every aspect of the company. It also meant that they bore all of the responsibility.

When I looked up the current company records, I found that the men were no longer the majority shareholders, with Maxwell having a few token shares and Julian and Nicholas owning fewer than before. It didn’t take long before I pieced together who owned the various holding companies that owned the shares today.

My gaze lifted from the screen and traveled to the man who’d taken over the company.

Dominic was deep in work, his focus unbreakable. His sleeves were rolled like he was cleaning a gutter, a job I couldn’t imagine he knew about. His cold gaze was directed at the screen of his computer, and I pitied the screen. Dominic’s jaw worked, tensing the muscles in his face as he ground his teeth quietly. He lifted one hand to his bare neck and rubbed gently, fingers trailing down to the top of his chest where the shirt was open.

I returned to work, but the heat began creeping into my face.

I squirmed in my chair, pressing my thighs tightly together. These feelings had no place here. Just because I was away from my parents’ watchful eyes didn’t mean I could indulge in all that my heart desired. Especially not when Dominic was the source of these tingling sensations.

The three men who were soon going to be sorry they were ever born—if Dominic had his way, which I had no doubt would be the case—had personal files, too. At a glance, they each had a Harvard degree, same year and same class, and it matched the degree that hung on the wall in this very room. College enemies, I decided, but said nothing.

Dominic didn’t want to confide in me and had no reason to change his mind. Still, I had caught moments when his hateful gaze would break and something completely different appeared in his eyes. They weren’t always so cold and calculating.

No matter how much the rational part of me needed to hate Dominic for troubling my parents and being a ruthless businessman, I couldn’t convince myself that it was all. I couldn’t make myself see him as just that.There must be more to you, buried somewhere so deep that even you don’t know it exists.

Dominic sent me to have lunch on my own, choosing to make a few calls from the office, and I found that Orwell had already left a serving for me in the dining room. After wolfing the lunch, I wandered through the big library and neared the bookshelves that had drawn Dominic’s gaze once. The titles he had acquired himself…

My heart tripped as I found a shelf of familiar titles.

Half of the books I had carried here with me, those I had to hide from my parents and siblings, were on the shelf. From Mary Renault’s historicals to some particularly salacious contemporary reads, Dominic Blackthorne had a very gay bookshelf.

Hope bloomed in me so abruptly and absurdly that I struggled to keep it down. It was the same sort of hope I felt every time I ever entered Neon Nights. Not a real sort of hope, but a stupid, unattainable one. It felt like possibilities opened up where I hadn’t expected them. It felt like anything at all could happen just because someone near me was like me.

All my life, I had known not to hope for this. I had taught myself to enjoy stories instead of yearning for the real thing. Even so, every time I walked into Mama Viv’s bar, something in me buzzed with the expectation that a guy would sweep me off my feet. Fantasies blossomed even if they were just that—fantasies.

Dominic was gay.

I knew that a few books didn’t confirm that, but something in me was dead sure. The truth was, it had never crossed my mind that he wouldn’t be.

And there I found the bottom of it.

The thing that had drawn me to him from the start, that had lingered there beneath the repulsion and hatred, was a sense of familiarity. In the closed-off way he carried himself, I saw myself.

We were both creatures driven by survival and self-preservation. We just chose different ways to survive. And his way was to hide everything that was kind and good in him. After all, it couldn’t hurt you if it was just a business transaction.

I grew comfortable with his presence after that first day of working together. Even so, remembering that he was like me always sent a strange flutter through my body. But aside from that, we had a simple routine. We worked together in the morning, and I had my lunch alone. After lunch, I would browse his library and rejoin him in the study when his calls were finished.

In the evenings, Dominic would expect me for dinner, and I made an effort to have my decent clothes ready for those occasions. We didn’t speak much. Mostly, when I tried, Dominic pulled his cards closer to his chest, and I knew when to stop asking.

The workload was interesting. The three men Dominic targeted for reasons he wouldn’t share had done plenty of wrong with other people’s money. They used their business accounts for all sorts of small luxuries. According to the textbooks, that was enough to mark them as criminals, but Dominic told me that such things were mostly accepted in practice. “But keep collecting invoices for those corporate flights,” he advised me.

Corporate flights were just the tip of the iceberg. The men seemed to spend lavishly on so-called business meetings in themost exclusive clubs in the country. Vastly overpriced gifts, like gold-plated golf clubs and such, were sent to various powerful investors as tokens of goodwill. And HVB paid for all of it.

Early next week, I took my lunch an hour later, sun already tilting westward, and slipped into the library quietly to explore more of Dominic’s queer books. His collection was far larger than mine, I had found.

My gaze flicked to an old, battered spine of a book, and I pulled it off the shelf. It was dusty, the leather cover cracked and tied with a cord. Carefully, I unwrapped the leather cord and opened the front cover. The paper was yellow with age and water stains, unlike any of the books in the library. But when I saw what it was that the pages held, I regretted lifting it at all.

Photos.

Glued photos on each page of the book looked back at me—people with big smiles and slightly dated styles. On one page, a boy between two adults was blowing out six candles on a birthday cake, his eyes impossibly blue. On another boy, the same boy, now well into his teens, was standing shirtless in a pair of denim jeans by a small tractor with some farming tool attached to it. On yet another, the boy was not a boy at all but a young man with clear blue eyes and a determined look on his face. He was beautiful with those dazzling eyes.

When had they gone so cold and dead?

“What are you doing?” The low voice rose from my left, and I jumped, dropping the photo album on the floor in a moment of clumsiness.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted.

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