Caught in the Billionaire’s Embrace(31)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

As she folded herself onto the bed and fired up the laptop, Della’s heart began to race, and her stomach erupted with nerves. She wasn’t sure what was more exciting—the prospect of learning more about Marcus or the prospect of seeing his face again, even if it was just in an online photo.

She brought up the Google page and clicked on the image option, then typed in the name Marcus and the word Chicago, along with the words Fallon Brothers in quotation marks. And in the blink of an eye—literally—she was staring at the first three rows of what the site told her was hundreds of images. Marcus was in every one of the first batch. And the second, third and fourth batches, too. As she scrolled down the page, she saw him in even more, sometimes alone, but more often with women. Lots of women. Lots of different women. All of them smiling. All of them clinging. All of them beautiful.

Only when Della moved her hand to run her finger over the mouse pad did she realize it was trembling. In fact, all of her was trembling. She had no idea why. Maybe because seeing Marcus online only reaffirmed that the weekend had really happened. That he really existed. That she had some link, however tenuous, to him. From now on, no matter where she was, or what she was doing, or who she was, she would still be able to find him. She would have physical photographs of him to go along with the insubstantial pictures in her mind. He wouldn’t be ephemeral, as she had feared. He could still be with her forever.

Even if he wouldn’t be with her forever.

She flexed her fingers to calm them and chose a photo of Marcus alone to move the mouse over. It wasn’t one of the candid shots, but rather a posed, formal portrait that must have been one he’d had taken for professional reasons. It was probably from the Fallon Brothers website. When the cursor moved over it, the picture grew larger and added information, starting with a url, then the fact that it was a jpg—sized seventy-something by eighty-seven-something else—then, finally, a description that read Marcus Fallon, Chief Investment Officer, Fallon Brothers Chicago.

Della’s hand began to tremble again, and her stomach pitched with nausea.

Marcus Fallon. He was a member of the Fallon family and one of the highest ranking executives in the company. She’d known he must be well-connected to the business. It didn’t take seeing him in a place like the Windsor Club to know how well-paid he was or how many perks he must have enjoyed. But this… This went beyond well-connected. And it went way beyond well-paid with excellent perks. He was a descendent of some of the very people who had designed the way the country did business. His ancestors had been the equivalent to royalty in this capitalist society. As such, he was, for all intents and purposes, a prince.

So CinderDella’s Prince Charming really was a prince. And she… Well, that would put her in the role of pauper, wouldn’t it?

She recalled his assurances that he had friends with clout on the East Coast who might be able to help her out, and her stomach pitched again. Those friends were probably of equal rank to him in New York’s financial district. Some of them might very well be officers of Whitworth and Stone. She wouldn’t be surprised if some of his friends ended up behind bars because of her. Oh, yeah. He would have loved to help her once he learned what the nature of her “trouble” was. He would have been on the phone in no time flat, tipping off everyone he knew that might be at risk.

Any small hope that Della might have been harboring that she and Marcus still had a chance—and she was surprised to discover she had indeed been entertaining hope, and not such a small amount at that—was well and truly squashed at the realization. Once she gave her testimony to the grand jury, she would be an exile in the financial world. It didn’t matter that she was bringing to light illegal activity that should be stopped and punished. No one on Wall Street was going to applaud her, and every door would slam in her face. People like Marcus—and Marcus himself—would want nothing to do with her. She would be bringing down some very powerful people. And other very powerful people didn’t like it when that happened. Especially when it was a peasant doing the tearing down.

Unable to help herself, Della clicked on the link and found herself looking at a larger version of Marcus’s photo, and it was indeed on the Fallon Brothers website. She read that he was the eldest great-grandson of one of Fallon Brothers’ founding members who would be moving into his father’s position as CEO in the not-too-distant future. She read about his hobbies and favorite pastimes—she already knew about opera, squash and port, but the sailing and polo came as something of a surprise—and about his education at the country’s finest schools. All in all, it was a sanitized version of the Marcus she knew and wasn’t particularly helpful. Once she got past the part about him being the crown prince of the Chicago financial kingdom, she meant.

So she went back to Google and began clicking on some of the other pictures she’d found. There was one of Marcus with a former Miss Illinois taken at a New Year’s Eve party last year. That would have been right around the time Della’s world was beginning to fall apart, but Marcus looked as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Another photo showed him and a very generously endowed redhead at a fundraiser for a children’s hospital. Yet another had him sitting on the deck of a high-rise with Lake Michigan in the background and a very generously endowed blonde in his lap. The next was a picture of him at some red-carpet event with a woman who looked very much like a certain Hollywood starlet who was known for appearing in public without underwear.

This was how she needed to remember him, Della told herself. In photos taken within months of each other in which he was with a different woman every time. She had to stop thinking of him as Prince Charming and start recognizing the fact that he was just another rich guy with a sense of entitlement who took advantage of everyone who crossed his path. His emotions ran as deep as a strand of hair, and he thought of little other than how to make his own life more enjoyable. He had probably stopped thinking about Della the moment he woke up and found her gone.

He wasn’t Prince Charming from a fantastic castle in an enchanted land, she told herself again. He was a big, nasty toad from the toxic swamp of entitlement. The sooner she forgot about him, the better.

She told herself the same thing in a dozen different ways, every time she clicked on a new photograph. But her memories of him crowded out her admonitions. She remembered his smile and his tender touches, and the genuine sadness in his eyes when he had talked about the woman who hadn’t been with him that night. That was the real Marcus Fallon, she knew. Maybe not Prince Charming. But not a toad, either.