Caught in the Billionaire’s Embrace(32)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

She just hoped that, wherever he was, he was remembering her fondly, too.

Marcus sat in the study of his Lakeshore Drive penthouse, his black silk robe open over a pair of matching pajama bottoms, nursing a glass of port and sifting through a thin file of information that had been couriered to him that afternoon. Beyond the expansive picture window to his right, Lake Michigan was as inky black as the sky above it, dotted here and there with lights from commercial vessels in the usual shipping lanes that twinkled the same way the stars above them did.

He didn’t much notice the vista, however, settled as he was in a boxy, overstuffed club chair that was bathed in the pale amber glow of a floor lamp beside it. Much of the room was amber, in fact, from the coppery fabric of the chair to the golds and browns of the area rug, to the bird’s-eye maple paneling to the small, sculpted bronze originals displayed on the built-in shelves. Marcus liked the warm colors. They made him feel calm.

Usually.

Tonight, he felt anything but. Because the file he had thought would be stuffed with information about Della Louise Hannan of New York City contained little he couldn’t have discovered by himself. That didn’t, however, make what information was here any less interesting. Especially the part about her having worked at Whitworth and Stone, one of Wall Street’s biggest—if not the biggest—powerhouses. Marcus knew more than a few people who worked there. And since Della’s position as executive assistant to one of its executives would have had her moving in the upper echelon of the business, there was a small chance someone he knew there had at least made her acquaintance. Tomorrow, as soon as the business day started on the East Coast, he would make some phone calls.

Not that having any information about Della’s time at Whitworth and Stone would help him much now, since she hadn’t worked at the brokerage house for nearly a year. In fact, Della Hannan had pretty much dropped off the face of the map in mid-January of this year and hadn’t been seen or heard from since. The apartment where she had lived was now being rented by a married couple who had moved into it in March—and it had been advertised as being a “furnished apartment,” because Della had left virtually all of her belongings behind, and her landlord had claimed them on the grounds she hadn’t fulfilled the terms of her lease. She’d left her job as abruptly, had simply not come to work one day…or any day afterward.

What was even more troubling was that, in spite of her sudden disappearance, no one had reported her missing. Not a family member, not a friend, not a neighbor, not a lover, not her employer. There was no police report on file, no formal complaint from her landlord, nothing in her personnel file at Whitworth and Stone about why she may have stopped coming to work after more than a decade of not missing a single day.

There was, however, office chatter about why that may have happened. Word in her department was that Della had been dating an executive in another part of the business who had turned out to be married. Whether or not Della had known about his marital status was a bit murky. Either she had known and then been angry that the man refused to leave his wife, or she hadn’t known and had left once she discovered the truth. In either event, her office affair seemed to be the reason everyone cited as to why she no longer worked at the company.

It was a reasonable enough explanation. It might even offer a reason for why she had left New York. Except that she was a native New Yorker without family or friends in any other part of the country to whom she might turn for help. Except for the fact that she hadn’t started working somewhere else. Except for the fact that there was no record of her having done anything, anywhere, after January 16th. She hadn’t applied for any jobs. Hadn’t applied for a new driver’s license in any state. Hadn’t accessed her bank accounts or used her credit cards. Her cell phone service had been canceled due to her failure to pay, in spite of her having had a tidy sum in both a checking and a savings account, neither of which had been touched.

His thoughts halted there for a moment. Her cell phone. He recalled scrolling through her information at the hotel, all the photos and numbers she still had, even though she hadn’t called any of them. Obviously she was using a different number now than the one that had been cut off, but why wasn’t there a record of her having applied for a new number? Even if she’d requested it be unlisted, his man Damien should have been able to find out what it was. Why hadn’t he?

And why had she had all her contacts from the old phone transferred to a new one, clearly wanting to hang on to them even if she wasn’t using any of them? He spared a moment to give himself a good mental smack for not bringing up her number on her phone when he’d had it in his hand. Then he cut himself a little slack because he’d been in such a hurry and so preoccupied by the photos he’d discovered. Still, had he remembered to get her number, it really would have made things a lot easier.

He returned his attention to the P.I.’s report. Marcus might have begun to wonder whether or not the woman he’d met even was Della Hannan if it hadn’t been for the photographs contained in the file along with the information. He had the picture from her ID badge at Whitworth and Stone, along with copies of photos from her high school yearbook and early driver’s licenses. The woman he had met was definitely the same woman in those photos, but, as had been the case with the pictures on her phone, her hair was shorter and darker in all of them.

She’d changed her appearance after she disappeared, but not her name, and his contact hadn’t found any evidence that she had any aliases. So there was little chance she was some con artist and a very good chance that everything she had told him about being in trouble was true. The file also had information about Della’s early life, which also corroborated what she had told him. There was information about the two brothers she had said she had—one older, one younger. What she hadn’t mentioned—probably because she hadn’t wanted to dissuade him of his completely wrong ideas—was that she had come from a notoriously bad neighborhood and wasn’t the product of wealthy society at all.

At the end of the file was a handwritten note from Damien. It was short and to the point:

The only time someone drops off the face of the planet like this, it’s because they’re in the hands of the feds. Or else they’re trying to avoid the feds and are tapped into a network that makes that happen. I have a friend on the government payroll who owes me a favor. I’ll let you know what he finds out.