Caught in the Billionaire’s Embrace(37)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

“Why not?”

“Because I’m leaving Chicago in three days, and I’m not coming back.”

“I know that was your plan before, but now—”

“Now, it’s still the plan,” she told him. “I can’t stay here, Marcus.”

“Why not?”

How did she say this without having it sound melodramatic and paranoid? Probably, she should simply spell it out. “Because after I give my testimony to the grand jury, I’m going to be one of the most hated people on Wall Street. No one’s going to give me a job. The people I’m going to help put away have contacts everywhere. Not only in other brokerage houses, but in banks and all kinds of businesses. They have corporate America eating out of their hands. No one will hire me. Whistle-blowers might make for great movies and documentaries, but in the real world, their lives are shattered. They can’t find work. They can’t support their families. They lose everything.”

He was still looking at her in a way that made clear he didn’t understand what she was saying. So Della spelled it out further. “After this thing is over, the government is giving me a new ID. New name, new social security number, new history, new everything. They’re going to move me someplace where I have a chance to start over again where no one will know me, and where there’s no chance I’ll be recognized. I’ll be able to find a job doing something I love, something I’m good at. I won’t be Della Hannan anymore.”

Marcus sat back in his chair and inspected her openly now. “Then who will you be? Where will you go?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “But it won’t be here.”

“Why not here? It’s as easy to start over in Chicago as anywhere else. Better. There’s a vital financial community here. Where else are you going to go and find that? Go ahead and change your name and history. You’ll still be Della. You’ll still be the woman I met at Palumbo’s. You’ll still be the woman I spent the most amazing weekend of my life with. You’ll still be the woman I—”

He halted before finishing, probably because Della had started shaking her head as soon as he finished his first sentence. “If I stay here, Marcus, I’ll want to be with you.”

He gaped at her. “And that’s a problem?”

“Yes!” she cried. “Because you’re so…” She recalled the adjective he’d used himself. “Notorious. You’re all over the society pages and a regular fixture on a lot of celebrity websites. You said so yourself.”

Now he closed his mouth. She was pretty sure he was starting to understand. But since she was still in spell-it-out mode, Della continued, “You live a big life, Marcus. It’s what makes you happy. It’s who you are. You like your notoriety. And I don’t blame you,” she hastened to add. “Big life suits you. You were born for the spotlight. But me…” She shrugged lightly. “I wasn’t born for a big life. And now, more than ever, I need to be invisible. It’s the only way I’ll be able to rebuild my life. It’s the only way I’ll be able to get back everything I’ve lost.”

“In other words, you don’t want to be seen with me.”

“I can’t be seen with you,” she corrected him. “What if someone recognizes me? What if, as I’m starting to get my groove back, someone in your world realizes who I really am? They could destroy everything I have.” She swallowed hard against the anguish she felt threatening. “And they could hurt you, too. Doing what you do for a living, if you were seen consorting with the woman who brought down Whitworth and Stone, no one would ever trust you again. Then your life would be shattered, too. I can’t let that happen to you. I can’t be responsible for it.”

“I’d never worry about something like that,” he told her.

“I would always worry about it,” she said. “It would never work out for us, Marcus,” she said. “It would be a mistake for me to stay. That is just as well, because after Monday, I’ll be gone.”

He leaned forward in his chair, taking both of her hands in his. “No, Della, you can’t. We need to talk more about—”

This time, when Marcus stopped speaking, it wasn’t because he cut himself off. This time, it was because of a loud crash in the living room—which Della was pretty sure was the sound of the front door being broken in—followed by a wildly shouted, “Della, it’s Geoffrey! Are you okay?”

And then, just like in the movies, everything turned to chaos.

Ten

Marcus sat on the sofa in Della’s house—even though both obviously really belonged to Uncle Sam—and wondered when his life had morphed into a Quentin Tarantino film. One minute, he’d been sitting at the kitchen table trying to tell her how he felt about her, and the next, he had been face down on the linoleum with some guy’s knee in the small of his back yelling that he should keep his hands where the guy could see them at all times.

At least the guy, whom Della had eventually been able to introduce as the federal marshal assigned to keep an eye on her, had taken off the handcuffs after shoving Marcus onto the sofa. Now, as he rubbed at his wrists and tried to crane his head around the man to see how Della was faring, the guy—who Marcus couldn’t help thinking looked like an older version of Dwight Schrute, only not as well-dressed—leaned the same way he was trying to look, cutting off his view of Della. Again.

“Geoffrey, it’s okay,” Della said. Again.

Marcus had gathered from the frantic exchange between Della and the marshal only moments ago that before answering her front door, she had dialed Geoffrey’s number without pressing the call button, and that when she dropped the phone on the floor, it had somehow performed that function anyway. Geoffrey had answered his phone after seeing Della’s name attached to the caller ID and heard her talking to someone in the distance. Even though the conversation hadn’t sounded threatening and she hadn’t sound frightened, she wasn’t supposed to be talking to anyone, so he had leaped into action and driven to the safe house to check on her. Then, when he mistook the wine stain on her shirt for blood…

Well, that was when the knee in Marcus’s back had nearly broken his spine.

Now, however, all was well. The marshal was only looking at him as if he planned to cap him in both kneecaps with the sidearm he hadn’t even had the decency to reholster. At least he wasn’t pointing the weapon at Marcus anymore.