The Billionaire Gets His Way(30)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

Sex. Not lovemaking. Sex.

So why did she feel so empty inside? Before, even if it wasn’t good sex, Violet had always felt a little better afterward. Satisfied. Unstressed. Ready to move on to the next task, whatever it was. Sex with Gavin—and it had been great sex—had had the opposite effect. She felt more anxious now than she had in weeks and in no way satisfied. Instead of moving on to the next task, all she could do was replay what had happened over and over again in her head. It was going to be a long time before she could move on from this.

He thought she was nothing. That, strangely, was the thing she was having the most trouble letting go of. He’d said as much when he’d talked about his own meager background, how people from his old neighborhood had been invisible and hadn’t counted for anything. He might as well have been talking about her own origins. She’d come from the same place he had. But she’d never thought anyone from that world didn’t count. Especially not herself.

She wondered why she was so surprised by some of the things he’d said. She’d known how he was from the get-go. He’d said himself in his office on Monday how badly he wanted to keep everything from his old past hidden from everyone in his new life. And it wasn’t as if he was alone in his opinion of poverty. There were plenty of people in the world who shared it—and most of them ran in his social circle.

What difference did it make how he felt, anyway? She’d told him she never wanted to see him again. And she didn’t.

She didn’t.

Really.

Even if, for one brief moment at the party, when she’d been dancing with him, he’d made her feel things she’d never felt before. Even if, while making love…ah, she meant having sex…with him, she’d felt those things again, even more strongly. The kind of things that made a person feel…close…to another person. The kind of things that made a person want to be close to another person.

The kind of things Violet wasn’t wired to feel.

Her gaze lit on the tray of food Gavin had put together that he had obviously intended to bring to her in bed before getting sidetracked by her work. No one had ever brought her breakfast in bed. Hell, no one had ever even prepared food for her. In all her foster and group homes, that responsibility had fallen to the kids. To teach them independence, her foster parents had always said. And sometimes, they’d even meant it. Would he have prepared a romantic feast like this for her had he known who she really was and where she really came from?

She laughed humorlessly at her own question. Of course not. He wouldn’t even have made love…had sex…with her tonight if he’d known that. Hell, he probably thought coming from poverty was even worse than being a call girl. At least call girls moved in high society the way he did. At least they knew how to dress and talk and behave. Call girls didn’t have to rent clothing from a boutique off Michigan Avenue. They didn’t have to be taught to dance. They didn’t have to be given lessons about art. Gavin would be infinitely more comfortable with Raven French than he would with Violet Tandy. It was Raven he had made love…had sex…with tonight, not Violet. Had he known her true origins, he wouldn’t have had anything to do with her. No way would he let the stink of her pollute the life he had now.

So why should she let the stink of him pollute hers?

She knew what she needed to do to dislodge Gavin from her brain and from her—from everything else. It took less than fifteen minutes for Violet to wash her face and brush her teeth. Then she fired up her laptop and opened the file for the novel she was writing to follow up High Heels and Champagne and Sex, Oh, My! She’d hit a point where she wasn’t sure what to write next, had gotten bogged down in a scene where her protagonist—a naive, small-town girl who was visiting the big city for the first time—needed to fall down on her luck. Violet hadn’t been sure what form, exactly, that bad luck should take.

Now she knew. Oh, boy, did she know. Mason Gavin was about to take advantage of her in a big way, then toss her to the curb along with that kitten in the icy slush.

After cracking her knuckles, she began stroking the keys slowly, ordering her thoughts as she wrote. Gradually, her typing speed increased—as did her thoughts—and she began to write in earnest.

Write what you know, she thought sardonically. Just like Ernest Hemingway.

Less than thirty-six hours after being tossed out of Violet’s apartment, Gavin sat at his desk looking over a file that had been specially couriered to him by a private investigator he used on a regular basis. It was an interesting mix of documents and reports, all of which were related by one cohesive thread: Violet Tandy. Had he done this before Saturday night, the file would have only bolstered his certainty that she was exactly what he’d thought her initially to be: a prostitute. Because all the information in front of him indicated she’d come from exactly the kind of environment that would push a woman to become just that. An environment full of poverty and need, of loss and neglect.

She really had come from a world even worse than his own.

She was older than he’d suspected, nearly thirty, Chicago-born and -bred. After being abandoned as a young child—and he recalled now how she’d said she didn’t know who her father was, a comment he’d shrugged off at the time—she’d been shuttled from one foster or group home to another. Almost a dozen by the time she turned eighteen, at which point the state had cut her loose to fend for herself, with no education, no training, no benefits, nothing. After that, with no one to rely on, she had been on her own. College had been understandably out of the question for the average student she had been in school, so she had worked at a number of menial jobs before penning her novel. As a hostess at a five-star restaurant, as a tailor’s assistant at an exclusive Michigan Avenue menswear shop, in housekeeping at a luxury hotel. Places where she was exposed to the affluence of high society and the potential for her to meet rich men.

Had she wanted to become a call girl, she wouldn’t have had any trouble finding clients, he was sure. Not coming from the sort of background she’d come from. Not having the access to potential clients that she’d had. Not looking the way she looked and being the way she was. No man in his right mind could have resisted her.

But she hadn’t done that. She had worked honest jobs, some of them backbreaking, sometimes from sunup until sundown. She had planned. She had dreamed. And, using her wits and determination, she had pulled herself up from her meager beginnings to make those dreams a reality.