Cute Billionaire’s Damaged

By Rachel Foster

Ian won't let her go from his protection. He finally reveals who is behind selling her and she can't believe it. But she wants to feel free again. Even if that means leaving him… And then gets some surprising news.

• Language: English
• Publisher: 3rd Publishing
• Release date: Mar 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215303221

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Cute Billionaire’s Damaged

Rachel Foster

Copyright © 2018 by Rachel Foster

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Contents

Cute Billionaire’s Damaged

Cute Billionaire’s Damaged

1

Kayla

M

y feet carried me toward the door before I could stop them. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t be here right now. I needed to get out.

Stop her, Ian instructed his security. I didn’t even realize that they had been at the door, ready to grab me, but there they were. I tried to pull myself away, but the two men who had hold of me were gripping tight, making sure that they didn’t let me slip through their fingers. I struggled, but it was useless. I dropped my arms by my sides, turned, and saw that foul video playing on the screen once more.

It just...it just kept going. Ian walked away from the man that he had just shot, and, a moment later, another one approached with a gun. I managed to pull my gaze away just a moment before I had to see what he intended to do, but I knew what it was. And I knew what it meant.

I felt nausea stir in my stomach. I wanted to throw up, right there on the marble floor of his beautiful townhouse, right here in the middle of the room in front of anyone. Why the hell did he have that video? What the hell was he doing with it? I needed to know the truth. I needed to know what in the name of holy hell had told him that this was a good idea to bring home. And I needed to know, more than anything, exactly who the man on that screen was and just what he had done to earn that kind of treatment.

Ian shifted, so that he was standing in front of the screen, blocking my view of it for a merciful few seconds. My heart was still pounding hard in my chest, and I did my best to steady my breathing, but it didn’t work much. I just wanted to get out of there. I could feel the same fear that had taken me the moment I had woken up in the room with the men who had snatched me off the street – that urgent need to get the fuck out, no matter what. That need to fly and flee and get as far from there as I possibly could.

But I knew that Ian wasn’t going to let me do that. It wasn’t going to be so easy, not with him. His eyes were fixed on mine, and, in them, I tried to find the man that I had been sure that I had been falling for until this moment. He was there, somewhere, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out just where he had gotten to. I didn’t like this, not one little bit, and I hated how fearful I felt right now. I had promised myself that I was never going to let myself go backwards, feel the same terror that I had been through before, but that was – that had been prior to the fact of seeing that video. Knowing that it existed. And feeling like there wasn’t a hope in hell of truly finding out who Ian really was.

What the hell was that? I demanded. Ian gestured for his guards to let go of me, seemingly content in the belief that I wasn’t going to try to make a run for it again.

It was a neccessity, he replied. His voice seemed distant, cold, almost, and I felt a shiver run down my spine. Where was he? Where was Ian? I wanted to reach out and touch his hand, but I was too scared to, too certain that I would feel nothing but coldness under my touch if I did that.

Why? I begged him. Who was – who was that, Ian?

I looked past him once more, trying to peer at the image of the man just before his life had been snatched from him. I squinted at him in the moments before the gun went off. I felt as though I recognized him. As though I had seen him before. But where? And how...?

Please, just tell me who it is, I begged him. I needed to know. I needed to hear it out of his mouth. It was the only way that I was going to be able to let go of anything that had happened, if I believed he was being honest with me.

I could see him crunching the numbers inside his head, wondering if it would have been easier to just brush me off and tell me that I shouldn’t worry my pretty little head about it. But then, finally, he sighed, and I could tell that he was going to give me what I needed.

That’s your half-brother.

My jaw dropped.

What? I hissed at him. I didn’t - how could I – that I didn’t know about this till now...

Your father had a son by another woman, he explained, as quickly as he could. That man, that was him. He was the one who sold you off. It was all his idea. He wouldn’t give us any information on John, so we decided that it would be better to-

To just kill him? I exclaimed. My head was spinning. A brother? A brother that I had known nothing about? My father had kept a lot of things from me, but this – this was about the furthest he had ever gone to try and hide something, and I hated him for it. And this brother of mine, he had been tied close enough to my father to go along with him when he said that he wanted to sell me once more? The thought of it was enough to stir even more sickness in my stomach. How could people like that exist? And why the fuck did so many of them happen to be in my family, of all places?

I sank down to my knees, planted my forehead on the cool floor in front of me. Shit. How the fuck – what the hell had happened here? I felt as though I was going to throw up. I needed to get myself together, I needed to make myself stand again and look Ian in the eye and get him to tell me just what he had done and just what he had planned to do without my knowledge.

But I knew I couldn’t do that. He was just another man who had lied to me, another man who had made sure to keep everything from me as best he could, another man who had made sure that he had nothing more than the very least that he could share with me out in the open. If I hadn’t walked in on him watching that video, then I would never have found out what he had done.

And he hadn’t just killed that man, that man that he claimed was my brother. He had shot him first. As though he had wanted him to suffer. It would have been one thing if he had just taken his life, as foul as that would have been for me to wrap my head around, but it was quite another to know that he was willing to let this man suffer first. I didn’t know the truth of what that man had done for Ian to believe that he was worthy of such a fate, and, in all honesty, I wasn’t sure that I much wanted to know, either. I just wanted to wipe the memory of seeing that video from my mind, to go back to what it had been before.

But it was too late for that now. I had seen the truth. I had seen the kind of man that Ian was, and I knew that there would be no escaping from it. I needed to face up to it, even if it hurt. Even if it made me feel like I had been trusting the wrong person all of this time.

I managed to rise up to my feet once more, holding on to the wall for support, and Ian offered me his hand to help me up. I ignored it. I didn’t want anything to do with him right now. If he laid a hand on me, then all I would be able to think about would be the sight of his fingers wrapped around the trigger of that gun, the one he had used to shoot the man in the video.

I wasn’t able to look him in the eye again. I knew that, if I did, my head would be flooded with the memories of what he had done, of what he was capable of. I felt betrayed, on some deep, primal level, felt betrayed by what had happened, living in terror of what he had done and where he might go next. I could feel something coming off him in waves, an emotion, a strong one, but I had no idea what it was, and frankly, I didn’t care to, either. I just wanted to put all of this behind us, for now. I wanted to be able to leave everything that had been clinging to me like so much scum on the top of a dirty ocean behind.

I turned and pushed past his guards. No point going for the door. They would have stopped me long before I got anywhere, anyway. I made my way in the direction of the bedroom that had been mine before he had started to sleep in it with me, and I prayed that he wasn’t going to try to make amends. I couldn’t handle that. I couldn’t handle any of this right now.

I could barely even feel my feet moving beneath me as I walked, trying to keep going forward. Tears wanted to fall down my cheeks, but they seemed to have dried around my eyes. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t do anything right now, except try to work out what the hell I was going to do with the sickening image of him holding that gun to a man I hadn’t even known had been part of my family until today.

I managed to make it into the bathroom before the nausea got the better of me. Groaning, I leaned over the toilet and sank to my knees in the moment before I felt it swell up inside of me, the hot, acrid vomit tearing at my throat. I couldn’t control it. Maybe it was the only way to get this all out of me, the only way to make sure that I didn’t have to suffer and struggle and pain myself to try and push those memories down. If I could purge them like this, then I would take it. I would take it any way that I was able to.

Because I couldn’t live with the memory of what I had just seen. I couldn’t live with the knowledge that the first man that I had actually trusted in far longer than I could remember might have been as monstrous as the rest of them. Yes, he might have hidden it better, and yes, he might have made me feel safe for those few precious weeks before he had revealed the truth of who he really was to me – but that didn’t undermine what he had done. What he was capable of doing. All the things that I had no idea about, all the things that I had managed to make myself believe that he could never do.

But Ian was not the man that I thought he had been. And now, I had to handle life in this place knowing that. And praying that he wasn’t going to manage to make me the victim of his next violent act.

2

Ian

I

paced back and forth in front of her door. I knew that she wasn’t going to come out anytime soon, at least not to deal with me, but I wasn’t going to be able to get any sleep until I knew that she was okay.

What the fuck had I been thinking, playing that video in the middle of the living room like that? Maybe there was some part of me that had wanted her to see it. Some part of me that had wanted to make sure that she knew just what she was dealing with when it came to me. I knew that she cared for me, and there was a part of me, a part of me that I didn’t want to acknowledge, that didn’t feel as though I was worthy of that care. Maybe that part had come out to play, tried to blow up whatever it was that the two of us actually had here.

I had no clue. But right now, I just wanted to see her again, to hold her in my arms and tell her that I was so fucking sorry for everything that I had put her through and that I didn’t want her to be scared and that I would do everything that I could to make it right for her.

But she wasn’t going to believe a word that came out of my mouth, and maybe she was smart not to. I knew that I had changed everything between us right now. Changed it so far that I didn’t know if I was going to be able to get it back. I needed to hear from her, hear her voice, hear anything that told me, that she didn’t hate me as much as I felt like she did right now.

But she was in her bedroom, and if I opened that door and tried to let myself inside, she would have turned on me in an instant. Just like I deserved. Just like I had always deserved.

I had never been worthy of a woman like her. I could see that now. Maybe this had all just been some ploy to make sure that she saw it, too – something to make certain that she wasn’t going to get too attached, because she knew that I wasn’t worth it. Not on any level. I wished that I could go back in time, tell her that I was serious when I said that I wasn’t some perfect man, but I knew that she would never have believed it. She needed to see cold, hard, proof that I wasn’t the person that I said I was. And, well, now she had been presented with it. Once and for all. And I knew that she wasn’t going to forget it anytime soon.

I could hear her moving around in there, and I considered pushing open the door, just to check that she was alright, but I held myself back at the last minute. She needed her space right now. I wasn’t going to make anything better by forcing her to deal with me for the time being.

I stepped back from the door, even though it pained me to move away from her. I knew that she must have been hurting right now, hurting worse than perhaps she had been hurt in this whole twisted affair. She had thought she had been able to trust me, and now – now, she could see that I was anything but the man that she had believed I was. I had let her down. And I had no idea at all how I could make that right.

I just needed to give her space. Even though I wanted nothing more than to hold her in my arms and tell her how sorry I was for everything that had happened. I knew that I only had myself to blame for this, but I needed to make it right, needed to do anything and everything that I could to make sure that she got the support she needed right now.

The best I could do was make sure that she didn’t make a break for it in the middle of the night, when she thought that I was gone. I knew that there was no way that she would sit there on her ass for the rest of the evening. She would likely already be plotting ways to get out of there, to make it away from me so that I didn’t have a chance to do to her what I had done to her brother. I wished that I could tell her, convince her, that she had nothing to worry about, but she had already made up her mind about the kind of person that I was and that was something I was just going to have to live with.

Watch the door, I told one of the guards, who had followed me up to her room. And you – the window outside. Make sure she doesn’t get out. Alright?

The two men nodded, and I could tell that there was a whole host of things that they wanted to ask me in that moment. I wouldn’t have been able to come up with an answer for a single one of them. I just needed this to be over already. Over for good. But I didn’t know if I was going to be able to make that happen.

I turned and stalked off toward my room, trying not to think about her, about Kayla, locked up in her bedroom like that, probably hating me more than she had ever hated anyone in her entire life up until this point. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she never wanted to speak to me again. After what I had done to her, after everything that had happened, I could hardly be surprised that she had decided that she was going to turn on me. It was only a matter of time before she saw the darkness inside of me, and she knew that she couldn’t take it for another moment.

I stepped into my bedroom, pulled the door tight behind me, and sank down on to my bed, face-first. I instinctively reached over for her, where she normally lay right next to me when we were sharing a bed, but of course, she was nowhere to be found. Just like I deserved. Just like I always deserved.

I wanted nothing more than to be able to be with her again. I could still remember the way she had looked at me, when the two of us had been driving home from that dinner with Wes and Marie, and I had been able to tell just from the soft smile on her face that she didn’t want this to end. That she was starting to get used to this, to being with me, that maybe she didn’t see it as so bad, after all.

Because when she saw it that way, I felt as though I could, too. I had spent so much of my life trying to duck and dive and weave and hide from the things that I knew were true about me, from the monstrousness that had been sewn down inside of me from the way that I had been raised, that sometimes I forgot I even had the capacity to enjoy the human things that other people did. Like love. Like being in love.

No. I couldn’t think of it like that. I couldn’t think of what I had shared with her as love. It was far too painful to force myself into that, especially when I knew that she wanted nothing to do with me right now. I had to accept that I had fucked it up, in some profound, deep way that I might not be able to come back from, and that was the end of it.

Eventually, I found myself drifting into a dark sleep, the kind that seemed to curl around me like smoke as I lay there, alone, in the bed. All the memories that I did my best to force to the back of my mind rose in me once more.

I saw the way that Kayla had looked at me. Saw the disgust, the anger and betrayal, in her eyes, and I knew that she must have been suffering in that moment. I knew that I had taken from her something that she thought she could rely on, and I hated myself for making her feel that way. I thought that we had managed to build something here, something that existed outside of the abuse that the two of us had endured, but it looked as though I had just triggered all the memories of the things that she had been through, the things that she had never wanted to be