This Billionaire’s Damaged: The Billionaire's Damaged, #3

By Rachel Foster

In this final installment, things are darker than ever before. Now that Kayla knows she's looking at a pregnancy on her own, she has to do whatever she needs to do to survive. While she's estranged from Ian, she tries to make it on her own with the demons of her past still lingering over her. Ian is intent on getting Kayla back by any means necessary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: 3rd Publishing
• Release date: Mar 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215781296

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This 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

This Billionaire’s Damaged

This Billionaire’s Damaged

1

Kayla

I

felt like I was wading through mud as I stepped out of the house for the first time.

I couldn’t believe that this was happening. Not really. Not after everything that we had been through – not after everything that we had endured. I couldn’t be – I couldn’t really be...

With my bags at my feet, I paused for a moment to gather myself. The car was already waiting for me, and I knew that the driver must have been looking at me sideways, wondering what was taking me so much time. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it. I just needed to get out of here, get some sleep, and hopefully start to navigate through the mess that was happening inside my own stupid head.

I managed to drag my bags to the cab, threw them in the back, and glanced back toward the house. Sure enough, there he was, standing in the window, as though he was trying to will me to come back just through sheer force of will. I knew that it must have hurt him, seeing me go like this, but he couldn’t expect me to stay. Not after what he had done. Not after what I had seen.

The very thought of it was enough to send a long shiver down my spine. I tried to ignore it. I had to move on from what had happened on that day, when my father had tried to snatch me up from the street again. I could still remember the way that his fingers had dug into my skin, the harshness of them against me, even as I had tried to pull away and run from him. But I had known that it would have been pointless. If he wanted me, he would have me, and that was the end of it.

I knew that I should be grateful to Ian for doing what he had done. But gratitude felt like such a sick, twisted thought in light of everything that he had pulled. He had taken my family from me – even family I didn’t know that I had, like my brother, Aaron. I had nobody left in the world with me who shared my bloodline, at least, not that I knew of.

Well, apart from the baby that I was carrying inside of me.

As the cab pulled away from the house, back toward some hotel across town that Ian had booked me a room at for the next couple of nights, I planted my hands on my belly and looked down at it. How far along was I? I had no idea. No idea how many days or weeks this little creature might have been tagging along for the ride with me.

The thought of it - the thought of how much danger this little creature might have been in if my father had actually managed to take me – was enough to make my stomach turn. No, no, I needed to stay calm, manage the stress. It was bad for the baby to let it get the better of me. And yet, it was hard, harder than I had ever thought it could be to keep my head on straight when I felt like I needed nothing more than to curl up in a ball and cry myself to sleep as many nights as it took for this to stop hurting.

I had no idea what I was going to do with this kid, to be honest. Even the thought of them inside of me was enough to make me feel a little...off-balance, to say the least. I knew that there was nothing that said I had to go through with this pregnancy, and I knew that I would have to seriously consider termination as an option, but that didn’t mean that it was any easier to put those pieces together in my head. I was already stressed enough as it was, already feeling like the ground had been ripped out from underneath me, and I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to organize something as intense as an abortion on top of that.

Or maybe that was the excuse that I was spinning to myself, because I knew, deep in my heart of hearts, that I didn’t want to get rid of this baby. I had to stay logical about all of this, but I knew that there was no way I could keep myself clear and focused until I had figured out what the heck was going to happen with this child. No matter how much I wished I could just flip a coin and make the choice. The emotions that were tied up in the thought of the little bundle of cells growing inside of me were more than I could reasonably be expected to take.

We’re here.

The driver spoke curtly, and my head snapped up at the sound of his voice – had he been speaking to me before? I couldn’t remember. Wasn’t sure that I wanted to. I nodded, went to drag my bags from the back of the cab, and was met with a concierge hurrying out to help me. I almost wanted to tell him that I could manage this myself, but in truth, I knew that I couldn’t. I knew that I was going to have to take all the help that I could get and use it for everything that it was worth if I was going to survive what had to come next.

In a flurry, I was booked into my room, my bags dropped off, a key pressed into my hand so that I could come and go as I pleased, and I planted myself on the edge of the bed and stared off into space, not sure how I could actually go to sleep now that I was here. Even though I was so exhausted I felt as though I could have curled up and dozed away the next six months, I knew that my mind would have been racing all the way through, and that I would be better off just staying up and getting something to eat rather than attempting to push this all down.

Ian didn’t know. Ian didn’t know that I was pregnant. I had made sure to hide the pregnancy test, and I doubted that he was suddenly going to start doing housework when his staff normally took care of it – I just had to hope that they would be discreet, understand that I didn’t want anyone else to know about the mess I had gotten myself into.

The mess I had gotten us into.

Because I had to think of myself and the baby as a pair now. It wasn’t just me any longer, hadn’t been for a while now. Every choice that I made from here on out was one that was going to affect the future life and the future chances of the kid that I was carrying inside of me. What did I want them to be like? How did I want them to do in the world? If I did decide to have them, would I ever tell them who their father was? Or how I had come to be in his orbit in the first place?

I would never be able to tell them that. I would never be able to tell anyone the truth about what had happened, what had drawn me so close to him even though I knew that I should have held back. Because there was a part of me, a part of me that I usually would have thought was best left untouched, that understood that he would never have been with me had it not been for the strange circumstances that had pulled us together in the first place. I wished that I could go back in time, to that version of me who had been dumped on his doorstep, tell her that I shouldn’t fall for him just because he seemed so different from everyone else I had ever met before in my life. Just because he actually seemed to care enough about me to want to take care of me when everyone else around me only wanted to hurt and to harm.

But maybe he was as bad as them. Maybe he always had been, and I had just been far too terrified to admit to myself that it was the case. Because the thought of going back out into the world by myself, with nobody to keep me safe, was too much for me to even think about bearing. I had thrown myself on his mercy and I had at least found enough to make me believe that I was worth something to him. Worth enough to fight to keep in his life.

But I could see now that I had been wrong to believe it. He had wreaked havoc on my life, on my world, on my job, on everything that I had worked so hard to build all this time. And now I was left with the rubble of what was left behind, trying to rebuild it from the wreckage of what he had left.

Except he had given me one more thing to contend with than when I had started. A baby. And I didn’t know how in the hell I was meant to be able to deal with that.

I wanted to cry. I really did. But I knew that nothing would have come out. I was too exhausted for that by far, too wrecked from everything that had happened to even think about letting the tears fall.

At least I didn’t have to worry about going out into the world anymore – everyone who would have wished ill on me was gone. I had that to look forward to, at least. The bare minimum that most people out there got to live their lives with in the first place.

I hated that. I hated that I had had to wait for someone like Ian to come along and into my life to get to the stage that I could go outside without having to fear for my life. But I had, and now I had let him into my world in a way that I would never be able to change. The two of us, something had happened there, something that I knew I was going to have to take years to unpick fully – I had no idea how long it would take me, how many months I would have to wait before I could actually wrap my head around everything that had happened and everything that had moved my life for good.

For now, sitting on that hotel bed all by myself, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was going to be able to survive it. If there was any part of me, no matter how small, that would be able to come out the other side of this and prove that I could live a life all on my own terms. I wasn’t sure if I was proving it to myself or to Ian or to our baby, the baby that I was carrying inside of me right now – the baby that felt as though it weighed a million tons, even though I knew that it couldn’t have been much bigger than a cluster of cells right now.

I would just have to keep moving forward. Have to keep pushing on. Even though I couldn’t imagine how I was going to do that, I would have to find a way – I would have to make it happen. If I could get through this, I reasoned, then there wouldn’t be anything in the world that I couldn’t survive – and frankly, I wanted nothing more than to believe in myself enough to make that happen.

2

Ian

I

stood there, in the window, watching her leave, and I swear it felt as though a string was being pulled tighter and tighter between the two of us until it snapped as the car drove off down the street.

I wasn’t sure how long I kept standing there. I felt as though I couldn’t move. If I took a step, so much as a single step, then I knew that I was going to have to accept that all of this was actually happening. Turn around and see the house empty, know that she was nowhere to be found, know that she was gone and that she wasn’t coming back.

Know that this was over, and that I had been the reason for that.

Even though I had been sure that I was doing the right thing when I had pulled the trigger on her father. The way he had been grabbing her, pulling her to him, I knew that he wasn’t going to let go until he was dead and gone. I should have thought it through a little more before I had pulled the trigger, but in that moment, I knew all that mattered to me was getting Kayla out of there in one piece. I wasn’t going to settle for anything less. Not a chance in hell.

And now, she was gone. Same difference as if I had let her father take her in the first place, but I knew that I would never have let that happen. No matter how much pain I was in right now, no matter how many confusing feelings were pulling me this way and that as I tried to work myself out, I would never have just left her to be taken by that man. No matter how easy it was to stand here and tell myself that it wouldn’t have made a difference, I knew that it did. It wasn’t about whether or not I had her – it was about whether or not she was safe in the world at large, and I knew that she was. That she always would be, now that her father and his sick ways were out of the world for good.

That was what I had started on this path for in the first place, after all. To make sure that he would never again get close to his daughter, that he would never again be able to exploit my site to do what he wanted to do. Men like him, men who used women for everything they were worth, they were the scum of the Earth, as far as I was concerned, and it was better off without him on it.

But the pain on her face – the pain that Kayla had clearly been dealing with as she had tried to come to terms with everything that I had done, I hadn’t been ready for that. I had thought, at the back of my head, that she would be fine with it, as glad about it as I thought I would be. I thought that she would see it as the freedom that she had been long-since owed finally gifted to her.

But she wasn’t like me, never had been. She still had that forgiveness in her heart. I should have known it from the moment that I saw her dealing with my own father, the kindness with which she approached him, the gentle sweetness that she used to talk to him. She had offered him basic decency even after everything he had done, and maybe she wanted the chance to offer that to her own father, too. Even if I felt like he didn’t deserve a single scrap of it.

But that hadn’t been my choice to make. I should have seen that. Looking back, I felt like I was starting to understand it, starting to wrap my head around the way that she felt. She had this kindness to her that I had never been able to find in myself, some sweetness that made it hard to believe that there was anything else underneath her surface. I didn’t know how she could have come out of everything that she had been through with such grace, but she had, and I had taken the chance from her to reconcile or at least make peace with the man who had done all that to her.

I hated myself for it. Hated myself so much it hurt. Hated that I had driven away the first woman that I had ever really cared about – the first person that I had let close to me in longer than I could even remember. And this time, I knew that there was nothing that could bring her back. I had pushed things too far now, the last ties that had kept us together severed by the choices that I had made, the actions that I had taken. Now, as I stood there in this empty house, feeling like the whole place was an open wound, I knew that it had all been my fault.

And that I would have to work to build myself up again without her there to keep me company.

I had made a mess of things, and not just with Kayla – with her father on my conscience, I needed to find a way to make sure that news of his death at my hands never got out into the world at large. There was only so much that I could cover up, only so much that people were willing to overlook when it came to someone like me, and I had every intention of making sure that I didn’t let this tank the rest of my life, as well.

I heard footsteps making their way through the door – not Kayla, too heavy for that – and a moment later, Davis appeared in the doorway of the living room where I was standing.

Hello, he grunted to me, sounding pissed. I knew that I had dropped more on his lap than he could possibly have imagined when he had taken this job on, but honestly, he was going to have to deal with it. I had hired him because I had known that he was the kind of guy who could actually make a difference in this business – I could actually use him to clear up my mess, and not have to worry about being caught out again in the future.

Hi, I replied. My voice, even to me, sounded tired, stripped of energy, exhausted. I felt like I could have lay down on the floor and slept for three days straight, but we had bigger things to deal with right now.

The body, he explained. We’ve got it out in one of the cars, circling the block to keep things moving. But we need to decide what we’re going to do with it.

What do you think we should do? I asked. He had been doing this a lot longer than I had – no doubt he had smarter things to say on it than me.

We need to get rid of it, he replied. As fast as we can. But we need to make sure that, wherever it ends up, it’s not going to come back and bite us in the ass.

You got any ideas? I asked. My brain was too fried right now to think about anything but Kayla – I knew that she had a room in a nice hotel waiting for her once the cab pulled to a halt, but I wasn’t sure that was enough to make me feel better about any of this. She had been in such danger for such a long time that the thought of taking my hands off the wheel, even for a little while, was enough to make my entire body clench with discomfort. I needed to know that she was okay. I needed to know that she was safe, and I needed to have someone following her again, just to be sure that I didn’t have anything to worry about...

But then, I pushed that down again. She didn’t want that from me. She had asked me to drop it with that shit. And, now that I had taken out the people who would have been a threat to her, there was no reason other than my own paranoia to actually keep chasing her.

I had to respect that she wanted her freedom from me. She wouldn’t have been the first person to need her distance from someone like me, and I didn’t blame her for taking it. She felt like she had seen the real version of me, the true one, the one that she wasn’t going to be able to forget again anytime soon. Maybe I just needed to get