“I’m not working for you!” I roared. The words exploded from my mouth like a cannon. “Now get the fuck out!”
He didn’t budge. The asshat didn’t move a single inch as his arms slowly slinked into the pockets of his thousand-dollar suit, and he began to swagger around the deck. I watched as he took the beer I’d opened before stepping out here, and slowly brought it to his own lips.
“You will work for me, and here’s why,” he casually said as he set the beer down on the rail. His voice was eerily calm, in vast contrast to the crashing tide below. “Before your little incident, turns out you owed me money. A lot of money, actually.”
“I’ll write you a check,” I interjected, which only made him laugh harder.
“I don’t think you’re quite grasping the concept here. So let me dumb it down for you. You may think you’re on the up and up because you have a few million stashed away in the bank. That’s chump change to what we dealt with on a daily basis. Did you ever wonder why you could afford a place like this?”
I had actually, but like so many things in my past, I’d just let it go.
Obviously that had been a big mistake.
“The reason we could afford shit like this house you’re standing in and the crazy huge yacht I own is because we never keep it in one place for a long period of time. We keep our money hidden, from the prying, investigating eyes of Big Brother. It works. Or at least it did until you decided to peace out for two years, leaving behind a huge debt and no one but me to clean up after you. And I hate messes.”
“How much?” I gritted through my teeth.
“Fifty million dollars.”
I tried to school my emotions, temper my expression, tone down my temper. What the hell had I gotten myself into?
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” I asked.
“Well, you see, that’s the tricky part of amnesia, isn’t it? But I guess I could always go to your lovely girlfriend and ask. She was around back then, wasn’t she? What was her name? Everly? She was a hot piece of ass, if I remember correctly.”
He obviously hadn’t just been calling. He’d been watching—waiting for the right opportunity to ambush me with this information—and now he knew he’d hit the right button to make me flinch. The right nerve that just might cause me to cave. I had no idea who this man was and what he was capable of, but based on the way Everly cringed at the mere mention of his name and his maniacal laugh, I wasn’t taking any chances.
“What do you want?” I asked, knowing he had me. Knowing I’d do anything to keep Everly safe, even if it meant giving up everything.
“You always were a little sensitive when it came to her,” he said, a mischievous grin on his face. “You’re going to come back to work, like a good little boy, and we’ll talk about this amnesia no more. No one ever needs to hear about it. As far as your clients are concerned, you took an extended vacation after your very traumatic hospital stay, and are now well rested and ready to make them as much fucking money as humanly possible.”
“And when they discover I have no skills as a stockbroker whatsoever and lose every single penny of their well-earned fortune?” I asked, each word coming out like a dark staccato note, drilling me deeper into hell.
“They won’t know their head from their own ass, because I’ll be pulling all the strings. As soon as they discover the much loved August Kincaid is finally back, your beloved clients will come rushing back to us with open arms, and we’ll be flooded with so much fucking business we won’t know what to do.”
“So, I’m just your puppet?” I asked, my eyes darkening as his lightened with glee.
“Yes. You see, you were always the face and I was the brains. People don’t like me much, which is why I brought you on board. You, with the good looks and the wholesome ideas. You were exactly what I needed. People believed you when you told them you would make them money, even when we were robbing them blind. And the amazing part…they just kept coming back for more.”
His bone-chilling calm as he spoke about robbing people of their life savings was eerily scary. And the fact that I’d once helped him do this, with the same smile on my face, made me ill.
“You know the front door is open?” Everly’s voice cut through the tension as my eyes went wide with panic. I turned just in time to see her step onto the patio, her face bright with life until she met Trent’s eyes and then everything seemed to drain from her like water leaking from a sieve.
“What is he doing here?” she seethed, her words barely audible from between clenched teeth.