Chapter 9
“The credit cards are cancelled. The bank accounts have been placed in your name as trustee of the estate. The remaining assets will be under the umbrella of the trust within the next thirty days,” my financial manager said over the phone.
I leaned back in my leather home office chair, enjoying the satisfaction of a plan coming together.
Stella would have to beg me for everything from this point forward. The only question now was how long it would take for her to realize it.
I checked my watch.
Perhaps I would have her on her knees by evening.
An intriguing thought.
Having her on her knees—begging.
There was something about her needing me that made my cock swell with interest.
Usually the idea of anyone needing me made my skin crawl. Men like me did not claw their way to the top and hold on to their empires with an iron fist by putting other people’s needs above their own.
I pushed the images of Stella on her knees, with her big eyes filled with tears and her lips stretched around my shaft, out of my head.
There was more work to be done.
The house and other assets were going to take a bit of time, but with her liquid assets transferred, I now had control over her spending.
I told her she was going to have to ask permission even to buy a cup of coffee, and I meant it.
My office door slammed open.
Expectation hardened my cock.
Stella.
I was not accustomed to being denied something I wanted. Although it would have been brutish and borderline unforgivable to have fucked her in that courthouse, a gnawing need tightened inside my chest.
I hadn’t felt such a keen, almost desperate need to possess a woman for a very long time.
There was just something about the innocent fire and smolder of intelligence behind those golden eyes that challenged me.
It had also been quite some time since I’d been challenged by something or someone.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Olivia shouted as she and Charlotte burst into my office. “How could you be so cruel?”
Fuck.
Usually I would stand to greet them, but in my current state, that would not be possible. “What is the meaning of this?”
“You know what the meaning of this is. Stella is our friend. She just lost her family, and you are hurting her.”
Olivia had always been the stronger of my two daughters.
Maybe that was my fault. Maybe I had given her too much freedom as a child. Maybe I’d hired the wrong nanny. Whatever it was, Olivia would have made a much better son than a daughter.
Charlotte had been much more amiable and obedient, until I let Luc hire that Texan cowboy to protect her. I might as well have hired a dog to guard a bone.
Now they were both married to wealthy men, but their marriages were wasted opportunities. There were no contracts, no deals that had been struck, no understandings. There wasn’t even a single subsidy merger in either of their marriages.
I hated wasted opportunities for profits.
It was like burning money.
Luc was just as bad.
No, Luc’s marriage was worse.
Unlike the girls, he knew better.
And just because my children destroyed their opportunities for a lucrative marriage, that did not mean I was going to let them do the same for me.
My hand flipped the leather portfolio on my desk closed as they approached. The last thing I needed was for Olivia to realize there was a prenuptial agreement already being drawn up.
Charlotte may not have recognized the contract, but Olivia would.
She was a shrewd businesswoman, and although part of me wanted to be proud of her for it, she was still shortsighted and didn’t understand that the family business, my business, needed to come first. Always.
I twirled my heavy, black Mont Blanc pen between my fingers. “I don’t appreciate either of you barging into my office unannounced with your shrewish complaints. Not that it is any of your concern, I am acting well within my responsibility as trustee of Stella’s estate.”
“Is that why you canceled her credit card, embarrassing her in front of her friends and her peers?” Charlotte asked.
I pressed the heel of my palm against the top of my thigh as I tried not to shift in my chair. My disappointment in seeing my daughters and not Stella added a heated edge to my tone as my erection cooled.
“Again. Neither of your concerns. The trust bank accounts and investments are being moved under my control. Had she bothered to talk to me like a responsible young woman instead of throwing a temper tantrum in the courtroom, she would have learned that and been given her new bank card.”
Olivia’s eyes narrowed as she crossed her arms over her chest. “How did you get new cards issued before the judge ruled?”
“Because the judge issuing the order was a formality. Her father’s will stated I was to be the one handling her finances if she was unmarried when he died.”
Charlotte huffed as she waved her arm at me. “But you hated each other. Why would he give you control over Stella’s estate?”
She said estate, but all I heard was control over Stella.
Control over her body.
Control over her heated response.
Control over her pleasure.
Dammit.
I needed to get my meddling daughters the hell out of my office and go find Stella. Being denied earlier was fucking with my head.
“We were not on the best of terms when he died, but we had been close once upon a time. I suppose he never updated his will. Why is any of this your concern?”
Olivia’s mouth thinned as she paced in front of my desk as if she were inside a boardroom. “Why is this so important to you?”
Apparently my daughter had missed her calling. She should have been an attorney. Soon she would ferret out the truth about my intentions toward Stella.
I couldn’t let that happen.
Knowing she hated it when I took a shot at her business, I fired back, “Shouldn’t you be buying another handbag or some other frivolous thing while you run your little magazine?”
It was a dick move, but effective.
Olivia’s cheeks heated. “My business is just fine, Father.”
“Is it? Have you seen your quarterly earnings? They looked a little anemic. Maybe you should talk to your brother or ask your husband for a little help improving profits.”
Her profits looked fine. Actually, she was ahead of what I had estimated by about 8%, and she’d outperformed every single one of my expectations—but telling her that would make her even more suspicious.
“That’s not… I… We aren’t here—” Olivia stammered.
Mission accomplished.
“Instead of wasting my time and yours, why don’t you two go and do something productive? If Stella wants her new cards, she will need to come to me for them.”
Come to me. Come for me. Semantics.
Olivia glared at me, hatred in her eyes, as the blood drained from Charlotte’s face.
Dammit. I may have overshot the mark. All I really wanted was them out of my office before they asked too many questions about my intentions toward Stella—not to start a whole new family feud.
Regret. An emotion I had little use for, crept into my consciousness.
With no intention of making an excuse for my behavior, or hiding behind the fact that I was a young widower who’d suddenly and traumatically lost his wife, I knew I’d been a shit father. There was no point in insulting my children by trying to make amends now.
The past was the past.
The best I could do now was have us all stay out of each other’s way.
“She is twenty-six,” Charlotte said. Her voice was stronger, but her eyes were back to studying the carpet, an evasive stress reflex she’d done since childhood. “She is an adult, not a child. She deserves to have everything that is rightly hers in her possession. If she can’t manage it or is frivolous, then that is on her. But it’s her money and her choice. You have no right?—”
“The court says I have every right.”
Charlotte’s eyes widened. “You’re not going to marry her to Ziegler, are you?”
“The family’s title has been stripped. They have nothing and are worth nothing. That is not the match I am considering for Stella.”
There was no point in mentioning that I was the one who had petitioned to the crown and used my extensive influence to have the ancient title stripped in revenge for harming Charlotte.
She wouldn’t trust such sentimentality from me, and even if she did, I wouldn’t have deserved it.
And there was also no reason to mention that I had an entirely different groom in mind for their friend. Me.
Charlotte’s shoulders relaxed, and the line that had formed between her brows disappeared.
“Is there anything else, or do I need to have a word with your husbands and tell them that you two both have far too much time on your hands?”
Both of my daughters swallowed the insult and then stormed out of my office just as quickly as they had stormed in.
They were angry of course, but no more than usual.
Charlotte would be pacified knowing I wasn’t going to marry Stella off to that spineless worm.
The phone on my desk rang. I picked it up without saying a word.
“Sir, she is staying at the Aman here in New York.”
“In one of the suites?”
“No, sir. She rented one of the long-stay homes. Her stay doesn’t have an end date.”
“Good. How is she paying for it?”
“Her family has a line of credit. It’s the hotel her father used when guests or family would stay. The bill is sent to the family’s financial manager and is paid monthly.”
“Perfect.” I slammed the phone down and relaxed back into my chair.
She was making this so damn easy.