The Owner of His Heart Read online

  Layla couldn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth. To a certain extent, he was right about her. She tried her best to be nice, to be polite, to be all the things her father hadn’t been. She had even gone into a helping profession. But there was something about Nathan Sinclair that upset her equilibrium. She didn’t want to be nice to him. In fact, he irked her so bad, her palms itched to slap him.

  Seconds ticked by as they took each other’s measure. Him challenging her with his stare, her refusing to back down by lowering her eyes.

  She thought she’d won the stare-off when he turned away from her. But then he grabbed a file folder out of one of his desk drawers, dropped the receipt into it, and said, “Fine, I’ll expect you the second Friday of next month with the first installment.”

  She blinked. “You want me to deliver the check here?”

  He held out his hand. “Right into my palm.”

  “I mean, couldn’t I just deposit it into a bank account or something? Or maybe mail you the check?” The same instinct that had told her to run was now telling her she did not want to confront this man again. That she should do whatever it took to keep her distance.

  He sat back down and steepled his hands in front of him.

  “I like to look into my enemy’s eyes when it comes to payback—even if in this case, my enemy is literally paying my family back. You’ll come here, to this office, and hand me each check directly until you’re done paying back every cent. Those are my terms. Either take them or you can—how did you put it? Zip it.”

  His tone was soft, but his eyes brooked no argument, and Layla knew he wouldn’t be convinced to modify his so-called terms. His face was beautiful, but she could now see there was something very cruel inside of him. For some reason, he wanted to watch her suffer under the burden of repaying her father’s debt.

  “Fine,” she said. She schooled her face into a emotionless stare. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing the anxiety now churning in her stomach as she tried to figure out how to pay him back as quickly as possible. “I’ll see you in June.”

  “Fine,” he said. “You may go now.”

  With that, he took his laser gaze off of her and turned it to his computer.

  “Thank you for meeting with me and for not handing me over to security,” she said, because it was the polite thing to say. And she was determined to remain polite even if Nathan Sinclair couldn’t appreciate such niceties.

  He didn’t answer, just typed on his keyboard, signaling he had already dismissed her before she was even out the door.

  “Bye,” she said, feeling silly now, but unable to stop herself from issuing one more small courtesy.

  Again, he didn’t answer. So she left, already piecing together a plan to get more hours at her physical therapy center. She’d work double shifts every day if it meant paying back that blackmail money sooner rather than later. Even though she still had a lot more questions, she had never wanted to be done with anything the way she wanted to be done with Nathan Sinclair.

  ***

  Nathan waited ten minutes after the door clicked behind Layla to pick up the phone and buzz Kate.

  “Yes, Mr. Sinclair?” she said, picking up immediately.

  “That investigator we used for the Columbus lawsuit…”

  “Spencer Greeley?” she said.

  “Yes, contract his services. I want him to get everything he can find on Layla Matthews. And I especially want access to her medical records.”

  She paused, obviously wondering what this was all about, but she was too professional to ask outright. In the end, she simply said, “Yes, Mr. Sinclair. I’ll get right on that.”

  Nathan usually hung up after issuing his orders, but this time he stopped himself and said, “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” his assistant replied, sounding rather startled.

  He gritted his teeth and hung up. Layla Matthews had only been back in his life for a few minutes, but she was already disrupting it in ways he didn’t like. Again. With her innocent doe eyes and the luscious curves hidden underneath those hideous scrubs… he couldn’t help but want to pull them off, just to see how much that body of hers had changed in the nine years since they’d seen each other last.

  He didn’t know what her game was, or why she had come back to Pittsburgh, but he planned to find out and neutralize her before his brother returned. Just a few minutes ago, he had been furious with Andrew for skipping town, but now he could see what a stroke of luck that had been. If he played the situation right, he could get Layla Matthews to leave Pittsburgh before the ball, before Andrew came back, and before she figured out she and his brother used to be in love.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BY THE TIME the second Friday of June rolled around, Nathan began to see what a bad idea it had been to insist Layla meet with him in person to hand over her first installment. At the time, he’d done it to make her uncomfortable, him batting at her in their game of cat and mouse. But that had been before Spencer Greeley sent in his report and he’d discovered everything Layla had told him that day she barged into his office had been true.

  According to Greeley’s findings, after her fall and subsequent forty-eight-hour coma, Layla woke up unable to remember her accident, or anything that happened in the year prior to it, including moving to Pittsburgh to attend college, and meeting her boyfriend, Andrew. And since Andrew had never visited her in the hospital, there had been no reason for her to seek him out. His brother had been forbidden to see her by both their father and the family lawyers after Henry Matthews had threatened to sue them.

  “Layla wants to sue you all,” Henry had told Nathan, Andrew, and their father nine years ago when he visited the Sinclair mansion, ostensibly to let them know she had come out of her coma. They’d invited him to meet with them in the study, where Henry had confessed with much false handwringing that Layla wanted to sue the Sinclairs.

  “She says maybe she was pushed down those stairs,” Henry said. “I told her that couldn’t be. She fell face forward, you see, and the doctors think she just slipped. But she told me to come here and tell you that. She thinks maybe you’ll give her something to make sure this story don’t get out.”

  Their father had not suffered this foolishness for long. “How much does she want?” he asked. He tended to be decisive and to the point when it came to business decisions. It was a quality Nathan had inherited from him, which was why his father had named him CEO in his will instead of his brother.

  Henry named the price, and his father wrote down a number three times that amount on a piece of paper, which he slid across the desk.

  “That’s what we’ll pay you. Once. I’m not as nice as my son, Andrew, here. Tell your daughter if she ever comes near him or tries to blackmail my family again, I won’t hesitate to ensure it’s the last time she does it. Do you understand?”

  Henry’s voice shook when he answered, “I understand. Layla don’t have a bank account. Could you make that check out to me?”

  Nathan had known Layla’s father was a slime ball just from that one exchange, but according to Greeley’s report, he’d been even worse than Nathan thought. He had gotten a job in New Orleans that would let him add his nineteen-year-old daughter to his insurance, then he had blown the money their father had paid him to gamble on the riverboats.

  From what Nathan could tell, Layla hadn’t seen a dime and had even taken out loans to complete her masters in physical therapy. He read through the report, which detailed how she grew up, with an itinerant gambler for a father, hopping from Las Vegas to Reno to New Orleans until she eventually landed at Carnegie Mellon, where she met his brother, only to lose any memory of having attended the prestigious university or her relationship with Andrew less than a year later.

  Anyone else would have felt sorry for her, reading over this tragic backstory. But no one else knew the Layla Nathan knew. Not even his brother had known what she had really been like.

  He could still remem
ber the first time he saw her. He had been partying the night before and had woken up in some strange girl’s room on the other side of town, so hung over he’d barely managed to crawl out of bed and into his Ferrari to get himself home to the family mansion. He didn’t live in the main house like his brother, but had taken over the one-bedroom guest cottage out back, which unfortunately was gated off and could only be accessed by walking through the mansion.

  He’d snuck in through the kitchen to avoid his parents, who, back in those days, needed very little prompting to start asking when he planned to do something with his life and why he couldn’t be more like his brother. But when he walked in through the back door, he found a large-eyed black girl with closely-cropped hair and a pretty face, sitting at the kitchen table, a chemistry textbook spread out in front of her.

  “Hi,” she said, giving him a toothy smile after he came stumbling in. “You must be Nathan.”

  His hangover headache intensified. “Yeah, I’m Nathan. Who are you?”

  “I’m Layla.”

  He dropped into a seat across from her and commanded, “Get me some coffee. Now.”

  She just sat there, observing him in his pain.

  “I said coffee,” he repeated.

  “Please,” she said.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You forgot to say please.”

  He blinked at her. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Layla,” she said again.

  “No, who are you to me? Are you one of the servants? No, you’re too young. One of their daughters? Is that why you won’t fetch?”

  “You have so many servants, you don’t know anything about their family members?” she asked.

  “No, that’s not it. Maybe I’ve seen you before, maybe I haven’t. I just didn’t care enough to remember you until you came between me and my coffee.”

  She closed her large textbook and said, “What if I was one of the servants’ daughters? Would you have her or him fired just because I didn’t get your cup of coffee?”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “That depends. If you get me coffee now that you know what the situation is, then no, I won’t fire your mother or father. If you don’t…” He let the threat hang in the air.

  “Wow,” she said. Then she expelled a breath of air, before she picked up the thick textbook, held it high above her head, and dropped it. The resulting bang against the kitchen table sent a piercing pain arcing through the back of his brain.

  He groaned. “What are you doing?”

  “My mother’s dead and thank goodness my father doesn’t work here,” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “So I’m taking advantage of the fact that you can’t fire them because I won’t fetch.”

  Her yelling had the equivalent effect of beating drumsticks against his throbbing head. “Shut up,” he commanded.

  “Make me!” she shouted back. “Make me you ridiculous, arrogant, spoiled, rich boy!”

  Nathan covered his ears, trying to block out her voice. But then it turned out he didn’t have to. Footsteps sounded from the other room, and Layla’s head jerked up, like an animal that had caught the scent of another.

  She picked up the book and scrambled back into her chair with it, opening it to the page she had been studying before Nathan had come in through the back door.

  By the time Andrew entered the kitchen, dressed in jeans and a light blue polo, Layla was the very picture of someone studying peacefully.

  “Seriously, bro,” he said, upon seeing Nathan. “It’s ten in the morning and you smell like the Yuengling distillery.”

  Yuengling was a local beer, and it happened to be exactly what Nathan had been drinking in copious amounts the night before. But Nathan was too furious with Layla to respond to his brother’s insult. He pointed at Layla, his head throbbing even worse than before. “Who is she?” he demanded. “And what the hell is she doing here?”

  “This is Layla,” his brother said. “She’s tutoring me in chemistry.”

  Nathan’s eyes narrowed. “You’re going into the family business. What do you care about chemistry?”

  Layla looked up at him, confused, and Andrew blushed. “I’ve always liked chemistry,” he said, despite his red face.

  Nathan turned back to Layla. “Where did he find you?”

  “In the school academic development office,” she said. “He came in for peer counseling.”

  “How old are you?” Nathan asked.

  “I’m eighteen,” she answered.

  “And he’s a twenty-one-year-old junior, who supposedly needs a freshman’s help in chemistry. A really cute freshman’s help. Yeah right. He just split up with his girlfriend and now he’s trying to get laid.” He turned back to his brother. “You probably aren’t even taking chemistry. No room for it on your business major schedule, right?”

  Andrew didn’t answer, but the deeper shade of red he turned was answer enough. Nathan stood up. “Well, good luck with this harpy. If you see a servant, tell her to bring some coffee to the guest house.”

  He left the kitchen on the high note of having blown his goody-two-shoes brother’s cover story.

  But Layla even managed to thwart him in this. The last thing he heard her say before he left the room was, “It’s okay, Andrew. Actually, it’s kind of sweet...”

  Less than two weeks later, they were officially dating, much to the consternation of their parents who had much preferred Andrew’s ex-girlfriend, Diana Swinton, a society blond, and the daughter of another prominent Pittsburgh business family.

  But no one had disapproved of the relationship more than Nathan, who knew from the start what she was really like. He also knew he’d gone hard the moment he’d seen her sitting at the table, and he’d stayed that way for hours after that, until he jerked himself off, with visions of her underneath him, calling his name and begging him for more.

  Now nine years later, he was in the shower and once again hard as a college-aged boy at the thought of seeing her again. Nathan turned the water fully to cold to try to calm himself down, but that didn’t work. Visions of her pulling her top off, revealing dark breasts with even darker aureoles came to mind, and despite the cold water, his dick pulsed with an aching, red hot longing. He took himself in his hand and started massaging the heat of the vision out of his rock hard flesh. But as he did so, he imagined himself bending her over his desk and taking her from behind, his hand pinching her pebbled nipple as she moaned.

  His hand moved swifter over the rising tide of his cum until he finally released, spraying a thick stream of semen against the shower wall and down his leg.

  He breathed hard into the cold shower spray. Yes, it had been a really bad idea to ask her to come to his office in person. But he refused to let her off the hook by telling her she could mail the installment. He was the cat and she was the mouse. And at the end of day, the cat would win. He promised himself that, even as he washed the sticky evidence of his desire for Layla Matthews off his body with freezing water.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  INSIDE HER cozy apartment in Squirrel Hill, Layla was also cursing herself. Honor was always being touted as such a great quality to have in movies and books, but in real life, it only caused you more trouble than it was worth. For instance, if she hadn’t felt compelled to pay back her father’s debts along with her student loans, she might have a bigger nest egg of her own by now. And if she weren’t so honorable, she definitely wouldn’t be in the position of having to meet with Nathan Sinclair, a man who didn’t even try to hide how much he despised her for reasons she still couldn’t remember.

  Moving to Pittsburgh in order to unearth the mystery of her last year here had been a gift to herself for being so good and honorable all these years. For once, she was putting herself first. She had even started saving money toward hiring a private investigator. But then she’d had her run-in with Nathan Sinclair, and her honor hadn’t let her back down and walk away with a simple apology for her father’s deceit. Oh no, her honor demanded she not
only pay him back the money her father had taken from his family, but that she also do so as quickly as humanly possible.

  She sold her car and started taking the bus everywhere. She’d also picked up extra hours by signing up for the center’s mobile physical therapy service, which involved visiting clients all over the city. The extra hours wouldn’t have been so bad if she still had a car. But as it was, bussing everywhere meant she often didn’t crawl into bed until eleven at night, only to wake up again at five am for her regular shift at the center.

  Layla had never been a complainer and wouldn’t have minded the lack of sleep, except for two things: one, by her calculations, she would have to work at this rate for eight more months to pay Nathan Sinclair back, and two, he kept showing up in her dreams.

  She only got six hours of sleep a night, but for some reason, an embarrassing number of those hours were taken up with images of the man she disliked most in the world doing things to her, in a large window seat of all places…sexual things, so graphic in nature she’d often wake up from them with a hot face and an aching leftover desire between her legs.

  The morning of her check appointment with Nathan Sinclair had been no different. She woke up from a scorching hot dream, dripping wet, and with no time to pull out her vibrator, because it had taken her braying alarm clock fifteen minutes to actually break into her sex dream and wake her up.

  “Girl, please take a day off,” Peggy, the grandmotherly receptionist at the St. Mary’s Physical Therapy Center said when Layla dragged into work that morning. “I’m getting tired just looking at you.”

  Layla tried to rub some of the sticky sleepiness out her eyes. “I’ll be fine after a cup of coffee. A really large one.”

  “You know what’s even better than coffee, I hear.” Peggy leaned in and whispered like it was a state secret, “Sleep.”

  Layla gave her a tired smile. “I’m fine, Miss Peggy. But I really appreciate your concern. You’re kind to fuss over me.”

  “You know what’s even better than an old black lady fussing over you?” This time Peggy cupped a hand around her mouth to whisper even louder, “A good-looking man fussing under you.”