Page 1 of Suddenly Desired (APEX Billionaires’ Club #2)

BLAKE

Blake Fielding gently closed his laptop. The blood had drained from his face, turning his tanned skin ashen. Five people stared at him from the other side of the wide boardroom table, their eyes cold, their mouths thin, hard lines.

“I don’t know how this happened,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm.

His hands were shaking so much he had to rest them on the shiny walnut veneer. It was the truth — he didn’t know how this had happened.

It was impossible.

Every single Heartbook account was secure. And as the founder of the multimillion-pound social media network, Blake’s account had been triple-locked. Nobody on the planet should have been able to breach it, yet that very morning somebody had — and in doing so they had set about destroying his life.

“The evidence suggests that you posted these yourself,” said Agnes Mason, adjusting her thin glasses and brushing a strand of grey hair from her forehead.

There was a sheaf of printouts in front of her and she picked up the top sheet, reading from it.

“ ‘A woman’s place is in the kitchen.’ This was posted four weeks ago, and the evidence suggests it was sent from the computer in your office.

I’m seventy-two years old, Blake, and this kind of attitude was tiresome enough back when I was young. ”

“Agnes . . .” Blake tugged at his tie, the expensive suit making him uncomfortable.

He didn’t feel at home in anything other than jeans and a T-shirt, but David Wyvern, his right-hand man, had told him to dress smart, dress powerful .

The board were out for blood, and he needed every bit of help he could get.

“You know me. You’ve known me for almost ten years. I would never say something like that.”

“What about this one?” boomed board member Mike O’Connell, jabbing a finger at the document in front of him. “You say, ‘In my experience, women lack the intelligence necessary to run a business, any business.’ I mean, come on, Blake, half our shareholders are women.”

“And apparently you think we should all be at your beck and call,” said Michelle Carlson, her glossy red lips curling into a smirk.

Blake glanced at her, trying not to let the dislike show on his face.

Michelle sat directly opposite him, looking like a cutout from a fashion magazine.

Her blonde hair was perfectly styled, her Chanel dress so new and exclusive it wasn’t even in the stores yet.

She was the picture-perfect beauty, and it was this that had drawn him to her a year ago when she’d joined the board.

Six months into their relationship, though, he’d come to understand that beneath her flawless exterior lay a devious and dangerous mind.

Even now, all these weeks after he’d politely and kindly ended things with her, she still bore a grudge.

“Were you always such a brute? I can’t remember. ”

“I did not post it.” Blake’s voice rose as he pushed back his chair.

He walked to the window, looking at the bustling plaza ten storeys below.

It was his kingdom — he’d built the entire campus from scratch when Heartbook had floated on the stock market six years ago.

Over a thousand people worked here, and right now he’d have traded places with any one of them, even if it meant giving up his fortune.

He turned back into the room, blinking the glaring sunshine from his eyes.

“I didn’t post any of it,” he said, looking at each of the board members in turn, holding Michelle’s gaze for as long as he could bear it.

“You all know me. You know I’d never say anything like that, let alone post it.

These posts are an attack on me, and an attack on the company. ”

“He’s right.” David ran a hand through his prematurely silvering hair. “This doesn’t seem like Blake at all. Let’s at least look at other explanations before we start a full-blown witch hunt.”

“It’s not about if we believe you, Blake.

It’s about what’s happening to the business,” said Maurice Becker, checking the time on the fob watch he kept in the pocket of his crimson waistcoat.

“What matters is that these posts became public at 6.03 a.m. They went viral at 11.40 a.m. And shares in Heartbook had tumbled nearly twenty-five percent by noon.” He shook his head, fixing his old, watery eyes on Blake.

“My boy, public condemnation is a powerful thing. It can topple even the mightiest empire. You have to make a choice. Save yourself, or save this company. Take the hit, Blake. Announce your resignation.”

“No,” he said. He may have been thirty-one years old, his body sculpted from his daily gym routine, but right now he felt weak, small, backed into a corner with no obvious way out. “I won’t give up. I won’t let this happen.”

“At the end of the day, it’s not up to you,” said Agnes sadly, straightening her papers. “It’s a decision for the board. I say we vote on it.”

“I agree.” Michelle’s grin practically split her face in two. “I vote we take out the trash.”

“Wait.” David held up his hand. “I agree, we should vote, but we shouldn’t do anything hasty.

Blake founded this company. Without him, none of us would be sitting here.

Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.

Blake is telling us it wasn’t him and I believe him.

We need to look into what’s happened. We’ve got time, haven’t we? ”

Maurice sighed, then nodded. “We’ve probably got around twenty-four hours before the damage is irreparable,” he conceded, standing up. “We meet back here tomorrow.”

“But if the shares keep tumbling, then we act immediately.” Agnes folded her glasses and slid them into the pocket of her shirt.

Her eyes looked tired. “We have to extinguish the fire before it consumes us all. This is our business now, too. Our money that’s at stake.

So, think hard about how you want to play this, Blake. ”

One by one the board members left without a backward glance, all except for Michelle. She walked to the glass door, stopped and flicked her hair over her shoulder.

“It’s game over, Blake,” she said. “If you hadn’t walked away from me, I might have been on your side.”

She shrugged, and then she was gone too, plunging the room into silence. Only David stayed where he was.

Blake rested his fists on the table, hanging his head. “How did this happen? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense,” replied David, rubbing a hand down his face.

“Who wouldn’t want to take you down? You’re worth six billion pounds, you’re one of the richest people in the country, Heartbook is one of the most popular platforms on the planet.

And you’re you , Blake. Men want to be you.

Women want to be with you. You’re like some Greek god who’s stepped right off an island into the world of mortals.

Personally, I don’t get it.” David grinned.

“To me, you’ll always be the guy who tried to teach himself to juggle flaming torches for a charity event, only to set off the hotel’s sprinkler system and drench half the board of trustees. ”

Blake sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “It was for a good cause, David. And, for the record, I raised ten grand.”

David chuckled. “Yeah, and you nearly raised their blood pressure to lethal levels. But, hey, it proves you’re not perfect. That might be your best defence right now. That’s if the whole Greek god look doesn’t work for you this time.”

Blake almost laughed. He’d been blessed with his father’s athletic physique and his mother’s bright blue eyes, sure, and he’d looked after himself his whole life, the way his mother had taught him to.

But he was no Greek god — not in his own eyes, anyway.

You had to be strong to be a god. You had to be decisive, you had to be fearless. Right now, he was none of those things.

“You believe me, though, right?” Blake asked, looking at his friend.

They’d met at Cambridge, over ten years ago now, and even though Blake had dropped out while David had gone on to complete his degree, they trusted each other like brothers.

He didn’t know what he would do without David’s level head and fierce intelligence.

“You know I’d never write those things?”

David walked around the table and opened his arms. They hugged, clapping each other on the back.

When they parted, David kept his hands on Blake’s wide shoulders, not breaking eye contact.

“Blake, I’m probably the only member of the board who knows your mother would tan your hide if you’d even thought stuff like that,” he answered.

“I know you’re not a bad guy. You’re one of the most decent people I’ve ever met. ”

“Thank you.” Blake turned away so David wouldn’t see the fear on his face. Once again, he stared out of the window, losing himself in the warm, yellow glow.

“But the trouble is, nobody really knows you,” David went on.

“You’ve always been closed off to the outside world — even the press haven’t been able to penetrate that great wall of yours.

You’ve always eschewed the public eye. You never do interviews, and even your profile on Heartbook is just the surface stuff. There’s no depth there, no you .”

He was right. Blake had always hated attention, and had done everything to avoid it, even throughout his meteoric rise.

He figured people might think him aloof, or arrogant, but that had never really concerned him.

Now, thanks to these mystery posts on his page — over a hundred of them, dated from eight months ago to as recently as today, all suddenly public — people had started to hate him.

And it was so much harder to defend yourself when nobody knew the real you.

“Look, we’ve got a day to fix this,” said David. “It’s not long, but we can do it. Take some time, get away from the office for a while. Let me look into it. I’ll round up the tech team and we’ll figure this out, I promise.”

“Okay,” said Blake. “Do what you can. But I’m going to get to the bottom of this myself.”

“I know you will,” said David. “Go on, I’ll hold the board at bay.”

Blake wasn’t sure if even David could do that.

Maurice and Agnes had been lobbying for years for Heartbook to strategically expand into an e-commerce site that would prioritise their profits.

Blake had blocked numerous attempts — he didn’t want Heartbook becoming a glorified shopping site.

He had always wanted Heartbook to be something good, a social network that was a positive force in the world, but as soon as the money had started to roll in, the vultures had arrived.

The honest truth was that Blake didn’t even enjoy his job now.

All these years he’d thought of Heartbook as his way to escape from the real world, but now he was a prisoner in his own social network.

As for Michelle, she simply hated him. This was just the excuse the board needed to send him to the gallows.

He offered his hand to David, who shook it, then he made his way to the door.

“Oh, and Blake,” said David. “You might want to keep a low profile. There are a lot of haters out there.”