Page 28 of Vicious Arrangement (Alpha Billionaire Daddies #7)

Chapter Twenty-Three

ARIA

I’m beyond tired, and more than a little nauseous to be anything more than grateful today’s shift was a single.

Angus is usually waiting for me by the lift door whenever I get home. Because short of locking the pocket doors, he can nudge them open. So I’m slightly shocked what’s waiting for me in the great room isn’t Angus, but Noah.

And he’s pacing.

Not a good sign.

“What…” I trail off. My gaze locks onto the lavender glittery phone case in his hands, the cover a gift from Katie. “Why do you have my phone?”

For a moment, a dark anger beats in my veins. Then my stomach twists and turns, my heart beating rapid fire fast.

My phone… I don’t… there’s no lock on it because if I’ve got to check it quickly at the hospital I don’t want to mess with a mask if I’m wearing one, or remembering a pin.

Shit. Fuck.

I meet his gaze, and it’s a full on violent storm looking back.

He knows.

He fucking knows.

And an answering storm whips through me as I stalk over to him and reach for my phone.

Noah’s taller than me, and he holds the phone out of reach.

I glare and jump, trying to reach it. “Give it to me.”

“Why? Something on there you don’t want me to see?”

Oh yeah, he definitely knows. “I can explain?—”

“Explain what?” His eyes blaze, belying the silk and calm his voice exudes. There’s not a single calm thing about him. “You mean explain the fact you’re pregnant and everyone in the world knows apart from me? Explain why you didn’t bother to tell me?”

“I was going to tell you, you idiot,” I say, “but listen to you. Is it any wonder I didn’t rush up and tell you the moment I found out?”

His lips curl and he laughs harshly. “Is it even mine?”

I reel back. What? For a moment I’m nonplussed. What kind of question is that? Who would I be seeing? I’m not the type to sleep around or be chased by swathes of men like he seems to be hinting at.

I’d laugh if the situation weren’t filled with a rough and dangerous fury.

“What the fuck do you mean, is it yours? Who else would it belong to? I can’t reproduce on my own, and there hasn’t been anyone but you for a very long time.

” I stop, fighting the urge to throw up at all the meanings in his accusation.

“And by that, I mean a very long time before I even met you. Like before I split up with my ex.”

“Your ex?” He latches onto that, voice now a savage attack. “Have you been fucking this mythical ex?”

“He’s not mythical. And no. We broke up, long before you.

He moved to LA and another hospital.” I close my eyes for a moment.

“Not because of me. He got a job offer and we had problems—” I stop, cut myself off, and glare.

“Why am I even telling you this? You don’t need to know.

We don’t discuss pasts, presents, or even futures, do we?

So yes, it’s yours, and yes, I was going to tell you?—”

“When? After it graduated college?—”

“Maybe after you became a grandfather for the second time, Noah.”

He flinches, and I know I’ve said the wrong thing.

“Or were you going to just get rid of it without giving me a choice and in the hopes I’d never find out.”

I spread my hands in the air. “One thing needs to be clear, this is my body, not yours.”

“So you do?—”

“No, Noah! Fuck.” I drag in a breath and hold out one hand for my phone, which he fails to give me.

“What I mean is this is my body, and I won’t be bullied, but I’d also never in a million years make the decision on the fate of the fetus without talking to you.

The fact you seem to not just think I’m going to get rid of it on a whim but I’m also fucking half of New York speaks volumes about our relationship. ”

Or lack of one.

I didn’t mean the “my body” line as anything more than I get to decide when to tell him. I get to decide when I’m ready to deal, to share, even if he’s the father. And I’m not talking weeks or months, I’m taking hours and days.

It’s a big thing. And it’s happening to me.

He can say no, and I can walk away and do this on my own.

“You really don’t trust or respect me, do you?” I snap, jumping to get my phone. “You’ve got major trust issues, and I haven’t done a thing to make you think you can’t trust me.”

“I don’t know,” he says sarcastically. “You keep this from me. You’re buddies with my best friend now. How is that trust?”

I stumble back. “I found out yesterday, and I was going to try to catch you to talk. I’d have texted to see if we could talk, but you’d bail, like always. How is that for trust?”

“You said it’s your body.”

I dart forward and snatch my phone. “Because it is, and that doesn’t mean anything other than that. I was going to tell you tonight, if you must know. If you were here, if I heard you come in. If you weren’t out being a fuck boy.”

He has the grace to blush. “Point taken.”

But my anger is running high now. “Regardless of what you found out, going into my phone is an invasion of my privacy and a huge breach of my trust. Because up until now, I trusted you. I gave you room to try to sort things out for yourself, but that never extended to a romp through my phone.”

“I didn’t mean to,” he says, “I found out by accident when a text from Asher came through.”

“You think that explains things?”

He just sighs. “I lost my mind. I thought…”

I know what he thought, and it cuts into me, through the bone.

“You think the fact you thought I was cheating makes this better?” The expression on his face tells me everything and I laugh. It’s bitter and acidic on my tongue. “You’re fucking insane.”

“And what would you do?” His words are bullets.

“Not. That.”

They hit me because in his barren world, the one I thought had fertile ground, the one beyond his money, looks and sexual conquests is just that, barren. In his eyes, I’m another gold digger, which is why he’ll attack first.

Why he never gets involved?

“Well?”

“I wouldn’t think that. Because if it were my choice, my fantasy world, we’d be shocked, but happy, making plans for the future. We’d have married because you wanted me and I wanted you, we’d have married out of love, Noah, not greed. Not coercion.”

Pressure pushes against my eyes, and my throat hurts when I swallow, but I somehow hold the tears back.

“I thought we were getting somewhere. I thought you might have discovered feelings for me. I thought…” My words falter.

“I thought wrong, and since you think I’m this monster and you’re the most suspicious, angry, empty man I’ve ever met, I’m going.

Fuck you and your fortune, fuck your sky mansion.

I’d ask you not to hurt my gramps, but you will because that’s all you are.

Made of hate and mistrust and all the wrongs in the world.

I’m sorry for your past, Noah, I really am, but it’s something we work through.

It’s something you want to move beyond. I’m fucking leaving. ”

“Nice fucking speech,” he snaps. “And you can shove your sympathy. I don’t need it. I know who and what I am. And I apologized for looking in your phone. You should lock it. Can you imagine if mine was out and you saw it and Katie texted me?”

Heat flares in my cheeks, and my vision blurs, but I blink the unshed words away.

I might be tempted to look. It is temptation personified the private world a phone holds. But… “I’d never think there’d be something between you two because I trust her. I… I trust you.”

With shock, I realize I do. “Or did.”

“Yeah, well,” he says, “it happened, and I can’t undo it and I’m sorry.”

“Not good enough. I’m going.” I need to think, I need space?—

“No, you’re not.”

I glare. “And who’s going to stop me?”

Then he does something. He doesn’t yell or threaten. He just steps forward and takes my hand. “I am sorry, Aria. I am.”

“I know.”

He nods like he hears all the pain and frustration in that tiny truth. “How far along are you?”

“Around six weeks. I… I wanted to bring you when I made an appointment at the hospital.”

“I’ll get you the best Ob-Gyn?—”

“I know the best.”

His dark eyes are pools of fire as we glare at each other. Then he slides his other hand along my cheek with such tenderness I give a sob.

Noah closes the gap, pressing me against the lift’s door, and he kisses me.

The kiss is a match to tinder, and I flare into flames as I drop my phone, his hand, and I take his shoulders and slam against him, kissing him back with a ferocity I didn’t know I had.

The desperation and urgency from me seems to mingle with his as the kiss turns feral and we paw at each other, ripping at each other’s clothes. He yanks down my scrub pants, taking my panties with them, and I manage to get his fly open, my finger wrapping as far as they can around his thick cock.

He’s hard, and I’m wet.

Noah kisses a path along my throat and lifts me, and I wrap my legs around him, guiding his cock as I sink onto it, crying out in pleasure.

He slams us against the lift and fucks me hard. Like every demon in the underworld is forcing him to come inside me.

I start to shudder as my orgasm hits, my body clenching and spasming around him.

And he blows his load. I can feel him come, the twitch and the swell of him and I bite into his shoulder hard.

Then Noah finds my mouth as our orgasms ebb, and he rocks into me, milking it to the end, or letting me do it, I don’t know which. But the soft kisses in the wreckage of the storm are alive with latent need and passion and so many emotions I refuse to unpack.

I’m falling for him, and it’s not the looks, not even that dimple that continues to make me weak and bloom with heat when it flashes my way, and it’s not the sex. I’m falling for him for the glimpses of the heart of him, the soul. All the good and bad.

Even his outrageous jealousy is a symptom of him being a flawed, scarred person. One worthy of my heart.

After, I don’t know when I go and spend time with Angus. I take him for a walk, one which Noah insists on coming with, much to Angus’s doggy dismay, some of which is lessened when Noah bribes him with an outrageous treat of steak cubes bought from the butcher on Bleecker.

But now we’ve all eaten some takeout of my choice—burgers and fries, where I feed the patty to Angus, scraped free of sauce, while I just eat the fries—we go to bed, and Noah insists I stay with him.

I lie in his arms, listening as he talks.

“I know I’m fucked up, Aria. Like, really fucked. There were… years, a lot I don’t remember, where my father, when he wasn’t out fucking other women, would abuse us. He didn’t smoke so there weren’t any burns, and he didn’t use a belt.

“He used his fists, his feet. He’d kick and punch and break bones.

He’d fling me down the stairs of our brownstone when I left a toy out or something slightly out of place.

He’d do it so it’d look like an accident.

Even when social services would come, we lived well, we were rich and had the name of Templeton behind us, and he’d use it when it suited him.

He’d fucking charm them and then he’d take it out on us. ”

I don’t say anything, giving him time.

“He was jealous of the things Mom never did—jealous because he did them. He’d hurt her if she interfered with his beating me. And when he’d done too much, he’d starve me, not let me go to school.

“Asher and his dad put a stop to that, they’d come by, concerned about my health and how much school I’d be missing, Asher would bring homework. He knew, I’m sure he told his parents as the cops came more often so he moved back to hurting Mom.

“He’d do it to her worse if I tried to stop him.” He swallows. “I’m pretty sure he abused her sexually. There was one time I remember when I had to call an ambulance. Her legs… so much blood.”

He falls silent for a long time. “I don’t know if she was pregnant and tried to abort it, or if he did something to her. All I know is the beating she got for not being able to have children anymore hurt me too badly. She then told him, and he wouldn’t have a bloodline.”

I wipe my tears and swallow down a sob.

“Sometimes we tried to run, but he got us, and one time Grandfather brought us back. They talked for a long time, and after that, she… she had a secret case for us, hidden. We were going to run, but she had to time it, and she said if something happened, if he found out or hurt her so badly she couldn’t get up to stay hidden. Not to come out.

“She has a space that he couldn’t find, and we’d practice me hiding.”

He lets out a breath.

“I told you about how the cops finally came and he killed himself after killing her, but… I was practicing one day when he came home in a rage. He’d found out we were planning to run, and it must have been soon.

He killed her. I knew it. Because where she landed, I could see her staring, empty eyes.

And then he hunted me, screaming how he’d kill me next and then himself and…

well, after twenty-four hours, he did it.

Killed himself rather than go to prison.

“And I went to my grandfathers. The man who hated me, blamed me for it all.”

“I’m sure?—”

“No. The man was cold and cruel to me. Nothing was good enough, nothing. I’m guessing he was scared I took after my father.”

The man was afraid his murderous, abusive son would have a child that only took after him and not the mother, not the old man, or anyone else?

My heart aches. It wants to break.

I can’t let it, because I think Noah’s heart is broken enough for both of us. He needs support and love like Asher gives. He needs the kind only I can give, too.

“But the thing is, maybe Oscar was right to think that. Because it scares me senseless, that thought. What if I am like my father? And when I lash out, I think I might be?—”

“No.” I turn and hold him tight. “You’re not. The fact you worry tells me you’re not. You’ve never hurt me or abused me.”

“I’ve talked about whips, and I’ve spanked you.”

“In sex play. A part of why you’re a dominant is to gain control. You want to own your fears, and a light spanking is hot. Talking about whips doesn’t make you an abuser. It’s talk. I’ll buy you a whip to go with your velvet suit. You’re not him in anyway.”

“But what if I am? What if?—”

“You screw up as a father?” I laugh. “It’s guaranteed, and I’ll screw up as a mother, too. Everyone does. It’s called being human. But I already know you’ll be a fantastic father because look at how amazing you are with Josh.”

He doesn’t answer, just brushes a kiss on my lips and the top of my head, holding me close. I listen to the slow beat of his heart as calm washes over me, and my eyes get heavy. The last thing I remember before slipping into sleep is this is where I belong.

Here, in Noah’s arms.