Blackmailed by the Billionaire Brewer Read online

  “That was exactly the right thing to do. Generally, if an original owner can’t be traced within a week, you can consider her yours.” He looked at her seriously. “If that’s what you both want to do. Pets are a huge commitment.”

  “Um, we’re not together actually,” Piper said awkwardly.

  Matt responded to the vet’s curious look. “Just a friend.”

  “But I want to keep her,” Piper added. “And I’ll take good care of her.”

  “Okay, that’s the good news out of the way.” Dr. Uvi tickled the fur between the cat’s ears. “I can’t save the exposed bit of her tail. I’m afraid it needs to be amputated–just half an inch or so, and it won’t affect her long term.”

  Piper looked alarmed. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.” His voice dropped into a sympathetic tone. “I would never resort to surgery unless absolutely necessary, but it’s the kindest thing to do. She’s in pain and at high risk of infection. Cats are very good at hiding pain, it’s a defense mechanism, but trust me when I say she’s hurting and will be much happier if I operate.”

  As if in agreement, the cat snapped her head around and attacked the end of her tail, her claws skittering on the smooth surface of the examination table as she spun around twice before being restrained by the vet.

  “Poor little thing,” Piper said and sniffed. “Please, just fix her.”

  “I’d say her pregnancy is about halfway through, which gives us four or five weeks to get the op done and for her to recover before she births.” Dr. Uvi made soothing noises, but held the cat firmly. “So should I book her in for you?”

  She nodded and a tear slipped from under her closed eyelids and ran down her cheek. Matt felt a sick lurch in the pit of his stomach. The silent, raw emotion emanating from her was almost tangible and his throat ached as he reached out, took her cold hand in his, and squeezed. She squeezed his hand back and sniffed quietly.

  “I’ll put a dressing on the site for now so she doesn’t worry it and make things worse.” Dr. Uvi clicked away at his keyboard. “She’ll be fine with that for a couple of days. Just make sure she doesn’t rip it off, and I’ll give you some pain meds to take with you today. I would book you in first thing in the morning, but looking at the weather forecast, there’s no guarantee that any of us will make it out here too easily.”

  “Okay.” Piper frowned as she watched him fill a syringe. “What’s that?”

  “Antibiotics.” The cat snarled and hissed as he approached with the needle, suddenly very much awake and feeling the need to vent her displeasure at all this indignity. “And I’ll need to shave some more fur from the tail. The surgical site needs to be clean near that wound and, well, you might not want to know the details of the operation, but it is necessary, so we might as well do it now. Perhaps you’d like to wait outside while I get the nurse to help me?”

  Matt sensed from the look Dr. Uvi shot him that things were about to get more stressful and Piper was already clearly upset.

  “Come on, we can fill out all those forms outside and grab a coffee from the vending machine,” Matt said. She just nodded and turned her back before she could see the vet nod at him. “I could certainly do with a hot drink.”

  Fifteen minutes of listening to chilling howls from the lobby later, and a harassed looking veterinary nurse emerged carrying the beige pet carrier. “She’s a feisty madam, that’s for sure!” She put the box on the floor and handed Piper a box of medication. “Instructions are printed on the box. Keep her as quiet, warm, and inactive as you can. She’s booked in for the op the day after tomorrow and we’ve put a cone on her. She went for the tail a couple of times so the doctor’s not sure she can be trusted with that bandage. Try to keep it on her if you can.”

  “Oh poor baby,” Piper crooned through the slats of the carrier and a claw shot out. “I’d be angry, too, sweetheart.”

  Matt settled the bill, thanked the nurse, and picked up the box. “I’ll carry her to the car. We’ll need to be quick if we want to make it back into town. It’s getting bad out there.”

  Piper grabbed the sleeve of his jacket.

  “Are you a humane and understanding person behind all the CEO stuff?”

  “What?”

  “I need another favor.”

  “Go on.”

  “Could you keep the cat at your place for the night?”

  “Why? You scared of her now? If you don’t want to keep her after all, nobody will judge you.”

  “Can you or not? I think my furnace is broken again and I won’t be able to get a guy out until tomorrow or even later with this storm. It’s going to be really cold and I don’t think she’s going to take kindly to crawling under a blanket with me tonight.”

  “Piper, are you crazy? It’s supposed to be the coldest night in years. What makes you think you’re going to have a great night with or without the cat?”

  The strip light in the lobby flickered. “I’ll be fine, but I’m worried about her. I’d never forgive myself if—”

  “Neither would I, and we have no way of knowing how long this storm is going to last.” He put the carrier down and stared through the glass double doors for a moment. Somebody needed to keep an eye on Piper whether she liked it or not. Independent and sassy she may well be, but he needed her in the next few weeks and he wasn’t about to let his best-laid plans fall apart. His concern was purely practical, and had nothing to do with the image his mind was torturing him with: a picture of her shivering under a thin blanket in the dark. Alone, worrying about her feral cat, possibly sobbing… “Are your folks in Passion Creek? Could I take you both there?”

  She looked horrified. “No way. Sophie’s making the place crowded as it is, and my mom doesn’t like pets because of the way they shed. She’s OCD on the cleaning front. Besides, I’m a big girl and I have blankets. I’ll be fine.”

  He shook his head. “A buddy, then? You can’t spend a night like this alone in sub-zero temperatures with no heating.”

  Her face lit up. “Genius idea, why didn’t I think of that? Yes, my friend Melanie will let us stay the night, no problem. I’ll call her on the way.”

  “Excellent, then let’s get out of here.”

  Piper jabbed at the screen of her phone irritably. She’d tried five times to send a text to Melanie and each time it had bounced back as undelivered. Her network coverage was virtually non-existent, but what choice did she have but to keep trying to call?

  “Can’t get a text to go through. She wasn’t answering earlier,” she muttered, half to herself, half to Matt. “And damn, now that I’ve got a signal, I’m going straight to voicemail again.”

  Matt raised his voice over the lash of the windshield wipers thrashing back and forth in the screaming wind. “What if she’s not there?”

  Piper continued to listen to Melanie’s voice recording. “She will be.”

  “Can you be absolutely sure about that? What if she’s not?”

  She frowned at the question and then her hands flew to her mouth as the road ahead disappeared beneath a wall of falling snow and rock. “Watch out!”

  “Shit,” Matt growled and braked so quickly and so hard it was like being kicked by a horse in the chest when the seat belts activated. He swerved the car to the left, avoiding hitting the six-foot-high wall, but coming perilously close to the mountainside of the road—harsh, black jagged, unforgiving rock. His breath came out in short bursts. Even Superman had his limits, it seemed. The engine whined. “That was close.”

  “Holy crap.” Piper heard the shake in her voice, but it was okay to be scared and in a state of shock. They could have been buried alive or crushed to death if he hadn’t reacted so quickly. Even the cat had fallen silent.

  Matt took a deep breath, gripped the steering wheel, and closed his eyes briefly. “Nobody this side of that avalanche is going back to Passion Creek tonight.” His eyes opened and they were dark and serious when they connected with hers. “Before you say anything, I’m not goin
g to argue with you, Piper, okay?” He looked edgy, but maybe he was in shock, too. “I’m taking you to my cabin.”

  “Oh no, I don’t think—”

  “No, don’t think about it at all because you have no choice.” He snatched his cell phone out of his jacket pocket and jabbed at the screen for a few seconds. “We have no choice. If we don’t get shelter in the next fifteen minutes or so we could be in serious trouble.”

  He carefully turned the car around and she could see a muscle working in his jaw as he concentrated on the maneuver. She wanted to protest, to try and find some other way of not being taken into the middle of nowhere with Matt DeLeo, but was too frightened by their brush with death to even speak as they roared off. They passed by the veterinary center again and neither of them spoke to confirm what she had suspected and feared. All the lights were out, even in the parking lot, which Matt’s headlights showed was now empty.

  “Power’s out,” he announced flatly and squinted through the windshield. Visibility had gone beyond poor to verging on the impossible. “Hold tight. Five miles.”

  Piper squeezed her eyes shut against the black and white whirlpool of the ferocious, unforgiving night. She was clenching her fists the way she did in the dentist’s chair and she had a tension headache brewing. Not surprising. Just five miles and they would be safe and another nightmare would take its place; she’d be stranded with Matt DeLeo, on his territory, with no polite means of escape, and no clean underwear. It truly had been the shittiest of days and it wasn’t over yet. If it wasn’t for the poor little cat…

  “Some cabin,” Piper muttered as the car ground to a slithering halt and she finally opened her eyes. The sight that greeted her was like something off a Christmas card or one of those sentimental jigsaw puzzles that Aunt Mabel would spend the winter putting together. Toffee-colored wood gables were topped with a thick layer of snow, and neat wooden railings ran around the front porch and upstairs balcony. “It looks like an enormous gingerbread house.”

  “Thanks,” he murmured and killed the engine.

  Light streaming out of the downstairs windows like golden inquisitive eyes made Piper uneasy. “And it looks like somebody’s already home.” Hell, she’d never even considered that he might have a live-in girlfriend.

  “Remote instructions.” He lifted up his cell phone for her to see. “This is all I need to activate the heating, lights, and intruder alarm. I can even preheat the oven if I want so everything’s ready to go when I turn up cold and hungry.”

  “I wondered who you were texting after we almost got crushed. I thought it might be your girlfriend or something.” It was a loaded statement, and maybe she shouldn’t have said it.

  His dark gaze burned into her and she felt a little quiver skitter up her spine. “I don’t have a girlfriend. It’s not something I do. Dates, flings, and sex, yes, but nothing long term,” he said quietly. “Unless you’re volunteering to up the stakes on our deal and persuade me to change my ways?”

  She wasn’t going to answer that; she couldn’t because she didn’t know what on earth to say in reply. “So,” she coughed lightly. “What happens if the power’s out like it is down the road? I don’t suppose your remote control wizardry’s much good in that case.”

  “There are backup generators, three of them.”

  “Not taking any chances, then?”

  “I can’t afford to because it’s rented out most of the year. I don’t want any bad reviews of the place on the internet because of something preventable like a power outage, and I take great pride in offering a deluxe rental experience.”

  “I guess it doesn’t come cheap, either.”

  “No, it’s ridiculously expensive, but that doesn’t slow down business. There still seem to be plenty of executives out there with money to burn, world recession or not. I don’t mind taking some of it off them.”

  “IT millionaires?”

  “They come from different fields. IT, oil, banking, shipping, you name it, but I don’t get too close to it all. An agency deals with it.”

  “Weeds out any trailer trash, too, I’ll bet.”

  He laughed. “The security deposit tends to do that. We’re lucky it’s vacant for the next week. There was a last-minute cancellation.”

  “They must be bummed about that.”

  He shrugged. “It happens, life happens, and sometimes these hotshots have to give up one of their five holidays a year. They had insurance, and there’s always next season. Hopefully the housekeeper will have made it in to clean up after the last people left.”

  “So it’s your cabin, but you never actually live in it?”

  “It’s easier to stay in Passion Creek when I’m working here. It saves time and that means I get more work done. I can also walk back to wherever I’m staying if I put in a late shift at the Railway Tavern and I’ve had more than one beer.”

  “You’re nutty. A multimillionaire and you choose to work behind a bar and rough it in a dive over a fried chicken takeout in Florida. I can’t begin to think of what motivates you to do something like that.”

  “Billionaire. Now, let’s get inside and you can question me as much as you like.” A growl from the cat appeared to signal that she agreed with him completely.

  Chapter Six

  The ice-laden wind bit at her cheeks as they rushed from the safety of the car and up three steps to the covered porch that ran the length of the cabin front. Holding the cat box under his arm, Matt flipped open what at first seemed to be a wall-mounted mailbox by the door, but turned out to be something electronic—she should have anticipated that. He punched a series of digits into the keypad inside and the front door unlocked with a smooth whirr and a click.

  He pushed the heavy wooden door open and indicated that she should enter, which she did very quickly. Stepping inside a great golden hall of warmth and polished wood, her gaze fell on a gas fireplace at the far side of the open-plan living room beneath a breathtaking cathedral ceiling. “It’s gorgeous.”

  “Thanks,” Matt said, shaking snowflakes off his shoes and holding his hand out to take her coat. “It’ll take a little while longer to warm up, but I’ll close the drapes to stop any drafts.”

  She glanced over her shoulder to see him pull a thick tapestry panel across the front door. “You don’t have the drapes on your remote control?”

  “Not yet.” He laughed softly. “Next rainy day project.”

  The sound of a branch lashing against the roof in the wind made her shiver. “I’m so glad we’re not out there anymore.”

  “Hopefully things will be calmer by morning.” He glanced down at the unusually quiet pet carrier. “I guess I’d better get her some food and water. When did she last have anything?”

  Piper kneeled down and peered through the slats in the pet carrier. “I fed her before I went to work this morning, but I didn’t check if she’d eaten. Either way, she’s well overdue for dinner, poor thing.”

  “We’ll have to improvise. I don’t keep any pet food here.”

  “Got any canned fish? I’ll pay you for it. Tuna, salmon, sardines, something like that?”

  “Yeah, there’s tons of that kind of stuff in the pantry, but you don’t need to pay for anything.” He grinned and crouched down beside her. “And milk?”

  She could feel the heat of his body, he was so close. “No, that’ll upset her stomach. A lot of cats are lactose intolerant, so you shouldn’t give them milk.”

  “Really?” His voice was soft and deep. “You learn something every day.”

  Piper swallowed and stared pointedly at the box, not daring to meet his gaze. They were just too close to each other. “Not a cat person, are you?”

  “Nothing against cats, but I’m not a pet person at all.”

  “Too much responsibility?”

  “Too much of a tie and too much potential heartache.” He stood up abruptly and strode toward a large window. He pulled the thick drapes across it to shut out the black night. “The damn things have a t
endency of dying before you do every time.”

  “I guess,” she said and scratched her head. “Is there somewhere small and cozy we can put her? I think she might freak out if I let her loose in here. It’s a huge room and being in another strange place and her being so stressed…”

  “We can put her upstairs in the smallest loft room if you like.”

  “And maybe put some old blankets or something out? Your carpets are so nice and clean, I have a horrible feeling she may be tempted to do something unspeakable to them.”

  “You mean like—”

  “She’s capable of anything and everything after the day she’s had.” Not unlike her new owner.

  “Follow me,” he said, picking the carrier up gently and making a soothing noise as he did. “We’ll get her fixed up.”

  Piper sat tensely in a large armchair in the loft room guarding the cat who had been released from her prison and was currently cowering in a corner of the room, looking deadly. They were doing their best in the circumstances, having fashioned a bed nest out of towels and blankets, but it wasn’t as if the cat knew how hard they were trying.

  Piper glanced around in the soft light from a lamp in the corner and thought how much the place looked like a show house. There were strategically placed interior bits and pieces, and there was a cozy feel to the place, but it was all far too tasteful and uncluttered to be anyone’s home. It was a shame. It would be amazing to live so close to nature in the mountains, and yet enjoy such domestic luxury.

  “Hi,” Matt whispered as he inched around the door carrying a breakfast tray under his arm. “I remembered that cats crap and pee just like we do, so I’ve rigged up a litter box for our little princess.”

  “Good thinking.” She smiled as he set the tray down on the floor and poured wood chips into it. “And innovative of you.”

  “Thanks. Do you think she’ll use it?”

  She rustled her fingertips over the surface of the chips to make a sound like scratching. “She’s giving it a good look, so let’s hope so, but if she doesn’t, I promise to clean up any mess.”