Billionaire's Betrayal a contracted revenge (Aurelia) novel Chapter 147

Chp 147: Be Safe.

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Charlotte’s whole body wanted to run, and there was nowhere on earth to run to because Dawson was blocking the only door.

So she did the one thing she had ever really been good at. She smiled.

“You scared me half to death.” She pressed a hand to her chest and laughed, light and unsteady, and let the shaking read as surprise instead of pure fear. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“You are packed,” Dawson said.

“My mother.” The lie came out smoothly, thank God, her mouth working while her mind screamed. “Her doctor called an hour ago. Complications. They don’t know yet how serious, and I couldn’t just sit here waiting.” She waved a hand at the suitcase. “I threw a few things together. I’m sorry, I should have phoned you, I panicked.”

He looked at her for a long, slow moment.

“Complications, huh,” he said.

His eyes went to the suitcase again. To the corner of her passport just showing in the side pocket. To the jewelry box she hadn’t quite managed to close.

“You pack a passport to sit at a bedside?” he asked.

“She’s upstate, not overseas, I only…” Charlotte made herself laugh again. “I grabbed the whole drawer, Dawson. I wasn’t thinking straight. You try folding neatly under a phone call like that.”

“No,” Dawson agreed. “I suppose you wouldn’t.”

He said it kindly. That was the worst of it.

Every word out of him was kind, and every kind word landed like a stone dropped down a deep well, and she never once heard it hit the bottom.

“With her heart. You know how she is.” Another lie stacked neatly on the first. There was no sick mother. There had never been a sick mother. The sick mother was a story she had sold him once for two hundred thousand dollars, and she was betting her life he had forgotten buying it. “A few days, that’s all. A week at the very most. I’ll call you the moment I land.”

For one endless breath she was sure he saw straight down to the bottom of her.

Then he smiled, and he crossed the room, and he took her cold face in his warm hands and kissed her forehead like a man kissing his wife goodbye.

His lips were cold. They were always cold now. She used to tell herself that meant nothing.

“Go,” he said, gently. “Be with your mother. Family is everything.” He winked at her. “Be safe, sweetheart. Text me when you are in the air.”

16:51 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

And he stepped aside, and left the doorway open, and let her walk through it.

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She didn’t take the bus.

The bus had been the plan back when the plan was to vanish, a nobody in a crowd, no camera and no name on any list. But Dawson had seen her now.

Dawson had stood in her bedroom and seen her pack and then let her go, and some cold quiet in her didn’t believe for one second that a man like Dawson ever just let a thing go.

The bus was too slow. Slow left him time to change his mind.

She had to be out of the country before the sun came up.

She worked the phone in the back of a taxi with the shades pulled down, one call after another, the voice she kept for difficult concierges and difficult men.

A jet. A crew willing to fly tonight. A destination she would give to no one, not even the pilot, not until they were in the air.

She had learned that much from the men she had hired to kill for her, before it all went wrong.

Say as little as you can. Trust no one you haven’t paid.

It cost a sickening amount of money but she didn’t care, because money could be earned again.

It came together frighteningly fast. A plane, a crew, a flight plan, all of it arranged in three hours flat, smooth as poured silk.

She should have wondered why it was so easy.

She boarded a little before midnight, alone, her one bag stowed, and sank into a wide leather seat, and finally, finally let herself breathe.

Beyond the window the runway lights slid by and dropped away, and the whole glittering city fell under her, small and gold and behind her at last, and for the first time in weeks Charlotte felt her shoulders come down from around her ears.

She pressed a hand to the small swell of her belly and made it a promise.

No more men. No more lies. Just the two of them, somewhere cozy, starting over clean. She would be a good mother. She would be someone new.

Twenty minutes into the dark, the cockpit door opened.

She didn’t look up at first. A steward, she thought, come to ask if she wanted something. She very nearly asked for champagne, to toast being alive.

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16:51 Mon, Aug 31

Billionaire’s Betrayal, a contracted revenge

34

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Then the smell reached her. Scotch, and old cigarette smoke. And every muscle in her body immediately turned to stone.

She looked up.

Dawson ducked out of the cockpit and straightened to his full height in the narrow cabin, and the temperature of the air seemed to drop with him.

He looked down at her out of those shattered grey eyes, and he smiled the smile of a man who has finally, at long last, stopped pretending.

“Hello, sweetheart.”

She had pictured a hundred versions of getting caught on the drive to that airfield.

Police. Adrian. A hand on her shoulder in a crowd. But she hadn’t pictured this, because this wasn’t possible.

He had kissed her goodbye four hours ago in a city hundreds of miles behind them now.

And yet here he sat, folding himself into the seat directly across from hers, crossing one leg over the other, perfectly at home in the sky. Because of course he was. There had never been an airfield in that city his money didn’t quietly own.

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