PORTIA
It felt like love.
She had never been in love before, but still. It wasn’t hard to recognize. The way she felt around him, like she was opening up, receptive to him, warmth coming over her that was designed to pull Nathan into her and never let him go, was undeniable…
…and it was greatly complicating matters.
He had been so tender with her, yet hungry at the same time, during their long night together that had started in his private playroom. It hadn’t been until the next morning when Portia had woken between his silken sheets, alone, that it had sunk in.
Her betrayal.
She’d executed the plan flawlessly. She’d lured Nathan Cromwell away from his penthouse suite as best she could. She might not have gotten him in his jet or even out of the building, but what she’d accomplished had been no less effective where the FBI was concerned. They’d swept through, done whatever it was that they’d aimed to do, and slipped out well before Nathan and Portia had emerged in a lustful tangle, eager to fall into each other’s arms in his bedroom.
But serious reservations had crept into her mind and cropped up in her heart. In part, it was the glowing feeling inside of her—the light that had ignited in her soul for him and was now radiating through every fiber of her being on a cellular level—but she was also having doubts and reservations about the FBI investigation she was playing an integral in, because she believed him.
It had been the cold, raw truth that had clouded over his otherwise chiseled expression, causing him to fly into a rage and lunge at her from across the dining room table. He was a puppet when it came to the Cromwell Corp, a mouthpiece at best, the face of a brand perhaps. Not the one pulling the strings, and he balanced the violent frustration that came with it by domineering over women in the most brutal fashion.
That’s what had brought Nathan to Infidelity.
The more Portia thought about it, the more it seemed to her that she and Nathan shared a common enemy—Guinevere Cromwell, the real face of evil.
She’d latched on to the dream that if she came clean with Nathan, she might be able to convince him to turn on his mother, come into FBI Headquarters in Manhattan, sit down with Agent Jennifer McBride, and cut a deal, one that would put only those directly responsible for Trystan Rothschild’s murder and all the other used and killed soldiers behind bars.
But she was being naïve. She knew that. An exciting feeling of love had filled her and she wasn’t thinking straight. Nathan would never forgive her for deceiving him if he found out.
When he found out…
It gave her sudden pause from where she sat in front of the sitting room fireplace of his Long Island estate.
How could this be ‘love’ or ‘real’ if it was destined to end?
Whether she told him the truth about who she really was on her own terms with the aim of getting him to flip, or waited for the clock to run out and for Agent McBride and her team to swoop in and make their ambushing arrests, either way, sooner or later, Nathan would know the truth, feel betrayed, and hate her. And then he’d spend the rest of his life behind bars cursing the day he’d ever met Portia.
As she watched the crackling fire and listened to the soft sound of sleet tick against the bay windows, her mind began hunting for another option, one which wouldn’t pit her against Nathan, one which wouldn’t result in his arrest, one which would give them a shot at exploring whatever this was that had blossomed between them, call it love or lust or sheer animal need that felt better to live with than live without.
She stirred from deep thought when Nathan returned from the wine cellar carrying a bottle of Merlot, two wine glasses dangling, empty and upside down, from his fingers.
As he sat beside her, placing the long-stemmed glasses on the low, wooden table in front of them, and proceeded to uncork the bottle and pour them each a generous glass, Portia deeply wished—so deeply that it felt like it was coming from her bones—that she could’ve met Nathan under any other circumstance.
But then she realized, would it have changed much? Sooner or later, no matter how they’d met, she would have learned of his association with Maxum, connected the dots, and held him responsible for what had happened to her brother, and her entire family, as a result. Maybe in a different scenario she could forgive him, and him her. But the path she’d chosen, the one that was paved with deceit and betrayal, would only lead to more ruin.
Revenge didn’t come without consequences…
…and here Portia found herself, falling in love with the man she had agreed to destroy.
“It’s a good year,” he said in that smooth, deep tone of his that had a way of stirring her darkest desires, as he handed her one of the filled glasses.
He swirled and smelled his own, then leaned back, wrapped his free arm around her, and watched the fire crackle and spit in the gated fireplace.
“I realized something,” he offhandedly began after taking a drawn sip of wine.
Her entire body tensed, which he must have felt. Letting out a deep, rumbling laugh, he stroked her blonde hair behind her ear and asked, “It makes you nervous that I’ve realized something?”
She was getting paranoid. Making a concerted effort to limit her incessant worrying and focus only on the fact that she was here with Nathan, here in the privacy of his Long Island estate, in his wing of the mansion… She should be able to suspend the dark walls of reality that seemed to be pressing in on her and enjoy that he had whisked her away. It was just the two of them. She could pretend that there was no investigation, no deceit or betrayal, no reason to fear that what was growing between them had been doomed from the start.
“No,” she breathed, quiet in her lie. “I’m chilly, that’s all.”
Nathan pulled the cashmere blanket that was draped over the back of the couch over both their shoulders and helped her to curl up into his strong and very warm arms.
“What did you realize?” she prompted.
“That you’re changing me.”
It brought a smile to her face.
“For better or worse, I can’t tell,” he added and she gave him a playful shove before returning her head to the crook of his neck again. “But I’m different now.”
“How so?”
He stroked her hair and said, “I agreed to a year with you for a very specific reason.”
“To command me behind closed doors,” she suppled. “To control me, tie me up and punish or reward me to both our satisfaction.”
“I suppose I haven’t felt the need.”
“You’ll pulled me in there last night,” she pointed out, remembering the hellish, red glow of the lights and the chilling darkness of that soundproof room.
“I did,” he allowed, “but that’s as far as it went.”
“Why do you think that is?” she asked, taking a sip of wine.
He said nothing, but she could feel him shaking his head as if to reply, ‘I don’t know.’
“You can if you want to,” she told him. She was changing, too. The Portia who had been born and raised in the cornfields of Kansas would’ve never allowed a man to chain her to a wall and fondle her between beatings. But her deceit had been eating away at her. Didn’t she deserve to be humiliated, punished, harmed? The more she thought about it, the more it seemed that allowing Nathan to do whatever he wanted like that, could even the score, level the playing field… It might just be the only road they could travel to forgiveness…
How crazy was this? Why was she thinking in terms of him forgiving her, when she should be furious—forever vengeful—that his company had carelessly and greedily funded what amounted to her entire family’s tragic unraveling?
“I can,” he agreed then added, “if I have it in me.” She was about to address the statement—could he have changed so much in a matter of days, did he love her as well?—when he shrugged the warm blanket off their shoulders and said, “Come with me, I want to show you something.”
With wine glasses in hand, they laced their fingers together and walked, hand-in-hand, into Nathan’s private study where stormy weather was now beating against the window panes. He flipped on the lights, keeping them low, and brought her to his desk where, on a mahogany bookshelf behind it, he grabbed a photo framed in silver and handed it to her.
“My parents,” he said, “on their wedding day.”
Portia studied the elegant black and white photo of a stunning, young woman clinging to a tall and devastatingly good-looking man, who looked exactly like Nathan.
“My father, Duke died when I was barely a teenager. In many ways, I never knew him.”
Portia could say the same about her own father, who had taken his life when she was only sixteen. Had he died years into her own adulthood, she might have felt differently. She might have gotten to know him on a very different level, no longer seeing him as a paternal authoritarian, but an equal. When he had mourned Trystan, he’d locked himself away, shut down, and the next thing she knew, he’d taken his own life.
“He knew how to handle my mother,” Nathan went on. “She didn’t become a different person after he passed away. She became more herself, but in my experience, that was the problem.”
Portia wasn’t sure how to respond to that.
Nathan locked eyes with her and said, “You wanted me to open up, share a secret. This is it. My mother found a man who could tame the monster inside of her. My father, in all his imperfection, had found the same in her. They laughed at times, and they also fought like wild animals. Neither of them loved me as much as they did each other. It was a dark partnership, darker than I ever realized at the time, but a partnership none-the-less.”
Nathan retrieved the framed photo from her loose grip and eyed it with affection.
“That’s what I want, Portia. That’s my secret. I have a beast inside of me, a monster, and it will come out.”
She swallowed hard.
“I need you to know when to tame it and when to let it roam free,” he concluded, meeting her wide-eyed gaze.
“I have demons of my own, you know,” she confided in a whisper, but it only brought the dark shadow of a smile to his face.
“I’m counting on it.” He set the framed photo on the desk abruptly and reached into the front pocket of his slacks when his cell phone began vibrating. “Excuse me,” he said, suddenly serious having eyed the LCD screen, as he walked briskly from the study and into the marble corridor.
He closed the door and she let out a rocky breath, closing her eyes and riding the sudden swell of nerves that had split through her like a shattered pane of glass.
When she felt steady again, she rounded to the business side of the desk and reached for the framed photo to return it to its home on the bookshelf, but the open files on the desk caught her eye.
Her jaw dropped.
Maxum.
The private military contract company’s name was printed clearly across the header of the top sheet, but as she began frantically skimming the document, she quickly saw that it was an old, archived file dated in the mid-90s. Duke Cromwell’s name was all over it and the further she skimmed, absorbing as much information as she could glean, the clearer it became that Duke—not Guinevere and certainly not Nathan—had been at the helm of the dark operation…
Where was her purse? Her cell phone? She need to get this back to Jennifer, get it into the hands of the FBI.
As she neared the closed door of the study, she heard Nathan’s muffled voice far on the other side. It sounded as though he’d wandered down the corridor. She peeked her head out and sure enough he was out of sight, around the corner. In the other direction was his sitting room, the crackling fireplace, the couch where she’d left her cell phone in her purse.
She wasted no time slipping into the sitting room, tucking her cell phone into the front pocket of the designer jeans Nathan had provided for her along with the rest of her wardrobe, and returned, heart pounding and mind racing, to the study where she proceeded to take photos of every single page of the Maxum file with shaking hands.
Luck must have been on her side, because it was long after she’d captured the entirety of the Maxum file, as well as two others she’d rummaged through on the desk that seemed to exonerate the Cromwell Corp. and incriminate Maxum, pinning all activity—illegal or otherwise—on Duke, and Duke alone—that Nathan returned and apologized for having kept her so long.
She saw him with new eyes as he neared her.
An innocent man.
A concerned man, who had hired a private investigation firm as well as an international attorney to unearth his deceased father’s wrongdoing and right those wrongs.
She kissed him, holding his handsome face in both hands.
“What was that for?” he asked in a deep whisper.
Searching his eyes, she told him, “Everything.”
That night, there was no beast within Nathan to tame, only the golden heart of a man who Portia knew, now more than ever, that she wanted to spend the next year of her life with, if not all of it.
This was more than love.
It was starting to feel like a part of her.
Like forever…
…and at the first opportunity to send all of the photos to Agent Jennifer McBride at the FBI, which came after a long night of lovemaking and falling deeper into what Portia now knew was true love, she didn’t hesitate.
One quick email from her cell phone was all it took, as she listened to the sweet sounds of Nathan showering in the next room.
Clutching the sheet against her nude body, Portia sat up in bed when her cell phone began vibrating with Jennifer’s responding call.
“Where are you?” the federal agent asked.
Speaking quietly and keeping an ear out for when the sounds of Nathan’s pounding shower ending, she said, “I’m at the Long Island estate. Did you read through the files?”
“Of course not,” Jennifer snapped. “There are well over four hundred pages and I’ve only just assigned agents to sort through it. I’m calling because of your misconception.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your email stated, and I quote, ‘Nathan is innocent’.”
“Read through the files,” she insisted, cupping her hand around her mouth in order to get away with the volume her emotions caused. “He’s not responsible, his father is. Duke Cromwell.”
“Portia, I want you to listen to me and listen to me carefully,” said Jennifer with such intensity that her tone dropped an octave. “You are not safe there.”
“What?”
“Nathan Cromwell is a dangerous man. He’s not to be trusted.”
“How can you say that based on what I’ve just sent you?” she challenged.
“I’m saying this because of what you just sent me,” Jennifer insisted.
Plowing right over the agent’s concern, Portia—anxious that Nathan would return now that the shower had been turned off—began rattling off everything that had been occurring to her, starting with the plan to get Nathan to ‘flip’. “Why would he object?” she went on. “He wouldn’t. He’ll work with you, I know he will. He wants answers just as badly as we do—”
“Portia—”
“He’s not who you think he is,” she exclaimed, gripping her cell phone and not letting Jennifer interrupt her again.
The agent was too determined. “He’s not who you think he is,” she shot back. “Get out of there before you get yourself killed. Portia, listen to me. He left those files out for a reason, and it wasn’t because he didn’t want you to find them—”
Portia had already lowered her cell phone, having heard Nathan’s footfall, and in an instant, she ended the call.
Her life wasn’t in danger.
It was only just beginning, for herself and Nathan as well.
She could see it in the glint of his dark eyes as he grinned at her, chest glistening wet, a towel wrapped around his waist, from across the bedroom.
“What are we doing today?” she asked with a huge smile on her face.
“More of the same,” he said with a devilish grin. “But first, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.” When she raised her eyebrows with interest, he told her, “You’re part of my life now, Portia, so it’s important that my mother gets to know you.” He locked eyes with her and said, “I want her to love you as much as I do.”
“You love me?”
“Is that alright with you?”
Portia felt her entire face—and spirit—lift with the biggest smile.
Of course it was ‘alright’ with her. It was more than alright.
It was all she’d ever wanted.
She’d never felt happier in her entire life.