Stripping the Billionaire Read online

  She’d thought for a while she could have it with Ben, but she was obviously wrong. And she wasn’t going to give up all of her dreams and pour herself into a lost cause.

  “Okay,” she said, one more time, this time speaking more to herself. Then she was able to take another step. Then another. Then one more.

  Until she was walking away from him for good.

  ***

  She found Mrs. Damon in the ballroom, chatting with some friends.

  At Mandy’s appearance, Mrs. Damon stepped away from the other women and hurried over. “My dear, what’s the matter? Are you ill?”

  “No,” Mandy said, hating the way her voice cracked. She felt dazed, shaky, like she was on the verge of collapse. “I just need to head back. I’m so sorry.”

  “But why, dear? Where’s Ben?”

  “He’s still out there.” Mandy gestured toward the doors that led to the terrace. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Damon. You’ve been so kind, and I so appreciate your hospitality. But I need to leave. I mean, I need to go back home.”

  Mrs. Damon’s face transformed as she registered the words. “Oh, no. What did he do?”

  “He didn’t do anything. It’s just not going to work out.” Saying the words was like torture, since hearing them spoken made the truth even more real. She took another ragged breath. “I’m so sorry to just run out like this, but…”

  “Oh, my dear, of course. You do anything you need to do.” Mrs. Damon looked over her shoulder toward the terrace doors. “But are you sure there’s no other choice? I know he has a long way to go, but he’s made such strides. You can’t give him another chance?”

  Mandy contorted her face to keep from bursting into tears. “He doesn’t want another chance.”

  Mrs. Damon closed her eyes. Mandy thought for a moment she was praying, but the only words that came out were, “Oh, Benjamin.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Mandy said again, tightening her hands into fists to hold onto her composure. “And thank you again for everything.”

  “Of course. You can call the car, and they’ll take you back and then anywhere you want to go. Then the driver can return to pick up me and Ben.” Mrs. Damon leaned over to kiss her cheek. “I know you think it’s over, but I’m not ready to give up hope. But goodbye for now, my dear.”

  “Goodbye,” Mandy mumbled, the kindness completely doing her in. She was crying as she hurried away, out of the ballroom, out of the building, away from Ben for good.

  She called for the car, and the driver took her back to lovely, old Savannah row house that was only halfway redecorated. She would never be able to finish off the rooms the way she’d envisioned in her head.

  Then she changed clothes, hurriedly packed up her stuff, and had the driver take her to a hotel for the night.

  There, she bought tickets for the first flight back to California in the morning.

  She was crying when she crawled into the impersonal bed, and she was still crying when the sun rose the next morning.

  ***

  Ben had refused to talk to his mother the previous evening, even though she’d pestered him the entire trip back to the house, demanding what he’d done, how he could have been so stupid as to let Mandy go, and how he absolutely needed to fix things as soon as possible.

  The only way he could fix things was to become the Damon man he couldn’t be, so there weren’t any real options for him.

  He couldn’t tell his mother that without brutally hurting her feelings, so he didn’t say anything at all.

  He didn’t sleep. Mandy’s empty room across the hall was agony for him, and he stayed awake in the dark all night, picturing her broken face again and again and again.

  But he was sure it was the right decision. He could never make her happy. He could never be the man she wanted, needed, deserved. So better to break it off now then to waste several months of her life before she realized that she was pouring her love and affection into a broken vessel.

  His head was pounding and his eyes ached when he went downstairs the next morning, and he dreaded the conversation he was going to have with his mother.

  She’d been disappointed in him too. She’d had faith in him too. And he’d let her down as much as he’d let down Mandy.

  She was drinking coffee in the morning room and reading the newspaper when he walked in with his own coffee. He sat down at the table with her and waited until she looked up and met his eyes.

  “You look terrible,” she said at last.

  “I feel terrible.”

  “Good.”

  He blinked. It wasn’t at all what he’d expected her to say.

  She was shaking her head at him. “It’s your own fault you have a broken heart right now.”

  He hadn’t thought in those terms, but he realized she was right. The reason it hurt so much was that his heart was broken.

  Everything else about him was already broken, so it was about time his heart caught up.

  What he said was, “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “I know you think it is, but I don’t think that’s really true. It’s not complicated at all.”

  “Mom, please—”

  “Don’t ‘Mom, please’ me. I’m not as clueless as you think I am, and I know exactly what happened. You’re in love with that young woman. You are completely in love with her. I saw it the moment you showed up on my doorstep with her. But you refuse to let go of your bitterness, and so it keeps tainting everything. You think you have to be miserable. You think you deserve to be miserable.”

  The words felt like blows, and he was already too vulnerable. He stiffened with a surge of indignation. “That’s not what happened.”

  “Yes, it is. You love her, but you won’t let her love you.”

  “She doesn’t want to love me. She wants to love this imaginary man she thinks I am.”

  “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” His mom looked almost angry now, and she snapped the words out. “You’ve cast everything in this false light because you were hurt before and you won’t let go of all your old anger, but Mandy has nothing to do with all of that.”

  Ben was suddenly so exhausted he could barely hold his head up. He couldn’t imagine how he was going to get up day after day for the rest of his life, knowing he’d almost had Mandy but then lost her. “It’s too late, Mom.”

  “It’s only too late because you refuse to budge.”

  “What kind of budging am I supposed to do?” He’d thought the words would come out as sarcastic, but they didn’t. They sounded almost helpless instead. “I can’t just run after her, as if everything that’s wrong will suddenly fall into place.”

  “Of course, you can’t. Not yet. You have to work on fixing things first.”

  “Like what?” He had a feeling he knew what she was about to say, and he dreaded it so much his stomach dropped.

  “Like getting your head on straight about what happened with your uncle and about how relationships are supposed to work.”

  “And how is that supposed to happen?”

  “By talking to your uncle.”

  “I’m not going to do that. I’ve given him many chances before.”

  “I don’t care how many chances you’ve given him. You need to do it again. If you really love Mandy, if you really want things to work, if you really don’t want to be a coward and lurk in the shadows for the rest of your life, then you need to get your head on straight. And that’s not going to happen unless you talk to your uncle.”

  “He’s not going to change.”

  His mother made an exasperated sound and slammed down her almost empty coffee cup so a few drops slopped out onto the table. “You still don’t get it. It doesn’t matter if he changes or not. That’s not your responsibility, and it’s nothing you can ever control. You have to change. You have to change.”

  For some reason, his mother’s words hit him strangely. Maybe because he hadn’t gotten any sleep. Maybe because his heart hurt so muc
h from the loss of Mandy that he could hardly think straight.

  But he started to wonder if she was right.

  He’d always believed that living as a Damon meant he could never take a full breath.

  But, without Mandy in his life, he couldn’t seem to take any breath at all.

  Eleven

  A week later, Ben’s cousin Harrison picked him up from the airport on Santorini to drive him out to the inn that Andrew and Laurel managed in Oia.

  Ben still didn’t know why he was doing this.

  The entire last week had been hell. He’d been working like a machine on the house, from dawn until well past sunset, mostly to distract himself from thoughts of Mandy, thoughts of his family, thoughts of what he could do to breathe again, to live again.

  His mother hadn’t said anything after the first morning, but he could feel her disappointed eyes on him whenever they were in the same room, and he would have preferred for her to just give him lectures. She’d finally left three days earlier to fly to England and spend a couple of days at Damon Manor before going to Greece for the wedding.

  Andrew kept calling every day until Ben finally just agreed to come to the damned wedding after all.

  It was like the universe was conspiring against him, and he simply wasn’t strong enough to wage an adequate defense.

  Years ago, he’d made two vows and thought he’d be able to keep them. Now both were just making him miserable.

  Harrison had greeted him casually, as if it wasn’t a big gesture that Ben had agreed to come. That helped. Made him feel less like he was on his way to an entirely different life.

  “So how is everyone?” Ben asked, as looked out the window at the Greek island landscape—blue sky, steep cliff, sun glinting on the Aegean.

  “Good. Everyone’s here for the wedding. Jonathan and Sarah got in last night.” Harrison was the quintessential Damon—clean-cut, educated, authoritative, eminently civilized. He was a serious man and a classic workaholic. He’d always made efforts to reach out to Ben, though, even after the others had pretty much given up on him. “Oh, here’s some news. Sarah is pregnant.”

  Ben blinked. “Already?” Sarah and his cousin, Jonathan, had been on the verge of getting together at Harrison’s wedding eight months ago. Ben had been amused watching them circle around each other, knowing they were already a done deal. They’d been engaged now for a few months, but they weren’t married yet and they’d been a couple for less than a year. “That was quick.”

  “Yeah.”

  Something about the way Harrison said the word felt off to Ben. He studied the other man and thought he saw a flicker of emotion beyond the composed expression on Harrison’s classic features.

  It was hard to tell what Harrison was thinking. He was the most self-contained man Ben had ever met, and that included his uncle.

  “Are you and Marietta thinking about having kids?” Ben wasn’t sure why he asked, since it was a personal question, and he usually avoided those kinds of conversations.

  Harrison cut his brown eyes over to Ben before he turned back to face the road. “We’re trying.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  There was a tension in the car that hadn’t been present before, and it was emanating from Harrison. After a minute, he added, “We’ve been trying since we got married.”

  Ben felt a pressure of sympathy in his chest as he realized the explanation for the tension. “No luck?”

  Harrison shook his head. He was holding the steering wheel tightly. “Not yet.”

  “Well, it’s early days yet.” He felt like an idiot for saying that, since it was one of those empty gestures he’d always hated. But he could tell that Harrison was troubled, and he felt the uncharacteristic impulse to answer it.

  Even last year, he wouldn’t have made the effort. Something had happened to him over the last eight months.

  Mandy had happened to him.

  The thought of her hurt too much, so Ben pushed her out of his mind. “Is Marietta…” Ben cleared his throat. “Is she upset?”

  “She never acts upset or discouraged, but I know she is. She wants a baby so much. And if I can’t give her one…” Harrison gave his head a little shake, as if he didn’t know why he’d said so much.

  Ben wasn’t sure how he and Harrison had found their way into this intimate conversation. There weren’t two men on the planet less inclined to bare their hearts than the two of them. But it occurred to Ben that Harrison had probably never talked about this with anyone before. Maybe not even with his brother, who was likely all wrapped up with his upcoming wedding.

  Ben felt a strange surge of empathy and responsibility both, like he needed to do something to help Harrison. He’d felt that way with his mother. And with Mandy. But with no one else for years. For years. He’d made a conscious decision not to do just that.

  But something was different now.

  He asked carefully, “Have you tried to go to a doctor? A fertility doctor or whatever?”

  Harrison nodded. “We’ve got an appointment in a couple of weeks.”

  “Hopefully, that will help. They can do all kinds of things now, I guess.”

  “Yeah.”

  They were both silent for a few minutes. Then Harrison glanced over at him with a strange expression. “You know, I keep waiting to get to the point in my life when things are…I don’t know…settled. Simple. Easy.”

  “Yeah.” Ben’s chest hurt like a wound—for Harrison and Marietta, for Mandy, for himself. “That would be nice.”

  “But I never get there. And then I realize that life is only simple if you’re not all in. And I’m all in. It means it’s sometimes going to hurt, but it’s the only way it’s worth doing at all.”

  Ben had no idea what to say to that, so he just said, “Yeah,” again.

  He thought about what Harrison had said, though. All the way to the inn.

  ***

  Andrew and Laurel’s inn was a collection of quaint, white-washed buildings built into the cliffside in the traditional Greek island architecture. Parking was on the level of the road, and then they had to walk down a flight of stairs to get to the main building.

  Ben paused at the bottom of the stairs, realizing that, in a minute, he’d be surrounded by his family. Face to face with his uncle, whom he’d walked out on eight months ago at Harrison and Marietta’s wedding and whom he’d vowed to never speak to again.

  Harrison had been behind Ben on the stairs, and he stopped beside him now, putting down the bag he carried. “You ready?”

  “I don’t know.” Ben felt something similar to what he’d felt the night he’d shaved his beard, like the world was throbbing with an impending change. Like it was about to transform, whether he wanted it to or not.

  “He’s not as bad as you think,” Harrison said quietly, as if he could read his mind.

  Ben’s shoulders stiffened. “I don’t believe that’s true.”

  “It is true. You don’t know him as well as I do.”

  “I know him well enough.” The words were thick and grating on his ears as a surge of long-held bitterness rushed through Ben at the thought of his uncle and his ruthless hold on everyone who surrounded him. “You’ve been his victim too. I know how he treated you when you got together with Marietta. You ended up dead-drunk in my apartment. Remember?

  Harrison stiffened too, but it wasn’t with anger. It was from some other emotion—one Ben couldn’t quite label. “I remember.”

  Ben remembered all the long years he’d been trying to please his uncle, live up to his family’s expectations. He remembered finally buckling under the pressure until he couldn’t take a full breath. He remembered how much it hurt to know he’d never be the nephew his uncle really wanted. He remembered how little his uncle had seemed to care. “He’s hurt you too, and he refuses to change. So how can you stand there and defend him to me? How can you forgive him? You’ve given your whole fucking life to him, and I bet he’s never even apologized to you.”

&
nbsp; Harrison’s brown eyes were suddenly urgent, and his voice stripped bare of its typical cultured resonance. “He hasn’t apologized. Not in words. But it doesn’t matter. I can forgive him because I’ve been forgiven, even when I didn’t deserve it.” He took a ragged breath. “I’ve been him. I’ve been just as hard and inflexible as he has, and I hurt Marietta just as much as he ever hurt me. But she forgave me regardless. Despite how I acted, she saw something in me to love.”

  His face tightened and he glanced away, toward the horizon, where the blue sky melted into the bluer water of the sea. “Every day I don’t deserve her, and every day she loves me anyway. So I can forgive him. I can love him. And I don’t care if he never does anything to deserve it. I’ll stand here in front of you or anyone else, and I’ll keep defending him. Because he’s my family, and that’s what a man does.”

  The words hit Ben even harder than the conversation in the car had. He was almost dizzy as he tried to process the truth of them.

  As he thought of the people in his life who had loved him when he’d done nothing to deserve it, when he’d done nothing but hurt them.

  His mother, who had never stopped hoping he’d come back home to the family.

  Mandy, who’d genuinely believed he was someone so much better than he really was.

  Even Harrison, who was one of the best men Ben knew, who’d never stopped reaching out to him for the last six years when Ben had done nothing but slam the door in his face.

  The reality of it was torment, burning in his chest, aching in his throat, shuddering all through his body.

  He’d thought it was safer, better, to live without the pressure of pleasing other people, but that meant he wasn’t really living at all.

  “Oh, shit,” he muttered, trying to clear his vision so he could see, so he could move, so he could take the next breath.

  “Are you—” Harrison broke off, shifting slightly as he stood beside him, as if there might be a crisis coming but he didn’t know from what direction. “You’re not going to be sick or something, are you?”

  A strange sound burst out of Ben. It might have been a choked laugh or a sob or some kind of release of tension he’d been holding too tightly for years. “Maybe.”