The Billionaire's Debt

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I used to be the one with all the leverage.

Five years ago I was the heiress who wouldn't take no for an answer, and Cassian Vance was the broke kid clearing tables to make rent. I didn't force him into anything. I offered him a deal he had no good reason to refuse, and told myself the rest would come.

It didn't.

Someone asked him once, right to his face, whether he minded other men coming after me.

He smiled. "Be my guest."

I was standing just outside the door. I stood there until my fingertips went numb.

So I left. Booked the next flight to London and didn't look back.

Five years later he owns half this town, and my company is the one on its knees, begging Vance Pictures for a deal.

He backed me against a car door, eyes gone red at the rims, and said it low. "How am I supposed to be happy without you."

"Cassian. What is it you think I owe you?"

He looked down. His voice dropped.

"Five years," he said. "You owe me five years. I'm going to collect every one of them."

Chapter 1

I never planned to see Cassian Vance again.

Then there he was, three seats down at a partners' dinner, watching me over the rim of a whiskey glass like he had all night.

The VP made the mistake of mentioning I was running point on the project.

Cassian looked at me. Just looked. "That right," he said. "What's your name."

Like he didn't know. Like he hadn't had it memorized for years.

These days his name moved markets and mine moved his paperwork, so I gave him what the room wanted. "Mr. Vance. Evangeline Ashford."

He didn't answer.

Someone filled the silence. "Didn't you split with somebody right before you went abroad, Evangeline? What happened there?"

"Don't remember," I said.

Out of the corner of my eye: Cassian, bored, biting down on a cigarette, tipping his head to take a light off the woman beside him. Whatever he caught pulled one corner of his mouth up for half a second.

The table was young. Someone got brave. "Drinking's boring. Come on, Vance, tell us how you and your ex went down in flames."

A beat of quiet.

"Just killing time back then," he said. "Forgot the rest."

He said it looking straight at me.

My fingers closed around nothing. My throat went tight and sour, and I let neither one show.

Then a woman's voice. His date for the night.

My half-sister, as it happens. Vanessa.

"In college," she announced, sweet as poison, "Evangeline used some very dirty tricks to land a man who couldn't stand the sight of her. Selfish to the bone, that one. Who knows. Maybe she flew home just to embarrass herself all over again."

I hadn't wanted to talk to her tonight. She insisted.

I lifted my eyes. "And what are you, exactly? Somebody's mistress? Does Dad know about that?"

Vanessa's face went dark.

Heads turned down the table. Beside me a colleague pressed his arm to mine, a quiet don't.

I glanced at Cassian. Nothing on his face. Same as ever. Cold all the way down to wherever a heart was supposed to sit.

I used to want to crack his chest open and check whether it was stone in there.

Dinner didn't run late.

I came back from the restroom and we collided in the hallway, shoulder to shoulder, almost past each other, when his hand closed around my wrist.

Years, and his skin was still warm. It felt like something out of another century.

"Evangeline."

Low. I used to love the way he said my name. Used to love it in a wrecked bed, his voice gone rough against my ear. Evangeline. Ask me.

Heat under a face that gave away nothing. That gap between what he showed and what he wanted was always the part that got me.

"Yes?" I said, polite.

He took his time. Then, "Vanessa's nothing to me."

I had no answer for that.

He let go of my wrist and walked off.

I stood there and almost laughed at myself. Nobody jumps into the same fire twice.

I was young once, and stupid, and I thought loving someone meant you had to have them. Look at me now. Reformed.

The first time I ever saw Cassian, it was in a bar.

Tall kid. Hard jaw. Eyes a flat, freezing black. Famous for the face. Famous for being broke.

He was bussing tables that night, and my friends decided it would be funny to pour drinks down his throat. A kid built like that doesn't swallow an insult.

His eyes went arctic. He had the loudest one by the collar before anyone could blink.

I stepped in for the fun of it and talked it down before it could blow up.

And I never forgot the look he gave me then. Cold enough to cut.

Five years on, that broke busboy could buy the building we'd just eaten in. And the way he'd watched me across that table tonight, I already knew the truth of it. He hadn't flown home to forgive me.

He'd come to collect.

Chapter 2

The bar thing blew over.

Preston Marsh wouldn't let it go. He wanted to go back and start something, and I held him by the sleeve until he sat back down.

"You see the way that busboy looked at us? Like we were dirt. I could kill him."

I didn't say anything.

I had zero interest in killing him.

I'd decided I wanted him.

So I started turning up wherever he was. Engineering accidents. Drifting from my lecture hall to whatever place he was working that week, like the universe kept shoving us into the same room.

Eventually he hit his limit. "Say it. What do you want."

"Preston Marsh makes your life hell at work. Every single day." I let that land. "Be with me. Keep me company. And I'll make him disappear from your shifts for good."

Cassian laughed through his nose. "You rich kids are really something. Be with you how, exactly. Hold hands. Kiss." He lifted his eyes, and the cool in them sharpened into mockery. "That include sleeping with you?"

Up to that second, he had been a pretty face I liked to look at.

That was the second I felt it: the want and the hunger running under all that clean, careful quiet.

He took the deal.

Not for me. Because he needed to eat, needed to earn, and couldn't keep absorbing the games bored rich kids played with his life. So he said yes, jaw set, every line of him still armored, and folded the whole arrangement somewhere behind his eyes where I couldn't reach it.

I gave it two years. I figured by then he would at least like me a little.

Then one night, outside a private room, some guy floated the idea of chasing me.

"You don't mind, do you, Vance?"

I heard him answer, easy and quiet. "Be my guest."

My fingers went cold. Something sour turned over in my chest.

Turns out I had fallen for him without noticing.

Turns out I was nothing to him. Never had been.

The next day I ended it.

"Reason," he said.

"Just killing time," I said.

Even trade. Debt cleared. A stupid, reckless chapter that belonged sealed in a drawer I would never have to open again.

Until now.

The memory came back like a spring let out of prison.

Meridian Media is mine. Mine and a few friends who put their money in beside me. We were deep in a financing round, the kind where one bad week sinks the whole thing.

So of course, the next morning, the word came down: Cassian had pulled out of the deal we'd already shaken on.

Weeks of my people's work, the launch plan they had bled overnight hours into, all of it in the trash. And everyone in that room could do the math on why. This one landed on me.

I wasn't going to swallow it.

I had a meeting at his company that afternoon. What I didn't expect was Preston Marsh, sitting right there.

His career hadn't moved an inch these last few years. Cassian saw to that. A tap here, a tap there, keeping the man who used to torment him bowed and quiet. Petty. Effective. Very him.

Old friends, plenty to catch up on. Preston reached over and brushed a loose strand of hair off my cheek.

Cassian walked in at exactly that moment.

"Is this fun for you," I said, flat.

"I'm about to lose my mind from how boring my life is. A real shot at making Vance jealous comes along, I'm not wasting it."

I gave him a tired smile. "He won't be."

Back when I used to spend time with Preston, Cassian would catch us, and something other than ice would surface on his face. Then that same night he would dig his hand into the small of my back and kiss me like he was working something out of his blood.

I read all of it as jealousy.

Pretty dream. He didn't want me.

The room was dead quiet, and the proof came right on cue.

Cassian's gaze swept across me and didn't bother to stop.

Chapter 3

After the meeting I put my face back together and went up to his office.

No assistant at my side. Just the two of us, standing across from each other.

I didn't waste time. "Mixing business with a grudge. Is that the great Cassian Vance's idea of class?"

He knew exactly what I meant. "You're reading too much into it." Careless. Meaning: you don't even rate as a grudge.

"Then do me the courtesy of a reason. Whatever the problem is, my company will fix it. I want this deal."

"No reason," he said. "I just don't want to work with you."

Flat. Honest about it, even.

The truth is we were built the same way, the two of us. Too proud to bend an inch. The only difference was the world had moved on, and I was the one who needed the money now, who had to swallow her temper to keep the lights on.

"What do you want," he said.

He didn't answer right away. He leaned back against the edge of the desk, tipped his head, and lit a cigarette. Clean jaw in the flare of it, that lazy menace he never quite put away. He read me through the smoke.

"Spend the night with me."

An ordinary sentence. Out of his mouth it never stayed ordinary. My scalp prickled and the anger went straight to my head.

He grinned around the cigarette. "Dinner."

Enjoying it. Watching me trip over the thing I'd assumed.

"I didn't realize you were such a comedian, Mr. Vance."

"And you take yourself awfully seriously." The cold smile cut for a second before he kept going. "Tell me. How's it feel, having your pride ground under someone's heel?"

One word at a time.

That was when I understood he'd come to make me pay. And later, turning it over, I couldn't even blame him. There was exactly one mark on Cassian's record people loved to throw in his face: two years spent on my arm for a deal he'd signed, wearing the kept-man label the whole way. The going rate for saying yes to me.

I had nothing to say to that. I let the silence run a few seconds, then turned to go.

A few steps. I stopped. My fingers curled, released, curled again.

I went back.

Steady, even though it cost me, I made him a promise. "Cassian. You'd better come at me with everything you have. I'll match you, all the way down."

"Don't worry," he said.

He leaned in, close, eyes gone dark and cold at the bottom while his mouth curved.

"One thing, though, Evangeline." His voice dropped low and level. "Smile at Preston Marsh one more time, and I'll burn it all down. Marsh Group, Meridian, every last brick. I mean it."

Eyes locked. Stranger and most familiar thing in the world, both at once.

The standoff held a long time.

A line like that is easy to misread.

But he was perfectly at ease, and I don't rattle. "Thank you," I said. "So good of you to care."

In three years Cassian had built the hottest film-investment group in the business, his reach running well ahead of mine now. Half the companies in town wanted to ride his wake for the scraps.

Mine included. Except that door was shut.

I let myself feel it for about a second, then went back to the deals I still had.

Then it was my father's birthday, and he called to tell me to come home.

Father. For a while that was the warmest word in the world to me.

Then my mother got sick and died, and the year wasn't even out before he married his first love and moved her in. That was how I learned I had a half-sister.

The man who doted on his daughter. The man who'd worshipped his wife.

Turns out he could hand that same love to someone else and never once break stride.

Chapter 4

Look at them. One happy family.

The stepmother with the soft smile and the knives behind it, working against me at every turn. The little sister the grown-ups always lined up behind. The year I started college I took the trust my mother left me and moved out on my own.

It had been a long time. His voice on the phone had gone old. Fine, I thought. Maybe it was worth going back to look.

I just didn't expect Cassian to be there.

Vanessa fussed around him like a girl who'd brought her boyfriend home for the first time, refilling his glass, topping it off. He wasn't surprised to see me. One flat glance, then nothing, his attention back on the middle-aged man beside him.

My father used to be a producer. Eventually he opened his own studio. After my mother died, the work dried up. Stalled, then slid backward.

So he went looking for something to blame.

He decided his dead wife was the bad luck pulling him under. Some advisor had whispered that she was souring his fortune from the other side, and he swallowed it whole. I walked in and saw what he'd done to the entry wall. The photograph of my mother that used to hang there was gone. In its place hung a new one. Him. Cynthia. Vanessa. The three of them, smiling. My mother painted out of the house, and me right along with her.

I'd taken that thing down the day I left. Somewhere along the way he'd hung it back up.

I looked at it, and my fingers shook.

At the table Cynthia played the gracious lady of the house, smiling, laying food on my plate.

"Your dad talks about you all the time, you know. You're not a child anymore, sweetheart. How long are we going to keep sulking? Come home more often."

I didn't speak. I didn't touch my food.

It didn't dent her. The smile only warmed.

"You'll have to forgive her, Mr. Vance. She lost her mother so young, and she never did care much for me, so she grew up a little difficult. Those college years, her own father got so upset he wouldn't let her come home."

Those years, I'd torn the house apart fighting them.

What actually happened was my father stood there while I dragged a suitcase to the door and shouted that if I walked out I was never to come back. I didn't turn around.

No family. On my own, and certain that was the whole rest of my life.

Not long after, I met Cassian, and the heiress who couldn't take no for an answer wrapped him into a deal he had his own reasons to take, and pulled him into two years of my world. Two years where I was proud and sharp and never once mentioned my family to him. In his head I was probably just a girl born with a silver spoon in her mouth.

I was happy to play her.

And now every word out of Cynthia's mouth was peeling that girl open for Cassian to see. Look. She isn't doing half as well as she pretends.

Fine. Let him look.

I smiled, light. "What's wrong with my personality is none of your business. Half a lifetime as a man's kept woman, simpering over the dinner table. Doesn't that turn your stomach? Oh, and the part where you were the other woman first. That one's worse than being kept, honestly."

Vanessa shot a look at Cassian, terrified the family portrait might crack in front of him. "My mother was the one he wanted all along. Yours was the one squatting in her place. Stop making things up!"

My father set his glass down hard. "Enough. We finally sit down to one meal as a family and this is what you bring up? Evangeline, they're your sister and your mother, whatever else they are. Don't embarrass yourself in front of a guest."

I never expected him to take my side. I'd stopped expecting it a long time ago.

"The most embarrassing person at this table," I said. "Isn't that you?"

Chapter 5

Right on cue, my father opened his mouth to put me in my place.

Cassian beat him to it, lazy against the back of his chair, mouth tipping up. "Mr. Ashford. The only reason I'm sitting at this table is out of respect for Evangeline Ashford, VP of Meridian Media. So what exactly is this little performance?"

He never left anyone room. My father didn't like it one bit and reached for a change of subject. "Mr. Vance. Let's get to business."

That, Cassian found funny. "Sure. Business. I just can't work out where you find the nerve to pitch me a long-term partnership. You know full well Evangeline's the capable one. You sent her off to claw a company out of nothing on her own, then handed your younger girl the keys to play executive."

He took a sip of his drink. Smiled.

"A stranger walking in might think you'd planted some mistress in the building to run it into the ground."

Silence.

Vanessa knew she had no ground to stand on. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again.

It was Cynthia who couldn't hold still. Whatever was needling her, she tilted her lips and asked, "What a thing to say, Mr. Vance. Don't tell me you and Evangeline go way back?"

Cassian's gaze drifted, slow, until it settled on my face. One brow lifted. His voice came soft.

"Something like that. She's easy to like."

The whole table heard it. Nobody moved. The word easy hung there, warm and low, years too intimate for a man who supposedly hadn't known my name an hour ago. I watched the rest of them do the arithmetic in real time.

It came out smiling. Low, and somehow gentle