His to Hold: A Billionaire Romance (His to Have Book 2) Read Free Page B

laughs. “I don’t even know what M-CORE is. Let me tell you what I do know. When I started working for Carlisle Capital, I was lucky to get the job, or at least I thought I was lucky to get the job. I was fresh out of school, and I was making big money for the first time. We’re talking a hundred thousand a year. Within two years, I was making several times that. I was rising up the ladder faster than I knew was possible.
    “People started talking about me inside the company. They started calling me the golden boy. It seemed like every trade I made was successful. After a while, I began to wonder if I was having too much success. I mean, we were coming close to the height of the market and everything was crazy anyways, but I was on a hot streak like no one had ever seen before. I figured out something wasn’t right. I started going back through the records, and that’s when I found it. Three trades at huge volumes in a company named M-CORE.
    “At first I thought it was some kind of accounting error, but then I noticed a few other trades I hadn’t made were on my file. Some were winners, some were losers, but overall, it was a huge boon of cash. We’re talking tens of millions of dollars. And none of this reflected the actual work I had been doing. Well, I went to accounting to see if there had been a mix-up, and then I went to my boss, who went all the way up the ladder to your father.”
    “Seriously?” I ask.
    “Yeah. He asked me to meet him for lunch the next week. We left the building and went somewhere. I can’t remember where, but it was nice, and he offered me a promotion for my diligence. I thought I had exposed something. I thought I had done the right thing, and I went back to my work thinking it was over. Except a few months later, I noticed another irregularity and another after that, and I went directly to your father this time, but he was out. He was out a lot that spring. He was all bent out of shape. It was an open secret that he was a train wreck.”
    “That was the year my brother died,” I say. “I didn’t know he had taken it so hard.” All I had gotten from him was a look of disappointment at the funeral. My father had always been detached, and I had just assumed he had buried my brother and moved on with his life. It never occurred to me that my father loved us, that he cared about us more than business or money or power. I try to think back to everything that happened in the limo, the argument, me leaving. Was he mad at me for messing up his plans? Or was he mad because our relationship was broken beyond repair, and I was only making it worse by leaving?
    “I think he saw me the same way he saw you, like someone who needed direction. I don’t know why, but he took an active interest in me, started grooming me for bigger things. I tried to tell him about the trades, but he wouldn’t listen. I tried to warn him that something was wrong, but he insisted everything was fine. It wasn’t.”
    “What does this have to do with the company you were talking about earlier?” I ask. I sit up and put my feet down on the floor. “Can you hand me that shirt?”
    Blake laughs and starts picking our clothes up off the floor. He tosses me the shirt. “This part might take a while,” he says. “Do you remember how I told you that my sister moved to New York to follow a boyfriend? That wasn’t exactly true. There’s another part to this story, and it’s where the trouble really started. Something happened when I was a teenager. It was bad enough that my sister and I left town in the middle of the night. We changed our names. She dyed her hair and cut it short. She managed to get a job working at a bar. I wanted to drop out of school and help pay the bills, but my sister wouldn’t let me. She forced me to go to school. So I forged a transcript under my fake name and enrolled in school here in Brooklyn. I felt so guilty about lying about who I was that I made sure to use all my real grades,