***
Nathan waited ten minutes after the door clicked behind Layla to pick up the phone and buzz Kate.
“Yes, Mr. Sinclair?” she said, picking up immediately.
“That investigator we used for the Columbus lawsuit…”
“Spencer Greeley?” she said.
“Yes, contract his services. I want him to get everything he can find on Layla Matthews. And I especially want access to her medical records.”
She paused, obviously wondering what this was all about, but she was too professional to ask outright. In the end, she simply said, “Yes, Mr. Sinclair. I’ll get right on that.”
Nathan usually hung up after issuing his orders, but this time he stopped himself and said, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” his assistant replied, sounding rather startled.
He gritted his teeth and hung up. Layla Matthews had only been back in his life for a few minutes, but she was already disrupting it in ways he didn’t like. Again. With her innocent doe eyes and the luscious curves hidden underneath those hideous scrubs… he couldn’t help but want to pull them off, just to see how much that body of hers had changed in the nine years since they’d seen each other last.
He didn’t know what her game was, or why she had come back to Pittsburgh, but he planned to find out and neutralize her before his brother returned. Just a few minutes ago, he had been furious with Andrew for skipping town, but now he could see what a stroke of luck that had been. If he played the situation right, he could get Layla Matthews to leave Pittsburgh before the ball, before Andrew came back, and before she figured out she and his brother used to be in love.
CHAPTER THREE
BY THE TIME the second Friday of June rolled around, Nathan began to see what a bad idea it had been to insist Layla meet with him in person to hand over her first installment. At the time, he’d done it to make her uncomfortable, him batting at her in their game of cat and mouse. But that had been before Spencer Greeley sent in his report and he’d discovered everything Layla had told him that day she barged into his office had been true.
According to Greeley’s findings, after her fall and subsequent forty-eight-hour coma, Layla woke up unable to remember her accident, or anything that happened in the year prior to it, including moving to Pittsburgh to attend college, and meeting her boyfriend, Andrew. And since Andrew had never visited her in the hospital, there had been no reason for her to seek him out. His brother had been forbidden to see her by both their father and the family lawyers after Henry Matthews had threatened to sue them.
“Layla wants to sue you all,” Henry had told Nathan, Andrew, and their father nine years ago when he visited the Sinclair mansion, ostensibly to let them know she had come out of her coma. They’d invited him to meet with them in the study, where Henry had confessed with much false handwringing that Layla wanted to sue the Sinclairs.
“She says maybe she was pushed down those stairs,” Henry said. “I told her that couldn’t be. She fell face forward, you see, and the doctors think she just slipped. But she told me to come here and tell you that. She thinks maybe you’ll give her something to make sure this story don’t get out.”
Their father had not suffered this foolishness for long. “How much does she want?” he asked. He tended to be decisive and to the point when it came to business decisions. It was a quality Nathan had inherited from him, which was why his father had named him CEO in his will instead of his brother.
Henry named the price, and his father wrote down a number three times that amount on a piece of paper, which he slid across the desk.
“That’s what we’ll pay you. Once. I’m not as nice as my son, Andrew, here. Tell your daughter if she ever comes near him or tries to blackmail my family again, I won’t hesitate to ensure it’s the last time she does it. Do you understand?”
Henry’s voice shook when he answered, “I understand. Layla don’t have a bank account. Could you make that check out to me?”
Nathan had known Layla’s father was a slime ball just from that one exchange, but according to Greeley’s report, he’d been even worse than Nathan thought. He had gotten a job in New Orleans that would let him add his nineteen-year-old daughter to his insurance, then he had blown the money their father had paid him to gamble on the riverboats.
From what Nathan could tell, Layla hadn’t seen a dime and had even taken out loans to complete her masters in physical therapy. He read through the report, which detailed how she grew up, with an itinerant gambler for a father, hopping from Las Vegas to Reno to New Orleans until she eventually landed at Carnegie Mellon, where she met his brother, only to lose any memory of having attended the prestigious university or her relationship with Andrew less than a year later.
Anyone else would have felt sorry for her, reading over this tragic backstory. But no one else knew the Layla Nathan knew. Not even his brother had known what she had really been like.
He could still remember the first time he saw her. He had been partying the night before and had woken up in some strange girl’s room on the other side of town, so hung over he’d barely managed to crawl out of bed and into his Ferrari to get himself home to the family mansion. He didn’t live in the main house like his brother, but had taken over the one-bedroom guest cottage out back, which unfortunately was gated off and could only be accessed by walking through the mansion.
He’d snuck in through the kitchen to avoid his parents, who, back in those days, needed very little prompting to start asking when he planned to do something with his life and why he couldn’t be more like his brother. But when he walked in through the back door, he found a large-eyed black girl with closely-cropped hair and a pretty face, sitting at the kitchen table, a chemistry textbook spread out in front of her.
“Hi,” she said, giving him a toothy smile after he came stumbling in. “You must be Nathan.”
His hangover headache intensified. “Yeah, I’m Nathan. Who are you?”
“I’m Layla.”
He dropped into a seat across from her and commanded, “Get me some coffee. Now.”
She just sat there, observing him in his pain.
“I said coffee,” he repeated.
“Please,” she said.
“What?” he asked.
“You forgot to say please.”
He blinked at her. “Who are you?”
“I’m Layla,” she said again.
“No, who are you to me? Are you one of the servants? No, you’re too young. One of their daughters? Is that why you won’t fetch?”