Jessica Clare - Once Upon a Billionaire

A few days later, however, he hadn’t heard from her, and he was rather concerned. Was she not aware that he’d followed her home from Bellissime? He searched for her phone number, but it was nowhere to be found. Blast, that was rather irritating.

So he texted Hunter. Tell your assistant to call me. It’s important.

A few minutes later, he picked up the phone. “Maylee?”

“Hello, dick .” That was not Maylee.

“Gretchen,” Griffin greeted, his lip curling with dislike. “Why are you calling me?”

“You told Hunter to have his assistant call. Looky there, we’re on the phone. Magic, right?”

“Where’s Maylee?”

“She quit.”

“What do you mean, she quit?”

“I mean, she quit, you asshole. She just emailed me and asked me to forward her last check to her apartment. Said she couldn’t work for Hunter anymore. What did you do to her, you prick?”

“You really should quit calling me names—”

“You really should stop being such a total dickbag—”

He hung up on her. Griffin stared at the phone for a minute, and then picked it up to call back.

“Hello,” Gretchen said in a sweet voice.

“Just give me Maylee’s address. I’ll go talk to her myself.”

“I want to know what you did to her first. Were you mean to her?”

He sighed. “I was not.”

“Really? Cause I don’t believe that.”

“All right, I was mean to her in the beginning—”

“That I believe—”

“—but then we grew to like each other.” How did Hunter ever get a word in edgewise?

“That I don’t know that I believe,” Gretchen said. “It would take a lot to make that nice girl quit, but you managed to do so in the space of a single trip. I mean, do you know how often Hunter snarls at her? And she just sucks it up and takes it. But then here you come in, and we find Maylee’s packed up and run off.”

I’m a Meriweather. We don’t run and hide from our troubles. You can be as mean to me as you want, Mr. Griffin, but I’m going to do my job to the best of my ability, no matter how nasty you are.

“If you’re trying to make me feel guilty, you cannot possibly make me feel worse than I already do.”

“What if I told you that she’d called me up, bawling her eyes out?”

His breath caught in his throat. “She did?” His poor, sweet, sunny Maylee must have been so hurt. He felt like such a royal ass.

“Well, no. I was just curious what you’d say if I told you that.”

He hung up on Gretchen again.

A moment later, his phone buzzed with an incoming text. Maylee’s address is here . She listed the address and followed it with a YOU’RE WELCOME.

It killed him to type thank you, but he did anyhow.

Maylee’s building was repugnant. Griffin frowned to himself as he headed up the steps, eyeing the tinfoil in several of the windows. Air conditioners dripped condensation from above, leaving trails on the brick and making the entire place look as if it were weeping. He didn’t blame it. The building was a hovel.

He knocked on Maylee’s door, and there was no answer. Concerned, he headed down to the first floor and looked for the apartment of the landlord. He found one door that was less beat up than the others, took a guess, and knocked.

A dirty man in an equally dirty undershirt glared at him. “What do you want?”

It took everything he had not to hold a handkerchief to his nose in disgust. “I’m looking for Miss Meriweather.”

“She left.”

“What do you mean, she left?”

“She moved out.”

Frustration made Griffin’s nostrils flare. “Are you lying to me?”

The man crossed his arms and glared back at Griffin. “You calling me a liar?”

He was, actually. But he wasn’t going to get anywhere accusing this man. So he pulled out his wallet and opened it . . . and frowned because it was empty. Goddamn it. “Wait right here,” he told the man.

Ten minutes later, he’d borrowed cash from his driver and returned to the landlord’s door. He peeled several twenties off the stack and held them out to the man. “I want to see her apartment.”

The man regarded him as if he were a dirty pervert, and for a moment, he felt like one. But he thought of the newspaper she’d left behind, and the clues it had offered him. Perhaps she’d left other things as well. Perhaps this man was lying to him because Maylee had asked him to.

He had to know.

So he followed the sleazy landlord to the back of the building and watched as the man opened a rickety door with a set of keys. He pushed it open and gestured at Griffin. “Don’t make a mess in there, buddy.”

Griffin grimaced. Did he think he was going to jerk off on Maylee’s things? He made a mental note to see about buying this building. Hunter would know how real estate worked. Right now, Griffin’s main thought was getting that landlord out of here. If he would take a couple of bills and show a woman’s apartment to a stranger, Maylee wasn’t safe here.

He walked in to her apartment. It didn’t take much, considering it was one small, dirty windowless room. He was appalled at the sight of it, the cracks in the walls, the water damage in the corner of the ceiling. There was no bathroom, no closet, no nothing. A mattress lay on the floor, the only thing remaining in the room. Despite the small dankness of the place, it was clean.

He couldn’t imagine his sunny Maylee here in this pit.

“Do you want to stay here alone for a while?” the man behind him asked. “I can look the other way for the right price.”

Griffin gave the man a scathing look, ignoring his question. “She left nothing here?”

“Nothing,” he said. “She left in a hurry. Probably got fired from her job.” He snorted in derision.

Griffin’s jaw tensed with anger. “Thank you. You’ve been most helpful.” He turned and stalked out of the hole of her apartment, angrier than ever.

You can be as mean to me as you want, Mr. Griffin, but I’m going to do my job to the best of my ability, no matter how nasty you are.

She’d put up with everything to succeed here, and he’d somehow destroyed that—and her heart—in one fell swoop.

Angry at the world, but mostly at himself, Griffin went back to his sedan. As he got in and waved the driver to return to his townhouse, he began to text Hunter.

Tell Gretchen I’m a dick. And ask her if I can please have Maylee’s home address. Her home in. . . wherever in God’s name she would have gone back to. Arkansas? Louisiana? One of those places where they all talk like she does.

Soft, sweet, and adorable.

Griffin ran a hand down his face. He really was a fucking prat, wasn’t he?

“The Brotherhood’s going to be light one member tonight,” Reese said as he lit his cigar. “Jonathan ran off on one of his half-cocked trips again.”

Griffin frowned at his cards. He’d been waiting for Jonathan to show up so he could talk to him about their joint dig. But he found that he didn’t give much of a shit at the moment. Maylee’s missing presence was gnawing at him like an ache. He could talk about archeology any time, but now he just wanted his girlfriend back.

Was that what Maylee was to him? Griffin scowled at his hand of cards, not even seeing them. Girlfriend seemed like the wrong word. It was too frivolous, too silly for how he felt at the moment.

All he knew was that he needed Maylee, and she was gone because he’d hurt her. And he needed to fix it.

Logan eyed him from across the table, frowning. “You going to bid, Griff?”