In His Grip: His #5 (A Billionaire Domination Serial) Read Online Free PDF Page A

attention on me, it was with a disapproving frown. “He is not good for her, Adrian. Men like that aren’t good for anyone. What are you going to do to protect her?”
    I settled onto the platform, my elbows resting on my bent knees. “Protect her? You think that’s my job? She’s an adult. She wants to be with him—”
    “Adrian Knight!” I almost corrected her to Alexander. Old habits… It’d been almost a decade since the name change, but hearing it from Penn last night seemed to erase the years. “She is your woman.” But she wasn’t. “You owe her your protection.” But did she want it? Would she have it?
    “Manuela, it’s…complicated.”
    “It’s not,” she insisted. “Deus, Adrian, you own half the world.”
    “Not quite that much.”
    “Enough of it. Buildings and islands, and people all working for you and doing what you say. You can’t deal with the one girl who matters?”
    I opened my mouth…and sighed and cleared my throat and chuckled uncomfortably at the scolding. Manuela really was like a mother to me, and not just because she took care of me. Upon occasion, she made me feel like a boy, a very small and foolish one.
    “There’s more to it than you realize,” I told her. An innate lack of personal redeeming qualities, for starters. And a lack of the trademark Ellison dimples. A lifetime of issues I hadn’t dealt with and generations the tendencies I couldn’t overcome.
    To my surprise, the matron nodded. Her dark eyes, a brown so deep they seemed almost black with highlights tinged in violet, regarded me with a knowing so clear I could believe she really did understand all those things I had never spoken. Was it just in her nature to know? Or was I that obvious?
    “And there is less to it than you seem to think. You want the girl, and he wants the girl, but the girl wants you.”
    “Does she?” I asked under my breath before could stop myself. This earned me another hard-angled perk of Manuela’s brow.
    “You don’t think so? She lives with you. The way she gazes at you…”
    “It’s not what you think.” Chloe was not my lover. She was my submissive, by verbal contract, and only temporarily. My Miss Bloom had made that clear from the beginning.
    Manuela handed me a plastic cup of mixed pineapple and sugarcane juice, then sipped on her own. “Are you telling me Chloe is not your girlfriend? A… What is the word? A gold digger?”
    “No. No, not at all.” I could still picture the look of anger on Chloe’s face when I’d offered her a stipend to act as my submissive. “She just doesn’t want…” I lingered over my choice of words. “Anything long-term.”
    Manuela snickered against her cup. “If that’s what the girl says, she’s lying to you.”
    “You think so?” I asked, no hope or heart in my voice.
    “Don’t forget I raised a girl.” Manuela lifted that classically beautiful face and pursed her glossy red lips in a subtly impish smile. “And I used to be one, you know. I may be just a simple cook—”
    “Chef,” I corrected her.
    “But you should trust the judgment of this old Brazilian grandmother. Keep your girl from making a mistake, Deus me livre, with that rich blond filho da puta.” That son of a bitch.
    “Language, Avό,” I chided, but I couldn’t help warming to the passion in Manuela’s voice, even when it came out as a sudden curse…or perhaps because of it.
    Another few hours at the project site, swinging a hammer and jerking a saw through all the thickest pieces of wood I could find, and I’d settled myself enough that I thought I might have a fair chance at a civil conversation with Miss Bloom. With the heat of the day, and in need of a shower, I didn’t bother to put my shirt back on for the trip back to the villa. I was at a distinct disadvantage upon my arrival, finding a small collection of men at my front door, some clad in the dark shirts and khakis of federal authorities and several in the green of the Brazilian