Billion Dollar Boyfriend (Celebrity Love)

Chapter Fourteen

The color drained from Aiden's face. "Could you repeat that?"

If Shelby had held even the slightest hope of being wrong, that hope was gone now. Aiden looked as if he had just seen a ghost, which was enough to confirm for her that she was right.

Her hand remained on her hip, and she looked straight into his eyes. "Which of your personas thought surprising me was a good idea? Aiden or Tristan?"

He stared at her, wordless. She stared right back.

"Who told you to call me Tristan?" he finally asked.

"Clearly not you," she shot back. "But that's your name, isn't it? Or at least the one women and the media in the UK seem to know you by. Keira's very pretty, by the way."

Shelby congratulated herself for keeping her voice steady and calm. She was somehow managing to keep it together and stay composed, but she couldn't say the same for Aiden. His pallor had gone from pale to bright pink in the blink of an eye.

"Keira?" he repeated.

"Don't play dumb," she told him. "I saw a photo of you hugging her, and read some sort of speculation about if you and her have put the past behind you. I'll assume that means you were involved with her once and might be again now."

"I'm not seeing Keira."

"But you're admitting to knowing who Keira is," she pointed out. "And to being someone named Tristan."

"None of this is what you think," he said.

"What I think?" she scoffed. "The only thing I think—no, make that the only thing I know—is you've been lying to me since I met you. I had to find out about all of this from some website, instead of from you."

"You found this out by searching for me online?" Aiden sounded alarmed.

Shelby's eyes narrowed. To her, Aiden seemed more concerned that what she had found out was easily available to anyone who went digging online than he was about her accusing him of deceiving her.

"I wasn't searching for your name, if that's what you're asking."

Was it her imagination, or had what she just said made Aiden's shoulders drop a bit, as though the news came as a relief?

"What were you doing, then?"

Shelby let Aiden's question sink in for a few seconds. She couldn't tell if he wanted the details of how she had found out what she knew so he could flip this around on her and make her out to be the one who had done something wrong, or if he was trying to piece together how she had uncovered the things he had so far neglected to tell her.

"I had this dorky romantic idea that I would use my airline miles and surprise you in London," she replied. "I was searching for things to do there next week in case you had to be wherever it is you spend your days there when I came across an entertainment site that had a photo of you and Keira. At first I thought wow, that guy looks so much like you, only with black hair, but then I saw the same scar on his hand that you have, and the same ring you always wear. I thought I had to be seeing things, and so I asked Em to look at the photo. She saw what I did. Then Raine came by to get her, so I asked him to tell us both we were crazy. He's known you the longest, after all."

"What did Raine say?" Aiden fumbled with the incriminating silver ring she had just mentioned.

"Not much, actually. He said I should talk to you. I guess he didn't want to get caught up in your lies."

"I haven't lied to you about anything."

"Except about your name and who you are. I'll also take a wild guess that if you're a billionaire like the photo caption said, you're probably not a songwriter and your trip to London has nothing to do with work."

"I never said I was going to London for work," he argued. "You did."

Shelby blinked, then took a step back, putting more distance between them. "Did I really hear what I think I heard just now? Because if I did, it sounds like you're trying to shift the blame for lying to me."

"That isn't what I was—"

She interrupted him. "No, that's exactly what you were doing. And you know what? I've been here before with someone else I used to date, and I've learned from that. I think you should leave."

Aiden came closer to her and touched her arm. "Shel—"

She shrugged his hand away. "I won't do this with someone again. Honesty is a huge deal to me, and you knew that. I want you to go."

"We should talk about this."

Shelby stepped around Aiden and opened the apartment door. "We should have talked about it weeks ago, but that ship has sailed."

Aiden started to say something, but stopped when he caught sight of her face. He nodded instead and walked past her. Shelby shut the door behind him.

"My life, the soap opera," she muttered to herself, exiting the foyer and heading back to the living room. She flopped onto the sofa.

Barely a minute passed before a chime from her phone pierced the silence of the room. Shelby pursed her lips and eyed her phone, which was still on the end table where she had left it.

It's probably Aiden texting me, she thought. Do I really want to read that?

The phone chimed again, and curiosity got the better of her. She got to her feet and picked up her phone.

The first message from Aiden said he would call her later. She was about to text back and tell him not to, when she read the second text.

This is why I was in London, and it's what I'll be doing there for the next couple of weeks. A link followed his message.

She could tell from the link address that he had sent her a news article, and she wondered if it was another report about him and Keira burying whatever past it was they had. Then her gaze shifted to the link preview and she saw the headline: Murder trial begins today.

"Murder trial?" she said out loud. She tapped the link to open it in her browser app.

The date on the article was from Monday. She scrolled past the headline and began to read.

This week marked a bittersweet homecoming for London's lost son. It's been a few years since anyone in London has seen or heard from Tristan Thornbury, the orphaned son of Larissa and Kent Thornbury and billionaire heir to the Thornbury fortune. That changed today when he resurfaced at the Old Bailey courthouse for the trial of the man charged with murdering his parents almost twenty-six years ago.

Shelby stopped reading, even though the article continued for another two paragraphs. None of what she'd read had yet explained why the person known as Tristan Thornbury in the United Kingdom claimed to be a songwriter named Aiden Montgomery in the United States, but learning his parents had been murdered made her heart hurt for him. Had he been planning to tell her about the trial when she'd told him to leave?

She was furious with him, but she wasn't heartless. Even if it sounded like his parents had died when he'd still been a baby, it was still a big deal. She would acknowledge it and tell him she was sorry he had gone through that. It was the decent thing to do.

Shelby opened her contacts list and tapped Aiden's name. She waited through the first and second rings, then the third and fourth. After five rings, she was connected to his voice mail.

"Hi," she said. "Call me when you get this."