by Lori Ryan
They, of course, all turned at once making it more than obvious where they were looking. The couple standing by the table of food didn’t seem to notice.
“What’s that about?” PJ asked.
“That’s Roark, Jack’s lawyer,” Kelly said. “He’s a widow and he’s been trying to get Mrs. Poole to go on a date with him for years.”
“Years?” PJ asked, smiling as she looked at the older couple. Mrs. Poole was blushing, one hand resting on Roark’s arm as he leaned in to say something to her.
“Years!” Kelly emphasized. “He took her out to dinner the other night and it was super cute. She was so nervous and he brought her flowers.”
Jesse laughed. “It’s weird that we call him Roark but we all still call Mrs. Poole Mrs. Poole.”
Kelly laughed at that. “I know, right? I think I was living here a month before I even found out her first name. It’s Greta, but she’s always been Mrs. Poole.”
“Let’s hope that’s not what Roark calls her in bed,” Jesse said, earning an elbow from Kelly.
“PJ!” Jill said with a start, “What is that?”
PJ glanced down to her hand where Jill’s round eyes were focused and where, thanks to Jill’s not so subtle outburst, all eyes were now glued. PJ smiled at her friends, her heart kicking in her chest at the happiness that surrounded her.
“Gabe asked me to marry him,” she said, her eyes finding Gabe’s as the men approached.
They each leaned in to congratulate Gabe with one-armed hugs and manly slaps to his back, while the women surrounded her with hugs.
As PJ listened to the chatter of good friends around her, and watched as Kelly swung a laughing Maddie over her head and Jill and Andrew each patted a tiny baby’s back, she knew she finally had everything she’d ever need in life.
A family, love, and good friends who would support her no matter the choices she’d made. She needed absolutely nothing else.
The End
Thank you so much for reading! Gabe and Pru were so fun to write and their story let me sink back into the Sutton family. One person whose story I've been DYING to write is Samantha. Listen, you know she needs a strong man, right? One who loves her quirks and accepts her for who she is. It turns out, her hero needs her just as much as she needs him. He's a Navy SEAL struggling to come home and settle back into a world he isn't sure he fits into anymore. And through all the sexy heartwarming moments, there's going to be a ton of heart-stopping action! I'll tell you a secret. This book is my favorite of all the books I've ever written. Like, EVER.
Grab The Billionaire's Navy SEAL here and binge now!
Read on for chapter one of The Billionaire’s Navy SEAL:
CHAPTER ONE
Logan Stone looked up when his boss—as of three hours ago— approached his office. Logan had been at his desk since five that morning but the time had gone by quickly with no distractions around to interrupt him.
He watched as Jack Sutton, CEO of Sutton Capital, entered the moderately-sized office with a large window on one wall, and sat in the chair across from Logan. He’d known Jack for a few months and respected the man as both the head of the company, and as a person.
Zach Harris, Logan’s best friend and Jack’s brother-in-law, was responsible for introducing the two men. Logan suspected Zach might be responsible for Jack giving him this job. A fact that grated on his nerves on a daily basis, but he needed the job. He wasn’t exactly in a position to turn it down.
“Security told me you’ve been in the building since five,” Jack said. “I gotta tell you, I do like hard workers, but you really don’t need to be here that early.”
Jack’s smile was easy and his posture loose as he crossed one ankle over a knee. Logan wished he felt the same way, but edgy didn’t even begin to describe what he was feeling.
Despite his mood, he grinned and shrugged, throwing a mask over his features. From what he’d heard, there was a time when Jack Sutton would have demanded his employees showed up earlier than the competition, and left later.
Being a husband and father had changed that in the last few years. Sutton Capital had been changing to a family-oriented company that prized relationships and quality of life as much as it valued dollars and cents. It still held a powerful position in the industry, but the environment of the company had changed dramatically in recent years.
“Wanted to get a jump on things.” What the hell else could he say to explain his early arrival? No way would he tell Jack he’d made the twenty-minute drive to work at five in the morning because he wasn’t yet able to drive in traffic. Because he needed the ability to run a red light when the panic set in. Because, most days, he had to roll through a stop sign and hope to avoid a ticket or worse if he was out when there weren’t many people on the road.
Jack nodded as though he accepted the excuse and placed a stack of files on Logan’s desk.
“These are the files I told you about. If you can go over them this morning, I’ll tell Samantha to get with you this afternoon. You can run through your thoughts and get her perspective on things. She’s familiar with all of the companies we’re thinking of acquiring. She can often spot things I can’t, so it’s useful to touch base with her before we make any decisions.”
Samantha Page. The woman had grabbed his attention at Zach’s wedding three months ago. She was good friends with Zach’s new bride, Jesse and with Jack’s wife, Kelly.
Although he didn’t talk to her directly the weekend of the destination wedding, he’d sure as hell noticed her. And damned if she hadn’t been sauntering through his dreams every night since then. In fact, he owed her a debt there.
The one thing that had eased in the last three months since he’d medically retired from the military were his nightmares. He still had to deal with his memories when he was awake, but they didn’t seem to come pounding on his door as often at night anymore. Sam had that distinction now.
Logan shoved aside thoughts of Sam with that long black hair and soft curves that plagued his dreams, and nodded. He pulled the files closer to him and scanned the names of the companies neatly typed on the edge of each one.
Jack had mentioned each of them in their prior talks and Logan already had a list of follow-up questions for Sam. Logan would be teaming up with three men and one woman who, like him, were new to Sutton Capital.
As someone who had been with Sutton Capital for years, Samantha would be his liaison to the rest of Sutton. She was set up to help get him and his team settled into the company and get up to speed on the companies Sutton Capital was interested in backing financially.
Logan’s new team all had medical, science, or technology backgrounds—some earned in the military like him, one in a research firm he’d helped to found, and another as a physician.
He was glad Sam would be teaming up with him to lead the new team. From what he knew of her, she was a computer genius. She could hack just about anything you threw at her and had a deeper than average knowledge base of a hell of a lot of other topics as well. From what he’d heard from Zach, she was the kind of person who read physics textbooks for giggles as a kid, but she was cool enough to have designed a kickass online game that he had to admit, he’d spent many nights playing recently.
Sam’s looks reminded him of one of those woman you might see painted on a plane in World War II. Back when women were real, with curves and full lips and a body a man could lose himself in. Not one of those damned french fry stick figures most women aspired to nowadays. Sam had curves and substance to her. Logan wouldn’t feel like he might break her if he grabbed hold of her or tucked her up under him—
Hell.
“Logan?”
“Yeah?” The look on Jack’s face told Logan his boss had been trying to get his attention without success.
“So, you’re good to get with Sam at two?”
Get with Sam? Crap. Get it together, sailor.
“Sure.” Logan picked up a pencil and jotted the notation on his desk planner. He was
still old school in that respect, which some considered odd given his technology background. He liked a paper desk blotter with the calendar printed on it, and he still used the plain old yellow No. 2 pencils he’d learned to write with in elementary school.
Something about the graphite scratching across the paper settled him. People asked him how he could schedule appointments when he was away from his desk, but in reality, he didn’t need to be near it. He could see the entire calendar in his head at any given moment. If he scheduled something while he wasn’t in reach of the blotter, he simply wrote the notation in his head, imagining the feel and sound of the pencil as it left its markings on the page. That action alone was enough to embed the date and time so he could fill it in on the paper later.
Logan stood, needing to stretch his legs and move for a few minutes. “I’ll walk with you,” he said as Jack turned to leave. “I could use another cup of coffee.”
In reality nothing could be further from the truth. His blood pressure was already pounding hot and heavy enough to meet the circulatory needs of a gorilla, but it was one more way to cover what was happening with his broken-ass body. The ache in his left hip and thigh got to be too great if he sat still for too long.
Broken body and broken mind. Two things he didn’t want to share with anyone.
Samantha Page sipped the latte her friend had handed her and then smiled. She and Jennie Thompson stood shoulder to shoulder outside her office on the twenty-sixth floor of Sutton’s office building. Her office was one of the twenty that ringed the outer edge of the room. The inner area of the large room held rows of cubicles and desks that she and Jennie looked out on now.
“No, I’m serious,” she said eyeing Jennie, who was still laughing too hard to talk. “It’s definitely time for a divorce. I’m just going to miss the ice cream.”
Sam probably should have left out the ice cream bit. Jennie only laughed harder at that and it was clear she had more questions. Sam waited patiently while Jennie recovered.
She was used to people laughing at her, and to be truthful, with Jennie it always felt more like the old saying: Jennie was laughing with Sam, not at her. Sam could handle people laughing at her, though. Even by her friends. It happened. It didn’t bother her anymore.
“What does divorcing your gym have to do with ice cream?” Jennie finally asked, using her fingertips to sweep an errant tear from under her eye.
Samantha shrugged a shoulder and grinned, knowing her workout routine wasn’t exactly what most fitness gurus would recommend. In fact, even assigning the word “workout” to it was a bit of a stretch. Or fitness. Or routine, for that matter, since she didn’t exactly go on a regular basis.
“If I finish whatever class I signed up for, I reward myself with an ice cream cone from the place next to the gym. If I started working out at home instead of the gym, I’d have to drive to get my ice cream cone and that just changes the whole thing. It’s not as fun.”
Jennie had been trying to convince Sam to hire a personal trainer. Sam’s budget could definitely afford it, but frankly, she wasn’t sure she wanted to pay someone to hound her to exercise. There would be no wheedling out of it if she wasn’t in the mood, which, most of the time, she wasn’t.
“And, tell me again why you have to divorce your gym?” Jennie emphasized the divorce part of the question, as if to stress how unusual it was to talk about divorcing a fitness center. Yeah, okay, so maybe that had been the wrong choice of words.
“It’s got bad juju,” Sam explained. “It’s cursed. You can’t deny the evidence. First, someone stole my wallet in the locker room the one time I forgot to bring my lock, then I ended up with a flat tire a week later, and yesterday someone sideswiped my car in the parking lot. They don’t have cameras in the lot, so I’m screwed. I can get her repaired, but she’ll never be the same.”
Jennie nodded and sipped her drink. Everyone knew Sam’s Jaguar was her baby. She didn’t splurge on things often, but that car had been her one great splurge and she babied it. Coming out and seeing the scrapes and dents all along one side of Dahlia had made Sam want to cry. Or hit something. Or throw things. She’d actually done all of those things. And, stomped her feet.
“That is some bad juju. Maybe you could join another gym. Mine doesn’t have an ice cream shop nearby, but there’s a donut place.”
“Ooooooo. Donuts could work.” Her grin was wide, but the reason for her and Jennie’s early arrival in the office walked through the door, distracting her from thoughts of food and workouts.
Three men and one woman followed the office’s human resources director into the room.
The men looked like they belonged in a magazine or on the pages of a calendar. One of those calendars. And the woman looked to be five feet one or two inches of size-zero gorgeousness, designed to make other women feel inconsequential, at best.
“You have got to be freaking kidding me!” Samantha said, probably a little louder than she’d planned to.
She heard Jennie sputter and cough over a mouthful of latte and had to admit to a bit of chagrin when Jennie turned amused eyes on her.
“What?” Sam said defensively. “You’re telling me you expected that for our new science and technology department? We should have gotten geeks and nerds, not underwear models and a woman who could easily pose for … for … for whatever the biggest fashion magazine is,” Sam said with a glance to her own outfit.
Sam would have no fashionable clothes if it weren’t for Jennie. When Sam’s online game took off and she started earning more money than she knew what to do with, Jennie helped Sam trade in boxy business suits for cute skirts and blouses that accentuated Sam’s curves. It had taken some talking to get Sam to see that, when showcased properly, her curves were beautiful.
And now Sam had a personal shopper who brought her clothes each month to choose from. She let Sam have her own unique style, as evidenced by the purple blouse and matching purple boots she wore today, which Sam loved.
Still, even with the personal shopper and help from her friends, Sam wasn’t what one would consider a fashionista. Hence, her lack of knowledge about the titles of the latest and greatest fashion magazines.
Her friend shushed her and laughed as they watched the HR director continue her tour, the underwear models in question following her as the group made their way across the room.
“I’m just not sure I understand your issue with it, Sam. If I was going to be in charge of getting those guys settled into the company, I’m pretty sure I’d be psyched, not complaining. I mean, if I didn’t have Chad, that is,” Jennie said with a sly grin.
Jennie was happily married to Chad Thompson, head of Sutton Capital’s security division and part owner in the company. Chad was also Jack’s cousin and best friends with Andrew Weston, Sutton’s Chief Financial Officer.
Chad, incidentally, was model-worthy himself. It didn’t surprise Samantha that Jennie was married to such a good-looking man, since Jennie could also easily have landed the cover of Vogue or some swimsuit or underwear spread.
Samantha, on the other hand, was a normal person. She was one of those “average” females you heard about, who wore more than thimble-sized clothing. She was taller than the average woman at five foot eleven. Oh, Jennie told her differently.
Jennie said she was voluptuous and sexy, and Sam saw that to some extent. But she also faced reality. If she were a model, she’d be showing off sweatshirts and galoshes, not underwear.
“Why am I not happy about this?” Sam gestured to the men who stood in a loose circle across the room, each with the kind of easy confidence born of above-average looks and a physical fitness level that can only come from years of honing and driven attention to exercise. “Because we need some normal people around here.”
Another coworker approached on Sam’s side as she finished her sentence.
“Damn right we do,” Tanya, the newcomer, said with a nod. Tanya worked in the finance department of Sutton and often had lunch with Jennie a
nd Samantha.
“See, she gets it,” Samantha said to Jennie, as she bumped her hip in solidarity against Tanya’s, earning a smile from the other woman. “We’re surrounded by above-average overachievers who look like they were crafted in the Ken and Barbie doll factory instead of a womb. We need average guys around here for those of us that weren’t graced with those kind of genes,” Sam said, casting a glance at Jennie. “No offense.”
“Um, none taken. I think,” Jennie answered with a huff of a laugh. “So you were hoping for ugly?”
“Not ugly. Just . . . normal. They’re science geeks. I mean, come on. These people are supposed to be walking computers on everything from nanotech and biochemistry, to immunotherapy and whatever the hell else they do. They should, at the very least, be a little pale from being indoors too long, not tanned and glowing and all . . . all . . .”
“Godlike,” Tanya finished for Sam.
“Yeah.” Sam nodded. “Godlike. You’d think Jack would have given the teeniest bit of consideration to us mere mortals when he hired them. It’s just selfish, is what it is. Selfish and inconsiderate. Just because Jack’s all walking, talking sex-on-a-stick doesn’t mean he shouldn’t think of the rest of us once in a while. The guy could at least throw us a bone for once. Is that too much to ask?”
Sam looked at Tanya and grinned, expecting to find her co-worker grinning back. Instead, Tanya looked past Sam and Jennie, her face a pale, pasty color—somewhat like the flour-and-water glue Samantha’s mother used to make for her dioramas. In fact, she looked a bit like she might be sick.
Sam turned her head slowly, flinching the second she caught sight of her boss, the sex-on-a-stick man, in the flesh. Jack Sutton stood in the doorway of the office next to hers, another man next to him, both wearing expressions that clearly told her they’d heard every word she’d said.
Jennie only laughed, but given who her husband was, she could do that.