My Boss, the Billionaire (The Billionaire Kings Book 2)

by Serenity Woods

  As we approach the pod, however, we go quiet. We stop in front of it, and stare at it for a moment.

  “Huh,” Leon says.

  The whole cottage appears to be built of glass. There are shaded lamps inside that give it a warm glow. The living room at the front faces south, with two reclining chairs that will undoubtedly give a magnificent view over the valley and of the stars. There appear to be two bedrooms behind it, but the dividing wall is glass. There’s going to be very little privacy here.

  He looks across at me. “You okay with this?”

  I laugh. “It looks amazing. Come on!”

  Grinning, he unlocks the door, and we go inside, admiring the beautiful cottage. There’s a heat pump on the wall and it’s pleasantly warm. There are a sofa and chairs and a TV in one corner, but the focus is on the two leather recliners at the front.

  “I’ll take this room,” I tell him, walking into the left bedroom, and I put my bag on the bed. It’s a queen, the same as the one in the room to my right in which Leon is now placing his bag. Behind it there are fitted wardrobes and a door to the bathroom, but there is no other furniture in the room. The whole focus is on the panorama before us that I know will be amazing once we turn off all the lights.

  Trying not to look at Leon next door, I unzip my warm jacket and hang it in the wardrobe, slip off my boots, then walk back into the living room. On the opposite side from the sofa and chairs there is a small kitchenette with a sink, a microwave, and a kettle with tea and coffee.

  “Do you want a drink?” I call.

  He walks out minus his jacket and boots, carrying a bottle of whisky in one hand and a small box in the other. “Fancy something stronger?”

  “God, yes.”

  He laughs and gestures to the cupboard, and I open it and bring out two tumblers. He hands me the box, and then smiles as he proceeds to tip some of the whisky into the glasses.

  It’s a box of chocolates from the café in Wellington. “Oh, how lovely.” I open them up; there are twenty truffles of various flavors, the smell making my mouth water. “Oh Leon, you are such a sweetie.”

  “Happy birthday.” He hands me one of the tumblers and holds his up.

  I clink mine against his. “Thank you for everything,” I murmur.

  “You’re welcome.” He sips his whisky. His eyes linger on mine for a moment, and a frisson runs down my spine. I don’t see him in casual clothes very often, and he looks gorgeous in his thick gray sweater and jeans.

  Oh, this is crazy, and so, so hard, being here with him and not being able to touch him. Why do I torture myself like this? I thought it was difficult enough in the office, seeing him every day, but it’s a hundred times harder here, just the two of us, with nobody to judge, no one to criticize. Just me, him, and the stars.

  He looks away, then walks over to the recliners. “There’s a remote control here for the lights,” he says, pointing at the table between the chairs. “Shall we take our seats?”

  I choose the chair on the right and he sits on my left, and I put the chocolates between us. There are a couple of blankets beneath the table, and I hand one to him, then shake mine out over my legs. It’s not cold in the room, but this is super cozy. We press the buttons at the side of the chairs that raise the leg rests and lean us back. Then Leon picks up the remote. “Ready?”

  “Ready!”

  He presses the red button at the top.

  All the lights in the house go out, and we’re plunged into darkness. I give an involuntary gasp. For a moment I can’t see anything, and then I blink a few times and my vision clears.

  It’s as if we’ve been transported up into the night sky. Stars glitter all around us, an amazing canopy of sparkling light.

  “Jesus,” Leon says.

  I’m speechless, and I can only stare around me with an open mouth. Below us, the town of Lake Tekapo glows like a jewel, but the small amount of light it throws out does nothing to mask the stars.

  Tears come into my eyes. “This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.” I glance across at him. He’s watching me, lit by the starlight, his eyes glittering.

  He studies me for a moment, then looks back at the view. “Tell me what you can see.”

  I swallow hard, blow out a breath, and begin to point out the stars. We can see Crux, the Southern Cross, high in the sky above us. Sirius is low on the horizon to the west, Capricorn to the east, with Sagittarius above it. The Milky Way is a ribbon on the black velvet, a truly beautiful sight.

  When I’m done, I have a large mouthful of whisky. Ooh, that’s good. Knowing Leon, it was probably hugely expensive.

  “You certainly know your stuff,” he says. He picks up the box of chocolates, chooses one, then offers the box to me.

  I take a mint truffle, pop it in my mouth, and suck. The taste of peppermint floods my mouth, and the creamy chocolate coats my tongue. “Mmm. I enjoyed my studies. I’d like to have done more, but… well… shit happens.”

  “It does.” He leans his head on the back of the chair, looking up, maybe studying Crux, trying to see if he can see the Jewel Box.

  I keep my eyes on the night sky, but say softly, “Will you tell me what happened when you were younger? What it was that skewed your view of office relationships?”

  He gives a long sigh and doesn’t say anything.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” I add.

  “I’m not worried about that.” He sips his whisky. “I’m ashamed.”

  I roll my head on the chair to look at him. “Ashamed?”

  He continues looking ahead. “Yes. And I don’t want you to think badly of me.”

  “We all make mistakes. I’ll tell you about some of mine later.”

  He gives me a wry smile. Then he sighs again. “I should tell you, because I know you must be wondering why I’m so adamant that we shouldn’t hook up when there’s obviously an attraction between us.”

  A thrill runs through me at that, but I make myself stay calm. “It would be nice to know.”

  He has another mouthful of whisky, keeping his gaze on the stars. “I think I said I was a bit of a rebel when I was young.”

  “Yeah, and Izzy told me a little, too.”

  “Oh, did she?” He doesn’t seem annoyed by that. “Yeah, she was obviously around at school. I was angry all the time, at everyone and everything. Part of it was directed at my parents, and at Noah.”

  “At Noah?” I know Noah is his adopted brother, from their mother’s previous marriage. I also know that Noah’s father took his own life, and Noah struggled for years to deal with that.

  “He’s twelve years older than me, and he always seemed to have everything. When I was eight or nine, he was at art college, drinking, partying, getting girls. By the time I was in my teens, he’d met Lisa and was talking about settling down. My parents were so proud of him for turning his life around, and there was a lot of, ‘Leon, you should be more like Noah,’ which didn’t go down well at the time.”

  “I can imagine. What about Clio?” I ask, naming his younger sister. “Did she get on with Noah?”

  “Yeah, you know Clio. She gets on with everyone. She worked hard at school, never got into trouble, so yet again there was a bit of, ‘Clio’s a good girl, Clio doesn’t misbehave.’ At the time it felt I couldn’t do right no matter how hard I tried. Of course, now I realize what an idiot I was. But I couldn’t see it then.”

  “So you didn’t go to uni?”

  “No. Failed my Level One exams and left as soon as I turned sixteen.”

  “And your parents signed the leaving papers?”

  “Yes. We fought a lot over it, but in the end, Dad said there was no point me staying at school if I wasn’t going to work. I travelled, bummed around Europe, worked in bars. When I eventually came home, I spent about six months doing a few jobs with my friends’ fathers, helping out on building sites, that sort of thing. I was late teens by then, still full of attitude. Drinking, sleeping around, getting into trouble.” He runs a hand
over his face.

  It makes me sad to think that this proud, strong man is embarrassed about the boy he was back then. “What happened next?”

  “My parents eventually sat me down and said I couldn’t keep on like I was. Dad said he’d got me a job in an office in Auckland—it was a computer firm, Katoa?”

  “The gaming company? Wow, that was quite a coup, it’s really hard to get in there.”

  “Yeah. Brock knew one of the directors, Stratton, and he got me a junior place in the accounts department. I don’t know how—I didn’t have any qualifications. A favor for a friend, I guess. Anyway, I started there, and on my first day, I met Angela.”

  He pauses to have a mouthful of whisky. I study his face, barely breathing at the thought that I’m finally going to discover his mysterious past.

  “She was thirty,” he says. “Ten years older than me.”

  I stare at him. I hadn’t expected that. “Oh.”

  “She was attractive, slim, dark-haired. I was dating girls my own age at the time, who often seemed immature and silly, and Angela was the opposite. Experienced, mature. She didn’t giggle or talk about clothes and celebrities. She knew a lot about business and economics, things that interested me.”

  “Was she your superior?”

  “Yes. She was head of the Finance Department. I didn’t see her much at work as I was a junior in Accounts and she was always in meetings. We got talking at lunch that first day. She was flirty, but in a sophisticated, seductive kind of way. I was flattered by her attention, and I turned on the King charm, made her laugh. I was cocky back then, arrogant. I thought I was the one doing the seducing.” The roll of his eyes tells me he now knows it was the opposite. “A few days later, she came into my office and quietly suggested we go out in the evening. I was quick to say yes. We met in a bar, had a few drinks, and then she asked if we could go back to my place.”

  “I can guess what happened next.”

  His lips twist.

  “And it carried on from there?” I ask.

  “Yeah. We continued to meet after work, and very occasionally at weekends. She told me she didn’t want anyone to know because we worked together, and I believed her. And I was happy sneaking around. It was exciting, sexy, having an affair with an older woman. She knew her way around the bedroom and wasn’t shy in telling me what she wanted and how to do it.”

  I can only imagine what young Leon was like. How gorgeous he must have been, so handsome and full of energy and arrogance and burgeoning sexuality.

  “How long did it go on for?” I ask.

  “Three months. And I need another drink before I tell you what happened next.” He pushes the button to lower the footrest of the recliner, gets up, and goes over to the retrieve the bottle of whisky. When he returns, he tips some more into our glasses, places the bottle on the table, and sits back down.

  “I thought we were being discreet,” he continues finally, “sneaking around, finding times and places to be together. But of course, people began to notice. It must have been obvious as hell.”

  “What happened?”

  “Someone told her husband.”

  I stare at him. “She was married?”

  “Yeah. With two small kids.”

  “Oh, Leon. You had no idea?”

  He turns his head to look at me. “I never asked, and she never mentioned it. My life was full; I was working eight hours a day, I was playing rugby, soccer, and cricket, I had a busy social life when I wasn’t seeing Angela. Did I guess she might have someone at home? Maybe. Probably. I know I found it odd that we always met in hotel rooms or at my place, never at hers. But, if I’m perfectly honest, I didn’t care. I didn’t want to know.”

  “So what happened?”

  He leans his head back and closes his eyes for a moment. “Her husband came into the office one day. He was crying, saying how I’d ruined his life, his children’s lives. There was a huge scene. Angela screamed at him, said she hated him, that she was leaving him for me. I was horrified. I didn’t want to see the guy’s tears, to hear him say how his kids’ hearts would be broken if she left. Suddenly it wasn’t exciting and sexy, it was real and messy and emotional, not a fantasy anymore. And I wasn’t interested in being with her. I didn’t want forever and rings and a mortgage, not at twenty. I guess that’s what I’m ashamed of most. I ruined her marriage, and I didn’t even love her.”

  “She ruined her marriage, Leon, not you,” I say fiercely, disgusted at this woman who didn’t tell him she had a family, who knowingly seduced him and used him.

  “I don’t believe that,” he says, his tone flat.

  I decide not to push it. He’s obviously cast himself as the villain in this show, and nothing I can say is going to talk him out of it.

  “Did you just leave?” I ask.

  “No. Someone must have called Stratton in his office, and he came in with Rich, one of the other directors, and broke it up. Rich took them up to his office, and Stratton took me to his. He was angry at first, but… well, I broke down. All I could think about was how her husband kept saying I’d ruined their kids’ lives.” He runs his hand through his hair. “Stratton changed then. He picked up his car keys and took me out of the office. He drove out of town, to a small café on the waterfront. It was pouring hard, I remember that. He bought me an Americano.” He smiles, and I know that this is why he still drinks that type of coffee.

  “What did he say?”

  “I waited for him to give me the speech about how I’d let him down and let my father down, but he didn’t. Instead, he asked me what I wanted. Me. It felt like the first time anyone had asked me that. My parents have always done their best to put me first, but it’s impossible for them not to project their own ambitions for you. But Stratton asked what I wanted out of life. Where did I see myself in five, ten years’ time? We talked for hours. We talked about money, and what it’s like to earn it, and to be born with it. He doesn’t have kids, but he has an adopted son, and he said sometimes Oscar struggled in his teens with knowing he could have whatever he wanted. It’s hard to learn the value of money when you’re born into wealth. But he talked about how he saw it as an opportunity to help others. Katoa gives a lot to charities, like the Three Wise Men does, but it also funds a lot of IT courses at the university, it runs internships, and it gives equipment and training to schools.”

  “He sounds amazing,” I whisper. It’s odd to hear him speak without his usual cynicism. He idolizes this guy.

  “He is. He’s older now, of course, in his sixties, the same as Brock, but I still call in and see him when I go to Auckland sometimes.”

  “I’d love to meet him.”

  He turns his head and smiles. “I’ll take you to see him one day.”

  “So he convinced you to turn things around?”

  “Yeah. That and the whole debacle made me realize what an idiot I’d been. Stratton took me home and talked to Dad about what had happened—I think he convinced him to go easy on me, that I’d had a huge shock. We spent a few weeks talking about options, and I eventually decided I wanted to get a degree in business and finance—I wanted to know more about money, how to make it, how to control it, and what to do with it. It was tough. I had to go back to school and get my Level One and do all sorts of catch-up courses, but I threw myself into it.”

  “What happened to Angela?”

  He looks back up at the stars. “They fired her. She was older than me, and my superior, and she went off the rails, so they couldn’t do anything else, really. Other people at the company told Stratton and Rich that she seduced me. Which she did, in a way, although that makes me sound as if I’m trying to make excuses, and I’m not. I wasn’t sixteen—I was twenty. I knew what I was doing. I wanted to take responsibility for it. But they fired her anyway.”

  “In what way did she go off the rails?”

  “She walked out on her husband and kids. Called me all the time. Wouldn’t leave me alone. I went back to my parents for a while to sort my
self out, and she turned up at their house in Russell and made a scene and refused to leave, and even broke a window—they had to call the police in the end. Dad told me to learn from it, to make sure I didn’t make the same mistake again.”

  “And so that’s why you’re so strict with office relationships?”

  He rolls his head to look at me. “That’s why.”

  “I understand,” I tell him. And I do. I can only imagine the horror he must have felt to have to deal with all that at such a young age. He was partly to blame, of course, because he was right; he should have known better. But we’re all dumb when we’re young. We all make mistakes we cringe over later.

  I feel sad, though, and angry toward the woman who has scarred him. She had her own family but wasn’t content with it, and she had to have Leon too. Didn’t she think about how it was going to affect her husband, her marriage, her kids? How it would affect Leon?

  Now I can see why he’s shut himself away from me, from everyone, in fact. Why he’s tough with everyone at work, and why he was so cross with Hal about what happened with Rosie.

  I want to reach across and cup his face, and tell him not every relationship at work has to end like that. Look at Hal and Izzy! But I know what he’d say—that it could all have gone horribly wrong. I know Izzy is still terrified Hal will tire of her. I’ve seen how he looks at her, and I’m pretty certain he won’t, but it doesn’t stop her wondering how she could work with him if it were to happen.

  Leon looks sad, and I’m sure he thinks his revelation has changed how I feel about him. But it hasn’t. I like that he’s honorable, and that he got upset when he thought he’d ruined the lives of Angela’s kids. Every decision he’s made since has been to try to do the right thing.

  I know he wants me. And I respect him for fighting that at work.

  But right here, right now, we’re not in the office. There’s nobody here to tell us what we’re doing is wrong.

  His gaze drops to my mouth, and he gives a little sigh, as if he’s thinking about kissing me. His eyes are filled with longing.