The Billionaire Series Collection

by Lila Monroe

  Grant’s body, powerful and strong, covered every inch of mine. He gazed deeply into my eyes before dipping his head to kiss my neck, and I moaned as he teased and tortured the sensitive skin there with his teeth and tongue. His hard cock nudged at my thigh. I was slippery with desire, so ready to take him in. I reached for him—

  Beep beeeeep. Beep beeeep.

  The ancient clock radio beside my bed went off, and my hand slapped out at it automatically. The sun was coming through gauzy white curtains, making a dappled pattern over the faded hand-stitched quilt my mother had made me when I was still a kid. I gazed up at the walls, the dust on my Speech Team trophies and the curled corners of my old rock-star posters. At the end of my childhood bed, Mr. Teddy stared back reproachfully, as if he could sense how lonely and displaced I felt.

  This should have felt like a refuge, a safe haven. I should have felt welcomed, and relieved. At home and at peace.

  But all these things I used to treasure so much just reminded me that while they had stayed the same, I had become a completely different person.

  And that completely different person was a total fucking screw-up.

  No. No. I’d promised myself I was going to be positive for at least an hour today. I wasn’t going to think bad thoughts about myself, or my decisions.

  No matter how much I deserved it.

  “Rise and shine, Lacey Spacey!” Mom said, dishing out a healthy portion of quinoa and acai berries onto my plate.

  I eyed them skeptically.

  “They’re very good for you!” Mom said mock-reproachfully as she caught my look. “And they’re delicious. Try them, honey! You won’t know until you try them, will you?”

  She was trying to be cheerful for me, but all it did was make me feel like I was four fucking years old. “Yes, Mom.”

  I took a bite. Okay, it wasn’t terrible. The berries were a little sour, but not bad.

  But damn, I missed the days when Mom made comfort breakfasts of bacon and eggs and a foot high stack of blueberry waffles with whipped cream.

  “Aren’t you going to eat any more?”

  “I guess I’m not very hungry.” I pushed the food around my plate. Who could work up an appetite for this stuff? Yeah, it was definitely my breakfast that was causing my lack of appetite, and not the way my stomach kept twisting every time I thought about Grant or the company or—

  Yeah, face it, Lacey. This could be nectar and ambrosia from Mt. Olympus, and you’d still be picking at it like a bird.

  Dad came in with the morning paper, and a cup of chicory coffee—Mom and Dad were apparently protesting the treatment of workers who harvested actual coffee, which was morally admirable but also keeping me from getting any damn coffee—and kissed Mom on the cheek. “Ah, both of my two favorite girls! How’s the quinoa?”

  “Great,” I said, crossing my fingers under the table. “Very—full of texture. Interesting texture. Yeah.”

  “You know, we get that from the local farm down the road, the Lee family,” Dad said for the seventh time already. “Completely sustainable, and you should see the tomatoes they get!”

  “Tomatoes are a very spiritual fruit,” my mom added. “I think we could all learn a lesson from tomatoes, the way they thrive in the driest conditions.”

  “We certainly could,” my dad agreed, setting down the newspaper. “I had a conversation about that just last week down at the meditation center—”

  I took a big bite of quinoa and chewed as noisily as I could, hoping to drown the rest of it out. I loved my parents, but sometimes a girl just longed for the days when they thought ‘meditation’ was something you did in court when two sides of a business dispute couldn’t come to an agreement.

  I was so busy chewing quinoa and feeling resentful that I almost missed the quick flash of worry in my mom’s eyes, and the way they darted to the side pointedly before my dad—a little too casually—picked up the paper again, turning the front page away from me. But Mom and Dad, great as they were, were not exactly super-spies, and so despite their efforts I caught a glimpse of the headline they were trying to hide:

  DOES DEVLIN MEDIA CORP HAVE A FUTURE?

  It didn’t even mention Grant by name, but fresh pain still stabbed into my heart as if I had been shot back into time to that moment in the hotel when I had seen what I had to do, when I had made my fatal decision.

  Tears gathered at the corner of my eyes, and I swilled a glass of organic green tea to try to hide my face, but I could feel more, welling up under the surface.

  Oh, damn. Why did giving him up have to be so hard? Shouldn’t it be easier, when I knew it was for the best?

  “I think I’ll take an early shower,” I said, standing abruptly before either of my parents could see how upset I was.

  “But Pumpkin, you didn’t finish your acai berries—”

  “I’ll have them for lunch!” My voice wobbled slightly as I ducked past them. Maybe she would just think I was getting really emotional about fair farming practices.

  I made it to the other side of my bedroom door before the tears began in earnest. I slid to the floor, and let them flow.

  “I did the right thing,” I told the back of my old teddy bear. “I care too much about Grant to have some fake wedding. It would have been so much worse if I had gone through with it.”

  Mr. Teddy did not gain the power of speech to respond to me, but that was okay. I had all my rebuttals ready in the form of a daydream that had been playing nonstop in my subconscious since the day I met Grant Devlin. Since the day I saw the way his suit hugged his strong shoulders, the way the light glinted off his perfect smile, the way his eyes looked like the answer to every question I’d ever thought to ask and a few I’d never dared to—

  But it was stupid to keep dwelling on what-ifs and what-could-have-beens. Grant clearly wasn’t. He hadn’t called or tried to see me once.

  He must really hate me now.

  That thought made another sob choke in my chest, and I bowed my head

  Get over it, Lacey.

  He obviously has.

  The doorbell rang, and lifted me slightly out of my gloom.

  “Oh, is that Katie?” my mom said from her downward-facing dog pose. “Can you get that? I can just feel my chakras releasing their tension, and I don’t want to leave them all spiritually clogged.”

  “Sure, Mom,” I said, just barely suppressing my eye-roll reflex. “Wouldn’t want you to have to call that spiritual plumber.”

  Of course, Mom and Dad don’t actually lock their doors these days—something about a lack of trust blocking their karmic energies—so Kate was already knocking the door open with her hip before bounding in, her arms full of shopping bags. “I come bearing the delights of the great city!”

  “Is coffee one of those delights?” I asked. “Also, put that down and let me hug you.”

  “The hug isn’t dependent on coffee?”

  “Girl, if you did bring me coffee, I might kiss you.”

  “Try not to, Stevie’s being jealous as hell lately.” Kate dropped the shopping bags and enfolded me in a back-breaking hug before diving back down to retrieve the bag of coffee beans and a grinder. “Ta-da!”

  “You are a lifesaver,” I gushed as the smell of coffee wafted up toward my nostrils, my eyes practically leaking all over again with sheer gratitude.

  “And there’s more!” Kate informed me, dropping to her knees and pulling out each item with a triumphant flourish before setting it on the coffee table. “Your favorite sweater! Burgers from the fast-food place next to work! Noodles from that fast-food place next to your apartment! Candy bars from that old-timey candy shop down by the beach! The latest CD from that band we saw last time we went out for margaritas! Shampoo!”

  One of these things was not like the other.

  “Shampoo? Kate, my parents don’t live in a mining camp in the year 1870. I can actually get shampoo here.”

  “But can you get shampoo that doesn’t smell like eucalyptus and se
lf-righteousness?” Kate asked, her eyebrow raised.

  “Okay, point taken.”

  “Girls, girls,” my mom said, shaking her head in a way that would have come across as more stern if she hadn’t been smiling fondly, and also doing a yoga pose that meant her head was upside down while her butt was sticking straight up in the air. “Eucalyptus has a very healing energy. And that shampoo company donates ten cents from every purchase to help preserve koala habitats.”

  “Sorry, Mrs. N,” Kate said. “But koalas are on their own as far as I’m concerned. Did you know they have a huge chlamydia problem in zoos?”

  “All the more reason to support them in the wild,” my mom said calmly, as if Kate hadn’t just forever ruined every cute koala picture for me forever.

  The three of us chatted about various topics for awhile—my dad’s attempt to graft solar panels onto his Volkswagen Beetle, and Kate’s latest rejection from someone who had initially seemed interested in marketing her lingerie line.

  Eventually my mother decided that enough negative energy had been released from her spine, and straightened up to head off to the kitchen and fix us up some kale-banana smoothies with extra whey powder. Kate could barely contain her excitement, and by “barely contain her excitement,” I mean that she shot me a look that could’ve turned a gorgon to stone.

  There was a brief, awkward silence as my mom left and we both wondered if either of us was going to point out the elephant in the room.

  Three seconds was about how long I held out before broaching the subject. “So…so I bet it’s been pretty bad? The fall-out?”

  Kate waffled for a second. “Lacey, you don’t need to be hearing this right now—”

  “Please,” I said, taking her hand. “Whatever everyone’s saying about me, it can’t be worse than what’s running through my head. I just want to stop wondering.”

  She broke eye contact and tried to take her hand back. I held tight. “It’s probably best to make a clean break—”

  “Katie,” I interrupted. I could feel my throat starting to choke up. I’d beg if I had to. “Please.”

  Kate sighed, but relented. “The papers and gossip mags and blogs can’t get enough. The party line everyone’s trotting out is that Grant figured out you’re a gold-digger.”

  I felt pain like a shard of glass stabbing into my heart.

  Kate went on, staring straight ahead as she recited her news like she was reading it off a teleprompter: “He sent you packing, you’re hiding out licking your wounds. Meanwhile, Grant is doing a Batman act and hiding out too, licking his wounds.” The faintest suggestion of a smile ghosted over her lips. “One paparazzi snuck onto his balcony. Grant almost threw him off before his butler intervened.”

  A few weeks ago—God, it seemed like a lifetime ago—I would have made a crack about Grant having a butler. Now, joking was the last thing on my mind. All I could think about was how much I must have hurt Grant, for him to let people say those things.

  And I had no one to blame but myself.

  “A gold-digger,” I said, trying not to let my voice show the way I felt that tiny parts of me were cracking, shattering, and splintering apart inside. “Well. That’s a good angle. I’m glad he thought of that.”

  “I’m sure Grant didn’t—” Kate began soothingly.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” I said. My voice sounded like it was coming from very far away. It sounded cool and clinical, and nothing like I felt. “It’s all a PR spin, whosever idea it was. And it’s a good one. I couldn’t have done it better myself.”

  “This is not a PR spin!” Kate snapped, a little too loud. The sound of the blender in the kitchen stopped; could my mom hear? Kate quickly lowered her voice. “This is your life, Lacey.” She hesitated for a second, and then tentatively offered: “You could send a message back with me, if…if you’ve got anything to say to him. If there’s anything you think he needs to know—”

  “Grant knows everything relevant,” I said. But my voice began to crack on the last word.

  “Girl, did you forget who you’re talking to? I’ve been your best friend since kindergarten; I know when you’re putting up a front. I’ve heard you rant about this man, I know how you feel—”

  “Feelings aren’t important,” I said, looking away. “Love—or whatever it was I was feeling, attachment or affection or whatever—”

  “Love,” Kate insisted.

  “It wasn’t real,” I argued. “It was just—an extreme situation, and emotions were running high, and there were hormones and that oxytocin thing you were reading about in Women’s Health and—and it doesn’t really matter, Kate. Whatever it was, it’s over, and feeling anything about something when it’s over doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “Right,” Kate said with an exasperated eye roll. “Because everything worthwhile in life definitely makes complete and total one hundred percent sense.”

  “I’m not going to indulge myself,” I said. “I’m not going to sit around thinking about my emotions and feeling sorry they’re not reciprocated.”

  Kate tutted. “And that’s not what you’re doing out here?” She stood, gathering her things. “Tell your mom sorry I couldn’t stay for the smoothies. And remember, Lacey—you can’t hide out here forever.”

  26

  Kate has this annoying habit of being right. I couldn’t hide. Not if I wanted to keep my job, and my pride. And let’s face it, those were the only two things I had going for myself right now.

  So Monday morning, I girded my loins for battle, by which I mean I put on the latest set of lingerie Kate had brought me, plus a perfectly tailored Italian cut suit, and I headed back to work.

  For a moment when the car rounded the corner and the Devlin Media Corp tower loomed in the distance, I felt exactly like a princess sent out to the lair of a dragon. Somehow the building seemed even taller and more imposing than usual, a black slash against the sky, ready to crush me beneath the weight of my inadequacies.

  I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and went inside.

  A sudden silence descended on the lobby as I entered, people openly staring at me as if I were the Loch Ness Monster. I stared straight ahead, not deigning to acknowledge their rudeness, trying not to hear the furious whispering that began the second my back was to them, little snippets of words just reaching my ears:

  “—how she can show her face—”

  “—five thousand on the reception alone, I read—”

  “—no way she’s not fired, not after—”

  I tried to brush it off until I got to my office, where I shut the door and let myself take a few deep breaths until I could fight off the need to sink to the floor, curl up in the fetal position, and start sobbing. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Sticks and stones—

  Yeah, who was I kidding? I’d take the entire stick and stone supply of a national forest adjacent to a quarry over one more hurtful insult or insinuation.

  But I didn’t have the luxury of feeling sorry for myself. I straightened, reminding myself that the best revenge would be a job well-done. And there was a lot to catch up on if I wanted my work to even remotely resemble success: there were meeting minutes to review, new meetings to be scheduled, allied companies to reassure, and merger possibilities to investigate. Not to mention the fact that I had to coordinate the final wrapping-up of the PR hatchet job on myself. How ironic.

  A knock on the door caught me before I’d made it halfway to my desk.

  Grant. For a second my heart stuck in my throat—what would I say? How should I act?—but then I saw that the silhouette through the frosted glass was distinctly feminine, and I felt the anxiety drain out of me. Well, some of it.

  “Come in!” I called, trying to sound like I hadn’t been fighting off a panic attack seconds ago, and the door creaked open, revealing a timid young lady with mousy brown hair and thick black-rimmed glasses, wearing
a plaid skirt, vest, and suit jacket. I felt myself relaxing more. Anyone wearing that amount of plaid couldn’t be dangerous to anything except possibly my retinas. “Can I help you?”

  “Um…hi?” she said, edging into the room uncertainly, as if rattlesnakes might be hiding in the corners, ready to leap out at her. “I’m…supposed to help you? I’m your new assistant? I was just, um, hired?”

  Normally that Valley Girl verbal tic where every single sentence turns into a question bugs the hell out of me, but this girl looked so terrified I found it impossible to be annoyed with her. It would have been like getting annoyed at a small bunny.

  “Well, congratulations,” I said, trying to give a reassuring smile. “I’m pleased to meet you, and I’m sure we’ll work well together, uh…”

  “Oh! Tina? I’m Tina, Ms. Newman. Tina Harper.” She thrust her hand out at me like she was surrendering herself into police custody, and trying to suppress my amusement, I shook it.

  “It’s lovely to meet you, Tina,” I said. She smiled hesitantly back at me, and I vowed that I would make this job a pleasure for her. I wouldn’t torture her the way I’d been tortured by Jacinda. If I did nothing else of import for the rest of my time at Devlin Media Corp, I’d do this—make sure the cycle of verbal abuse and bullying didn’t continue in my office.

  I led Tina over the pile of work I had been contemplating before her arrival.

  “Now why don’t we get you started on tracking down time commitments for the department heads…”

  Tina was a dream, and between the two of us, we managed to clear out most of the backlog before noon. I had just sent her out for a well-deserved lunch break when my cell phone rang. My heart, as it had each time my cell phone had rung that morning, sped up until it could have been a competitor in the Indy 500.

  But when I checked the call display, it wasn’t Grant. It was my landlord.

  “Laney—” His nasally voice buzzed in my ear like a bee with dyspepsia.