Ruthless Tycoons: The Complete Series (Ruthless Billionaires Book 3)

by Theodora Taylor

  No answer. I hesitate, wondering how to handle this unexpected barrier. Without much hope, I try the knob in the middle of the right-side door…only to have it turn easily. It’s closed but not locked. Closed but not locked…

  This feels too close to the kind of metaphors I had to write essays about after reading books in which daring women met tragic ends. And thoughts of turning back tickle at the back of my mind as I enter what turns out to be a very dark front room. It is still light out, but all the blackout curtains are drawn, casting the apartment into a near pitch which means I can’t easily find a light switch near the front door.

  So, I leave it open and carefully pick my way across the dark space with the little light provided by the outside hallway light. Deeper and deeper…

  Without the ability to see clearly, I rely on my other senses to guide me. And that is a mistake, because the luxury penthouse smells like a bar. As if it’s been distilled and pickled. As I hand over hand the inside hallway wall to get to the last door, I brace myself to find Holt passed out or altered beyond all comprehension.

  But I soon discover the hard way that there’s no amount of bracing to prepare me for what I find on the other side of the door.

  Chapter Six

  I’m tempted to take off my glasses and rub the lenses clean with my shirt. That is how hard it is to believe the scene in front of me.

  Holt isn’t passed out on the floor. He sits at a desk, bent over some forms that look an awful lot like paperwork. His usually messy hair has been brushed and pulled back into a neat ponytail. And though he is wearing jeans and a t-shirt, the same as last night, it doesn’t look as if he picked these clothes up from off the floor. In fact, there are no clothes on the floor, and his bed is made so neatly, it could be the star feature in an ad for a luxury hotel room.

  I take a step back, because I was obviously mistaken. Holt is fine and I am the silly one for coming here to check on him.

  “Sylvie?”

  I cringe at the sound of Holt’s voice, and wonder on a scale of understandable to truly terrible how wrong it would be for me to continue fleeing so I do not have to talk to him.

  But he’s up out of his seat, his brow wrinkled with confusion. “Sylvie?” he asks again. Obviously expecting an answer from me.

  “Yes, it’s me, Sylvie…hello…” I say, but then trail off because of the way he’s looking at me. Hyper-focused, but not in the same unnatural way as last night. His expression is intent, but his eyes are sharp and wide open without the sleepy quality I have become used to over the last three weeks.

  “Holt?” I say, my own voice filled with confusion because I have never seen his blue gaze so clear. “Are you…are you actually sober?”

  His head jerks a little at my question. But then he answers, “Yeah, I’m sober,” his mouth tilting down like he’s not necessarily happy about it. “What’re you doing here?”

  I guess I haven’t become as good at lying as I thought because I end up answering with the truth. “I know you said you were not wanting company today, but I thought this being the day and all, I should come around and see about you.”

  “The day,” he repeats, eyes squinting.

  I wonder if he’s serious, if he’s really going to make me spell it out. I pray he won’t make me spell it out.

  But seconds go by and my prayers remain unanswered with me feeling more and more awkward by the second.

  “I’m sorry. But this is the day…the day your mother killed her poor self—I read about it in the paper this morning,” I finally burst out in a rush, like a hurried confessor. “I tried to respect your privacy but I kept thinking about you up here all alone with no company. And I thought it would be better if I came by, is all.”

  “Is all,” he repeats. Then his face screws up in disbelief as he asks, “Sylvie, are you saying you came here when you didn’t have to because it’s the anniversary of my mom’s death and you didn’t want me to be alone?”

  When he puts it this way, it sounds very silly. Like I am a foolish girl who does not and has never known how to just “be cool.”

  “Okay…I am sorry for having bothered you. I will leave you alone with your feelings now,” I answer, turning to the door.

  I want to escape his penetrating blue gaze. I want to get out of here before I melt into a pool of complete mortification.

  But I don’t take more than a few steps before his hand catches my arm. He spins me around and then the blue gaze I was trying to escape is back on me. Only much closer.

  “Why did you come here?” he asks me, his voice barely more than a choked whisper. “Why did you come here? On today of all days.”

  I’ve overstepped. I’m calling myself ten kinds of foofool for how badly I’ve messed up in this situation.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I didn’t mean to upset you, I was only trying to be your frien—” The rest of my words are swallowed by his kiss. A kiss that strikes me deaf, dumb, and blind to anything but the way his mouth moves over mine.

  Listen…I’m not a complete innocent. It is true that I can barely look this rich boy in the eye, but I have been kissed before. Sneaky kisses in Sunday school corners just to see what all the fuss is about. A friend of a cousin pecking me quick then running away before I can hit him. But not like this. Never like this.

  This kiss is a Kiss. Audacious and filled with dark and heavy intention. It is the kind of kiss that leaves nothing to wonder, a magnetizing kiss that tugs at me, until I’m up on my toes. Then it demands more, lifting me and wrapping my legs around Holt’s waist.

  In the next moment The Kiss is carrying me across the large room, back to the rich boy’s overlarge bed. And then comes a falling sensation. My glasses are taken away. But does The Kiss let me go? No, it continues to consume me even as something wet splashes across my face.

  Tears, I realize. His tears. He’s crying now. And I want to comfort him, want to give him words to ease his pain. But I can’t because The Kiss doesn’t stop. Won’t stop. It devours me, pushing my jeans and underwear down, then re-wrapping my legs around Holt’s waist. The Kiss demands another kind of comfort and I end up hugging Holt, not just with my arms, but with my entire body. Hugging him so completely that every part of me is touching every part of him.

  There is a pushing pressure between my legs unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. Cotton housing something thick and hard. I roll my hips, wanting more, wanting to appease this new feeling inside me. A low, curling ache, so powerful that it feels like my hips are moving on their own. Oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness…is this why my mother warned me against such lewd acts?

  I always thought sex would be something terrible, my virginity something I would lose in a mix of sacrifice and tradition on my wedding day.

  But right now, I cannot even think of such terms as “virginity” or “honor.” There is no right or wrong, just a dumb and desperate need that slickens me in my own juices.

  And as for Holt, he wants me. He is stone cold sober, but he wants me in this way, I know, because he is kissing me like a man who has been starving. I have never had a drop of alcohol in my life, but I find it impossible to deny him, impossible to deny my own hunger as we devour each other through kiss and touch.

  When he pulls away from me for a few moments to reach across to his nightstand, I keen like an animal, my hips rolling nasty into the empty air with the need to be back beneath his kiss.

  “Holt?” I say.

  “Fuck, hold on,” he answers, sitting back on his knees. I feel his hands between my inner thighs, knocking against my sensitive skin as he wraps himself. Then he is back on top of me…kissing me again…making me forget I am not the sort of girl who does indecent things.

  His hips lift and he moves his arm between us. Soon, there is a new pressure against my sex, harder and more precise. “Oh fuck, tell me it’s all right, Sylvie,” he says, holding still on top of me. “Please tell me it’s all right.”

  At first, I am too stunned to answer
him. In the time I have known Holt, he has never asked me for anything. Only commanded and manipulated me into positions where I couldn’t say no to what he wanted.

  But this is a request. A request for the thing I’m supposed to guard with my life.

  For once, I let myself stare at him as he’s been staring at me for three weeks. For once, I let myself follow an impulse, reaching up to take the hair tie out of his long blond hair. It falls over my hand and arm, soft and so silky that I find myself stroking it. He lets me, and his eyes stay patient as he waits for my answer even though I can feel his hard length vibrating against my soft sex.

  I am a good girl. I want to be a perfect daughter. And I shouldn’t be here. But in this moment, my mother’s voice is completely silent. There is nothing and no one here but him and me and the emotions radiating between us.

  And in the end, I nod, my lips whispering yes into his soft hair, without any doubt whatsoever.

  He’s not like I thought he would be. Instead of taking my yes for granted, he smiles down at me like I’ve given him a gift. Then he captures my lips and accepts the permission I gave him. There is a flash of pain, sharp and piercing, but soon it fades and then there is nothing but pleasure as his hips begin to move between my legs.

  He is no longer crying, and I’m no longer nervous. We’re both clear-eyed and despite our many differences, this feels right between us. Like we are two pieces of something that never should have been split apart in the first place. Like these coming together moments are the inevitable completion of an act that began when his eyes met mine.

  Falling. I’m falling for him. I’ve fallen.

  And what is most crazy is that I do not care—cannot care about what a bad idea this is because pleasure overrules every doubt, every negative whisper. Engulfing me. Consuming me. Until…

  I cry out, louder than I would have expected after months of trying to be the nice and responsible girl no parent would ever put on a plane back to Jamaica. And I suddenly understand why Lydia did the stupid thing she did. Why she gave in to the boy who liked her without sparing a single thought for the girl she was raised to be.

  The girl I was is no longer here in this room. There is only the woman born, wondrous at the sensations still echoing through her body.

  “Sylvie,” Holt says, calling out my name like it is something new. Then he suddenly pulls me in, holds me against him tight as he releases into the condom with a long groan.

  For moments on end, we just lay there. And though I can feel him heavy on top of me, it feels as if we are floating through space. Someplace where time and status and rational thought does not exist. And when I say, “we’re” I truly do mean “we are.” This boy no longer feels like other to me. He is a part of my soul previously unknown.

  Eventually, Holt moves. He pulls out and rolls away, leaving me cold—but only for a second or two. A light is flipped off, bathing the room in darkness. Then sheets rustle and the next thing I know, I’m under the covers. His covers. On my side, wrapped in his arms, with his lips resting against my neck.

  We do not talk. We both seem to understand and not mind that we somehow made it to the top of the sex cloud, no drugs or alcohol needed. And neither of us wants to come down.

  Chapter Seven

  I wake in a new eddy of pleasure. Wet and resonant and warm as a fever. The room is dark and he’s kissing me again.

  But not on the lips.

  I look down and feel rather than see a tangled nest of silky hair between my thighs.

  Wrong. So wrong. My good girl hands curl into his hair with a thought to pull him up. But then his mouth finds the swollen bud hidden at the top of my mound. And instead of telling him to stop, my hips buck, not knowing what to do with the sudden bolts of pleasure now spiking through me. His hands curl around the tops of my thighs, holding me down as he continues to kiss me nasty, without a care to morals or all the reasons why I should not be letting him do such dirty things to me with his mouth.

  “Holt…” I say when the pleasure is finally done with me. It’s meant to be a chastisement, but it comes out a breathless moan.

  “Fuck, I love the way my name sounds with your accent,” he answers, coming a kneel inside my legs. “Almost as much as I like making you come.”

  Nasty…he’s such a nasty boy, and I can only guess at all the obscene thoughts running through his dirty head as he turns on the bedside lamp with one hand and wipes his now glistening mouth with the back of his other hand. I watch him reach into the drawer to pull out another foil square, slightly mesmerized by the very hard thing between his legs. It is longer than I expected, and thicker. It’s hard for me to believe he fit it into me. So easily, I barely felt a pinch as he pushed past my seal of innocence.

  “You okay?”

  No, I don’t think I am. Obviously, he’s broken something inside me, the part of my brain responsible for good sense. There’s a protest floating in the back of my mind, some kind of “we should stop.” But it never manages to surface.

  And then he’s back on top of me, heavy and surer than a boy his age should be as he lines himself up with my slick core and pushes back in. He takes me again, just like the first time. Desperate and fast as if he’s mining for something deep inside me.

  He finds what he’s looking for with embarrassing ease. Despite his earlier attentions, I start going crazy beneath him again within minutes. And before I can stop myself, I’m coming on a long moan, my below lips clenching him hard as pleasure overtakes me. I smother my face into his shoulder to keep from screaming like the bad girl I told him I could not be when we first texted. But I don’t tell him to stop. I take every inch of him, every stroke until he pushes in one last time and shudders with his release.

  Silence once again descends over us. But this time I don’t hold it sacred. I grab my glasses off his nightstand and glance over at his digital alarm clock. It’s well past 8.

  “I must go,” I tell him, with a little push against his shoulders.

  “Stay,” he answers, back to commanding me.

  “My parents will be wondering where I am. I cannot worry them like that,” I answer.

  And the teasing look falls away from his face.

  I can guess why. Because his parents are the opposite of mine. One dead and the other not overprotective at all. In the many weeks that we’ve dined together, Holt has not mentioned his father once.

  But to his credit, he doesn’t hold my parents against me. “Okay, yeah. Let’s not give them any reason to worry about you,” he says, letting me up.

  “Thank you,” I say as I jump out of bed and try to decide how best to handle this. Of course, I’ll need to take a shower. I cannot return to my parent’s house smelling of sex and the scent of weed that sits on Holt’s skin like a permanent cologne even when he’s sober.

  “You’re going to let Javon send you home in a car, right?” Holt asks, getting out of bed, too. He doesn’t bother to cover up his nakedness as he talks to me, even though he’s standing right next to the bedside lamp. “I don’t want you riding the bus today.”

  Pride wars within me. But he is right. The 950 doesn’t run this late at night, and my mother will already be worried enough about me as it is.

  “Okay,” I agree, trying not to feel self-conscious about my nakedness as I go over to the backpack I dropped right inside the door when he surprised me with that kiss. This boy has a way of making me drop everything, I think to myself with a private smile. “I’ll ask him to get me a car, but let me send my mother a text first.”

  I find my flip phone in the backpack and as I pull it out, I hastily construct a tale about my bus breaking down somewhere inconvenient and it taking hours before a new one came to get me.

  But then a sight on the small screen stops me cold. Instead of a small black crescent, there’s a sun icon in the upper right hand of the screen. No…no…I think, even as my eyes drift down to the two letters at the bottom right of the 8:17 and find an “A” instead of the “P” I was
expecting in front of the “M.” And below that, a double-digit notification about missed calls from my mother.

  My heart feels like it’s beating inside my ears as I glance toward the balcony and find my worst nightmare confirmed. The blackout curtains have been pulled across the balcony windows, effectively blocking out any and all morning light.

  It is 8:17A.M.—not P.M. I didn’t just doze off for a couple of hours. I spent the night here.

  “What’s wrong?” a voice asks in the distance.

  It’s Holt talking to me but I don’t answer. I turn my back on him and with trembling hands, dial my mother’s number.

  My mother answers the phone without greeting, “Sylvie, where are you? Tell me now where you at.”

  “Mommy…Mommy, I am so sorry,” I say, and I somehow pull yet another lie out of the ether. “I was watching a movie at a co-worker’s house and I fell asleep on her couch. I’m so sorry for worrying you.”

  “Which co-worker?”

  “Um…what?” I ask.

  “You heard me, daughter. If this co-worker of yours was really the one you was with last night. If you are not lying straight into the ear of the mother who has raised you from naked baby on up, then give me this girl’s number and stay on the line while I use the house phone to call her.”

  I blink rapidly, buffering between the caught lie and the much worse truth.

  But it must take me too long to respond because my mother’s next question is, “So you are with a boy, then?”

  “Mommy…it’s not…”

  “You think I have not been suspicious? With your job so far away and the hours so long although this job be official at a daycare center? You know I do not abide the liar under my roof. Nor the slut. Ask your sister about that…”

  “Mommy, please…” I start, then trail off, wanting to fix this but unable to come up with a good enough lie.