by Aubrey Dark
Mr. Black's Proposal (Part One: A Billionaire Erotic Romance)
Aubrey Dark
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (2015)
* * *
Tame me? You want to TAME me?
I don’t date players. I don’t date aholes. And Lucas Black, gorgeous billionaire and heir to the Black Media empire, is both. So I am NOT dating him. Not even if he hires me so he can order me around like a servant girl on a leash. Not even if he looks at me like he wants to rip my clothes off with his eyes. Not even if he pushes the line with me, farther and farther. Not even if I’m starting to like it… Stephanie Hart learned the hard way: Never depend on a man for anything. She’s the one in charge of her business, her family, AND her love life. Until Mr. Black shows up… Lucas Black never met a pretty girl he didn’t want to fck. Problem is, Steph Hart isn’t a girl to be fcked with. If she didn’t have such delicious curves, he might be able to forget her… Will Lucas be able to tame Steph into submission before he loses her forever?
**
MR. BLACK’S PROPOSAL
A BILLIONAIRE EROTIC ROMANCE PART ONE
By
Aubrey Dark
Copyright © 2015 Aubrey Dark
All rights reserved.
First Edition: May 2015
ISBN: TBD
Book One
Steph
“I don’t want a woman who’ll submit to anyone.”
His voice is a growl, dark with desire. It’s the same way he spoke to me when we first met. Commanding. Powerful. The kind of voice that sends little hot shivers through my nerves, burning from my scalp to my fingertips.
“What do you want?” I say, choking back the dryness on my tongue.
“I want a strong, capable woman… and I want to bring her to her knees.”
I swallow hard at the image.
“How… how would you do that?”
He’s behind me. I can feel the heat radiating from his chest. He hasn’t taken my clothes off yet, but somehow I feel utterly naked, knowing that his eyes are sweeping over me.
“How could I bring you to your knees?” he asks, and his voice is only a whisper. An unspoken promise. I’ve never wanted any man to control me, but now that it’s happening, I couldn’t want anything more.
I close my eyes and wait, shivering, for the touch I know will send me over the edge.
Chapter One
Steph
My arms were covered in flour when Andy came strolling into the back of the bakery with a newspaper and two cups of coffee.
“You’re late,” I said.
My brother rolled his eyes and handed over my latte. He waved the paper flamboyantly under my nose as I tried to sip my coffee while keeping up with hand mixing the batter.
“Did you see this?” he asked.
“See what?”
He spread the newspaper open and read aloud.
“Cupcakes: the new trend!”
“Wow. They’re calling cupcakes the trend now? Has the reporter been living under a rock?”
“I think this is a good sign,” Andy said. “It’ll get people interested in our shop. It’ll help make cupcakes cool.”
“I was making cupcakes before they were cool. And I’ll make them after they’re cool.”
Andy laughed.
“Don’t tell our investors that, Steph. I don’t think that’s the best business plan.”
“Ha. Investors.”
“I wish,” he said.
“I don’t,” I said. “They’d want to expand.”
“I want to expand,” Andy said, picking up a batter-covered whisk and tossing it in the sink. “It’s cramped back here.”
“Welcome to New York. If you’re not cramped, you’re probably in the wrong neighborhood.”
I added the last cup of flour to the bowl.
“Why aren’t you using the stand mixer?” Andy asked. I exhaled impatiently.
“The broken stand mixer, you mean?” I’d turned it on last night and it had whirred sadly for ten seconds, then ground to a halt. Another broken thing that would cost money to fix or replace.
Maybe I did need an investor.
Andy plopped down on a stool next to me.
“I was wondering why you weren’t in the apartment this morning,” he said.
“Coffee Spot wanted twice as many cupcakes for today, so I got in early,” I explained.
“Didn’t you stay late yesterday to close?”
“Yeah.”
Andy leaned over sympathetically.
“Steph. Hey. You’re going to have to stop before you wear yourself out.”
“I shouldn’t be complaining,” I said, stirring as hard as my arm would let me. “Things are going well.”
“You’re working yourself way too hard.”
“Really?”
“You have dark circles under your eyes when you wake up in the morning. Don’t try to hide them from me. I see you before the makeup goes on.”
“Thanks for the moral support, bro,” I said sarcastically.
“Is this because of Derek?”
My lips snapped shut. I stared down at the bowl of batter in front of me.
My boyfriend Derek had decided—suddenly—that I wasn’t good enough for him anymore. He’d dumped me for one of the girls working at his dad’s marketing company, some businesswoman with a rich family and a great career.
I guess I shouldn’t think of him as my boyfriend anymore. He was my ex-boyfriend.
My ex. Ugh. I hated that word.
“Don’t mention him, okay?” I said softly.
“If you want to talk about it—”
“I don’t. I want to forget him and make cupcakes. That’s it.”
“Okay.”
“Okay. Talk about something else,” I said.
“Fine. Let’s talk about the party tonight.”
“Yes!” Immediately my mood brightened. “I can’t wait to meet Lacey’s new boyfriend.”
“What was his name?”
“Jake.”
“Right, Jake. I can’t wait to meet him either. I hope he’s hot. I hope he has a hot friend.”
Andy’s last boyfriend had broken up with him at around the same time Derek broke up with me. But Andy was already dating two new guys casually. And he was always ready to find someone even hotter. I had to admit, my brother had good taste in men. And much better luck with guys than I did, apparently.
“I’d settle for a not-hot friend who wants to buy some cupcakes from us,” I said, remembering how Lacey had met Jake in the first place. “Jake’s birthday cake was two thousand dollars.”
“You’re going to this party so that you can network?” Andy rolled his eyes.
I set my whisk down in the batter and leaned against the countertop.
“Why not? I could go for making fancy pants cakes for a bunch of billionaires,” I said, losing myself in the pleasant daydream. “All the best ingredients. Gold leaf on the fondant. No more endlessly wiping down the glass display case when kids smudge their thumbprints all over it. No more futzing over Justin Bieber printouts slapped on top of cheap sheet cake.”
“Hey, don’t knock the sweet sixteen parties.”
Andy opened the cabinet, and a measuring cup rolled right out. He caught it mid-air.
“Whoa!” he said, putting the measuring cup back. “Did you see that this back shelf is broken? It’s like, tilting forward. We need to fix it.”
“ARGH!”
I hit my fist against the counter. A puff of flour rose up from the countertop. I was ready to cry.
“Easy, Steph,”
Andy said. “What’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter?” I looked around. The last time Derek had come to the shop, he’d made the same observation that I was making now. “This place is a mess. Everything is broken. The front display door sticks halfway open when I try to open it. One of the display lights is out. The doorbell rings every other time someone comes in. Our last stand mixer just broke—”
Andy grabbed my hands and squeezed them. He was my little brother, but at times I found him oddly comforting.
“Everything will be fine,” he said.
“How do you know?” I whined. God, I hated sounding whiny. No wonder Derek broke up with me.
“Because you always do something magical, and then everything is fine.”
I sighed. Andy had been like this ever since we were kids. An eternal optimist. And I, of course, was the realist. Guess which one of us worked harder?
“Great. So I have to come up with a magical solution. That’s all?”
“Right.”
“Okay, I’ll get right on that.”
“I have faith in you, sis,” Andy said, pulling me into a big bear hug. “Now go open up the front and I’ll finish mixing up this batter.”
“Thanks,” I said, tromping out to the front of the shop.
A magical solution? I was feeling a lot of things today. Depressed. Overwhelmed. Stressed the fuck out. But magical? Like I was going to pull a magic trick out of my ass? Yeah, I could go ahead and pencil that in between No Way and Never.
Then the doorbell jangled.
I looked up to see who had come into the shop, and stopped dead in my tracks.
For a moment, I couldn’t say anything, even if I had known what to say. The man standing in the doorway was so handsome that I couldn’t even breathe. Sunlight haloed his golden hair, and his light eyes glinted with the rays of the early morning.
An angel. That was my first thought, and I didn’t even believe in angels. But if an angel ever came to earth, it would be in the body of the man who had just shown up on my bakery’s doorstep. My pulse beat hard in my veins.
Morning was always my favorite time of day, when the store opened and it was like letting the sunshine in. By nine o’clock the sun disappeared behind the office buildings looming up over the street, but before then I reveled in the early light.
And now, I had something else to revel at.
He was so handsome. A model, maybe? One of Andy’s boyfriends? No. Andy would have said something if he’d started dating a Greek god.
I swallowed and ran one hand through my hair. I prayed that I’d remembered to do my eyebrows. I cleared my throat to greet him with my normal cheerful tone.
Then she walked in past him, and all my cheer dried up.
The woman with him could have been my mirror opposite. Long black hair set in perfect waves. A slim blue dress that showed off her pencil-straight figure. Her cream handbag was a small Louis Vuitton, hanging carelessly and stylishly over her shoulder.
I’d never seen her before in my shop, but she strolled up to the counter like she owned the place. I hated to judge my customers, but it was always the trust fund kids who went straight for the cupcakes without even saying hello first. The snobs.
“Hi!” I said, putting on a happy face.
“You’re going to have to give me a second,” she snapped, not bothering to look up at me.
See? I hated to judge, but I was so good at it sometimes.
“Hmm,” she said. “Hmm.” Her triple-layered fake eyelashes swished from one shelf to the next. It almost hurt my mouth to smile at her.
Customer service. I breathed out through my teeth and took one step back to lean against the doorway.
“What kind are those?”
I stepped forward again to see what her long, manicured finger was pointing at. She jabbed the glass toward the front row of cupcakes, leaving a smudge. I blinked, being very careful not to accidentally jump over the counter and strangle her to death.
“Those are cinnamon with cream cheese frosting,” I said brightly, even though there was a little sticker right in front that said Cinnamon with Cream Cheese.
“Are they vegan?”
“Uh, no. Um, it’s real cream cheese,” I said. See the sticker that says ‘With Real Cream Cheese’?
She wrinkled her nose.
“Do you have anything for vegans?”
“Sure,” I said, pointing down to the bottom where it said Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes. “We have some chocolate cupcakes—”
“Are they gluten free?”
“Not yet,” I said, the smile wearing thin on my face. “We’re in the middle of expanding our line right now, and we hope to have some gluten-free cupcakes by next—”
“Ugh.” The woman’s face scrunched up tightly. “I can’t believe it.”
I didn’t know what to tell her, so I automatically reached for my best customer service line.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You ought to be,” she said. “If I had known that you weren’t going to have anything for me, I wouldn’t have driven in all this traffic, my God—”
She kept talking, but I fixed my eyes on the spot between her two perfectly manicured eyebrows and kind of zoned out. Every part of this woman was manicured, landscaped. She was a work of art created by a lot of money and other people. Even though she might have had an IQ of fifty, even if half of her body parts were surgically enhanced, she really was quite beautiful. I guess I could see why these two were together.
The man had come up to stand next to her by the counter. I made the mistake of glancing over at him.
Immediately my chest tightened and my pulse began to beat faster. He had a strong, square jawline that made him look like a superhero from a comic book. His golden hair was slightly tousled. I wanted to run my fingers through it. I saw his mouth turn up in the slightest hint of a smile as the woman continued to rant.
“…and there are never any options for us. It’s ridiculous, really. Like, completely ridiculous.”
I wrenched my eyes back to the woman. She might have been beautiful, too, but her face was contorted in a disgusted grimace that erased any hint of beauty from her face.
“Come on, Lucas,” she said, tugging on the man’s arm. “They don’t have what I want here.”
Lucas—that was a sexy name, Lucas—let the woman steer him back out the doorway. I watched them go, trying not to be disappointed. I hadn’t even heard him say a word.
Andy sat in the back, hand-wrapping cupcakes individually while I climbed up a stepstool to change a light bulb on the display sign. All the while, I ranted to him about the bitch in the blue dress.
“Flour and eggs and milk - that’s what a cupcake is made out of!”
“I know,” Andy said.
“A vegan, gluten-free cupcake? That’s an abomination against God! Is she insane?”
A cough from five feet behind me made me yelp in fright. I tumbled back off of the stepstool and slammed backwards into the door frame. All my breath rushed out of me in one single whoosh.
Take my breath away.
Even as I looked up to see the impossibly handsome man in front of me, I was thinking to myself what an idiot I was to turn my back to a broken doorbell while ranting about customers. And now I would pay for it.
Lucas, the golden-haired angel himself, was standing right in front of the counter, leaning slightly over the top. I quickly glanced around, but the woman was nowhere to be seen. Thank heaven for small favors, I guess.
“I. Am. SO! sorry, sir,” I said, gasping for air. “I—uh—I—”
“It’s alright,” Lucas said.
His voice had a smooth, commanding tone. So commanding that when he said it was alright, I almost believed him. I blinked again, trying to learn how to breathe again after my tumble into the door frame.
“I thought that I might get a chocolate cupcake while I was here,” he continued. “I didn’t have a craving for one before, but now I do.”
“Vegan?” I asked in a uncharacteristically high-pitched squeak. I prayed that he couldn’t see my cheeks blush, but from the way he smiled at me, I knew he could tell I was embarrassed beyond belief.
“No, not vegan. That would be an abomination, wouldn’t it?”
My already fierce blush grew even fiercer.
“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t mean—”
“Quite alright.”
I ducked my head and pulled out one of the chocolate cupcakes. I wrapped a napkin around it and put it on the counter, my head still lowered. I didn’t want to meet his eyes again. His gaze did something to me that I couldn’t understand. It was like I was back in middle school again, I was so nervous. My hands shook as I rang him up.
“That’ll be three twenty-five.”
Instead of pulling out his wallet, though, he took a bite of the cupcake. I stared at his lips as he bit off a piece. There was a little bit of white frosting on his lower lip.
You could just lean over the counter and lick it off—
The sudden, stupid urge came and went, and I tried hard to ignore the voice in my head that was screaming about how sexy he looked as he leaned on the counter. His tongue flicked out and the frosting was gone.
Perfect lips. Bet they taste good.
I bit my lip. He peeled back the cupcake wrapper. My eyes moved to his strong fingers holding the cupcake so delicately. Then down his arm, his toned arm. His white button-down shirt sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. The shirt stretched out taut over his broad chest.
Perfect body, too. Those muscles. I bet he could pick me up right now. Pick me up and shove me up against the wall, and those hands could go anywhere they wanted to, oh yes, they could— His blue eyes flickered up to mine and I swear the air in the shop jumped ten degrees.
“Penny for your thoughts,” he said.
My eyes froze open in fear, as though he had been listening in to what my horny, adolescent mind was thinking.