My Antisocial Billionaire: A Clean Billionaire Romance (My Billionaire A-Z Book 1)

by Katie Evergreen

  “You make me so happy,” she said as he came up behind her and held her tight.

  “I told you,” he replied. “That’s my job now, to make you happy. It’s my sole purpose in life, especially now that you’re the breadwinner.”

  She laughed, placing her hands on top of his and leaning back against the wall of his chest. Blake wasn’t lying. Ellie was now the CEO of the hottest new start-up company in Silicon Valley. Within a month of launching they had gathered over ten million followers, and that showed no sign of slowing down any time soon. Last time Ellie had checked her bank account there was a seven-figure balance waiting for her, and it was going up every single day.

  After the video of David, Michelle, and Josh had gone public, everything had moved frighteningly quickly. The board of Heartbook had called Blake within the hour, grovelling for his forgiveness. David and Michelle were fired on the spot, without benefits, and the police had taken them both into custody, pending an investigation. The only reason they hadn’t gone to prison was because Blake had decided not to press charges. By the time they were released, though, thousands of people had gathered to boo and jeer them as they waited for a taxi. The world would not forgive their crimes, and they hadn’t forgiven Heartbook either. The company had folded within a month, leaving the board—including Josh—penniless.

  But the world had forgiven Blake Fielding. The video had gone viral, and for a while all anybody could talk about was the dream couple, Blake and Ellie, and the way they had chosen love and happiness over money, the way they had defended each other even when all looked lost. Newspapers, TV shows, and websites had covered it almost non-stop, and Ellie had received invites to go on every talk show going. She’d turned them down, of course. They both had. They didn’t want the publicity, or the fame. They just wanted each other.

  “You’re my dream woman,” said Blake, kissing the top of her head. “I don’t deserve you.”

  “Yes you do,” she said. “We deserve each other. We deserve all of it. We’re good people, Blake.”

  “We are.”

  “And we’re old souls. We’ve been looking for happiness all our lives, and we finally found it together.”

  “I hope it lasts forever,” he said.

  “It will,” she replied. “I know it will.”

  They held each other in silence for a moment, content to be with one another. The farmhouse they had bought together, along with two-hundred acres of land, cocooned them from the noise of the party outside. It would keep them safe forever, she knew. She had hired a team of professionals to run LifeWrite for her. All she wanted to do with her time was spend it here, with Blake. Maybe they would even have a couple of kids one day—she could already see the best place for a climbing frame in the yard, and there was plenty of room for ponies.

  Somebody outside screamed, and Ellie saw Lissa run past the window, a goat in fast pursuit.

  “Oh no,” Blake said. “The goats are loose. We’d better go help.”

  “Do we have to?” she asked. “There are so many people out there.”

  “Who’s the antisocial one now?” he asked, laughing.

  Ellie laughed too. He let go of her and she missed his touch immediately.

  “Are you coming?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Just give me a minute.”

  He nodded, and kissed her. Then he ran out of the door, shouting the goats’ names. Ellie walked to the kitchen table, where her trusty old laptop was waiting for her. She was already logged into her LifeWrite account and the avatar was waiting for her on the screen.

  “You seem happy, Ellie Mae,” it said. “Would you like to hear a poem?”

  “No, thank you,” she replied. “I just need to make a change to my personal details.”

  She opened up her profile page and clicked a box.

  Ellie Mae is now Married!

  Grinning with pure happiness, she shut the laptop and went to join her husband.

  About the Author

  Katie Evergreen loves writing romance novels, and drinking tea. Quite often she is doing both at the same time. She currently lives in England, where she dreams of bumping into her own billionaire. The MY BILLIONAIRE A-Z is her first series of novels, and she’d love to know what you think! Feel free to get in touch on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or at her website, katieevergreen.com. Thanks for reading! :-)

  Continue Reading…

  … for an exclusive extract from the next book in the My Billionaire A-Z series, MY BEREAVED BILLIONAIRE.

  1

  Liberty Reynolds sighed as the guest bell rang out from the lobby. She tried to tame her corkscrew curls back into their hair band, but after a day of changing beds little blonde ringlets were poking out all over the place. Giving up, she took a deep breath and swung open the door.

  “Welcome to Pebble Cove Motel!” Liberty’s voice sang as she tried to beam her widest smile. “How can I help?”

  With the latest pair of guests happily ensconced in their little sea-view ensuite room, Liberty trudged wearily back down the three flights of stairs, through the door beside the reception desk, and into the tiny office that lay behind. The accounts book sat where she’d left it, open at a page that looked identical to all the rest—scrawled in ink and almost completely illegible. Liberty couldn’t believe that people still did their accounts by hand, let alone using a fountain pen and ink. They were a mess. And now they were her mess.

  Releasing the curls that hadn’t already escaped, Liberty set about trying to decipher the figures in front of her. This was the part of the job she didn’t mind. Numbers were her thing, not people. When she had to talk to people, particularly to new people, Liberty’s insides went as curly as her hair. Not that she had much choice at the moment, seeing as all of the jobs of Pebble Cove were falling at her feet.

  A timid knock drew Liberty’s attention away from the pages.

  “Yes?” she said, and the door creaked open. A shock of ginger hair appeared, and the tanned, freckly face hidden underneath stared nervously at the floor.

  “Sorry to interrupt you, miss, but it looks like there’s a leak in the shower of number 6, and the people in room 8 have asked for a wake-up call with the LN News at half five tomorrow morning.”

  “Thanks, Ginger,” said Liberty, trying not to cry at the thought of yet more work. “Is Fred about? Could he look at the leak for me?”

  Ginger shook her head and Liberty didn’t want to ask why. The young girl looked like she had suffered enough from having just spoken to her.

  “Okay, is that you done for the day then?” she asked instead.

  Ginger nodded and scarpered away before Liberty had the chance to say goodnight. Ginger’s real name was actually Florence, but everyone called her Ginger. Mainly because of her hair, but also because she had a twin brother called Fred. They had both been working at Pebble Cove for the last six months, and the only reason they’d got the job was because this was a small beach town with hardly any residents, and even fewer who wanted to work at a run-down motel with an infestation problem.

  Liberty had been beside herself when she’d met them. She thought she had a problem with the general public, but these two were off the scale. Ginger couldn’t meet anyone’s eye without her face turning the color of the Californian sunset, and Fred was just plain rude. Liberty wasn’t even sure they were working at the motel legally because their collective age looked less than Liberty’s, and she was only 22.

  She sighed. If someone had said to her a few weeks ago that she’d be back in her home town, working in Pebble Cove, she’d have chuckled in their face. Just a few weeks ago, Liberty had been part of a large accounts team in an even larger marketing company in San Diego—a million miles away from Little Norwich and its sole vacation spot. Fresh out of the University of California with a first-class honours degree in economics and mathematics, the whole world had been at her feet. Now, there was a mop and a bucket with room 6 written all over it.

  Liberty closed the a
ccounts book and placed it back with the others in the rusting filing cabinet. Fixing the squeaky drawers was on her to do list—a list that was already longer than her arm—but Liberty had been trying to prioritise the most important issues, and the tiny, stuffy office was the least of her worries. She walked into the lobby, hoping to catch some of the dying Californian sunlight. It should be a beautiful sight, but down here the pinks and oranges of the sun were sucked away by all the dark wood of the motel.

  Checking her phone for the first time that day, Liberty saw an abundance of messages from San Diego. Her best friend from university, Bronwyn, had secured a position at the same company as Liberty and was sending updates on office gossip seemingly every hour. Liberty giggled as she read about their uptight supervisor’s mishap with the water cooler. There were also a few messages from Brett, who Liberty had fallen into a relationship with without really realising it. He’d been asking when she was coming back to San Diego since she first sat at the wheel of her battered Chevy and started the journey here.

  Liberty pushed open the heavy wooden front door and stepped out onto the veranda that ran along the length of the motel. She picked her way over the broken floorboards and safely to the stairs, stopping at the bottom step to sit down. It had been her favourite place to sit when she was a kid. The sea stretched out in front of her—a short walk down the little pebbled path and across a stretch of sandy beach and she’d be dipping her toes in the Pacific Ocean. Back then, she would sit here and listen to her mum play the piano in the drawing room, her dad whistling as he cooked up a feast for them both. She would spend hours in the sea, swimming as far as she dared before diving under the waves to pretend she was a mermaid. It had been idyllic.

  Liberty turned her head back toward the beautiful building and sighed—she had been doing a lot of that recently. It was so far from idyllic now. All she wanted to do was run from these steps and not look back, like she thought she had done years ago. But this time she couldn’t. Her dad was in hospital and she was the only one left to look after Pebble Cove.

  She was stuck here whether she liked it or not.

  2

  “Okay, okay. Let’s kill her off. Your wife has done you proud, Nate, but perhaps it’s time you started living your own life now?”

  Nathaniel Parker let out a sound that was halfway between a sob and a laugh. He felt the tension release from his shoulders as he dropped his head to his hands, his elbows propped up on the boardroom table—which seemed enormous with only two people sitting at it.

  “Thank you, Tilly. I promise I won’t let you down,” Nate said through his hands.

  Matilda Arnold chewed the end of her pencil like a child, belying her actual age—which was still a mystery to Nate even after all the years she’d worked for him.

  “We need a good way to do it, though,” she said. “Nothing too gruesome or morbid. We don’t want to draw attention to the death, we just want it to happen and then, as time passes, people will forget.”

  Tilly shook her head, her immaculate brown bob immobile despite the movement. She swivelled her chair from side to side as she tended to do when she was deep in thought, occasionally brushing crumbs from her dress.

  “Whose daft idea was it for you to get married in the first place?” she said as she stopped her chair and looked at Nate.

  Nate lifted his head and smiled at Tilly.

  “I seem to remember a certain someone, Matilda Arnold, telling me that—now what was it exactly—‘no investor worth their salt will pay into a company designed to find people their true love when it’s run by a single guy barely into his 20s. Especially one with a dad well known for his philandering ways.’”

  “And you love me for it, don’t you, Nate?” Tilly replied. “Because without that crazy idea of mine you might not be where you are today.”

  “As a mentor, you have been one of the better ones.” Nate’s lips drew up at one side, making his cheeks dimple.

  Tilly threw the chewed pencil at him in jest, his quick reactions preventing the wet end from hitting him in the face.

  “That’s like a parent telling their only child they’re the favourite,” she said, laughing.

  Nate rose from his padded chair at the head of the boardroom table and walked to the door. He looked through the glass at the buzzing office outside. For as far as he could see there were rows of desks, and all of the people sat there were working for him. Even six years into the business, the view made him proud.

  He adjusted his focus and saw himself in the reflection instead. At 28 he knew he looked good, but he had the unfair advantage of being able to afford his own personal trainer and chef. His genes had bestowed him with a height of 6’2”, and a thick head of dark hair. He’d inherited his looks from his dad, but as much as he looked like Nathaniel Parker Snr, Nate had gone out of his way to not act like him. The bright blue eyes he had from his mother’s side of the family, and her boundless kindness and compassion, were what set him apart from the whole of the Parker family.

  It was exactly this kind of kindness and compassion that had inspired his company, Forevercom. The dating website wasn’t there to provide its clients with immediate access to other people’s bodies. There were criteria that Nate had written into the software that meant the users of Forevercom needed to match with their potential partners on deep rooted beliefs and ideals, not just looks and proximity. They had to be in contact for at least a month before any real names or addresses were allowed to be exchanged, and any attempts to undermine this were caught by a clever piece of software that was Nate’s baby. People trying to cheat the system were automatically removed from the site and excluded forever. Nate had wanted the site to provide users with everything his dad couldn’t provide his mum.

  As a result of the intricate coding, Forevercom was one of the most expensive sites out there. Nate had thought this might be a problem, but it seemed to have had the opposite effect because it was now one of the world’s most visited websites. People trusted Forevercom, and people trusted Nate. Which is one of the reasons both himself and Tilly were sat in the gigantic boardroom trying to come up with a plan to allow him to stop living a lie.

  Nobody outside of the shareholders of Forevercom, Nate and Tilly, and Nate’s immediate family knew that Nate wasn’t really married. It was a small white lie which had grown and grown, and now all the official sources claimed that Nate had been happily married for six years. Only Nate hadn’t been happily married at all, he hadn’t even been allowed to date in case the investors realised what he was doing and the story leaked to the press. It wasn’t as though Nate had a huge online presence, he kept his profile low and allowed his company to do all of the talking. But he had never been allowed to meet ‘the one’ because he couldn’t let his cover slip, and he certainly couldn’t trust anyone not to sell him out.

  Tilly handled all of his PR work, and he had only indulged in a few articles and interviews himself. Nate wasn’t the type of person who liked being splashed across the papers or the glossy pages of magazines, which was a shame as he certainly had the looks to sell them. No, he liked to keep himself to himself. But he did miss the ability to share everything he had with someone special. He longed to go on dates with a woman he could talk to about everything and anything. He had Tilly, of course, but he loved her like an aunt. She was no substitute for a romantic partner.

  Finally, if he played his cards right, he would be allowed to find himself a soulmate.

  Tilly came to join him at the door.

  “I don’t think we should have the wake in LA, there are too many people who would want to come,” she said. “You don’t think that’s too unfair on them, do you?”

  “No,” Nate said. “I don’t want it to be a big thing. Maybe we could hold something small in the town that Marie came from. I don’t know anyone who would make that trip. Can you remember where we said that was?”

  “I remember sticking a pin in a map of California,” said Tilly, sitting back at the table and
tapping away on her laptop. “Ah, here we go. It was a place in the middle of nowhere, perfect.”

  Nate came around behind her and read over her shoulder.

  “Little Norwich?” he said, picking up his mobile. “Okay, leave it with me.”

  3

  “Do you know just how selfish you’re being, babe?”

  Liberty had her phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder as she scrubbed at the toilet in room 7. She was trying to concentrate on what Brett was saying to her, but she’d been up since the crack of dawn to deliver a wake-up newspaper to the Kellers, and it was now almost noon. She hadn’t even had breakfast yet.

  “I’m so sorry, Brett. You know I’d come back if I could, but dad’s still in hospital. His stroke means that he’s having to relearn everything from scratch.”

  Liberty felt the words stick in her throat, but there was no way she would start crying on the phone to Brett. He already thought she was weak, he’d told her so on their third date when her eyes had pricked with tears at the sight of dog being berated by its owner.

  She pictured her dad in his hospital bed, thinner than she’d ever seen him before and totally unable to use the right-hand side of his body. The nurses had been feeding him and washing him. They were even having to help him go to the toilet. Liberty’s dad had been her rock since mom had died, and even before that, and now he was helpless. She’d had no choice but to move back to Little Norwich and take over the running of Pebble Cove. She was an only child, there was nobody else who could do it.