Billionaire's Best Woman - A Standalone Novel (A Billionaire Wedding Romance Love Story) (Billionaires - Book #5)

by Claire Adams

  I got out of bed, stretching, rubbing my eyes. Things hadn’t gone so well yesterday, but I was over blaming myself for it. Whether Dean wanted to answer the rumors about him and the mafia was one thing, but he was the one who said he wanted a more serious, more traditional relationship.

  As wonderful as that dinner was—or in this case, would have been—as incredible the setting, it still felt like we were playing house. It felt like being a teenager again, but not in any of the wistful, yearning ways. I was done with the in-between.

  I threw on some clothes and went out to find my brother. It was Saturday, and for the first time in quite a while, Luke was supposed to have the whole day off. Neither he nor I expected that would last past lunch, but it was still a big deal for him. My first stop was the kitchen, as Luke was rarely both home and away from his coffee machine at the same time. He wasn’t there. I checked out on the back deck, and I knocked on his bedroom door. I looked in the garage. His car was gone.

  “Well, so much for a day off,” I muttered to myself, pulling my phone from my pocket. I punched in Luke’s number. I had to know what I was getting into meeting Dean.

  “This is Blair,” he said, answering the phone.

  “Hey, what’s with this note you left me?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah, lover boy called and said you should meet him out in Westchester. Can you read the address all right?”

  “Where are you?”

  “I had to come in and help Mr. Yearly straighten out some of these new numbers we’ve been getting. The whole thing’s a mess.”

  “Did Dean say why he wanted to meet me all the way up there?”

  “I just take the messages. You know what you’re doing, right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that Dean Carrick, the guy you’re sneaking around with, is my boss. The two of you have a bad break up, and I’m going to have to start looking for another job.”

  “I don’t think that’ll be necessary-”

  “If you were running a company and you’d just broken up with someone, but their brother still worked at the company—more than that, he worked on your floor, and you had to see him at least a few times a day—don’t you think that would get a little weird?”

  “He didn’t say anything?” I asked. “What was his mood like?”

  “His mood?”

  “You know what I mean. How was his tone?”

  “I’ve really got to get back to work, Marce. If you’re going to take the other car, just remember to put gas in it while you’re out. It’s at half a tank, and you know I hate it when my cars get below that.”

  “Do you know the place where he told me to meet him?”

  “Bye, Marce.” He hung up.

  I looked at the clock. It was ten-thirty. I called Dean.

  He answered, “Hey, are you finding the place okay?”

  “I just woke up a few minutes ago, so it’ll be a bit before I can get out there.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you when you get close and meet you here. Let me know if you have any trouble.”

  “Dean, I guess I’d like to know what this means before I drop everything and head up there. If this is the end of our relationship, I’d just as soon not leave the house if it’s all the same to you.”

  “I’ll see you when you get here,” he said and hung up.

  I’d always prided myself on being able to tell with decent accuracy just what mood someone was in by the tone of their voice. I got absolutely nothing from Dean.

  There was nothing to do but get in the shower, get dressed, and put on my makeup. He probably wasn’t going to end things right then and there. There was no reason either of us would need to leave town for that to happen. I was uneasy, though, as I grabbed the keys to what Luke lovingly referred to as his “backup car.”

  The drive took forever. It’s not that far as the crow flies, but between traffic and my overwhelming sense of impending doom, every mile was frustration compounded. When I started seeing the signs for Yonkers, though, I began wishing the drive had been longer. I needed more time, but I didn’t take it. As soon as I pulled into the city, I followed my phone’s directions all the way to a parking lot near the center of town.

  I parked and got out, trying not to make it too obvious just how nervous I was leaving my brother’s $100,000 car out in the open like that. The spot where I’d parked, where Dean had said I should meet him, was in one of the shadier parts of town. I’d never been to this part of the city. Nothing looked like it had been built after 1971, and everyone going down the sidewalk had their eyes firmly set on the ground a few feet in front of them.

  I pulled out my phone discreetly. There were plenty of spots in the city much worse than where I was, but I knew the city. I’d been through Yonkers fewer times than I’d heard the Tyler, the Creator song of the same name. You learn how to deal with people when you get to the city, but that knowledge only seems to apply there. In Yonkers, I was easy prey.

  My phone rang in my hand before I could punch in Dean’s number. I answered it. “Hey, I’m in the parking lot. Where are you?”

  “Do you see the black sedan with the dark tint on all the windows?” he asked.

  I looked around. There were a lot of black sedans with tint on the windows. “Which one is it?”

  “I’m flashing my lights. Get in the passenger’s seat when you’ve found it.”

  “The way you say that makes it sound like you’re not in the car.”

  He chuckled. “Can you see the lights?”

  I looked. Toward the back of the lot, I could see a car flash its lights once, twice, and then stop. I walked over to it. “This is you, right?”

  He hung up the phone.

  As I got closer to the car, I could see Dean sitting behind the wheel. I got in. “Any chance you’re going to tell me what’s going on now?”

  He didn’t say anything. He just started driving.

  For a while, my mind was racing from one improbability to the next. Then, once we’d successfully left the bad neighborhood and made it to a downright frightening one, Dean started pointing to buildings. He’d say, “That’s Mariella’s Pizza,” or “That’s the auto shop where my dirtbag cousin worked when I was a kid.”

  He didn’t go into any more detail at first. It was like he was taking me on a tour of the town the same way he’d take me on a tour of his apartment or condo or floor or however he referred to that massive space at the Sobu Building. After about twenty minutes of driving and pointing out this landmark or that, Dean pulled over to the side of the road and put the car in park, saying, “We’re here.”

  I looked out at the beat-up and seemingly abandoned apartment building outside my window. “Where is here?”

  “This is where I grew up, at least until I was about fifteen,” he answered. “I used to work at Mariella’s. It was always a bit more exciting than it should have been making pizza for customers, but a lot of what happened started because I worked there.”

  “A lot of what happened?”

  He sighed. “I talked to your brother this morning and he told me about how you found out.”

  “Found out what?” I asked.

  “You don’t have to do that. He told me he told you.”

  “He said you had some connection to some families up here, but that it wasn’t what I thought it was.”

  “What did you think it was?”

  “I was hoping you could save me the trouble of guessing.”

  Dean said, “We shouldn’t stay here too long. It’s not safe.” He put the car back in drive and off we went once again. “When I was growing up, there were two kinds of men in this town: made men or men made to starve. I never wanted anything to do with it, but when you grow up where I grew up, you don’t always have the option.”

  “So you joined the mafia?” I asked.

  “Can we please stop calling it that? It makes the whole thing sound like a bad cop drama or something.”

  “What should I call it then?
”

  “I was working at Mariella’s. A friend of mine who’d dropped out of school worked there, too, though we rarely worked together. He was about two years older than me. One night, it was just me and him closing up—which hardly ever happened. We were goofing off and blasting music over the crummy radio our boss put up in the kitchen. Neither of us heard the door open and close.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’d just filled the rolling mop bucket and was pushing it out toward the main floor when I saw them standing at the counter: Three guys in suits, each one of them wearing a brown trench coat. It was like a scene from the movies, only these guys didn’t start out with snark and clever one-liners. At first, they didn’t say anything at all. I’d seen them and they wanted to make sure I knew what that meant.”

  “What did it mean?”

  “My mom would never talk about some of the stuff around town. There were always people breaking into apartments in our building, people getting pickpocketed and mugged just outside.

  “If you would have asked Mom, though, we lived in a long-forgotten wonderland where everything was more than it seemed. I always knew the people to stay away from because she’d stop talking as we passed them. We’d go on at least another half block before she’d jump back in, picking up right where she’d left off. I’d seen the guys who were standing at the counter before. They just stared at me. I think you can guess who they were.”

  “That’s scary.”

  “A little. These guys would never really go out of their way to screw with you unless you’d done something. It wasn’t that they had some ‘pride in the local community’ façade. Usually, they simply didn’t have time to mess with you because they were on their way to mess with someone else a lot harder,” he said. “But there they were staring at me.”

  “What did they want?”

  “They wanted to talk to my friend, the guy I was closing up with that night. He was the evening manager, so I relaxed a bit. Guys who work for that family, they’d hardly ever shake down a business, but they did expect a regular tribute from some of the more successful places in the area. Where I worked, we were always just squeaking by, so I assumed they wanted pizza and everywhere else was closed.

  “So, I told my friend who was out there and that they wanted to see him. His name was Joe. Joe said his big break had finally come, that he’d been talking to some people about maybe joining up with the local guys. Before he went up to the counter, Joe picked up the phone in the office in the back and he called our boss, telling her he quit.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t want to get involved. I didn’t like that they’d seen me, so I just tried to stay in the back, out of view of the front counter. They were so quiet. I don’t even think I heard them move before Joe was making his way out of the office.

  “Back then, Joe was the closest thing I had to an older brother. When he got a job at Mariella’s, he pestered me until I got a job there, too. When I was around, he’d only hit on women if they had a friend about my age. So, as he was passing me on his way to the counter, he grabbed my arm and tried to pull me along with him.”

  “He was trying to get you to join up with them? Why would he do that?”

  “You have to understand, things were a lot worse back then, not just for me and him, but for a lot of people around here. I know you probably think this part of the city is a slum or a shithole, but it’s head and shoulders above what it was when I was growing up. Nobody ever made it out of here, not on their own.

  “When you start from nothing and there’s little or no opportunity around you, you’re in a different world. You see people in their nice houses on TV and you know that’s never going to be you. People around here didn’t go to college. College wasn’t meant for people like me, people who came out of places like this.

  “At the time, Joe thought he was doing the best thing he could do for me. He was trying to set me up with a job that actually paid. It was the only career path in the area at the time that could reliably lift a person out of their poverty.”

  “Yeah, but organized crime? I don’t know, it just doesn’t sound like it’d be worth it in any circumstance.”

  “That’s the difference in our backgrounds. The situation I lived in, a person had to be crazy to turn those people down. Joe led me back to the front, and I didn’t try to fight him. I knew this was where my life was probably headed in the first place.

  “There used to be a library a few blocks from where I lived. It was a run-down place with about half the shelves emptied from a mix of almost no funding and years of theft, but they had a couple of old computers nobody had gotten around to stealing yet.

  “I’d always been interested in computers because they were the only things I could actually put my hands on and feel like I was somewhere else—like I was someone else. I never thought it would take me anywhere, though. Like I said, back then, if you weren’t a made-man, you were begging whether you had a job or not.”

  “So you joined up with them,” I said.

  “Not then, actually. Joe tried to introduce me to the guys, but they wouldn’t talk with me there. Life went on and I didn’t hear from Joe for a long time.

  “For a while, it looked like things might actually start turning around for me. By the time I was getting ready to graduate from high school, I’d started writing my own programs. I’d done really well in school, and I was addicted to coding by then, so I’d even started entertaining dreams of someday moving out of the old neighborhood. It’s funny how it never occurred to me I’d ever leave the city, itself. I mean, it’s not all as rundown and shabby as where we are now. I just happened to pop out in the worst part of town.

  “I’d just gotten an acceptance letter to MIT—something I didn’t even think was possible—when I got a phone call from Joe. He said he’d been with his crew since that night at the pizza shop where I’d last seen him. He said he’d told the guys about me and they’d finally agreed to bring me into the fold.”

  My stomach was churning. “What did you do?”

  “I told him about MIT, about how I’d sold a program to Microsoft, and how I was on my way out of this hellhole once and for all. He sounded disappointed, but he said congratulations. I thought that was the end of the story.”

  “It wasn’t or we wouldn’t be sitting here, would we?”

  “No. About a week later, I was coming home and found Joe waiting out front for me. He told me his crew felt disrespected the way I’d turned them down. I asked Joe what he wanted me to do. I told him I had a chance to actually get out of there and make something of myself for real: no crime, no drugs, no shakedowns. I told him I was on the verge of making something for myself. I told him that I’d started my own programming company, though at that point in time it was made up only of me and the secondhand computer I’d managed to save up for working at the pizzeria.

  “Joe asked how much I was bringing in, and I told him. It wasn’t much, but it was something. He said what I made in a week between coding and burning my fingers on hot ovens, he made in a few hours of light work. He said it wasn’t as dangerous as everyone seemed to think it was. He said his guys were the guys to know in town and that everyone paid homage.”

  “Sounds like he didn’t want you to leave,” I said.

  “I don’t think it was so much about whether I left or not as it was that I wanted to leave without giving him anything in the process. He reminded me how he’d always looked out for me, how even though we weren’t related, he’d always treated me and thought of me like his little brother. He told me that I could still do coding ‘or whatever’ if I joined his crew, that he was just offering me something with better job security. I still told him no.”

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about where this is headed.”

  “He convinced me to put off going to MIT for a year, that if I really wanted to do that, I’d be a lot happier in the long run if I didn’t have to break my back paying for school. All I’d ever
have to do would be make a couple of drops every couple of days and I’d get something under the table.

  “So, for a few months, I took packages from one dead drop and left them at another. I never ran into any of the people who were picking up my deliveries, but I came to know Joe’s ‘crew’ pretty well.

  “Then one day, the phone stopped ringing. I’d made my first full accounting program, and it was starting to look like I wasn’t going to need college to get out anymore, so I wrote it off as an unnecessary expense. I moved out of the building where I grew up, but I lacked the confidence to leave the city.

  “The money had started rolling in, though. I had Joe over one day to show him that I was on my way up and out, and I even offered for him to come with me when I finally did get out of the neighborhood. He told me he’d have to think about it.”

  “That sounds like a pretty good deal for him. What happened?”

  “A week later, the phone started ringing again. I didn’t answer it at first. I knew who was calling. By that point, I wasn’t living alone anymore, and I didn’t want my roommate knowing what I’d done for cash in the past.

  “The phone calls had always been short. They were only ever long enough for the man on the other end of the line to give me two addresses. The first was the pickup, the second, the drop-off point.

  “When I finally answered the phone, though, that’s not what I heard. A man was saying he knew about my business and that he was disappointed I hadn’t come to them for protection. There wasn’t a lot to protect. I never kept money in the apartment, and the computer I was using was hardly something people would risk too much trying to take from me. I didn’t have a storefront, either. All the programming I did, I did at my desk in my room. He was…persistent.”

  “So he was trying to get money from you?”

  “Yeah, and I wasn’t stupid enough to turn him down. You didn’t have to guess what would happen when those guys didn’t get what they wanted and I did not want the kind of trouble they could bring my way, so I started paying them to make sure nothing happened.