Billionaire Mountain Man

by Claire Adams

  Ryder didn’t take offense to my outburst. “Sure, it should’ve been us, but the team’s been struggling for the last two seasons. Management needs to shake things up. Otherwise you’ll never get that ring, my man. None of us will.”

  “Yeah, we have to do something to cut the dead weight. Otherwise, we’re dead in the water.” He and I both knew I was right.

  He nodded absentmindedly, staring through his window at the ocean below. I knew that look. He was working up to something, but he wasn’t ready to say it yet.

  I decided to preempt him. “Speaking of which, I’m thinking of talking to Ralls about restructuring my contract.”

  Richard Ralls, the owner of the Miami Dolphins. The man who owned my ass and Ryder’s. For the moment, anyway.

  “Probably a good idea, bro. You deserve a ring. You’re not going to get it the way the team is now. As much as I hate to admit it, we’re complete shit right now.” Ryder was nothing if not direct.

  “Yeah. Let me talk to Ralls. I’ll let you know what he says.” I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and downed it in one go. I was over at Ryder’s so often, I was as comfortable at his place as I was at my own. So was Harper.

  “If he’s going to listen to anyone, it’s going to be you, James.”

  I had nothing to say to that. It was probably true. Richard Ralls and I had grown close over the last few years.

  “What are you making, anyway?” I asked. My addled brain had only then realized that he was chopping up cubes of God knows what and chucking them into a blender. Usually, Ryder was all about grease for a hangover.

  “Smoothie, I think. The dietitian for the team put me on to it. Something about our health or some shit.” His brow furrowed. “I think I may have fucked it up, though.”

  A quick glance at all the random fruits and vegetables he’d haphazardly butchered and added to the blender confirmed that he had, in fact, fucked it up. “I hear they have recipe books for that kind of shit.”

  “Apparently so, but I’m a football player. I don’t read well.” Ryder wiggled his eyebrows at me, jokingly.

  I rolled my eyes and dragged my hand through my short hair. He had a degree in business for God’s sake, but that never stopped him from hiding behind the stereotype when the urge took him.

  “Oh, ha,” I replied dryly. “I’m sure that an advanced degree in economics is required to read the combinations to add to your smoothie to actually make it fit for human consumption.” I ducked the piece of apple that came flying my way.

  “Everybody’s a fucking critic. What’re you even doing up, anyway? From the sound of things last night, I thought you’d be down for at least a few more hours.”

  “I had to get out of there. I wasn’t feeling the awkward goodbyes.” Ryder was one of the only people in my life that I could be completely honest with. No fear, no favor, no judgment.

  He’d been a godsend once Harper had come along. He may have had a reputation for being the wild one of our group, but he was also fiercely loyal and one hell of a guy to have in your corner.

  “You know, you could have taken those chicks back to your own place.” He glanced in my direction but was too busy concocting his hideous potion to stare at me for too long.

  “You wanted me to drive in the state I was in?” I clutched at my heart in feigned betrayal. “Besides, my bed is mine and mine alone. No girls allowed.”

  “Except for Harper, right? And it’s called Uber, jackass. I think I should start charging you rent for that room. Oh, and the laundry service that keeps needing to sterilize it.” He punched the button on the blender and grinned at me. The grinding noise prompted the ice- pick-wielding assholes in my brain to start digging in again.

  Once the noise from the blender subsided, giggles floated into Ryder’s kitchen from the bottom of the stairwell, followed shortly by footsteps and the appearance of two underwear clad girls stumbling into the room.

  “Ladies,” Ryder boomed, drowning out my groan. “What’s up? James here was just talking about you.”

  The presumably faux blonde laughed. Her laugh sounded like a hyena getting fucked by a hippopotamus. Or maybe it was just the hangover.

  Christ, what the fuck have I done? They were both hot at least, but the way they checked me out, they were clearly stuck in the “deep blue Skye,” as some fans had nicknamed me.

  I hated it. Fucking hated it. I just wanted to play ball. Of course, I had loved it at first, but I was over being star fucked. I mean, fuck me, fine. Please, in fact. I’ve never stopped anyone, but I didn’t do the emotional shit after. There was no “deep blue Skye,” just balls deep Skye.

  “Really? He was talking about us?” The redhead giggled, toying with a lock of flaming hair. Her green eyes sparkled as they ran over me.

  Yup, I was definitely a prize. A story she could tell her girlfriends over sushi. Or margaritas. Or whatever the fuck girls did to gossip.

  Fun times.

  That was why I avoided morning-afters. After the “oh, baby” and the “fuck yeah, baby,” there was a level of expectation I didn’t want to meet. I only had room for one girl in my life, and the position was already filled.

  “Hells yeah, he was.” Ryder smirked, pointedly holding my eyes. “He was just saying how he’d love to take you out to breakfast.”

  Goddamn soul-sucking motherfucker. I needed better taste in friends. Or just new friends altogether.

  Maybe I should have taken up basketball. I was well over six feet. I could’ve made it work. Or maybe I should’ve taken up a sport that required no teammates whatsoever. Fencing or snowboarding. Anything seemed like a better option than the one I was stuck with, thanks to my fucking teammate.

  “Oh,” the blonde exclaimed, a slight Southern drawl evident in her accent as she continued. “Breakfast with the James Skye. Whoever would’ve thought? We’d love to. Just give us a minute to get changed, and we’ll be right down.”

  The girls headed upstairs. I grimaced. Ryder doubled over laughing.

  “Good luck, man.” He shot me his shit-eating grin and stumbled back to his bedroom. No doubt he was going back to sleep.

  “Fuck you, asshole,” I growled. I grabbed my leather jacket and stalked out the door before they’d even made it upstairs. I didn’t need that shit. I needed to get to Harper.

  Chapter Two

  Gabrielle

  “There is a special place reserved in hell for whoever came up with all these stupid ass principles for the validity of a damn contract,” Heather groaned from what used to be her dining room table.

  We hadn’t been able to see the table in weeks, let alone eat at it. It was covered with piles of textbooks, notes, mind maps, and files. Scraps of paper lay strewn all over the floor of her usually neat apartment, and diagrams on everything from business entities to wills and estates covered the walls.

  Ah, the life of a law school graduate. After three years of busting ass in school, we figured we’d be ready for the dreaded bar exam. It had taken me one practice exam to realize I didn’t know a damn thing. Those years of law school seemed like a waste of time now. What was the point if I still had to study other test prep materials to pass this test? Why did I go $100,000 in debt if school didn’t prepare me to get my license?

  “You could always skip it with me,” I said.

  Heather’s answering sigh followed me all the way to her kitchen, which was not all that far away in her tiny apartment. “No, I can’t. And you shouldn’t be skipping it either.” She huffed, finally looking up at me.

  I’d been trying to talk to her for the last half hour, but she’d quite obviously been so caught up in her studies that she hadn’t heard a word I’d been saying.

  I rummaged around her kitchen, searching for two clean mugs. In the end, I gave up and just washed a couple.

  “Maybe not, but maybe I like being a rebel without a cause.” I could feel her eyes on me, silently questioning.

  I fixed our coffee the way we’d been taking it since we
met back when I was in my freshman year of undergrad. Heather, a senior at the time, had been a tutor but quickly became my best friend.

  I placed her steaming mug on top of a pile of discarded notes, the summaries before the final set. Then I cleared a space on her couch, which masqueraded as a pile of dirty laundry. I wriggled my nose. This was getting ridiculous. It would be time for an intervention soon.

  Heather looked me over for a long moment, her sharp brown eyes rimmed with red. Sleep deprivation was an old friend of ours. “I know why you don’t want to take the bar. I just think you should take it anyway. Once you pass it, no one can ever take it away from you. It doesn’t mean that you have to start practicing right away.”

  “That’s the thing, though. Why take it at all if I never want to practice? This was all my father’s dream. Not mine. It’s not my fault he’s trying to live vicariously through me. I’m only 24. I just want to be young, for once. Live my life on my own terms and figure out what I actually want to do with it. If that really is taking the bar, I can take it then.”

  I could tell she thought it was a shitty argument, but it happened to be completely true. School had always come easy for me. My father recognized that early on and started pushing me toward law school and the bar before I’d had the chance to explore any other options.

  He started prepping me right away. As soon as I started preschool. By the time I was getting ready to start 6th grade, I tested out and was bumped up two years. They wanted to move me directly on to high school, but my father thought I needed some sort of social life. He didn’t want me to be too young in high school. Then, my senior year of high school was almost fully spent on a college campus. I had almost a full year’s worth of credits when I actually started college.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Heather rolled her eyes good-naturedly and pulled out the pencil that had been holding her hair in a bun, shaking her long locks free. “You could take it later, but then you wouldn’t be taking it with me.”

  Despite her obvious exhaustion, she started to look more like herself as the study haze cleared from her eyes. It encouraged me to keep the conversation going. Clearly, she needed a break.

  “I know,” I said. “It would suck to have to study for it by myself. I would have to turn my own apartment into a hermit’s nest, like you have.”

  That earned me a chuckle. Her eyes scanned the apartment as if seeing it for the first time, and she shuddered a little. Heather had come from no money, and she’d had to work hard for everything she had.

  Understandably, she took pride in her achievements and in being able to afford an apartment in the nicer part of town, even if it was tiny. She displayed that pride by keeping her apartment, and herself, spotless and in great shape. When she wasn’t prepping for the bar, anyway.

  “Let’s get one thing clear,” she said. “You would never have to study this hard. Not all of us are prodigies who just understand everything,” she snapped her fingers for emphasis, “like that. Secondly, maybe if you were taking it with me, you could do the cleaning while I studied.”

  “I’m flattered that you think that I can clean as well as I can study. For the record, I’m awesome at Febrezing the shit out of stuff. But sadly, that’s where my talent ends.”

  “Good to know there are a few things I’m still better at than you,” she teased. “Maybe not all of us are ready and able to take the bar at 24, but at least I can do my own laundry.”

  I gestured at the monstrous pile of dirty clothes I’d swept from the couch and raised an eyebrow. “Is that a fact? You could’ve fooled me.”

  She had the good sense to look contrite. For a second, anyway. Then she flipped me off with a smirk. “It is a fact. If I wasn’t studying all the damn time, or if, you know, I had my study buddy with me, I might have time to get to it.”

  I sighed. I’d let her down when I told her I didn’t plan on taking the bar with her anymore. Our friendship had surprised people at first, given that Heather was four years older than I was, but she got me. And I got her.

  “Just because I’m not writing notes with you doesn’t mean we can’t still do our thing.” I pulled her mind map for contract law closer. I could still argue theory with Heather until we both understood it. It was fun for me without the added pressure of taking the actual exam. “So, what’s got you damning the contractual founding fathers to a special place in hell?”

  “I’m struggling with the difference between detrimental reliance and promissory estoppel.” Her brow knitted, and her fingers fidgeted with the pencil she’d pulled from her thick chocolate-colored hair. She was striking, even now, looking like a raccoon startled from its nest with her mascara smudged under her emerald eyes.

  She could have easily been a model, but according to her, she lacked a taste for rabbit food and was unwilling to give up the tons of sugar we took in our coffee.

  Always coffee. Strong, black, and sweet. It was one of the first things we’d bonded over.

  “I think I remember that,” I said. “Okay, imagine you’ve been asked on a date.”

  I continued to explain the distinctions between the two concepts. It didn’t take long before the light was back in Heather’s eyes, and she nodded enthusiastically as the principles she had been struggling with sank in. Heather was smart. She just doubted herself sometimes. As a tutor, she hated asking for help before we met, but like I said, we just got each other.

  “You’re a genius!” she exclaimed. She’d just gotten nine out of ten questions right on the practice problems she’d been working on.

  Our hands clapped together in a high-five, and I grinned at her. “Nah, I didn’t just score a 90. I’d say you were good to go.”

  “On contracts, maybe. The rest, I’m not so sure about.” Heather paused and took a deep breath. I barely suppressed a sigh. I knew where this was going. “You know, it might be your father’s dream, but you’re really good at this. You would be a great attorney.”

  “I’m good at studying law, not practicing it. There’s a huge difference.” Even if I did take the bar eventually, there was no guarantee I’d be a good attorney. I’d probably suck.

  I didn’t have the driven, over-the-top, alpha personality that most lawyers have. In other words, I wasn’t an asshole. As an attorney, being an asshole was an asset. That was who you wanted on your side when push came to shove in the courtroom or in settlement negotiations. There was an old saying in the legal community: everyone hates lawyers until they need one.

  But that just wasn’t me.

  “Speaking of your beloved father,” Heather said softly, “did you watch the Super Bowl last night?”

  My face fell. I hated stupid football. So much. “Super Bowl, Shmuper Bowl. I hate football. You know that.”

  “Have you spoken to him about all of this? Not taking the bar?” Heather was hesitant but persistent. She was not-so-secretly hoping my father would change my mind.

  Too bad my father and I had never seen eye to eye on this issue. “Nope. His precious team has been dominating his time, as always.”

  “You have to tell him at some point, though.”

  She was right, of course. My father wasn’t going to be happy. It wasn’t a conversation I looked forward to having.

  “I know, and I will,” I said. “When the time is right.” Which might be, you know, when hell froze over, and football players started falling through the icy cracks. Maybe then my dad would be willing to listen to me.

  “Wouldn’t that be now?” The season was over. The Super Bowl had come and gone. If ever there was a time to capture Richard Ralls’s attention, it would be now.

  Heather’s brow furrowed. Whatever she was about to say, it was difficult. “It’s not easy for you, I know. He puts a lot of pressure on you, but he loves you enough to do it. Always remember that.”

  I knew that talking about parents was painful for her. Her folks had never really been role models, but that didn’t make my dad any better. “Yeah, sure. He loves me so much. I’m prior
ity number one. No, make that two. Right after his beloved fucking Dolphins. Or no, wait, how many football players are there on his team? I’m the number after that.”

  Her eyes softened. She’d been through a lot for only being 28, but it gave her insight that I didn’t always understand. “He owns the team, babe. They’re his job. You’re his daughter.”

  “I am. I don’t care about his damn team, though. He doesn’t care about what I want. Being his daughter doesn’t seem to make much of a difference in this equation.” In the battle between myself and his team, there was never a question as to who would win.

  Yay for me. I refused to even think about it. I wasn’t about to start whining about my father’s approval, or lack thereof.

  My phone chose that opportune time to ring. It was my father’s ringtone. Under Pressure by Queen. It was programmed for his cell, his office, and his assistant. I looked at the screen to see it was his assistant’s number calling me.

  No surprise there. I didn’t even know why I had his personal numbers anymore. It wasn’t like he ever called me himself.

  “Speak of the devil,” I muttered.

  “Answer it, Gabbi. It’s just going to eat at you later if you don’t.” Heather was buried in her notes again, but she shot a concerned glance at me.

  I nodded and answered the phone. As it turned out, my father could still surprise me. Maybe hell is freezing over, after all, I thought as I heard his voice on the other end of the line.

  “Gabrielle? Hello? Are you there?” He sounded like he had lifted the phone from his ear to look at it. Like he would be able to see if I was there or not.

  “Hey, Dad. I’m here. I’m just surprised to hear from. That’s all.”

  He didn’t skip so much as a beat. “I got your message that you wanted to talk. I’ll be available on Wednesday morning at 8. I’ll see you then?” It was more of a demand than a request.