The Billionaire's Gamble

by Penny Wylder

  Chapter 1

  I'm losing my mind. That's the only thought that sears through my brain as I crouch on the ratty, threadbare couch, staring at the website open on my ancient laptop. The screen is cracked in one corner, but unfortunately the distorted pixelation hasn't gotten bad enough to hide the hideous pink-and-gold banner at the top of the page.

  Sugar Babies. The internet's notorious one-stop-shop for rich guys looking for hot young things, and vice versa. Now known for something else, too. A little side business that started trending among the profiles on this site.

  This is what I have sunk to. Listening to Erin's utterly insane suggestions.

  Hell, she hadn't even meant this one seriously—and Erin once in all seriousness suggested that I try selling my kidney, because she'd heard you only really need one, and the black market value was through the roof.

  Her voice from the night before still echoes in my head. "You know there's a website where you can sell your virginity? I read this HuffPo article—one girl made two million dollars. Can you believe that? For one night." She'd laughed, and paused to toss back another healthy gulp from the water bottle-turned-wine flask she'd taken to carrying on nights out (because San Fran isn't like living in the backwaters of NoCal, and the bartenders always card). "I always learn about this shit like, four years too late, y'know?" She'd smirked around the lip of the bottle. "Hell, I bet even the kind of creep who'd buy me would've been better than fucking Jason McSwindle."

  I'd raised an eyebrow, grinning back at her. "Don't you mean Jason McThimble?"

  "Sure as hell felt like it!" she'd crowed, and then we toasted to bad first times and terrible dates and shitty kissers, and the whole conversation derailed. I'm sure by now, as she sleeps off her post-party hangover in the closet she rents (it literally used to be a walk-in closet, until our landlord Pano punched a hole in the wall, stuck a window pane into it, and called this a two-bedroom instead), she's already forgotten all about virgins-for-sale.

  But why would she remember? Why would she even think it was relevant to tell me? As far as Erin, my best friend since sophomore year of high school, knows, I lost my V-card to Aaron Zimmerman behind the bleachers after senior prom.

  I never had the heart to tell her the truth. That we got as far as his hand up my shirt and his somehow thicker-than-usual tongue down my throat and the hardwood gym floor absolutely killing my ass, not to mention a horrible cramp in my side from dancing my heart out with the girls earlier, when I asked him to stop. He was a total gentleman about it, which made me feel bad about being completely disinterested in banging him. I wasn't that naïve—I knew my first time would probably suck. I just wanted it to be a little less . . . Well. High school.

  But Erin was so damn excited that I'd "finally joined the deflowered club," I didn't have the heart to admit nothing actually went down.

  And now it's too late. Now I'm a nineteen-year-old virgin, living in Sin City as my grandmother calls it, and I'm too shy to even flirt back when a cute guy chats me up at work because I feel like it's written all over my forehead.

  Never been fucked.

  Virgin for life.

  I first clicked open this website because, frankly, while Erin was exaggerating about some girl making 2 million dollars on here, she wasn't exaggerating by much. And God knows I need the money.

  But the longer I stare at this homepage, the crazier I feel, because I'm starting to think it might be a good idea for more than just the cold hard cash.

  I mean, yes, 99% of me wants the money. But that little 1% in the back of my mind is thinking, I could rid myself of this brand for good. I could be a normal 19-year-old again.

  Not to mention I could finally satisfy my raging hormones. It’s not for lack of desire that I’ve never gone to fourth base. I’ve got a hardcore imagination and a serious relationship with my vibrator, that’s for sure. Finally stripping down with a real guy and letting him take control, touch me wherever he wants, position me any way he likes, and then thrusting his hot, thick dick inside me . . .

  Shit. Am I actually getting turned on by the idea of selling myself?

  Shy and paranoid as always, I shoot another quick glance at Erin's door. But it's still closed, and through the thin wood, I can hear the vague rhythm of her snoring.

  "You're just looking, Bonnie," I murmur under my breath. "You aren't committing to anything."

  I click through a couple of sample profiles to reassure myself. There are some hot guys on here—unless the samples are totally imaginary people. Which I guess is possible. But damn, if the real guys look anything like the blond hunk of half-naked on the first page, I could totally be down with letting him fuck me senseless.

  Still, hotties or not, it feels like taking a running leap into an ice-cold pool when I click the little button next to the header that says Create Account. Pretend it's a regular dating profile, I command myself. After all, I've written one of those before. Erin practically forced me at gunpoint to make a Tindr account when we first moved here together.

  "Just you and me conquering the world, girl,” she’d declared. “And taking advantage of all the boys in it while we’re at it."

  Erin was a lot closer to world-domination than me—she was in her sophomore year at Fashion Institute of Design now, one of the top colleges for design and merchandising in the country, and well on her way toward a design degree that would make her bucketloads of money as soon as she graduated (albeit with a crazy amount of loan debt).

  Me? I was just struggling to make ends meet, waiting tables in every spare minute I could find between studying my ass off for my nursing degree. A degree that was looking farther away by the minute, now that I had to delay a semester in the face of everything with Gram . . .

  Anyway, at Erin’s behest I’d created the damn Tindr profile, and then I just solved my embarrassment about it by deleting the app as soon as Erin looked the other way.

  But this site's questionnaire is a lot harder to complete. For one thing, it's so long. And for another, there are the questions themselves.

  What's your deepest, darkest fantasy?

  I pause, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. I think about my go-to daydream. A handsome stranger shooting me come-hither eyes at the bar. We barely know each other, but he crosses the room anyway, grabs me by the hand and pulls me into the restroom. Before I can blink, we’re making out, hot and heavy. His hands are all over me, under my shirt, down my jeans. Circling my nipples, then pinching just hard enough to make me gasp, and slipping a thick finger into my soaking pussy at the same time. He shoves me against the wall, pins me there and pushes my skirt above my hips. I can’t even see him, but I can feel his thick, fat cock rubbing all over my ass, teasing between my cheeks, before he finally thrusts deep inside me and starts to fuck me, hard and fast.

  I swallow hard. My hand strays toward the hem of my jeans. My panties feel damp already and I’m only on the first damn question. Shit.

  I take a deep breath. Somewhere out there, a guy is going to read this answer. A few guys, probably. But the thought of my future V-card owner reading this fantasy is what spurs me to be honest. Because the bathroom fantasy is only one of my usual imaginary pit-stops when I whip out the vibrator. I’ve got others, like that same mysterious guy bending me over a desk, or throwing me across a bed and repositioning my body however he wants. So I summarize.

  I fantasize about a man taking control and training me in the bedroom. Or other rooms, I add before I hit enter.

  Describe your sex life in one sentence.

  Well, if I'm going for the virginity thing, I guess honesty is the best policy. Nonexistent, I type. Okay, it said sentence, but brevity is the soul of wit, right? Unless my vibrator counts, I add.

  If you could have one wish granted, what would it be?

  That one, at least, is easy. I wish Gram were healthy.

  But you can't exactly talk about real things on a website designed for selling yourself to the highest bidder. I purse my lips and s
tare at the page header again.

  Sugar Babies: All that you desire, ripe for the taking.

  I crack my knuckles. Right. I'm a smart woman. I aced my first two semesters of nursing school while holding down a full-time job. I’m surrounded by my bestie’s whip-smart feminist badass friends on a daily basis. I can churn out academic essays almost as quickly as I can calculate a patient’s BP. I can handle one silly website questionnaire.

  I wish I understood my desires.

  Hmm. Probably not the sexiest thing I could put, admittedly. But it seems like the right combination of honesty, insecurity, and maybe a hint at hidden depths. Plus, it’s true. I don’t always know why things turn me on. Why the idea of a guy fucking me doggy style with my face buried in a pillow, or shoving his cock down my throat until I gasp for air makes me wet. I want to try those things, but I’m a little afraid to admit it.

  I take another long breath. Okay, maybe a few breaths. And a cold shower.

  Finally, I reach the free remarks section, where you can write a couple of sentences about yourself. By now, the pitch is already lined up in my brain, half stolen from the articles I read about other girls doing this themselves, and half dredged up from those aforementioned depths.

  I am nineteen years old, I write, and I’m a virgin. I’m looking for the right man to claim my virginity, but only if the price is right . . . After all, this cherry is a one-time only deal.

  I cringe at the last sentence, not least because it’s something my grandmother once said to me (she’s always been a little more-frank-than-feels-comfortable when it comes to discussing the birds and the bees). But hey, honesty and all that.

  Besides, I tell myself as I click through the last steps of setting up my profile, adding a few of the cute selfies I have saved from my social media pages, along with a couple of full body pics of me dancing at a ballroom swing event and playing pool in Erin’s dorm rec hall. It’s not like this is going to actually lead anywhere. This is ridiculous. Those stories about other girls doing this have to be exaggerated. And even if a couple people did manage to get bidders on a site like this, nobody on here is going to notice me. There’s got to be about a zillion hot ladies on here, all ripe for the picking.

  I take a second to swap out the pool hall pic for a better angle—one where my ass sticks out at just the right angle as I bend over to take a shot. Hey, I might be a virgin, but I know my assets. Then I hit post, and wait for the load screen to pop up.

  Your profile has been created.

  “Bonnie?”

  I practically jump out of my skin, snapping my laptop shut. But it’s only Erin, yawning and tugging her closet-turned-bedroom door open. She’s still wearing her miniskirt from last night, and a top that looks like it should be consigned to the trash by now, seeing as how it’s more holes than fabric.

  She blinks at me through raccoon-y eyes, and I hop off the holey couch. “Coffee?” I offer before she can ask what I was doing, because I can already see her eyes darting from my guilty, nervous expression to the closed laptop case and back.

  That does the trick, luckily. “Oh hell yes,” she manages before another yawn overtakes her.

  I set the water on to boil and pull out the teapot we’ve been using as a makeshift French press. “Rough night?”

  “You don’t know the half of it.” But she’s grinning, even as she winces and eases herself onto the barstool in front of our kitchen counter, the only thing close to a table or eating space in our little 400-square-foot pad. “Remember Chaz?”

  “The Art Institute’s only football jock?” I snort. “How could I forget. I’m pretty sure he singlehandedly hit on every single girl at the Halloween party last weekend.”

  “Yeah, well . . .” Erin bites her lower lip, but fails to hide the sly grin that’s started to emerge.

  “Oh my god,” I groan as I fish through the knee-high fridge for cream. “Tell me you didn’t hook up with him.”

  She bats her eyelashes. “Okay. I didn’t hook up with him,” she says, laying hard on the didn’t part of the sentence.

  “Erin!”

  “What? You’ve got to admit, player or not, he’s a hottie.”

  “Sure, he’s ripped and he has that whole . . .” I gesture at my face. “Easter Island thing going for him, but—”

  “That whole what?” Erin bursts out laughing.

  “You know, like his face is chiseled. And probably everything else, too.” I smirk. “But his head is probably also made of stone.”

  “He goes to the Art Institute, it’s not like he’s a complete meathead—”

  “You heard him at the party arguing with MaryAnn that having 5% alcohol by volume meant beer was stronger than vodka because the latter is 'only 40 proof,' right?” I raise an eyebrow.

  “He was joking,” Erin replies, albeit in an uncertain tone. “Besides, who cares if he’s a math whiz? He knows his calculus, if you know what I mean.” She wiggles her butt in the chair, and I groan audibly as I pour the now-boiling water into our not-really-a-coffee-press.

  “If you stop punning, I’ll stop making fun of you for banging the class musclebrain.”

  “Brains are muscles, Ms. I’m A Nurse,” Erin grumbles. But she accepts the mug I pass her and bows her head. “But fine, no more puns. It’s too early for braining anyway.”

  I glance at the clock over our two-burner stovetop. “It’s almost 3pm.”

  “Exactly. Early.” She yawns again, and pours herself a sip of coffee, even though it hasn’t finished brewing completely. “Hey, isn’t it Tuesday?” she adds a moment later, and my insides turn to ice.

  “Oh, shit.” How could I forget? I leap into action, racing across our living room to my own closet-slash-bedroom. It barely fits my little twin bed, and there’s not so much a closet as there is an open hole in the wall where I stuck a clothes rack I stole from a Macy’s dumpster. I yank my work uniform down—black skirt and black top, low-cut as per the manager’s request, of freaking course.

  “Relax,” Erin calls, “The Bart is running fine.”

  Knowing her, she’s got the schedule up on her phone right now, double-checking for me. But that’s not the problem. I completely forgot that I promised Raul I’d cover his early shift today. Which means that instead of arriving at 5pm as per usual, I’m due at Big Daddy’s in less than 45 minutes.

  Luckily, I have more than a little practice getting ready on the fly. I throw on my 'Got Milk?' shirt and skirt, grab my apron from the door and stuff it into my purse at the same time that I balance on one leg to tug on my sleek black flats.

  “Fill me in on the meathead later?” I yell as I sail toward the front door.

  “Oh trust me, you’re gonna love the rest of the story,” Erin calls back, just before I slam the apartment door between us.

  It takes me ten minutes to jog to the subway, because we have to live way off the main drag to afford our place. Lucky for me, though, Erin is right—the Bart isn’t delayed today, so I manage to sail into the restaurant with a minute to spare.

  Pete, our slightly-less-creepy-than-the-owner-but-still-creepy-enough manager lurks in the window, scanning passersby like he’s waiting for someone. When I jog past, his eyes light on me, and I realize he’s watching for me.

  “I’m on time,” I say as I breeze past him toward the stockroom, where I can log into our time system. “Don’t even try to convince me I’m not.”

  “Cutting it a little fine, huh Scrabble?”

  I grimace at the nickname. Pete decided on my first day that my last name, Taylor, was too hard to pronounce. He took it on himself to nickname me after “a bad hand of Scrabble.”

  “What does it matter? I’m here; that’s what counts.”

  “Being early shows determination,” he counters. “It shows your dedication to this job; it tells me that you care.”

  Frankly, there’s not another person in this diner who cares more than me, if that’s our definition. Raul is pretty reliable, but most everyone else breezes i
n and out when they please. Aside from Raul, Pete, our owner and me, nobody else has lasted more than six months straight in this place.

  But me, I’m going on two years now. “Gimme a break, Pete,” I groan as I punch in my employee code and verify the timestamp.

  “I will not.” He crosses his arms, and I fight an inward grimace. I’ve touched another of his sore spots. Dammit. Me and my carelessness today. Why am I so distracted?

  Unbidden, my mind drifts back to that website. To the profile I created, and the wish I let loose into the world. I can’t stop thinking about the guys reading it right now. I imagine one of them getting hard, looking at my photos, thinking about doing all the dirty things I dream about to me . . .

  But is this really how I want to lose my V-card, much overdue though it is? To some random stranger? Some stranger who pays me for it?

  There is something strangely hot about that. It’s so anonymous, so . . . businesslike. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am style. And a guy who will buy a girl’s virginity from a site like Sugar Babies won’t hesitate to be as rough with me as I want him to.

  Is that even legal? I also wonder, a little too late now. And if so, does it make me any better than, well, a common . . .

  Pete is still talking. I zone back in.

  “—body is going to cut you slack. If you don’t discipline yourself, you open yourself up to let other people do it for you. That’s what I’m trying to teach you here. All of you,” he clarifies, though from the way he glares down his nose at me, you’d think he meant only me, specifically.

  I lift my chin a little, defiant. “I’m here on time, Pete. That’s all you need to know about my personal life, thanks.”

  His mouth drops a little—that might be the first time in almost two years of working here that I’ve ever dared to speak back after one of his holier-than-thou sermons. It’ll only make the rest of the night worse, I know—he’ll be doubly determined to make me “respect” him now. But for the moment, I revel in my one small victory, and brush past him out of the stockroom to take my place on the floor.