Sleeping with a Billionaire - Complete Series (An Alpha Billionaire Romance Love Story)

by Nella Tyler

  “Yes, that is great.”

  When I hung up the phone, I knew I had just thrown Natasha for a loop. In all our years working together I had never actually called in sick. One time, I had been very ill and came to work and then left early. But never had I totally cancelled a whole day. In the world of the stock market, people didn’t really take days off. If the market was open, I was at work.

  Driving my rental car didn’t feel normal to me. The last time I drove with Rebecca was the only time I had driven in several years. Living in New York, there just was no need for it.

  I was so thankful to have MapQuest on my phone. I really didn’t know how people were able to get anywhere without the directions from their phones. I relied on them within the city when I walked to new restaurants; I certainly needed the maps guidance in finding where the warehouse was.

  The warehouse was located in Cooperstown, New York. Well actually just about ten miles south of there in the middle of nowhere. It took me a long time driving around before I actually found the address since it was located a long ways into the woods.

  It didn’t look like a place you would want your warehouse to be.

  The road was gravel and wasn’t suitable for semi-trucks. To get to the warehouse, you had to drive on a winding road that seemed pretty impossible for big trucks to navigate in the winter. Something was fishy, I felt it right away.

  As I pulled up to the address there was a fence around the warehouse. Sometimes warehouses had fences, so that wasn’t particularly worrisome. The thing that caught me off guard was the armed security guard who came out to my vehicle when I pulled up. Why would you need an armed security guard at a clothing warehouse?

  “This is private property, sir; I’m going to need you to turn around.”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sorry. I’m lost. Can you tell me where the baseball hall of fame is?”

  Again, totally out of the ordinary. A normal warehouse would ask someone if they could help them. Perhaps ask if I was there to see someone specific or at least check my driver’s license. This guy knew I wasn’t supposed to be there and made sure I knew it as well.

  “It’s about ten miles north,” the man said as he pointed and then went back into his small building.

  I turned the car around and drove down the road, but I wasn’t about to leave. I knew for a fact that something was going on in there. Something that certainly didn’t have anything to do with a new fashion clothing line.

  It took me about thirty minutes of driving around before I found a dirt road that ran parallel to the warehouse. I pulled off to the side of the road and made my way through the woods toward the building.

  I moved slowly and tried not to make any noise as I walked through the forest. Unfortunately, a forest is rather noisy when you have sticks everywhere and have to try and walk over them. I wasn’t use to being in the woods and I certainly wasn’t comfortable with trying to sneak into a warehouse that had an armed guard. But I was convinced that the information I needed was inside the warehouse. I had to get in. I had to help Alicia and try and save her company from going on. I knew that another tragedy with his company would have my organization seeing red. We wouldn’t be able to make much money at all and most of our stick holdings would be decreasing at rapid numbers. I would lose a lot of clients, and money.

  Luckily I had put on tennis shoes and jeans and wasn’t wearing one of my tailored suits. It took about twenty minutes of walking through the thick brush before I found the perfect spot to observe the warehouse. Surprisingly, there were only two cars in the entire area around the building..

  I sat in the bushes and watched the building for awhile. No one seemed to go inside or come outside. It wasn’t a typical warehouse and I was sure of that. But I had no idea what else could be going on inside of there.

  I was about to leave when I saw a man come out of the building and get into his car. Shortly after the first man left, a second one also left. Since I had watched the building for several hours I knew there was only the one security guard at the front. Well, that was assuming there wasn’t any inside, but since there were no other cars, I hoped that meant there were no other men in there.

  My mind had been made up and I wanted to see inside the building. I had driven way too far to just look at the outside and not actually go into the building. I walked around the perimeter to see if there were any areas where I could get inside the gate. To my surprise, the actual security around the building wasn’t that great. The gate was stretched out and broken in several areas and I even noticed a back door that looked like it wasn’t all the way shut.

  Slowly, I slid through an opening in the fence and made my way to the open door. I tried to stay as quiet as I could and hoped that the armed security guard was only located at the front gate and there were none inside the building. I certainly wasn’t prepared to deal with an armed officer.

  I pulled the door opened and walked slowly inside the building. I had expected it to be filled with boxes or other warehouse type things, but instead I found an empty building. The entire middle of the building was empty with just a few boxes around. There were offices along one wall on the top and bottom of the building, but they were all dark.

  There didn’t seem to be any reason to have security at this building at all. Even if there were people who worked there during the day, why have an armed security guard at the front gate?

  I needed to investigate more. I hadn’t come all the way out to the middle of New York just to find a little information, I needed all of it. Investigating certainly wasn’t my thing. I couldn’t believe that I was even out there. I was the guy who didn’t want to do recreational sports because I would get dirty. Climbing around an old warehouse was way out of my comfort zone.

  I decided to start at the top of the warehouse and look through those offices first. There was enough light coming from the main room for me to be able to see into each of the rooms. I went slowly and kept an eye out for the security guard. The last thing I needed was him coming into the warehouse and shooting me.

  Although the security guard didn’t look all that tough, the fact that he was carrying a gun made him immediately scary. It was also scary because he looked young enough to not understand the consequences of shooting someone. Young and dumb was not something I wanted to go up against.

  The first two rooms were totally empty, but when I got to the second room, I noticed a stack of boxes that looked very similar to the ones I had seen at the new offices of ALL Warren Clothing. I really couldn’t tell if they were the same boxes or not because I hadn’t had enough time to go through them at the office.

  I decided it was the best time to try and find the information we needed on the company. I quickly flipped through the boxes to find the payroll box and tried to find the most recent one. It looked like the most recent was about a year old, but I grabbed it. There was no place to make a copy of it so I just folded it up and put it into my pocket.

  I spent another ten minutes flipping through the boxes to see if I could find anything else that looked like I needed it. Unfortunately, nothing else caught my eye so I continued on to the next office. There was a desk in the office that looked like it was occupied during the day, probably by one of the men who had left earlier. Nothing seemed too unusual except that the desk and the file cabinet behind it were all locked.

  There was a noise downstairs.

  I froze and then looked out over the ledge to see what was going on. The security officer appeared to be making his rounds. I went and hid under the desk and hoped he wouldn’t find me. My heart pounded so loud I was sure he could hear me. My breath was rapid and I tried everything to get it under control.

  I wasn’t cut out for the Mission Impossible stuff. I was a stock broker; I needed to get out of there and get back to what I knew. My heart continued to pound out of control as I waited for it to be totally clear.

  I probably waited a lot longer than I needed to under the desk, but I had to be sure the guard was gone. Aft
er five minutes of not hearing anything, I crawled out from the desk and made my way down the stairs. I wanted to just leave, but something called me toward the downstairs offices and I decided I should at least take a look before I left.

  When I walked into the first office my mouth dropped open. There was a stack of money on a table and a dollar counting machine next to it. I wanted to touch it. My instant urge was to grab it all up and carry it out of the building with me. But I didn’t want to leave any clues that someone had been in the building.

  There were two large duffle bags under the table that I needed to see inside. I wrapped my fingers inside of my shirt and unzipped one of the bags. Sure enough, it was filled with cash as well. I didn’t know how much was there, but it was all in twenty dollar bills so I assumed there was a lot of money between the two bags and the money on the table.

  Slowly, I left that room and moved onto the next one. It had a desk similar to the one upstairs but no file cabinet. In the third room there was a huge safe that I didn’t try to open.

  I had seen enough and was afraid the security guard was going to come through again soon, so I made my way back to the side door. I crawled through the fence and hurried through the woods to my car. I didn’t stop to take a break and I didn’t look back at all. My adrenaline rushed through my veins as I sped down the dirt road and made my way back toward the city.

  I didn’t know what all I had seen yet. I did know that there was not a fully stocked warehouse in New York. I wanted to called Alicia and ask her about what I had found. I was angry. Mostly because I felt lied to about the type of person she was, but also because I still deep down wanted to believe that she didn’t know about that warehouse and what was going on.

  My logical side knew that Alicia had to of known what was going on. She couldn’t be the CEO of the company with all these people reporting back to her and she wasn’t aware that there was a fake warehouse.

  My mind raced all the way back into the city. I zoned out as I drove and really needed to talk to someone about everything that I had found. My first instinct was to call Rebecca, but since I now had a bandage on my hand where she had bitten me I decided I needed to enlist Mike to help me instead.

  It was too late to get him to help that night though, so I returned my car and headed home. As I walked past Edwards a small urge pulled me to go inside, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to deal with anymore women. I just wanted to sleep.

  Chapter 31

  For the first night in many, I finally got a good night sleep. I was exhausted by the last few days and the sleep was so appreciated. The adrenaline rush from the warehouse had worn off and my body was finally able to slip off into dream land without the need to worry all night long. My anxiety over all the events that were going on was finally beat by exhaustion.

  Typically the only time I went days without sleep was when I lost money on stocks. I had never been so consumed by researching a company, or by its CEO, as I was with ALL Warren. If the CEO had not been Alicia, I likely wouldn’t have invested in the company at all and instead would have just ignored the IPO all together.

  I wasn’t the kind of guy that would waste my time on a company that didn’t look good. I certainly wasn’t use to putting the kind of effort into something like I had been doing with Alicia. This was all out of my comfort zone.

  Alicia was the only reason I had gotten involved so far into the company. Now that I was in so deep, I needed to see if Alicia was part of it or not. I still held out hope that she had nothing to do with any of the illegal stuff that was obviously going on. Although, that hope was getting dimmer and dimmer the more information I found.

  I decided to call Mike before I got to work and had him meet me over at the gym. I needed a workout and so did he. Mike never worked out unless I specifically called him or his wife forced him to go on a bike ride.

  I liked having someone to work out with, well someone like Mike to workout with. He was quiet and we could just workout without the constant need to talk during the workout. I wasn’t the type of person who enjoyed idle chit chat. My life was just too busy for it and I didn’t see the need to waste my energy on talking if there was no purpose of it.

  As Mike and I ran on the treadmills, I explain to him everything that I had seen at the warehouse. He wasn’t shocked at all. He was quiet and let me finish telling the story before he started to judge me.

  “I knew something was up with that company, Evan. You’re just too close, you couldn’t see it.”

  “You’re right. I am close and that’s why I need to figure out how much Alicia knows about this all. I care about her. I don’t want her to be in trouble when this all comes out.”

  “Evan, she knows about it. There is no way she is the CEO of the company and she doesn’t know about all this that is going on. Get your head out of your ass.”

  “Mike, I don’t know if she knows about it or not. This Bill guy could really be pulling the wool over her eyes.”

  “Oh, God! Evan this is exactly why you shouldn’t be involved with the CEO of a company. You’re blinded by her tits and ass.”

  “Fuck you, Mike,” I said lovingly.

  We were friends; I knew he could take it.

  One time we were working out and Mike had told me to fuck off at least a dozen times. We were in a heated debate about women and anal sex and my opinion was that he should get his wife to do it more often. We were just joking with either other but a waitress had told the restaurant manager who came over and asked Mike if I was bothering him. He replied, “Yes,” and the manager asked me to leave the restaurant. It was hilarious.

  “I’m just being honest with you. If it looks like a criminal, it’s usually a criminal. There is just too many facts that point to her knowing what’s going on.”

  I wasn’t so sure there were all the same facts that Mike thought there were. In my head, things were still very much unknown and I had to have some sort of finality in order to cut off my relationship with Alicia. I needed her to admit something was going on or I needed to find evidence that she didn’t know what was going on. But I couldn’t sit in limbo land any longer.

  “I know you’re just trying to look out for me.”

  “Let’s call Rebecca and see what she thinks,” Mike said as we finished our workout.

  Panic set in instantly and I didn’t want Rebecca anywhere near me, or my hands. She was getting a little too much to handle in the bedroom and I needed to cool things down as soon as possible.

  “Um, I think we got things figured out. The two of us can go through this human resources file I have.”

  “I’d feel better if Rebecca sat in with us, I’ll text her and have her meet in your office.”

  Before I could stop him, Mike had already sent something to Rebecca.

  My stomach churned as I thought about how Rebecca had chomped down on my hand. Something about her had started to scare me that was for sure. At least Mike would be with me, so I should be safe for our conversation.

  We made our way to my office and cleared the conference table off. When Rebecca arrived we all pulled out the research we had and put it onto the table so we could go over everything and get our facts straight.

  The files I had ordered were all there, plus Rebecca’s files, and I added the human resource file I took from the warehouse. We should have had enough information to figure out what was going on, but when you are stabbing in the dark there is a lot of room to make mistakes.

  We didn’t really know what we were looking for and there were so many different people who could be hurting Alicia’s company. Even if we narrowed in on Bill Yobi, we couldn’t find everything we needed to find on him to prove he was involved in something sinister.

  I was overwhelmed before we even got started. I wanted to just leave the room and let Mike and Rebecca figure out what was going on. My mind just couldn’t get wrapped around all the nooks and crannies of information. If it had been stock information, I would have had no problem, but the financial i
nformation of a company that I didn’t know very well, that was overwhelming to me.

  I was lucky to have both Mike and Rebecca willing to give up their day and help me get to the bottom of my research. They were both much more detail oriented than I was and could see things from a different angle than I saw things. My focus was always on the hard numbers and Mike did great at the big picture.

  We all started going to through files and taking notes. Rebecca was vigorously writing and pillaging through page after page of material. I half wanted to just sit back and let her finish going through everything. She without doubt was an efficient researcher.

  “Bill Yobi isn’t on any of these payroll sheets. I mean they are from a year ago and not the most current ones; but still he should be on them,” Rebecca said to break the silence.

  “Well didn’t we already decide that there were probably hundreds of people not on the payroll sheets? Maybe there are other sheets?” I suggested.

  “No, there can’t be other sheets. That’s illegal. They need to all be together.”

  I sat still and pondered what exactly she said. If they didn’t have everyone on these payroll sheets they could make it look like there were making a lot more money than they actually were. But the thing that confused me was that they actually did have tons of money. I had seen it in the warehouse.

  “I still don’t get what’s going on,” Mike said as he looked at both of us.

  “It’s money laundering, Mike. That’s what’s going on here,” Rebecca said.

  I didn’t know the specifics yet, but I definitely could tell they were hiding their money from people. Their books were not how they were supposed to be. Their payroll wasn’t either. Nothing about ALL Warren Clothing seemed legitimate at all. I needed to talk to Alicia. But I had no idea what I was going to say to her.

  She could either be in on everything, or she could know nothing. I didn’t know which was true, but I was getting closer.

  “So, guys, I need to try and get some information out of Alicia. How can I do that?” I asked them.