by Cassie Cross
CONTENTS
One Night With the Billionaire: Book Three
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
One Night With the Billionaire - Book Three
Text copyright © 2016 Cassie Cross
All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, weather electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Cassie Cross.
One Night With the Billionaire
Book Three
By Cassie Cross
CHAPTER ONE
Jason’s phone buzzes on the inside breast pocket of his blazer, in the middle of a very important meeting. When he sees the name of the head of Kaia’s security detail pop up on his screen, his heart plummets all the way down to his stomach.
He stands and excuses himself immediately, claiming urgent business, and he practically runs to the hallway outside of the conference room he was seated in.
“Paul,” he says frantically when he accepts the call, not even waiting for any kind of a greeting. “What’s going on?”
Without wasting a second, Paul replies, “We have a situation here.” His voice is maddeningly calm; it’s such a stark contrast to the panic skittering across Jason’s nerve endings that it makes him want to claw his own skin off.
“What kind of situation?”
There’s a voice on the other end of the call—a voice that doesn’t belong to Paul—and no matter how hard he tries, Jason cannot make out what the voice is saying.
“Hold on.” Jason isn’t sure if Paul is talking to him or the person who was just speaking, but he hears bits and pieces of their muffled conversation. The fact that he isn’t getting the information he asked for right the hell now pisses him off.
“Paul? Paul!” he practically shouts, but…nothing.
If Jason is honest with himself, he’s been expecting this call ever since he went to Kaia’s apartment and told her he wanted to find out if the two of them could have more than just a one-night stand.
Jason knew then that he wouldn’t be able to stay away from her, that the more he got of her the more he’d want. He knew that wanting more from her and taking it came with its own set of risks, and he’d planned for those risks.
Jason had the security team in place before he even went over to her apartment that night.
He’d briefed Paul and his guys on what he feared could happen to Kaia, what they might need to guard her against. He told them all the ways he’d dreamed up over the years that someone he loved could be taken from him.
All the ways that someone he loved could be used against him.
After all that planning and precaution, his worst fears still seemed to be coming to fruition.
He knew this would happen, but he wanted Kaia anyway.
Now…now he feels sick.
And he’s running out of patience.
“God damn it, Paul. Talk to me!”
Paul knew better to ignore the growling, urgent voice of his employer.
“It’s fine,” he replies, a little breathless. “She’s fine. We have her. We’re just trying to smooth something over here. I’ll call you right back.”
With that, Paul ends the call.
What the hell does he have to smooth over? Without having anything to go on to tell him what exactly happened, knowing that Kaia is safe and in the hands of her perfectly capable security detail makes the panic calm just a bit.
It comes right back when it hits him that Kaia is safe in the hands of her perfectly capable security detail…that he never told her he’d hired. He’d been putting it off until the right moment (or so he was telling himself), and now the situation was completely out of his hands.
Chase was right. This is blowing up in his face.
Not wanting to wait for Paul to get back to him, he hits Kaia’s speed dial on his phone, desperate to get control of things. To get out ahead of this before she’s so angry and scared that he can’t make things right.
He wants to make sure she’s okay, and he needs to explain himself more than anything.
The phone rings and rings, then goes straight to her voicemail. All of his thoughts and feelings just trip their way out of his mouth.
“Kaia, it’s me. Are you okay? I want to talk to you. I need to explain. I need to hear your voice. Please call me back.”
He ends the call, then hits her speed dial again. He gets her voicemail. Again.
He starts typing out a text when his phone rings.
“It’s Paul. Sorry for-”
“What in the hell happened?” Jason growls.
“We followed her to Riverside, where a caucasian male stepped up behind her and held his hands over her eyes. My guys reacted quickly, just like I trained them to,” he explains, almost defensively. “They took the guy down, and got Kaia out of harm’s way.”
That sounded way less climactic than he’d been anticipating. “Okay, so…what’s the situation?”
Jason is antsy. He needs more details, and he needs them immediately.
“The guy was a friend of hers. She was meeting him for coffee.”
Jason’s stomach plummets. Of all the scenarios he’d conjured up in his head about why Paul and his team would need to spring into action, he’d never considered this one.
“Is he all right?”
“Just a little banged up,” Paul says. “My guys weren’t too hard on him, but I think it might be a good idea to get a lawyer down here, just in case. We’ve gotten him calmed down, but I think it would be a good precaution just in case he decides he wants to involve the legal system here.”
Jason takes a deep breath, trying to steady his racing heart. “Okay, I’ll send one down there. Is Kaia around?”
There’s a long pause before Paul says, “Yes.”
“She didn’t answer when I called her earlier. Pass the phone over so I can talk to her.”
Paul clears his throat, and what follows is an uncomfortable silence that seems like it lasts an eternity.
“Just do it,” Jason commands.
“I had to explain to her who we were, and who hired us,” Paul explains reluctantly. “I had to give her the bare minimum in order to keep her from making a scene.”
Reaching up and pinching the bridge of his nose, Jason lets out an unsteady breath. After a turn of events that he never could have anticipated, he’s really kicking himself for not being up front with her before all of this happened. He hired men to keep her safe, men she had no clue even existed. And in his unrelenting desire to protect her, he wound up scaring the hell out of her.
He can’t imagine how she’s feeling. He wants to know. He wants to talk to her.
“Let me talk to her,” Jason commands. There’s another stretch of silence, and Jason is very quickly losing his patience. “Get her on the goddamn phone, Paul.”
“She doesn’t want to talk
to you. She was…she’s pretty adamant about that.”
Fuck. Even though he doesn’t blame Kaia for being angry and upset, he can’t let this fester. He has to explain things to her before it’s too late.
He just hopes it’s not already too late.
Jason slides the phone back into his pocket, and makes his way back into the conference room, where the meeting has continued on in his absence. When he walks in, the chatter stops, and everyone looks in his direction.
“We’re going to have to cut this short,” Jason says, with barely suppressed irritation in his voice. “There’s an emergency I have to attend to.” He doesn’t wait for anyone to respond, he just turns and leaves.
He had always been concerned about a relationship getting in the way of business, but now that it’s happened, he doesn’t care. All he can think about is getting to Kaia. Maybe that should scare him, given that most of his life is about is work, but it doesn’t.
Instead, a strange new feeling hits him square in his chest. It’s not the end of the world. The meeting he just canceled can and will be rescheduled. He can trust the people in his employ to deal with anything pressing in his absence. Everything else can wait until tomorrow.
The world won’t stop spinning if he takes a little breather to make things right with his girlfriend.
This kind of thing won’t happen every day, but it’s okay for him to take half a day for himself every once in a while.
He’s just hoping Kaia will hear him out.
CHAPTER TWO
“Wait, wait,” Janine says, as she dips her spoon into the fresh pint of ice cream that Kaia brought home from the bodega around the corner. “I’m not sure I’m hearing you correctly. He had people following you?”
“A ‘security detail,’” she says, obnoxiously using air quotes. “A security detail that I didn’t know about, so…stalkers, maybe? I don’t know what they are in this particular situation.” Stalkers seems an appropriate name for a bunch of guys she didn’t know following her every move.
Kaia digs out a chunk of chocolate chip cookie dough, then pops it into her mouth. She was shaking with anger when she left the park this afternoon, after everything had settled between Clark and the security guys who accosted him. She needed something to occupy her mind, and picking up something that was sure to give her a sugar rush seemed like a really good idea.
As the sweet ice cream slid across her tongue, she was glad she made that decision earlier.
Janine narrows her eyes. “A security detail for what?”
“I don’t know,” Kaia replies with a shrug.
“Isn’t that the very first question you asked him?”
Kaia sighs. “It’s probably the first question I would’ve asked him if I had actually spoken to him.”
“What?” Janine asks incredulously. “You haven’t even spoken to him?”
“After everything happened, I was busy dealing with Clark and trying to get him to calm down. And I knew that if I talked to Jason while I was angry, I was going to wind up saying something that I could never take back. Angry as I am at him, I’m not sure that’s how I want to end things.” She leans forward to get another scoop of ice cream. “Or if I want to end things.”
That was the crux of the emotional turmoil she was feeling. She felt like this should be a deal breaker, but she wasn’t sure if she wanted it to be one.
Either way, it seems like Janine understands where she’s coming from. If not, she’s doing a good job of pretending.
“It’s better to give yourself some time to process, rather than making a rash decision you might regret later.”
“Yeah,” Kaia replies absentmindedly.
“Is Clark okay?”
Kai nods. “He is. He got a few scrapes, but he wasn’t hurt. He was more angry than anything.”
“Rightfully so.” Janine slides the back of her spoon across her tongue, licking off the remaining ice cream.
“Right? He comes to meet me thinking we’re going to go for coffee and catch up, and then out of nowhere he gets tackled in the middle of a park.”
Just recounting the events of the day makes a fresh wave of anger course through Kia’s veins. How could Jason do this without telling her? She knew he had his secrets that he’d share with her in due time, but she never thought he’d hire security for her without telling her what was going on.
Is her life in danger? Is he just being cautious? Does it have something to do with his scars? These are all questions she both wants and needs answers to, she’s just not ready to ask them yet.
Like Janine is reading her mind, she asks, “Any idea why he did this? I mean, he’s a businessman…is it a front for the mafia or something? Or is he just one of those paranoid types?”
Kaia wants to tell Janine that she’s being ridiculous. The mafia? Really? But the truth is, she doesn’t know if Janine is being ridiculous.
For all she knows, Jason’s reluctance to share with her could have everything to do with not wanting her to get involved in whatever it is that he has going on. She’s realizing now that she hardly knows the man she’s been sleeping with and…well, falling in love with.
She’s falling in love with Jason, and what happened this afternoon put a screeching stop to the whole thing.
“He’s not one of those paranoid types.” That she knows.
“You are going to talk to him, though, right? You said you weren’t sure if you wanted to end things, but…you’re going to give him a chance to explain himself first, aren’t you?”
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
Janine shrugs. “I’m not looking at you like anything.”
“Yes you are. You want to say something, but you’re wondering if you should. Just say it; I’m not going to get upset.”
Janine takes a deep breath. “I know how you feel about him. I’ve spent a grand total of five minutes with the two of you, and there’s something electric between you when you’re around each other. I know you, and I just can’t imagine that no matter how angry you are now, that you’ll be able to walk away without finding out why he did what he did.”
Just to play devil’s advocate, Kaia asks, “Does the why really matter?”
With a smirk, Janine replies, “Of course it does. You of all people should know that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Janine puts her spoon down, and sits up, giving Kaia her full attention. “For as long as I’ve known you, you’re always the one trying to get me to see the other side of my anger. Like, perfect example: remember when I first started seeing Charlie, and we saw him with that redhead at the movies?”
“The redhead who wound up being his stepsister?” Kaia asks, amused.
“Yeah, that one.” Janine lets out a little laugh. “I was ready to write him off after just seeing the two of them sitting next to each other in a movie theater. I would have, too, if you hadn’t talked me into getting the whole story.”
Kaia gets where she’s coming from, but, “Seeing your new boyfriend at the movies with some other woman is different than finding out that your new boyfriend is having you followed without your knowledge.”
Janine playfully rolls her eyes.
“What?!”
“I’m not trying to make excuses for the guy, but having you followed and hiring a security detail for you are two very different things.”
Kaia shakes her head. “Not when you’re the person being followed. Not when you didn’t know.”
“But one indicates spying, Kaia. The other indicates that he just wants you to be safe.”
“Safe from what, is the thing. If there’s something I need to be kept safe from, shouldn’t he be telling me that?”
Janine looks at Kaia like she’s lost her mind. “Kaia, he’s a quadrillionaire. Who knows who would come after you because of your connection to him. Seems to me the explanation could be as simple as him taking a precaution.”
Kaia takes a moment and lets that marinate. He
r eyelids flutter shut, and she thinks about the scars that mark Jason’s gorgeous body. For a moment, she’s able to put herself in his shoes, understanding how terrible it must be to live his life in that kind of fear. It actually breaks Kaia’s heart a little, and she’s wondering if this fear is a holdover from whatever it is that he went through that gave him those scars, or if there’s someone out there that she needs to be afraid of.
“He’s not just taking precautions,” she says.
“You won’t know for sure unless you talk to him, Kaia.”
She does know it. She knows it in her bones, and that’s what scares the hell out of her, and makes the idea of talking to him about this so damned scary. Before finding out about the security, she thought that whatever it was that kept him from entering into relationships, what kept him from taking her out on dates in public, what left him with those scars…she thought it was something that was still lodged firmly in his past.
Now, she knows that whatever it is, it’s in the present. And with her in his life, she’s going to have to deal with those demons, too.
She just isn’t sure she’s ready to do that.
CHAPTER THREE
Jason’s car pulls down Kaia’s street, and he feels a rush of nervous adrenaline when he sees someone sitting on the front steps of her building.
Disappointment settles bitterly in his stomach when the car gets closer and he realizes that it isn’t her, but her roommate.
When the car comes to a stop, Jason opens the door, not bothering to wait for his driver to do it. He can feel the weight of her gaze on him as he stands. He’s only met her once for five minutes; he isn’t even sure if she remembers who he is.
He’s heard a lot about her from Kaia; he probably knows more about Janine than he does some people he’s actually spent a considerable amount of time with. But he can’t assume she’s told Janine as much about him.
The second he sees the look on Janine’s face—a mixture of barely restrained judgment and surprise—he knows that she does remember him. And that Kaia told her about what happened this afternoon.