The Hot Billionaires Box Set

by Nella Tyler

  “He knows you’re white,” I assured him. “And he doesn’t really care.

  Dexter smiled at me. “Wait, he knows about me?”

  “Don’t get a big head about it,” I warned him. “But yeah.”

  He sat down next to me on the bed and kissed me for a moment. “Sounds good,” he said. I smiled at him and kissed his cheek. I couldn’t shake my excitement; finally, the man that I was hugely growing to adore was going to meet the person that I loved most in the world.

  Chapter 29

  Dexter

  I’d slept with Briella three times now and had taken her on several dates. Still, I’d never been more nervous than I was getting ready to have dinner with her father. I buttoned, unbuttoned, and then re-buttoned my shirt as I changed my mind about whether or not it was a suitable shirt. I didn’t want to dress like I was going to a business meeting, but I didn’t know how to dress to meet someone’s father. I hadn’t had to meet a girl’s parents since high school, and then it had been a quick ‘hello’ at the door before a less than satisfactory date at the movies, from which she’d called her father to pick her up.

  I nearly wanted to back out of this date, which was ridiculous. I would never stand Briella up. But my nerves were really letting me have it, and I stood by my door for a few moments before forcing myself to be on my way. I wasn’t going to let this go by because of my fear; I’d come all the way to Houston, for crying out loud!

  Briella had agreed to pick me up for dinner since my rental car had to be returned. There was an anomaly with the brake, and it was easier for me to just get a taxi than bother fixing it.

  “You look nice,” she told me. I fidgeted in the passenger seat and couldn’t help but feel that the roles had been a bit reversed.

  “Thanks,” I managed. “You do too. Is it hot in here?”

  “The AC is on full blast,” she said. She looked over at me and grinned. “Aww, are you nervous?”

  “Little bit.”

  My honesty must have sparked some empathy because she didn’t tease me too harshly. “It’s all right. I really think it’ll be fine. I wouldn’t have invited you over if I didn’t think it would go well.”

  That was true. There was no reason for Briella to lead me into some sort of trap where I would be hated by her father and lose credibility with Briella. It wouldn’t make sense. I tried to convince myself of that in order to calm myself down—this felt like a make or break moment, and anything that I said wrong would be a disaster beyond comprehension.

  Briella led me into the house. It was a sweet house, definitely something I could imagine her growing up in, with little decorations for summer strewn about and some nice pieces of art hanging in different places, probably from a home goods store. It looked like the comfortable childhood home that I could only wish I’d had.

  “Dad! I brought Dexter!”

  The way she called it made it sound like she’d brought home groceries or something. I smiled at the casual nature of it; it wasn’t some formal or forced introduction where it was understood beforehand that we wouldn’t get along. If she met my father…

  Her father rounded the corner, emerging from what looked to be the kitchen. He had a friendly face, and he smiled as soon as he saw me. “Ah, so you did. You must be Dexter.”

  “Yes, sir.” I returned his easy smile and shook his hand.

  “It’s good to finally meet you. I’ve heard lots about you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Dad,” Briella said, her tone warning. It was sweet to hear her get worked up, but I wanted to know what she’d told her father about me. I couldn’t imagine much in detail, but then, I didn’t know her father.

  We sat down to eat, and I did my best to not seem out of place here. I wished that I fit in in places like this. This place had character and heart and felt like people lived here. My house felt like a museum or an exhibit, someplace that people should be reverent of and not get comfortable in.

  “Briella tells me you work at an investment firm?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “It’s my father’s firm, really. I sort of got adopted into it.” I didn’t want to seem like I was any smarter than I really was—I owed much of my success to my position, and my position was lucky because I was born into it.

  “Oh? What’s your father’s name? Maybe I’ve heard of the company.”

  My heart skipped a beat. I thought about what Tyler had said about father being blatantly racist. I wondered if that was something that the public knew, or at least that people knew about outside of our family. If it was, I didn’t want to end everything here.

  “Dexter?” Briella tapped my arm.

  “Sorry, lost in thought. Leonard Mason, sir.” I couldn’t make a big deal about not answering the question without drawing attention to my distress at the subject. I couldn’t exactly lie, either. I wanted to continue to have a relationship with Briella, which meant that my father’s real name would come up without much trouble.

  Besides, Briella knew his name. It was not something I could avoid.

  Instantly, I saw her father’s demeanor change. He looked me over like he expected horns to pop out of my head, and I felt shameful. I was wrong to be dating his daughter, coming into his home, eating his food, when I came from such a background.

  In an unbelievable show of mercy, he didn’t kick me out on the spot. We continued dinner, albeit slightly more tersely than before, and he remained cordial. We talked about sports a little, and he asked me for advice on how to exercise with a bum knee. We talked to Briella about her job.

  All in all, the meal went well, except that when Briella wasn’t watching, I could still feel her father’s eyes on me. Even after he said goodbye to me, I could feel his eyes boring into the back of my head.

  This made for an incredibly awkward drive back to the hotel, at least inside my mind.

  “I think that went well,” Briella offered.

  “I think your dad hates me,” I blurted, at the exact same time.

  She pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows. “Well. All right. What exactly makes you think that?”

  I shook his head. “He… I mentioned my father’s name, and I thought he was going to stab me in the face.”

  “My dad wouldn’t hurt anyone,” Briella defended. She got a bit quiet. “But he did seem to get a little tense, yeah. I wouldn’t say he hates you, just… well, why do you think he got upset about your dad’s name? That’s kind of a silly thing to be mad about.”

  I knew; it was at the forefront of my mind, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. “I don’t know,” I lied. “I don’t, um…” I shrugged.

  “Well, I’m sure it’ll blow over,” Briella said. She came to a stop in front of my hotel building.

  Walking back up to my room, I was almost certain that it wouldn’t.

  Chapter 30

  Briella

  The morning after Dexter came over for dinner, I woke up to the smell of breakfast cooking. It was enough to tempt me out of bed. I brushed my teeth and thanked God that my skin was dark enough to hide the more obvious hickeys that Dexter had given me a few days ago. A little bit of makeup was all I really needed to keep my dad in the dark about my private life.

  I wandered into the kitchen and turned on the tea kettle. “Good morning. What’s cooking?”

  “Breakfast.” Dad sounded almost irritated, like he couldn’t believe I’d asked. It reminded me of the night before, and I stopped rifling through the boxes of tea to look up at him.

  “Hey, Dad. Yesterday when Dexter was over, he mentioned his father’s name and you kind of freaked out.” Maybe that was an overstatement, but I was only more concerned now to see that he was still annoyed about it. “What exactly is the deal?”

  Dad looked at me for a while and then he sighed. He put the eggs off the heat and leaned back against the counter. “I never told you about Mason?”

  “No.”

  He shook his head. “A little while back, I was going to get my company off t
he ground. We’d been talking at work about opening up a sports supply store off 59, right by that Mexican food restaurant, in that shopping mall.”

  I smiled, knowing exactly where he meant. “I remember that.”

  “We didn’t really have enough money to open a shop, though. So we thought we’d get in touch with an investment firm and see if we could figure out some kind of deal. A lot of times investors like to work with small businesses because the payoff can be enormous in the end. So we got in touch with Mason Investment. They deferred me to the CEO of the company, and so I went down to Florida to go and deal with the whole thing.”

  I frowned. He’d met Leonard Mason?

  “I met the guy in his office. Huge building in downtown Florida. Took one look at me and said he couldn’t take my investment. I asked him why, and he told me he knew better than to get involved with people like me.”

  My stomach turned. He couldn’t possibly be talking about the color of his skin, right? He must have meant something else.

  “He said he knew that people in ghettos tended to run business poorly,” Dad said. “As if I come from a ghetto, or as if he has the right to judge me if I do. I was spittin’ mad, so when I went back to the hotel, I did some searching. The guy’s been sued maybe 60 times in the past three years for his discrimination, but he always settles the cases.”

  I closed my eyes. “That’s…that can’t be true. The business is way too successful for him to be settling all those cases and still turning a profit.”

  “They’re backed by just about every major chain in Florida. Every white-owned chain, anyway.” Dad shook his head. “They’re Teflon. You can’t touch them.”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t process this right now. I didn’t know what to think or say or do. I didn’t want to tell my father that he was wrong, because I hadn’t been there, and I was all too familiar with the bitter taste of racism. Boys telling me I was pretty for a black girl, girls telling me I was lucky I had ‘white girl hair,’ getting turned down for jobs that I was qualified for with no good reason in sight—but seeing that job go to a less qualified white male.

  My concern followed me to work. I met with the apathetic couple from Monday, and they seemed to be even more eager now than they had been when I’d left them at that session.

  “Briella, okay, so I’m thinking we could do the buffet right next to the dinosaur eggs. How cute would that be?”

  “There aren’t any dinosaur eggs in the Fine Arts museum.”

  “There is an entire exhibit on paleontological art.”

  “That can’t exist!”

  I listened to their banter and shook my head. “We could set it up in the Renaissance exhibit. The banquet, anyway. Lots of lovely colors, lots of stuff to look at, it’s all very on-theme.”

  “That sounds amazing.” She grinned and sat at the edge of her seat.

  I could hear them continue to talk, but I couldn’t keep my mind focused on the task at hand. My father’s words echoed in my head. If he was right, it meant that I was dating at least the son of a horrible racist who didn’t think that black people were worth investment funds.

  If he was wrong… then what? My father was lying about someone being racist to cope with his own inability to run a business?

  The couple left, and I moved some books around. The group that had been in this library office before me was a little cluttered and hadn’t cleaned up well. As I started to leave and grab some paper towels to wipe up a spill, someone walked into the office with flowers.

  “Briella?” The librarian smiled at me. “These are for you.”

  I took the bouquet and thanked her. When I sat down, I pulled the tag out of the center of them.

  ‘I’m going to miss you when I go back to Florida. I’ll miss you every day. I couldn’t leave without giving you something to remember me by.’

  I looked back at the bouquet. The flowers were all in lovely assortments of red and pink, and a few blues thrown in for contrast. He’d clearly gone to a florist who knew how to arrange a proper bouquet. I sighed and slumped against my seat.

  All I could think of were the countless times that Dexter had smiled at me. He was kind, he asked me how my day was, and he genuinely wanted to know. He asked questions about my job, he respected my job, he respected my family, and he was good to my friend as well as me. He’d been cordial with my father.

  In bed, he was amazing. He kissed me like I mattered.

  I liked him. I liked him too much for what my father said to be true. And after the last relationship I’d had, where I felt oppressed for even walking out of my room too early in the morning and disrupting Jason’s sleep, I had a hard time understanding that Dexter could be every bit as dangerous, but in an indirect way.

  I looked at the flowers on the table and held the note in my hand, reading over it one more time. He was going back to Florida. I could forget him now, probably, if I deleted his number and forgot about him. I could probably block him from my mind entirely, and I’d never think anything of it again.

  I looked back up at the flowers and back down at the tag.

  No.

  My father was wrong. At least, he was wrong about Dexter. Maybe Dexter’s father was a horrible racist. But I knew Dexter, and I knew and believed that he was better than that. He was too good to be like his father.

  Chapter 31

  Dexter

  Tyler didn’t show up to work until a week after I got back to Florida. It really added insult to injury that I’d had to go down there—even if I had gone there to see Briella and not to fix the account, I still had to clean up his mess, and then when he ditched work for a week, the burden fell on me twofold.

  I had just thought about calling his personal number when he knocked at my door. The dark circles under his eyes and dazed smile on his face told me he’d been out partying, and he didn’t look at all regretful for it. Why should he? He could do whatever he wanted, and he’d never get fired or removed from the company.

  “Hey, man. What’s up?”

  “What’s up?” I raised an eyebrow. “What’s up is that I’ve been busting my ass trying to get your work done and my work done.”

  Tyler shrugged. “Even when I’m here, you end up doing my work anyway. Someone has to make it right.”

  “That’s a really shit attitude to have, Tyler,” I reminded him. “I know you think that this whole thing is impossible, but you don’t even try. I’m still reeling from cleaning up the mess in Houston.”

  “Oh, yeah, the horrible, horrible time you had in Houston.” Tyler rolled his eyes. “I’m sure that entire experience was strictly work.” He laughed, clearly not understanding that I was legitimately frustrated with him.

  My own tiredness got the better of me, and I sat forward in my chair. “You need to take things more seriously around here. I know you don’t think so, but this business is important, and you owe a lot to the fact that you’re lucky enough to be here.”

  Tyler wrinkled his nose at me and turned to walk away. Before he did, though, he spoke. “All right. Thanks for the pep talk, Dad.”

  I didn’t understand the misnomer until he left. I turned it over in my mind a few times before I made the connection of what he meant. He thinks I’m turning into Dad?

  I was still turning it over in my head when I went to talk to my father about the account. We needed make sure that everything was finalized, and I wanted to talk to him after being gone for a while to make sure we were on the same page. His office was open, so I walked in after tapping the door.

  “Good morning, Dexter. Did you see Tyler?” Dad asked. He looked particularly tired today, though I didn’t know why.

  “Um, yeah. Yeah, I put him to work,” I lied. I’d given him a half-assed lecture of how important the company was. It was hardly putting him to work, but I didn’t want to be responsible for another lecture on Tyler’s behalf.

  “Good, good. Did you have a question?”

  “Not a question, I just wanted to let y
ou know about the account in Houston. It got approved; everything should be running smoothly now,” I said.

  Dad nodded. He tended to nod instead of smile.

  I started to walk out, and something that had been eating at me made me turn around. “Hey, Dad. I was just wondering, do you remember a case from a Howard Green?”

  “Green?” Dad pursed his mouth and shook his head. “No, I don’t.”

  “You denied his account to open up a sports store,” I said. I’d done some light research when I got back to my office after dinner with Briella’s father had hit the fan. “You don’t remember?”

  “I remember he was…” Dad trailed off as though he were so lost in thought that he couldn’t finish his sentence. I couldn’t help but be disgusted that he could remember that Howard was black, but not his business idea, or his account situation, or anything more important than the color of his skin.

  “I was just wondering,” I muttered.

  “I’m sure I had a good reason,” Dad continued. “I rarely deny accounts.”

  That was true, at least. Dad rarely denied accounts. One of the reasons he’d grown so successful in this business was because he had a knack for spotting good investments and rarely turned one down now that the company was enormous. If they lost, we had nothing to lose, and if they won, we won, too.

  But that reminder that my father didn’t usually deny investments didn’t sit well with me. I knew that it meant that he was remembering Green and probably patting himself on the back for being racist. I walked back to my office and sat behind my desk, staring at the mountains of paperwork.

  I couldn’t turn into him. I knew that much. I didn’t know whether I could control how much I worked, and I might inevitably turn into him in the regard that I worked myself out of a well-fitting suit. But I had total control over whether I turned out to be a racist scumbag with no ability to feel empathy.