The Hot Billionaires Box Set

by Nella Tyler

  “Okay.” I grinned and watched him leave.

  I knew that things looked bleak, but I couldn’t help but be excited all the same.

  Chapter 35

  Dexter

  Those few hours at work were the longest hours of my life. Knowing that Briella was home and waiting for me was almost unbearable. I didn’t tell anyone about her, nor did I explain my sudden departure before I finished up what I was supposed to do.

  I got back and saw that someone had been rummaging in the kitchen. I couldn’t help but love having her there. Before I’d met her, I’d been more than prepared to spend my life alone, and now I couldn’t imagine a life without her in it.

  “Briella?” I called, unable to find her downstairs.

  “Upstairs!”

  I walked up the stairs with a grin on my face. I wondered if she’d found the dress that I’d bought for her. After a few conversations with Nina on the phone, I’d figured out her size, what she liked, and even coordinated with her best friend to guarantee that it would be a delightful surprise instead of an offensive gesture.

  I leaned on the door slightly and tapped my knuckles to it. “Room service,” I joked.

  “Finally,” she returned with a laugh. “I need a little bit of help.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Can I come in?”

  “Yes, please.”

  I cracked the door open and slid in almost like I was trying to go undetected. Briella stood beside the bed with the dress almost all the way up. The zipper was undone, leaving me a clear view of the smooth, rich skin, obstructed only by the strap of her bra.

  I thought I might start drooling. Thankfully, Briella said, “Could you lend me a hand?”

  “Just one?” I shook my head and pulled the zipper up, pressing my hand to the arch of her back and then holding her for a few moments.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “I almost want to skip dinner,” I admitted.

  “Why would you do that?”

  I shook my head and kissed her neck, hands still tight to her waist. “To tear up this dress I bought,” I murmured.

  I could feel her shiver in my grip. “You know, that doesn’t sound… bad.” I could tell I’d caught her off guard, but the way she pushed her butt back against me told me it was far from a bad thing.

  Before we could get too terribly far, I released her. “We’ll have all the time in the world later,” I assured her.

  She grinned. “Good.”

  Before, when I took her to dinner, I tried not to showboat my wealth. I didn’t want to startle her with five-star restaurants, like some kind of ass who needed to prove that he had money because he had nothing else to offer. Now, though, I wanted to make this date special. I’d made reservations at one of the best restaurants in the city. It was a seaside restaurant, much like the one we’d eaten at before, but this one was much more upscale.

  “It’s beautiful,” she whispered, holding tight to my arm.

  “Not as beautiful as you,” was my knee-jerk reply.

  “That’s the corniest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” she replied, but she was grinning all the same.

  “Really? I seem to recall indirectly calling you a princess at some point,” I recounted, despite my efforts to repress that little incident.

  She seemed to think that it was sweet, though, and she looked at the candle in the center of the table with fascination. “I’m glad we could get away for a bit,” she said. “And I’m glad I could get away for the weekend.”

  “Was work starting to get the better of you?” I asked. “Bridezillas?”

  She laughed at the suggestion. “No, not any Bridezillas. I don’t get a lot of those, actually. I’ve only had one, and then the family tipped me enormously for my trouble.”

  “As they well should,” I agreed. I paused and reconsidered. “So, it wasn’t work. Something else?”

  She wrinkled her nose and sighed. “It’s… well, my mother’s birthday is soon.”

  “If I had known—”

  “It’s not until next week,” she assured me. “I won’t be missing it. But my dad has been really, really down about it. I mean, when I talk to him, he’s fine. But I can tell it’s bothering him, and I don’t know how to talk to him about it.”

  “It’s not easy.”

  “I don’t know how to talk to anyone about it. Except you.” Briella smiled up at me, and she tilted her head to the side. “I never could talk to anyone about that. I’m glad you were willing to listen.”

  “Of course,” I assured her. Honestly, I felt like I had talked to her about my mother’s death, even though I’d carefully kept that information at bay.

  “It’s just hard. You don’t want to bring someone down, but you have to talk about it.”

  “And the people you go to for talking about it move on, and you’re still stuck on the same questions,” I agreed. “Like why it happened and what you could have done.”

  Briella nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, exactly.” She bit her lip and took a deep breath. “You really seem to understand this. When we talked about it before, you said you understood. But you wouldn’t say why.”

  I nodded. It was true that I had done that. I thought about what she was telling me and how much faith and trust she’d put in me just to agree to come out to Florida. It wasn’t fair for me to accumulate information about her personal life while I simply remained like a tomb. My father never shared; maybe that was how he’d become so cold.

  “My mother passed, too,” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “It was a while ago,” I assured her. “A really, really long while ago. She got sick.”

  She tilted her head slightly, like she didn’t know how to mention that it didn’t make sense for my mother to die of an illness when there wasn’t a treatment in the world we couldn’t afford.

  “I know,” I said simply. “We tried every doctor in the book. We even flew her to Europe to see some specialists there. But her system was just run down. There wasn’t anything anyone could do. Sometimes I wonder if there was anything I could do.”

  “But you must have been just a kid.”

  “I was. But you were a kid when your mother passed. There’s nothing logically that we could have done, but our brains… my brain just forces me to wonder what might have happened if we hadn’t played in the rain, or if I’d made her wear a jacket in the cold.” I shook my head again.

  “But we couldn’t have done anything,” she said. She was quiet for a moment, and then she looked up at me again. “What was she like?”

  “My mother?” I was a bit surprised at the question. “She was… she was kind. Down-to-earth. She cared about people, even if she wasn’t around a lot of the time. She was always making conversation with everyone, no matter where they were from.”

  “That must be how you got so down-to-earth,” Briella mused.

  I smiled. “I certainly appreciate the sentiment. She was always teaching us to respect everyone. She brought out the good in my father, too. He was softer then.” I could remember when he used to play with us on the front lawn and talk to us about our days.

  I thought of the skeleton in the office now, collecting on memories and forcing back investments on people who only wanted to choke up a dream. They were different people. Something else occurred to me, and I smiled at Briella.

  “She would have liked you,” I said. “She liked to organize, too, and she loved weddings. She would have seen how amazing you are.”

  “That’s a high compliment,” Briella said.

  “It’s earned, and then some.” I smiled, and I felt my heart knot up. I’d never talked about my mother with anyone except my brother before, and even then, we only talked in passing, in brief, impersonal moments. We didn’t discuss how she’d been, only what she’d left behind. Only the consequence of her leaving to my father. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d let myself remember her smile and her kind lessons.

>   Briella let me remember that. I looked at her across the table, face softly lit by candlelight, fingers arched against the pale tablecloth.

  I was falling in love with her. I didn’t know if I could stop it.

  The entire drive back to my house, all I could think about was this newfound emotion. It battered at the inside of my ribcage and begged to come off my tongue, but I knew better. We hadn’t known each other long enough for that, and while I was an emotionally suppressed investment firm worker living in corporate America, she probably had a much healthier system of going through relationships.

  I couldn’t tell her, no. I walked her back up to the guest room, but at the fork in the hallway, I pulled her in for a kiss. It was like I’d never kissed anyone before in my life, new and tender and vulnerable.

  I couldn’t tell her, but I could show her.

  Chapter 36

  Briella

  When Dexter kissed me outside his bedroom, I could tell something had changed. He’d never been so intense right off the bat before. Now he took my bottom lip between his teeth instead of breaking away to catch a breath, and his tongue snatched away any of the breath that I might have had in my chest. He opened the door to his room, and we made quick work of our clothes; despite his earlier statement, I didn’t want to destroy this beautiful dress.

  He replaced the dress with his hands in no time. He pulled me onto the bed, placing a hand on my stomach so that I wouldn’t bounce up and hit him. I struggled to catch a breath and gasped at how suddenly his hands came against my chest, working around.

  “Clasp in the front,” I told him. I’d chosen one specifically for this occasion.

  He grinned for a second, and we nearly bumped teeth. He undid the clasp and his hands, soft and warm but so strong, assured, carefully kneaded my chest and pulled at the most sensitive skin until I was a sighing mess against his mouth.

  One of his hands had found my underwear, and as I’d done before, I pulled my hips up to force friction. He withdrew his hand instantly, as though I’d done something wrong, and he began to kiss my neck.

  He said something to me, the words lost in the reverberation between my neck and his mouth, hand still hovering where I wanted him to touch me most. Further, teeth against my collarbone, marks on my chest. He caught my nipples in his teeth and grinned when I yelped and dug my fingers into his hair.

  I expected him to return to kissing me, but he didn’t. He continued to descend, leaving a trail of fire down my stomach. He pressed a kiss beneath my navel.

  His eyes flicked up to mine. I stared, entirely speechless, as he hooked his thumb in my underwear and pulled them away. His hands came up to my knees, and he pulled me towards the edge of the bed and got on his knees.

  A searing kiss in my inner thigh told me what was to come. He carefully, almost politely, pulled my knees further apart and then continued to press those burning kisses so close to where I wanted them. My fingers found their way back into his hair, and he pressed a kiss, a chaste, kind kiss, to my sex. I became intensely worried that he was going to stop, or that he thought that that was it.

  Then he settled in.

  “Oh my God.” I struggled not to pull my hips up against his face. His forearm came down across my hip bones as a sort of way to keep me still.

  I was nearly incoherent. He knew exactly where to apply pressure, when to back off, and when he could tell that I was reaching a point of no return, he slid his fingers inside me, pumping at a slow, luxurious pace. I pulled my hips up against them, effectively fucking myself on his hand, babbling through an orgasm that I couldn’t stop.

  When I’d finally come down from it, I nearly worried that I’d yanked out his hair. When I took away my hands, though, they were free of the dark hair that Dexter had. I sat up, a bit shakily, and couldn’t help but smile at the sheer mess I’d made of that hair.

  I noticed something else, too, when he stood up. My heart still pounded in my chest, and I didn’t know if I could make out any words. Standing there at the foot of the bed, his erection caught in his underwear, 6-foot-3 of muscle, I noticed that he also had several tattoos. I reached forward to touch one, a sort of rose.

  “You hadn’t seen them before?” he asked.

  “There was never time,” I replied. “Now, we have all of it in the world.” I paraphrased what he’d told me earlier and squinted to look better at it. I came to kneel at the edge of the bed and pulled the heel of my hand against his dick, earning a groan. He started to crawl back onto the bed, but a hand on his stomach refused him; I wanted to look at him like this for a moment longer.

  He had another tattoo, too, nearer his abdomen. This one looked like a bird of some sort. I kissed it, and then his hipbone, pulling the skin with my teeth.

  “Briella,” he whispered.

  I kissed the tent that only seemed to grow in his boxers. “Mmmm?” I pulled his underwear away, revealing my prize.

  I decided to be every bit as tantalizing with him as he had been with me. I kissed carefully against his lower abdomen and left unsatisfying kisses around his dick. I wrapped my hand around him and pumped so that he wouldn’t lose his arousal; honestly, I wasn’t sure he could lose it at this point.

  He repeated my name, and wove a hand into my hair. I finally enveloped him in my mouth, working slowly, and a thrill went down my spine when he pulled my hair, leaving a tingling in my scalp. I moaned around him, worked every trick I knew, until I could feel his hips starting to thrust a bit too much towards me. I pulled away and reached into the bedside drawer where I knew he kept his condoms.

  By the time I’d turned back around, he’d come down on me, pulling me towards him. I could feel every place that our mouths and bodies connected, and it seemed that even when we stayed still, we moved. I nearly dropped the condom, but he took it from my fingers and opened it, rolled it on himself.

  He opened his mouth to say something, and I shook my head, pulling my hips up against him to grind, and the sensation made me smile. He smiled back, understanding; we didn’t need to say anything right then. We could go without the meaningless words and phrases; right now, we could prove anything we needed to prove without saying a word.

  He slid into me more easily than he had the first two times because of his mouth’s handiwork. He retracted and thrust slowly at first, and our gaze unfocused at the pleasure. I clenched around him, and he closed his eyes, burying his head in my neck and shoulder.

  I didn’t want this to be over. He picked up his pace, driving deeper and deeper into me, and when he pulled my hips up and drove still deeper, I felt a part of me burst in pleasure. I shouted in surprise, and he backed away like he was afraid he hurt me.

  “There,” I managed.

  He pulled my hips up further, and I marveled at his strength. He drove into me again, again, each time hitting that spot that drove me mad. I could feel another orgasm coming, and based on his pace, he could feel one too.

  “I can’t last much longer—”

  “Come for me,” I told him. “Please. Please. Please, God, yes…” I couldn’t keep it together much longer.

  He detonated. He pulsed inside me, and the force of his final drive sent me over the brink; he held me up with one hand and worked the other between us to prolong my orgasm as long as it could last. I felt tears pricking my eyes as my hips bucked of their own accord, unable to control my own movements, lost to the throes of what he’d done to me.

  It might have taken entire years to come down from that moment. Before, we had gone our separate ways to clean up and make ourselves decent; now, there was no intention of moving. He pulled away from me to throw away his condom, and then he returned to my side.

  We were gross, we needed a shower, and we didn’t care. He kissed my shoulder, my neck, my cheek, and my mouth. I had never felt more spent, more loved.

  For a long time, we lay like that, catching our breath. Eventually, our heart rates evened out, and he played with the ends of my hair in a sweet move that I couldn’t help
but find adorable. I lay against him, nearly wanting to sleep when I made up my mind about something.

  “I want to meet your father,” I said.

  Dexter’s face contorted into surprise. “Oh. Now?”

  “No!” I rolled my eyes. It seemed men turned into idiots after sex. “No, just, before I go back. I decided I want to after all.”

  He still looked surprised, but honestly, he looked more tired than anything. “All right. I’m a little surprised to hear you say that.”

  “It’s just prolonging the inevitable if I don’t,” I pointed out. “If you’re okay with it, anyway.”

  “No, I’m more than okay with it. It was my stupid idea in the first place,” he reminded me, smiling all the while. “I thought you’d use the opt-out.”

  “I was going to,” I admitted. “But I think I’d like to meet him.”

  He wrapped his arms around me and held me close to him. I’d never felt safer. “I can arrange that,” he said.

  Chapter 37

  Dexter

  When I woke up the next morning, I still had Briella tight in my arms. I let her go gently, so as not to wake her up, and pulled myself away a bit. We smelled like sex, and I could tell that I was in need of a shower. The sheets needed to be cleaned, too.

  I couldn’t get the grin off my face.

  “Morning,” Briella offered. Her face was still very much planted in the pillow.

  “Good morning,” I said. I smiled at how sweet it was to see her turn her head in the pillow like she could keep the day from progressing. “Do you want breakfast? I’ll make it.”

  “We need a shower first,” Briella pointed out. “And then, yeah. Breakfast sounds awesome.”

  I kissed her head and took off to the bathroom to get through the shower quickly. I scrubbed up and threw on a pair of sweatpants and went downstairs to get started on breakfast. I heard her turn the shower on, and by the time it was off, I had breakfast mostly finished.