Wrong Kiss: An Enemies-to-Lovers Romance

by Lexi Aurora

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter 1: Lauren

  Chapter 2: Greyson

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Wrong Kiss

  An Enemies-to-Lovers Billionaire Romance

  By: Lexi Aurora

  © Copyright 2017 by Lexi Aurora- All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction

  Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  PREVIEW: The Billionaire’s Nanny by Lexi Aurora

  Chapter 1: Lauren

  Chapter 2: Greyson

  PREVIEW: The Big Billionaire by Lexi Aurora

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  All Books by Lexi Aurora

  Chapter One

  Olivia Young

  OLIVIA WAS LESS THAN thrilled to be walking into her boss’ office. There were two reasons for this unhappiness, both of them relatively simple. The first was one she was pretty sure she shared with most people across the globe. Being called into the boss’ office was the grown-up version of being made to pay a visit to the principal. There was never any way of knowing the purpose of the visit. There was no way to tell in advance if you were in trouble or about to receive unsolicited praise. The second reason was, perhaps, more unique to her. Olivia enjoyed her work. It was important to her and she cared very little for interruptions. Technically, her boss was in charge of not only her but her work as well, but that didn’t mean Olivia didn’t see his asking for her as an intrusion on her productivity. There was the mild concern of being in trouble for something, but it was eclipsed by good old annoyance, and this radiated through her as she made her way to Mr. Wellington’s office, the clack of her heels on tile the soundtrack to her frustration. When she arrived at his large, wooden double doors, she glanced at his secretary. Mrs. Frank, who had a widely circulated reputation for hating just about everybody, peered back at her through the thickest glasses Olivia had ever seen. She rolled her eyes and began angrily sharpening a pencil, as if Olivia just being there was the worst interruption she had ever experienced.

  “Is he in?” Olivia asked the question briskly, as a formality. Mr. Wellington was the one who had called for her, after all, and only moments earlier. Of course he would be in.

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Frank responded sullenly, practically radiating ill will, “who’s asking?”

  “I’m asking. He sent word that he wants to see me.”

  “Did he now?”

  “Yes,” Olivia answered pointedly, feeling her patience leach out of her quickly, “he did.”

  “Fine, fine. Hold on a minute.”

  The cranky older woman stood, sighing as she did so, and clopped towards the doors of the Wellington office solidly. Olivia wasn’t one-hundred-percent sure, but she would have sworn that the woman was muttering under her breath as she did so. Mrs. Frank stuck her head in the door without knocking, exchanged a brief number of words, and then turned back to face her unwanted visitor. Olivia briefly considered asking the woman if Mr. Wellington knew how rude his secretary acted towards anyone that wasn’t him but decided to keep her mouth shut. Going to war with Mrs. Frank didn’t strike her as the best idea. She was rough to take, but she was also the keeper of the gate, so to speak.

  “He’s in and he’ll see you. Just make it quick. He has a very full schedule today. He has a very busy schedule every day.”

  “Sure. That’s fine. I’ll take as long as Mr. Wellington wants and that’s all. Have a nice day, okay?”

  Olivia breezed past Mrs. Frank, holding her head up high and pretending not to notice the death glare she was now the subject of. It was unpleasant, to be sure, but it did have one unexpected benefit. By the time she was safely behind Mr. Wellington’s safely shut doors she was so relieved to be away from cranky Mrs. Frank that she was hardly nervous about meeting with her boss anymore. When she turned to face him, saw the expression on his face, her nerves retreated even further. He was smiling broadly and motioning for her to take a seat.

  “Ms. Young! Perfect. I have some news I think you will be very pleased to hear.”

  “CAROLINE! CAROLINE, please, tell me your home!”

  The meeting with Mr. Wellington had turned out to be much, much better than Olivia had imagined. Sometimes he wasn’t actually as pleased with you as you thought he was when you paid him a visit, something she had tried to keep in mind when she had first seen his smile. It was something of a business tactic with him, making a person feel right at home and then tearing said person down to size. Thankfully with her, his pleasure had been all real. He had asked her to take a seat and then gone on and on about all of her virtues, all of the things she had been doing well in her job. She had been putting in more hours than she could count, working far past the time when everyone else was out of the office for longer than she could remember without being able to tell whether or not anyone was really noticing. As it turned out, somebody had, and it had been just the somebody she most needed the recognition from. It was always a good thing to have the man whose name was in the law firm’s title telling you that you had done a good job. It was even better having him tell you that, after careful consideration with the firm’s board, you were officially being made a junior partner. Not just any junior partner, either. Olivia was now the youngest junior partner the firm of Wellington and Briggs had ever seen. Mr. Wellington had assured her that if she continued to work with as much fervor and tenacity as she had shown the company thus far, she would have a bright and lengthy future with them. He had then told her to take the rest of the day off, something that had made her blanch. She couldn’t remember the last time she had taken a day off of work in the middle of the week. She hardly ever even took the weekends off. Saturday was basically just another part of the work week, as far as Olivia was concerned.

  Mr. Wellington had seen it on her face, her disregard for weekends, and he had made it clear that it wasn’t a suggestion. It was an insistence, or order. He had told her that he needed her refreshed and ready for a whole new level of work and for that to happen she needed to give herself a little bit of a break. It had felt decidedly weird leaving the office in the middle of a Friday, but part of her had been relieved. She wasn’t sure that she was ever going to be able to give herself a break without somebody forcing her to do so, an
d truth be told, she needed one. Once she had been given permission, she had practically flown from the building, stopping at a fancy corner store and picking up a bottle of wine that cost more than she could really afford and several fancy cheeses with accompaniments. Caroline would probably have rather gone to a dive bar to do their celebrating but Olivia was past that, or at least wanted to be past that. She was a junior partner now. It was time for her to start acting like the adult she was supposed to be.

  “Caroline! Come on, lady! I’ve got a bottle of wine with me and I promise you it’s one of the best ones you’ll ever taste. Unless you don’t open the door, in which case I might just have to open it up and drink it all myself.”

  She heard the latch being undone and grinned to herself. She should have lead with that last comment. Caroline might have been a lover of dive bars but she was sort of in love with the idea of being fancy at heart. The mention of a super-nice bottle of wine was like a siren call for her. With this in mind, Olivia held the bottle out in front of her like a gift, presenting it the way a waiter in a fancy restaurant would do. She was practically laughing before the door was even open enough for her to see her best friend since forever, anticipating exactly what her reaction would be. It was laughter that died quickly in her throat, before it ever had the chance to truly be born to the world. She might have been in the mood to party, but apparently she wasn’t alone in wanting this visit. She had some unwanted company coming up next to her on the landing in front of Caroline’s door.

  “Um, hi. You’re not Caroline. What are you doing here?”

  “No, I should say I’m not. Not unless there’s been a major change while I wasn’t looking.”

  “Right. What are you doing here?”

  The man who had opened the door, the man who was decidedly not her best friend, clutched at his heart as if he had been mortally wounded. It was theatrical enough to be funny and she probably would have laughed if it had been a different man. But it wasn’t a different man. It was Nick Oswald and as ever, she wasn’t quite sure what to make of him. Nick was the best friend of Caroline’s boyfriend, Abel, and as such she had spent a decent amount of time around him. Abel and Caroline had been dating for six months and according to the way she told it, things were possibly starting to get serious. At first, Olivia had just assumed that Nick would disappear into the woodwork. Either Caroline would get bored of Abel, something she did rapidly with almost every guy she encountered, or it would come to light that Nick wasn’t that good of a friend of Abel’s, after all. As time had ticked by, however, she had realized that he wasn’t going anywhere. He was as devoted to his work as she was to hers, she would give him that, which meant he wasn’t around all or even most of the times when Olivia and Caroline were hanging out. He was there enough, though, for her to have come to the decision that she was nowhere near being his biggest fan. There was a cockiness to him, an arrogance that ruffled her feathers, and a level of flirtation that always made her want to squirm. Still, she did her best to be polite. No matter what kind of a feeling she got about him, he obviously wasn’t going anywhere. It didn’t help that he was so damned good looking, either. He was easily six inches taller than her five-foot-six with thick, black hair that always reminded her of Clark Kent. He had those same bright blue eyes, too, and every time he looked at her she got the impression that there was something mischievous going on inside his mind. It was exactly the impression she was getting at the moment.

  “Jesus, Olivia, you don’t really do the whole polite conversation thing, do you?”

  “No. I mean, sorry, that’s not what I meant. I don’t mean I don’t do polite conversation.”

  “Okay,” he asked with a little smirk, clearly amused by the bizarre way she was stumbling over her words, “then what did you mean?”

  “I just meant that I wasn’t really paying attention to what you were saying. I’ve got some exciting news and I just want to see Caroline.”

  “Don’t feel like sharing with me, too? I can be surprisingly good at sharking, you know.”

  There was something in the way he said it, in the way he raised his eyebrow at her, that made her skin break out in goosebumps. It was silly, that reaction, and she knew it. There had to have been a draft or something to cause that kind of reaction. It certainly couldn’t have been Nick who was responsible for it. She narrowed her eyes at him slightly, prepared to say something she hadn’t yet decided, but she didn’t get the chance. Before she could so much as open her mouth, he gave her an arrogant little salute, tipped her a wink, and then brushed past her on the stairs. Just like that, he had his hand on the door knob of Caroline’s place and was poised to go inside without so much as a knock. She was very close to being denied the last word she seemed to crave when it came to any interaction with the elusive Nick Oswald.

  Chapter Two

  Nick Oswald

  NICK HAD HAD ONE HELL of a day. At only thirty years old he was already the head of his very own engineering firm and it was a business that was quickly taking Austin, Texas by storm. It was a good city to be that go-to guy in, too. Austin was growing so rapidly the city could hardly keep up with itself. Almost every day there was somebody else knocking on his door and asking him to take on a new project. There were men who would have crumbled under the weight of all of that work but Nick wasn’t one of them. He ate it up. He lived for that pressure, that drive. He placed the relentless demands of his job at a premium higher than anything else in his whole life. Anything, that was, other than his friends.

  Women were a dime a dozen, as far as he was concerned. It wasn’t that he didn’t like them, or even worse, hated them, just that they weren’t a priority. He’d never met one who turned his head so that he wanted to have her around for more than a week or two. His friends, though? They were another story. Nick’s friends were the second most important thing in his life and one of the only things he would drop everything for, including work. Leaving work wasn’t something he made a habit of, that was for sure. If he had, his company wouldn’t be the raging success it was. Days like today, though, he was happy to make an exception. It was Abel’s birthday and Abel was a friend worth leaving work for. He and Abel had been friends since the two of them had ridden tricycles instead of full-fledged bikes. As they had grown up they had developed into two very different kinds of men. Abel was solid and quiet, the kind of man who got rattled by next to nothing. He was the antithesis of the work-driven machine Nick himself was, what Nick liked to call “one of those granola types.” For all intents and purposes, they had no business being in each other’s lives anymore, but friendships were funny things. They’d maintained their friendship throughout the years and it showed no signs of departure. Nick was pumped to hang with him and take a fucking break for once. He was so pumped, in fact, that he almost didn’t notice the frigid one standing on the stoop. When he saw her, he did his best to engage her in a little back and forth, a little banter, but as always she was stone cold. He had no idea how to handle a chick like her except to brush her off and go about his day. It was the only way that made sense to deal with chicks like her.

  “Um, excuse me?”

  “You’re excused.” It was a juvenile answer and he knew it, but he couldn’t quite keep his mouth shut. He had his back to her now, no intention of carrying on this miserable excuse for a conversation, but he didn’t need to be able to see her face to have an idea of what her expression must’ve been. He had seen her roll her eyes in disgust enough times to know what it looked like from memory.

  “God, so funny. Never in my life have I met a man as funny as you.”

  “Good. Glad to hear it.” He began to turn the knob, already knowing that she was far from done nagging him. Right on cue, she put a surprisingly firm hand on his shoulder and tugged, all but forcing him to turn around.

  “Seriously, Nick. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “What, aside from having this delightful conversation?”

  “Yeah,” she answere
d with an impressive amount of sarcasm, “aside from that.”

  “I’m sorry, I thought that was kind of obvious.”

  “Well, let’s pretend that you aren’t actually as easy to figure out as you think.”

  “Sure, I guess we can do that. Assuming that it’s not painfully obvious. I’m just paying my buddy a visit on his birthday.”

  “Huh.”

  “Huh what?”

  “Oh, nothing,” she answered in a voice that meant it most definitely wasn’t nothing, “I’m just wondering why you would pay your buddy a visit by waltzing into my best friend’s apartment unannounced.”

  Nick clenched his jaw. His teeth were grinding together seemingly of their own accord, probably messing with some of the very expensive dental work he’d had done over the years. He’d spent some time around this chick over the last six years, but he would never have said she was his favorite woman around. Every time he saw her, it was some version of this. She was cold. More to the point, she was downright icy. She appeared to him like she always had her nose in the air, which meant to him that she thought she was better than him and ninety-nine percent of the people she came into contact with. He did his best to be nice, or civil even, when he was around her, but she seemed to be on a personal mission to make that impossible – to piss him off. On top of everything, she was hot as hell. Her being kind of a bitch and nothing special to look at would have been one thing but she wasn’t your average girl. She was honestly one of the hottest women he’d ever seen and every time he was around her his body responded to it independent of his opinion of her personality. She wasn’t one of those stick-thin women he never felt like he could really grab onto. She was thick, voluptuous. She had a rack that appeared to defy gravity, enough to fill his hands up to capacity in the unlikely event that he was ever to find himself in a situation where his hands were anywhere close to her tits. She had a waist but underneath it were hips and an ass that wouldn’t quit. The hottest part about her was her confidence despite not being the skinniest girl on the block. She knew she was hot as hell and she acted like it. Being demure didn’t strike Nick as one of her issues, hence the constant ruins and arguments just like this one.