Bad Billionaires Box Set
Page 50
They stared at each other for a long moment. Then Kay shifted beneath him, hips undulating and sucking every rational thought from his mind. “I know I’m supposed to be the romance writer here, and I should be appreciating you and the loveliness of this moment, but can we appreciate it later?” She shifted again. “Because I really need you to move.”
“Yeah?” He pulled out, slid back in.
She nodded. “Fuck now. Romance later.”
Another thrust. Another shared moan.
“Words to live by?” he managed to ask.
“I’d rather live with you,” she said.
“Me too, sweetheart, me too.”
Then they weren’t talking, or at least they didn’t have any more room in their brains for talking. The moment became about sensation—for nerves to fire, for caresses and soft touches to leave goosebumps in their wake, for pleasure to build, orgasms to pull them each over into the abyss, and . . . for hearts to feel.
After, as they lay together, bodies intertwined, Garret knew his heart wouldn’t ever belong to another.
Kay owned it.
And that was perfectly fine with him.
Bad Hookup
Billionaire’s Club Book 4
Get your copy at books2read.com/BadHookup.
Rachel
Rachel watched her boss dance with her second husband—or maybe husband twice over was a better description?—and gave a little sigh of happiness.
Yes, Heather was technically her boss, but she was also her friend.
And her friend deserved a happily ever after.
The party was just getting started, friends and business associates spilling out onto Heather’s back patio that had been decorated with twinkly lights, an abundance of flowers, and plenty of portable heaters.
Only the Sextant—herself, Abby, Bec, Seraphina, CeCe, and Heather—along with Jordan and Colin, Abby and CeCe’s husbands, respectively, and of course, Clay, knew that the surprise wedding they’d celebrated that night was technically a second wedding.
The rest of the guests just thought Heather had pulled a fast one on Clay.
Rachel smiled as she remembered the way the couple had come down the stairs, both of their eyes a little damp, but love emanating from every fiber of their bodies.
The vows had been beautiful and—
Ugh. She was getting a little too sappy.
Wiping the tears away before they could escape—and heaven forbid, ruin her mascara as Abby was always so worried about—Rachel blew out a breath and set about making sure the food the caterers had delivered was arranged properly.
Soon the cocktail hour would be over, and then the group of fifty-plus—okay, so she knew it was exactly fifty-seven guests, because she was damned good at her job—would descend like locusts on the food tables.
Everything needed to be ready.
So, she went down her mental checklist. Appetizers. Check. Several types of salad. Blegh, but check. Entrees. Pasta, chicken, and vegetarian. Check. Check. Check. The cake was also ready, perched at the end of the table and waiting to be cut.
“This little shindig your doing?”
Rachel froze, all her nerve endings going on alert.
She knew that voice.
She knew if she turned around, she would see him.
Him.
Tall, much taller than her, but lean when compared to her curves. Still, all that lankiness hadn’t meant a lack of strength. He’d been all sorts of hard and hot as he’d pinned her against the door and pounded into her.
Rachel cleared her throat but didn’t rotate to face him. “Not my doing. I just helped out.”
A long pause, probably because normal people usually looked each other in the eyes when they conversed.
“Well, from what I’ve seen, you’ve done a lot of helping out.” He put a hand on the table next to her, and she shifted away, shivering. She remembered what those fingers could do, how they’d traced over her skin, slipped between her legs, slid inside.
Shuddering, she smoothed out a wrinkle on the tablecloth.
“For a last-minute surprise wedding, everything is beautiful,” he said, no doubt waiting for her to say something semi-coherent.
She didn’t.
Instead, Rachel shrugged and began fussing with the placement of the warming dishes.
The man didn’t take the hint. He didn’t leave.
Why won’t he leave?
She dropped her chin to her chest.
“So,” he finally said after another lengthy—and silent—moment. “Gay, taken, or not interested?”
“Oh my God,” she moaned, one hand coming up to push her bangs off her forehead. “This is not happening.”
“I—” A beat then his voice was incredulous. “I know that moan.” Warm fingers grasped her wrist, tugged until she could see him in all his yumminess.
Her moment of weakness. Her hookup because she’d been feeling desperate and lonely and—
“It’s you,” he said softly.
Yes, it was her. Rachel, the good girl who didn’t sleep around, who certainly didn’t hook up with random strangers in a bar.
Rachel, who had hooked up with a stranger.
The sex had been damned good. Incredible, actually.
But it had been just that. Sex. And she hadn’t been able to let go of the guilt. She’d now slept with a grand total of two men in her life, and one of them was her husband.
“I—” She tugged at her wrist. “I need to go.”
Heather and Clay chose that exact moment to saunter over.
Why universe? Why?
“Rachel,” Heather said, closing the distance between them and hugging her tight. “I told you not to work so hard on the wedding. This”—she swept her hand around the deck—“is all too much.”
“You deserve to have a beautiful wedding,” Rachel murmured to her boss and gave her a quick squeeze before she stepped back.
Heather shook her head, but she was smiling. “Thank you.”
“Yes, thank you,” Clay said. “For all of it. I know it was a lot of work, but we appreciate—Oh, good”—he wrapped an arm around her shoulders, turning her to face Sebastian fully—“I was going to introduce you two, but I guess you’ve already met my assistant, Sebastian.”
Sebastian’s expression flickered with shock—no doubt mirroring her own—but luckily, Clay and Heather were too lost in each other and the moment to recognize just how big of a bomb Clay had just dropped.
After a few more words, their bosses moved on to talk with a business associate, and Sebastian’s blue-gray eyes darkened. His stare, all heat and desire and sex appeal, was what had undone her the first time they’d met.
But it was his words, the hint of a growl edging into his voice that made her insides tremble in that moment.
“I’m really looking forward to working with you, Rachel.”
She tipped over a bowl of salad dressing.
—Get your copy at books2read.com/BadHookup.
Bad Divorce
Billionaire’s Club Book 5
Get your copy at books2read.com/BadDivorce
Bec
Bec closed the file she’d been working on and stretched her arms above her head. Her shoulders ached, her eyes burned—she gone way over the thirty minutes of continuous computer screen time her optometrist recommended—and she was the absolute last person left in the building.
Seriously.
Security had come by her office an hour before, telling her they’d locked up and the high-rise was empty.
Except for her.
She probably should have been lonely, being the singular human presence around, but Bec loved this time of night. It was after one, and she’d been in the office since six the previous morning working on a case that was preparing for trial.
But fuck, did she love finding a legal loophole in a contract and being the one to decisively close it.
Nothing was better than that.
Not being made partne
r several months before. Not the money or the power. Not having a slew of paralegals whose job it was to go line by line through all the paperwork pertinent to her cases and find loopholes like the one she’d just spent hours scouring for.
Those were all intoxicating in many ways.
But still, nothing topped the law itself.
The different interpretations, the way it morphed based on a court’s or judge’s decision, how it changed from year to year to year, even finding this particular loophole after all others before her had failed.
One lawyer to rule them all.
Snorting at her inner SciFi nerd—not that she’d had much spare time to indulge in any form of hobby as of late . . . okay, as of the last five years, if she was being honest—Bec knew it was all worth it. Law was her first love and it was a constantly shifting spider’s web, a fragile and intricate and complex lover.
But it also made sense to her when so many other things in her world did not.
“And no I’ve killed my own buzz,” she muttered before logging off of her computer, grabbing a stack of files from her desk, shoving them into her briefcase, and then slipping on her suit jacket and black pumps.
Down the elevator, through the locked door to the garage, and into her car.
Quiet.
So quiet.
She’d grown up in New York—or at least spent enough of her formative years in the Big Apple for her accent to reflect her time there—and felt more comfortable in big cities. San Francisco was a nice metropolis, but it had a definite sleepy time . . . or at least the district where her office was located did.
Normally, she liked that, preferred it over the way New York had always buzzed with activity.
But Bec had been . . . feeling weird as of late.
She was used to city life—the expensive rents, the exhaust fumes that hung in the air at all hours of the day, the horns and sirens and screeching brakes.
But this quiet? Fuck, did it hit her straight in the gut.
Or maybe it wasn’t quiet so much as disquiet?
Bec was a simple woman. She didn’t censor herself, didn’t trouble over hurt feelings or someone’s toes being stepped on. She took care of business in the quickest, most efficient way possible.
That was Rebecca Darden. What she was famous for—at least in the legal world.
No prisoners. Decisive. Smart as hell and not a fucking pushover.
She’d spent a lifetime studying and working and losing sleep and clawing and fighting and struggling against the pressures of being in a male-dominated field to become that woman.
And yet . . .
“Fuck,” she muttered and turned on her car, making her way through the quieted city to her apartment. “I’m losing it.”
Because she couldn’t help but feel that now she’d finally met her goal of being partner, of being revered and feared and even sometimes reviled—all fine qualities in her opinion—that she was missing out on something.
There.
She’d said it.
Rebecca fucking Darden felt that somehow along the way of all her success that she’d missed out on something.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t figure out what the fuck that something was.
A bigger challenge?
Nope. A month before, she’d taken on a case with impossible odds and had just that evening figured out how to win it.
Longer hours?
Hell no. At this point, she was paying for an apartment she was hardly ever in.
More money? No. She already had an obscene amount.
Better relationship with her parents? Nope. Things were fine at this point. Probably the most settled she’d ever been with them.
Different friends?
No fucking way. Her group of women—and now a few men—were the shit. They kept her sane and laughed at her jokes and were really incredible people.
She loved them and that was saying something, especially coming from her and her limited tolerance of bullshit. She didn’t like easy, let alone love easily.
And she loved every one of them.
So what?
That was the fucking problem. She didn’t know. Normally, she’d just turn that particular puzzle over in her mind until she figured it out, as she’d done with the contract that evening.
But she’d been turning this freaking enigma over in her mind for months and Bec was no closer to discovering the exact source of her unease.
“Boo fucking hoo,” she murmured, pulling into her parking spot and making it up to her floor via her private elevator.
The lift went directly to her penthouse—yes, the apartment she hardly spent any time in was a ridiculously expensive penthouse—and required a code to access it.
So Bec really didn’t expect to see another person waiting for her when the doors opened with a soft ding and she stepped off.
But there was another person waiting just outside her front door.
A person she never expected to see again.
Luke Pearson.
Her ex-husband.
It was one-fucking-thirty in the morning, and her ex-husband was sitting on the floor outside her apartment.
Asleep.
Fuming, she marched over to him and kicked his shoe. Hard.
“Luke,” she snapped. “Why in the ever loving fuck are you here?”
His lids peeled back, sleepy green eyes met hers. “Becky,” he murmured. “You’re gorgeous as always.” The drowsiness began to fade from his expression. “Did you just come from work?” He glanced down at his phone. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Of course, I know what time it is—” Bec bit back the words. Fuck, but wasn’t this conversation an exact replica of the broken record one they’d had way too many times over the course of their relationship?
She crossed her arms. “Never mind that.” A glare that had withered balls much bigger than Luke’s “Why did you break into my apartment?”
He stood, towering over her. Once, Bec would have said that his size made her feel petite, feminine, soft, which was atypical for a giant Amazon such as herself. Today, it just pissed her off. She was tall for a women, almost six feet in heels, and was used to using that fact to her advantage.
No longer hunching her shoulders to appear shorter. Hell, no. She wore heels if she wanted and as high as she wanted—
And she had this man to thank for that fact.
“Stand tall, sugar pie,” he used to say.
Yes, Luke had called her—world-famous, tough as shit lawyer—sugar pie.
But that had been long ago, when she’d been broken and . . .
Her heart, the one she liked to pretend didn’t actually exist, throbbed pulsed with old hurt.
Because she’d merely been an entertaining side project for him, a broken toy to fix, a puzzle to figure out and one to discard when he couldn’t find a satisfactory answer.
Memories.
Aw.
Motherfucking memories.
“First, I didn’t break into your apartment. This is the hall. Second,” he hurried to add when she opened her mouth to argue semantics, “I didn’t break in. You used our anniversary as the code.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Well, she was changing that tomorrow . . . today . . . fuck, yesterday, now that—
“Go away, Luke,” she said, pushing past him and unlocking her door while blocking his view of the keypad that was identical to that of the elevator. Her front door’s code was not the date of her anniversary with her ex.
But Luke probably already knew that, given that he had been sitting on the floor of her hallway rather than on her couch, beer in hand, feet making prints on her glass coffee table.
Men.
Fucking men.
She slammed the door closed behind her and threw the dead bolt. The knock approximately one second later did not surprise her. Bec dropped her briefcase to the floor then opened it just enough to shoot angry eyes at him through the narrow gap the dead bolt allowed
.
Serious green eyes fixed onto hers. “We need to talk.”
“Luke,” she snapped. “I’m exhausted. It’s the middle of the night. I wouldn’t have any patience to talk to my best friends right now, let alone my ex-husband.”
“Funny story about that,” he said, his lips curving. “Turns out that I’m not actually your ex-husband.”
Billionaire’s Club
full series information at www.elisefaber.com/billionairesclub
Bad Night Stand
* * *
Bad Breakup
* * *
Bad Husband
* * *
Bad Hookup
* * *
Bad Divorce
Also by Elise Faber
Also by Elise Faber
(see a full listing and descriptions at www.elisefaber.com)
* * *
Roosevelt Ranch Series (all stand alone)
Disaster at Roosevelt Ranch
Heartbreak at Roosevelt Ranch
Collision at Roosevelt Ranch
Regret at Roosevelt Ranch (August 4th, 2019)
* * *
Billionaire’s Club (all stand alone)
Bad Night Stand
Bad Breakup
Bad Husband
Bad Hookup
Bad Divorce
Bad Boyfriend (Oct 2019)
* * *
Gold Hockey (all stand alone)
Blocked
Backhand
Boarding
Benched
Breakaway (September 15th, 2019)
* * *
Life Sucks Series (all stand alone)
Train Wreck