DASH: A Secret Billionaire Romance
Page 1
DASH
A Secret Billionaire Romance
Lucy Lambert
Contents
About This Book
Dash: A Secret Billionaire Romance
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Epilogue
Thank you for reading DASH!
Anyone He Wants: A Billionaire Romance
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
About the Author
About This Book
Dash Beaumont is a billionaire on the run. Seven months ago when his mother died, he left behind his company, the board room, and all of his responsibilities. He hopped onto his bike and disappeared into the back roads of America. All he wanted was to feel the thrum of a motorcycle between his legs and forget that his past ever existed.
But sometimes the past has a habit of coming back to remind you of what you've lost...
Ellie Granger has been stuck in Pleasant, Kansas her whole life. Now that her parents are both gone, there's nothing keeping her there but a crushing sense of despair that things could ever get better. When a strange biker arrives in town and saves her from her abusive ex boyfriend, she can't help but feel the stirrings of something deeper. It's not only her fiercely burning attraction to the handsome stranger, though. Something about him isn't what it appears to be.
Something about him seems familiar.
But Dash isn't going to give up his secrets to anyone, and Ellie isn't going to run away from home with a stranger, no matter how searingly attractive he is. But when the memory of a first kiss comes screaming back, she must make the most agonizing decision of her life - and choose whether to give up everything she's known for a chance at true love.
Then he picked me up, literally sweeping me off my feet. I gasped, encircling his neck with my arms and holding tight while he took the stairs two at a time.
He pulled my shirt off and traced a hot line down between my breasts with his mouth. He kept going down my stomach. My skin knitted into gooseflesh in his wake.
It was so intense. My fingers squeezed the comforter into my fists while I arched my back up.
His fingers found the button and zipper of my jeans. He pulled the zipper down and tugged the cotton and denim lower, so he could tease the sensitive flesh there with his lips.
I knew he wanted to tear my jeans and panties away, wanted to savage me until I could take no more. I had a momentary panic, trying to remember if I’d shaved my legs and kept the hedges trimmed the last time I’d showered. I think I had.
But then something crept into my mind.
“It’s been a long time for me since… you know,” I said.
“Me too,” he said, “Are you asking me to be gentle?”
I hesitated a moment, then said, “No…”
Dash: A Secret Billionaire Romance
Chapter 1
DASH
I never thought that I’d come back to this place.
I pulled over to the side of the road, the gravel on the shoulder crunching beneath the old motorcycle’s tires.
I took off my helmet and felt my hair spill around my face, the breeze tugging at it.
The bike shuddered between my thighs and I gave the throttle a twist. The old beast growled and smoothed out.
Not far in front of me stood the welcome sign for Pleasant, Kansas. It hadn’t changed much since I’d been here as a boy.
Just over 4,000 people lived there. 4,000 people who didn’t know who I was, where I came from.
No one from back then would recognize me now, and that was exactly what I wanted.
No one could know who I was. Not yet. Not until I found what I was looking for.
If only I knew what that was, I thought, resting my gloved hands on the top of my helmet, which rested on my lap.
I closed my eyes and breathed the clean air of the heartland for a moment, letting it wash over my face.
It was so different from the air I’d been breathing these last few years. City air. Industrial air. The smells of success, some might say.
Then I pulled my helmet back on, the smoked visor immediately darkening the world.
I toed the bike into gear and twisted the throttle.
Chapter 2
ELLIE
“You’re never hitting me again, Bobby,” I said. I held the plastic laundry hamper against my stomach like a shield.
My body started those hot-cold shivers of fear and anger I’d become so used to
The cause of those shivers leaned against one of the battered washing machines in Abby’s Laundromat, the only place in town you could come get your things washed if your own machines broke.
Like mine had been. For two months now.
Bobby shook his head, his mouth grinning around a toothpick. He always chewed a toothpick. He thought it made him look cool, he’d told me once when we first started dating.
I’d told him it made him look ridiculous.
Of course, that had been back in high school, back when we both thought we’d be a thing together after school. Back before he’d shown his true colors.
The vibrations of the machine he leaned against made the little pull tabs on the zipper of his jacket jangle.
“I told you to call me Robert,” he said, “Bobby is a boy’s name.”
I would just leave, but the machine he leaned against held almost all my clothes in the world. I wore an old pair of faded blue jeans mostly worn through in both knees and my old Pleasant High hoodie, the stylized block letters almost worn away.
“Well maybe if you ever turn into a man, I’ll use a man’s name for you,” I said, my blood boiling.
I knew it wasn’t the right thing to say even before his self-possessed grin turned to a snarl. My mouth had been a constant source of trouble ever since I was little.
“You take that back, Ellie Granger,” Bobby said, pushing himself away from the machine.
Behind him I could see the street through the big plate glass windows. As usual, downtown Pleasant was pretty quiet. In fact, my old Ranger pickup and Bobby’s Trans Am were the only cars parked anywhere nearby.
Somewhere down the way an engine rumbled. A motorcycle, maybe. Too far away in any case.
“Or else you’ll what?” I said.
“You know I only do what needs doi
ng. A woman isn’t supposed to talk to her man this way,” Bobby said. He had a sharp, handsome face. Pale eyes made paler by his fair hair. A wicked face cut from stone with no empathy behind it.
“Then I guess it’s a good thing I’m not your woman,” I said. I glanced around, looking for an escape. But Bobby’s broad shouldered-frame took up the narrow alley between the washing machines on one side and the dryers on the other.
One of his black work boots squeaked against the scuffed tile floor as he came closer.
“But this is what your daddy wanted, Ellie,” he said.
“That was before he died, and he didn’t know you like to do your talking with your fists,” I retorted. I stepped back. What have I gotten myself into this time? I thought. I knew that as soon as I’d seen his sports car pull up to the curb I should have grabbed my wet laundry from the wash, tossed it into my truck, and driven away.
But he’d left his two buddies since preschool, John and Dave, in the car. I’d made the mistake of thinking that because he didn’t bring his goons in with him he might just leave well enough alone.
But only hindsight’s 20/20, I guess.
Bobby smiled again, shifting the toothpick to the other side of his mouth as he did. “Nowhere to go, Ellie. What’s say you and me work through a few things while we’re all alone here?”
He walked forward. I moved back. We kept going that way until my shoulders hit the wall. Bobby stopped in front of me, a few feet away, just out of reach.
My knuckles went white around the plastic rim of the hamper.
I shifted my hips and something dug into the small of my back.
It was the latch to the back door. But was it locked? I didn’t know.
“We have some catching up to do, you know,” Bobby said. He ran his fingers through his hair, always kept cropped short, and looked me up and down.
I reached back with one hand, hoping he couldn’t see. I tested the latch. It moved. Not locked. I can get out.
But I’d have to leave my clothes. It wasn’t a decision long or hard in the making.
“I think this is about as much catching up as I can stand for the moment,” I said. I realized then that I didn’t know what was behind the door. What if Abby kept stuff out back there, blocking it?
“Not much of a choice, as I see it,” Bobby said. He shrugged, relaxed and inattentive in apparent victory.
We were both quiet for a moment. That rumble of a motorcycle engine drew closer.
Here goes nothing, I thought. I unlatched the door and pushed my shoulders back against it, praying it would open and not hit some unknown block on the other side.
It opened. In fact, I almost fell it opened so quickly.
“Hey!” Bobby yelled.
I regained my balance. Then I threw the hamper at him. Instinctively, he reached out and caught it. It gave me just enough time to slip out into the back alley and slam the door shut.
Then I saw the pile of empty wood pallets tossed by the brick wall of the alley. I grabbed one and shoved it under the handle just as Bobby slammed against the door from the other side.
The wood creaked.
“She’s in the back!” Bobby yelled.
I ran for the mouth of the alley. It was a narrow space between the laundromat and a long-empty Five and Dime that had been closed since before I started high school.
I made it to the sidewalk, all the while fumbling in my pocket for the Ranger’s key. If I could just make it to the truck I’d be all right.
“Hey, sweetie,” Dave said as he grabbed my arm. I tried to wrench it free, but couldn’t. John grabbed my other arm just as I pulled my hand back to deliver a punch.
“That’s not nice,” John said coyly.
The bells over Abby’s Laundromat tinkled when Bobby exited through the front door. He chewed casually on his toothpick while he walked the short distance to us.
Some of my hair hand fallen over my eyes. He reached out and brushed it off my forehead. “Don’t you touch me!” I said.
“You shouldn’t talk to me that way,” Bobby said. His fingers grazed my cheek while they found their way to the back of my head. They clenched into a fist around my hair and used the grip to pull my head back.
In all the excitement, none of them noticed the burbling growl of the motorcycle engine come closer, hesitate, and then turn off.
“Please, Bobby. Please,” I said.
Bobby smiled. It was a shark’s grin.
Chapter 3
DASH
I sat on my bike, which was quiet and still between my thighs. The carb pinged while it cooled.
None of my business, I kept thinking. Two men had a pretty blond girl in jeans held between them. Some greaser wannabe who chewed on a toothpick like he was Clint Eastwood stood in front of them.
He had a pretty painful looking grip on the woman’s hair.
None of my business, I thought again. I wanted to stay incognito. No attachments. No long stays that would get me noticed.
If that’s the case, then why did I come back here? Back to this place where I used to live?
“Let go of me!” The woman spat.
“This is nothing you don’t deserve,” the toothpick chewer said.
My stomach churned. I missed my chance to start the bike up again and just keep on riding. Instead, I stepped off the bike. My thighs and lower back ached from the long ride, ached as the blood returned to them.
I pulled my helmet off and set it on the seat.
The toothpick punk, still gripping the woman’s hair, drew his other hand back into a fist.
“What the hell are you people doing?” I said.
The girl looked over her shoulder while the men glared at me. She was beautiful. It was the first thing I noticed. Even without any makeup, even with her hair in disarray.
And she was also familiar, her lovely face tugging at the strands of my memories from this place.
“Uh, Robert?” One of the goons said to the toothpick man. Robert, is it?
“Shut up,” Robert said, then he let go of the girl and moved so that he stood between me and her. “This is none of your business, man.”
He looked me up and down with contempt. The other two gave me more nervous glances. My bike may have been old, but my riding gear wasn’t. It looked rather like armor, which it was. Kevlar plates were sewn into it in the elbows and knees and across the chest and down the stomach.
My gloves had reinforced knuckles, too.
Although now I wished I’d left my helmet on. My face felt naked without it. For a second there I wondered if any of them might recognize me from the news reports. My heartbeat quickened with the worry.
I was risking a lot for a woman I didn’t know.
If they did, no one said anything.
“I’m making it my business,” I said.
I recognized the voice that came out of me. The voice of the man I thought I left behind in New York. It made people listen, and I needed it then.
The girl’s eyes dart towards me. “You should get out of here,” she mutters. “You don’t wanna get involved in this.”
That gave me pause. But not for long. I don’t think she knows the sort of trouble she’s in.
“She’s right, you know,” Bobby said. When she called him that, I took another look at him. He was definitely more a Bobby than a Robert. And I could tell he didn’t like that much.
“If you leave, no one gets hurt,” I said.
“You know how to count, friend?” Bobby said. His two goons laughed at his apparent wit.
“Yeah, I see one woman and three little boys,” I shot back.
Bobby’s smile fell for just a moment. I guess he thought himself some sort of big deal around here. His two buddies looked shocked, confirming that theory.
“John, I think the stranger needs taught a lesson,” Bobby said.
“Right,” John said. He let go of the girl and ran at me. I balled my hand into a fist and sunk it into his stomach when he came close e
nough. His breath whooshed out of him.
When I pulled my hand back he crumpled into a ball on the ground, trying to get his breath back. The Kevlar knuckles on my gloves really were unforgiving.
“Dave!” Bobby shouted.
The other goon came at me. This one came swinging. He hit me in the stomach, right on an armor plate. His face went white with the pain.
I turned him around and sent him on his way with a quick boot to his doughy behind. He staggered a few paces and fell, clutching his hand.
Bobby looked at me. I shrugged.
Then he spat his toothpick out. Getting serious now, I thought.
He was faster than his buddies. He pulled his fist back and swung before I could duck. Hard knuckles crashed against my cheek.
I staggered, dizzy, and fell to one knee.
Damn, I thought, waiting for the next punch to connect. It didn’t.
“You leave him alone, Bobby!”
“Get off me!” he said.
When my vision cleared I looked up in time to see Bobby throw the girl off his shoulders.
If I was fighting fair, I’d wait for him to regain his balance. But this is no prize fight. He had the kind of hungry evil in his eyes that I knew all too well.
This time I used my elbow. Elbows are far more effective than fists. The only drawback is you have to get so much closer. But that was no problem with Bobby distracted.
“Hey!” I shouted.
He whipped his head around in time to catch the point of my elbow on his chin. His lights went out, his eyes glazing, and dropped to the pavement.
“That was stupid of you,” the girl breathed, but gratitude shone in her eyes.
I frowned at her. My cheek started burning. Bobby may have been an asshole, but he knew how to throw a punch.
“No good deed goes unpunished, right?” I shrug.
She looks so familiar.
“Oh, it’ll be punished, all right. His father’s the sheriff,” she said.
That's my cue to leave, I thought. Sheriffs had offices. Offices had pictures. Even though they probably didn’t think I’d run this way, my picture probably hung on a cork board somewhere in that office.