Billionaire's Bombshell

by Sienna Valentine

“The tall one,” Ash said, “in normal chick clothes. What about you, Wyatt? You in?”

  “Deck seems kinda stacked, doesn’t it?” Wyatt said, but his gaze was locked on the blue-eyed girl. “I mean, we get the nuns, you get the normal one. The fuck’s up with that?”

  “I have it on good authority she’s a tough nut to crack,” Ash replied, “and I’ll tone down my game to give you two a better chance. How’s that?”

  “Bullshit,” I answered. “Bullshit, is what it is.”

  But I had the urge to look back at those girls again, at the one with the gorgeous hair and softly parted lips. Those wide eyes, so innocent, so full of wonder and a little fear. They made me want to know more about her. So much more…

  “Does that mean you don’t want in, then?” Ash said, snapping me back to the conversation like a too-tight rubber band. He was leering at the group of girls now, a wicked grin on his face. “’Cause if you don’t, a two-for-one special would suit me just fine.”

  Something in the pit of my stomach began to burn and I clenched my fists hard enough to turn my knuckles white. No way in hell I was letting Ash at her. No way was I going to let him drag my name and reputation through the mud on this one. I was Reid-fucking-Brody. I didn’t back down from a challenge.

  “I said the one with the freckles,” I growled, and it was like the room dropped ten degrees. Even Wyatt winced. He was a hothead. A ball of flame when he got pissed off. But me? My rage was always served cold. Hard. Relentless. Ash’s smile faded just a little and he couldn’t hold my eyes. He turned to Wyatt instead and clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Well, guess that leaves you with blondie,” he said. Wyatt didn’t seem to mind going last, for once. He just nodded, shrugged, then took a long draught of his shitty Pabst beer.

  “Now that it’s all settled,” Ash continued. “I’d say all that’s left to do is for us to meet our marks. You two sure you’re ready for this?” He eyed us skeptically. “I’d hate to throw you to the wolves…”

  I shook my head and picked my beer up from the table. “Those aren’t wolves, Ash. They’re sheep. Lost little lambs come in from the cold. And I’m going in for the kill.” I stepped away from the table. “Whenever you two ladies wanna join me…”

  I turned around then and set my sights on those strawberry blonde locks. That girl, whoever she was, was mine. She just didn’t know it yet.

  But I knew. From the very moment I saw her… I had to have her.

  Chapter 2

  Sarah

  Of all the places I never thought I’d be, here in this bar was the most unexpected of all of them.

  I still couldn’t believe I’d done it. That I’d actually run away from home. The sheer insanity of it was threatening to double me over. The lights were getting fuzzy around the edges, a halo that served to remind me just how far from grace I was about to fall.

  “Hey.” Next to me, Beth had noticed I was crashing. “Are you all right, sister?”

  “I’m not sure,” I whispered in reply. The room seemed to be spinning. The scents of liquor and sweat and blood and all kinds of unspeakable debauchery were an assault I could not defend myself from. Underneath it all was the crippling guilt that we’d sinned. We had failed to honor the laws of our father. I think I mumbled something else then, something in our mother tongue, when I felt a much stronger hand upon me.

  “Sarah…”

  I looked over. Hannah was there, her jade green eyes tethering me to the here and now. When she smiled, I felt the hot sting of tears. I hadn’t seen my older sister in so long…

  “It’s okay,” Hannah said, sitting me down on a barstool. I wobbled a bit and had to grab the bar to keep from toppling over. “This is new. This is all so new. I get that. It felt like that for me, the first time around…”

  Rumspringa. That was what Hannah was talking about. It was an Amish rite of passage for youths who had not yet committed themselves to the church. A time when they could explore the English world—that was what we called anything outside our community—and decide which appealed more: the simple life, or the allure of something darker, more complex. A life of temptation. Of sin.

  Hannah had embarked upon her Rumspringa years ago. And she never came back. Not even to say goodbye. Of course, the night before she’d gone away, she had told me and Beth how much we meant to her. How very much she loved us. It took me some time to accept, but I realized as I matured that that had been her goodbye to us. Even if she’d never uttered that exact word.

  And now here she was. A bartender. In this… place. Wearing those clothes; skin-tight denim and a sleeveless blouse—a tank-top—sheer enough to show off the color of her undergarments beneath. I blushed on her behalf. It was… scandalous. Frankly, I’d never seen anything like it, and I wasn’t handling it well.

  Beth, though? She was as awestruck as I was, but in a different way. For her, this was incredibly exciting. She had that youthful elation still; she was the most defiant of us all, no matter how many times our mother tried to teach her temperance. She was a bundle of nerves in the way that she couldn’t stop herself from vibrating, from practically jumping up and down at the newness of it all. Part of me wished I had half her enthusiasm.

  Beth was the one who had convinced me to go. Right at the last second I hesitated, and she had given me the push I needed to come here, to see Hannah after almost two years. The letters Hannah managed to leave in a hollow stump on the edges of our land weren’t enough; no matter how often we corresponded, defying our parents’ instruction, Beth and I needed more. We needed to see her. Our sister. The one whose name our parents refused to speak. Whose name had been forbidden from our lips, as well.

  We’d been forbidden from more than that. We’d been forbidden from Rumspringa entirely. All the girls who had come of age were. The young men were merely discouraged, but for us, shunning was at stake. I was already mentally preparing myself for that possibility when we returned. Or, as Beth kept saying, if we returned.

  I couldn’t think about that now. Not when my heart was beating so fast already.

  I looked up into Hannah’s face as she said, “You wanna drink? Should calm you down a little. Promise I won’t card you, though I’m pretty happy with the way those IDs came out, if you know what I mean.” And she winked.

  I knew roughly two-thirds of what that meant. But “carding”? What was that? I stared blankly at her, and she rolled her eyes and snapped at a man on the other side of the bar. “Hey, Jake, can you grab my sister a…” Hannah turned her attention back to me, looking me up and down. “You know what? Just get her some wine. We’ll start slow.” Jake nodded and I watched him uncork a bottle, filling up a glass halfway.

  When he set it down in front of me, my stomach turned. This was too much, too fast. We didn’t drink in the community. We were New Order, which means we didn’t drink or smoke. Those were gateways to ruin, our father often said. And here Hannah was, serving it up, not just to me, but to a whole room full of people. Too many people…

  “This is too much,” I whispered to Beth. But she wasn’t paying attention to me. Only Hannah seemed to hear.

  “Look,” she said, “you two are out in the real world now. You’ve gotta do some real world things. Live a little! Isn’t that what Rumspringa’s supposed to be about—exploring, getting your hands dirty?”

  “You seem to have done quite a bit of both,” I muttered, then winced immediately. I hadn’t meant it like that—not really. It wasn’t my place to judge Hannah, after all. But a little bit of my mother had shown through just then, and I could see the hurt in Hannah’s eyes. I swallowed hard and reached over to take her hand. “I’m sorry, sister. My tongue got away from me…”

  For as long as I could remember, Hannah had been the “strong one” of our trio. She was passionate, headstrong, and seemingly invulnerable—in many ways, she reminded me of our late grandmother, who’d been referred to as a “hard woman” by almost every man in our village. She was quite skilled at putti
ng up barriers and walls. So when I saw even the briefest flicker of shame cross my sister’s face, it pulled at the strings of my heart with such regret my cheeks burned.

  But then Hannah shrugged, put a mask of placidity back on, and said, “Well, if you’re looking for someone to catch it for you…” She nodded at the rest of the room behind my shoulder.

  I turned, and instantly my cheeks bloomed brighter. There, toward the back of the bar, three men were staring in our direction. Not just any men, either. These men were… well, objectively speaking, attractive. And they looked nothing like the boys Beth and I had left behind just hours ago.

  All three of them were tall and built, composed entirely of a series of powerful muscles that coiled like serpents whenever they lifted their drinks to their mouths. Those were not the lean sort of muscles earned by farming and woodworking. These muscles were larger, harder, different. Alluring in ways I hadn’t expected. I found it hard to draw my eyes away from the bulge of their biceps, the cords of their shoulders, and my mind went to a very dark place where I imagined with what ease those arms might hold me.

  My heart was in my throat by the time I’d dragged my eyes up the neck of the one nearest to me. He had a jaw sharp and defined as the edge of a blade, and it looked just as strong as the rest of him. His chin was square, not soft in the slightest, and led up to the bow of his lips stained by a scant trail of foam from the beer he was holding. I saw his nostrils flare just a little and met his gaze, piercing enough to nearly startle me off my stool. His eyes were the most beautiful shade of brown I’d ever seen, the shadow of his brow giving them a depth that left me breathless. And yet they seemed to have an inner glow, a fire that turned them amber and then honey toward the center.

  He lifted one of his jet eyebrows and curled his lips in a smirk when I didn’t look away. Then he swept his tongue, just slightly, over his lower lip and my pulse began pounding in my ears.

  And… somewhere else, too.

  I tore away and turned back to Hannah, who was grinning from ear to ear. When I began muttering a prayer, she rolled her eyes and took me by the shoulders.

  “Sarah, loosen up! Most girls your age would kill for men like that to undress them with their eyes! Beth certainly doesn’t seem to mind.”

  I looked over. My younger sister was distracted, gazing longingly in the same direction I had been a moment before. I shook my head at them both.

  “Beth’s not old enough to know better,” I said, and it was true. She was just barely nineteen, hardly old enough for baptism let alone to know anything about men. I wasn’t much better at twenty-two, but I at least had the good sense to be wary of outsiders in a way Beth had never been. She was the baby, and that had afforded her a certain amount of freedom and naïveté that struck me as ill-suited for the English world.

  At my detraction of her character, Beth blinked and looked at me, a scowl on her young and innocent face. “Hannah’s right, Sarah. You need to have some fun. This is what Rumspringa is all about.”

  “It’s not!” I protested, fighting the urge to slam my hands on the bar. I nestled them in my skirts instead, clutching the material tightly. “Rumspringa is supposed to be a time of contemplation. We venture into a world of sin so that we may know the nature of temptation, and so we may be thankful for the simple lives we lead back home. Rumspringa is supposed to be a cautionary tale, not a license to… to…” I turned away, disgusted. “To become inebriated and fornicate!”

  Hannah laughed, hard. To my right, I heard Jake laughing too, as well as a few other patrons who had undoubtedly overheard. My face was blazing now and I covered it with my palms, sending a silent prayer up to God that Beth and Hannah would come to their senses and we would all go back home.

  “Sarah.” Hannah’s voice was in my ear, soft, lilting with the accent of our mother tongue. I looked up at her through my fingers. “It’s all right. I know how scary this can all be. But you do have admirers, and that’s not such a bad thing, is it?”

  I wet my lips. “I don’t think that’s the case,” I replied in strangled, appropriated Dutch. “They’re probably looking at you, not me.” Even as I said it, I knew it was a lie. The one with the black hair had stared right through me. We’d locked eyes. I could still feel the heat of his gaze, still see the glitter of his irises in the dark. They were terrifying, those eyes—filled with forbidden knowledge, witness to the kind of things I couldn’t even imagine, yet things that were perceived as normal here. The way they’d made me feel, though… like I was the only woman in the room—no, all the world… That delicious beat he’d inspired low in my belly, and further south still…

  Hannah pulled my hands down gently and looked into my eyes. I remembered how she’d always protected me, growing up—Beth, too. Hannah was our guiding star as children. She was so tough and so wise. Now was no different except that she was also worldly, educated in matters beyond my and Beth’s comprehension. We were not on equal footing, Hannah and I, nor had we ever been… but the gulf between us seemed wider now.

  Still, her protective embrace brought me comfort. Softly, I told her, “Even if he was—looking at me, I mean—he’s got a beard, Hannah.”

  She blinked at me. “And… that matters why?”

  I frowned. Had she really forgotten? Two years was a long time, but was it really that long?

  “That means he’s married,” I whispered, and Hannah’s jaw dropped just a tad. Her lips moved, as if she wanted to say something… and then she laughed. At me. Again. I slumped forward into the bar, trying to find a way to curl up and disappear. I felt so foolish here. So much like I didn’t belong.

  “You’re talking about Amish standards!” Hannah said, pushing my wine glass closer to me. Even that was strange and new. I’d never seen a glass that looked like that before. “Out here, men grow beards for fun, not as a symbol of their availability.” She eyed the stranger I’d been intrigued by. “Anyway, I’m willing to bet he’s single as can be. Guys like that usually are.”

  I tucked a strand of hair back into my bonnet. “Guys like what?”

  “Bad boys,” she said with a shrug, picking up my untouched glass and downing its contents all in one go. I widened my eyes at her but she just shrugged. “Cocky. Sexy. You know.” She gestured vaguely. “Hot. Eligible! And they like to stay that way. For as long as they can, at least.”

  “You’re not exactly pleading his case,” I replied as Hannah waved to Jake to fill up her glass again. This time, she handed it to Beth, who took a long sip. I slapped her arm and gave her a look, but she ignored me—I even caught her shooting me a petulant glare out of the corner of her eye. The nerve… Looking back at Hannah, I added, “By the sounds of things, I should stay far, far away.”

  “Oh,” Hannah said, smiling slyly, “I don’t think that will be possible.”

  I wrinkled my nose at her. “And why is that?” Did Hannah think I couldn’t resist whatever temptation that man offered? Did she think I’d get a taste of the world beyond our borders and vow never to return, as she did? I wouldn’t have put it past her. Hannah often believed her way was the right way, and there legitimately was no other. I wasn’t so sure that in this case, she was right.

  But she just grinned at me a little wider and said, “Because he’s on his way over here, kiddo. And he hasn’t stopped staring at you the whole way.”

  My stomach dropped to my feet and I whirled so fast on my stool I almost lost my balance. Hannah was right. The tall, dark stranger was on his feet and swaggering over to me, running a hand through his black hair to push it away from his chiseled face. Wolf’s eyes, I realized—he had the eyes of a wolf. Of a predator.

  And judging by the way he was looking at me, I was his prey.

  Pride is available everywhere now!

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  Chapter 1

  Ava
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br />   I woke from a deep sleep to the unmistakable feeling of an icepick being shoved through my left eye.

  It shouldn’t have been unexpected, though. This might have been my first hangover, but popular media had led me to believe they were always like this. I just hadn’t properly considered the consequences when I’d started drinking yesterday afternoon.

  TMZ would have a ball with this, if they ever found out about it. “America’s Sweetheart, Ava Cassidy, goes on a drinking binge 12 hours into unemployment.” I knew the world had just been waiting for me to follow in the footsteps of those before me. First you’re “America’s Sweetheart,” then you’re shaving your head or being arrested on national television. Unemployment was just the beginning.

  Unemployment.

  The thought hit me like... well, like an icepick through my eye socket. I was unemployed. Bad enough that I’d caught Ken with Fiona—Fiona of all people! But to have lost my job over that, that... I wasn’t sure I had a word bad enough for it. Layla might.