Buy Me, Love (The One and Only Book 1)

by Lauren Milson

  Copyright © 2020 by Lauren Milson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Buy Me, Love

  The One and Only Series

  Lauren Milson

  Contents

  Buy Me, Love

  1. Kit

  2. Maxwell

  3. Kit

  4. Maxwell

  5. Kit

  6. Maxwell

  7. Kit

  8. Maxwell

  9. Kit

  10. Maxwell

  11. Kit

  12. Maxwell

  13. Kit

  14. Maxwell

  Kit

  Her Friend’s Father

  1. Joanne

  Also by Lauren Milson

  About the Author

  Buy Me, Love

  Katherine “Kit” Kensington is twenty years old and has never been on a date. As the daughter of a successful and wealthy hotelier, she is overprotected, constantly surrounded by her personal security detail, and doesn’t get to meet many new people.

  Her father has an idea. Kit can put herself up for bid at his hotel’s annual Valentine’s Day Charity Auction. That way, she can have her first date at the hotel bar with someone fully vetted, while being under the watchful eye of her guards at the same time. Win-win?

  It’s anything but.

  Kit’s world is turned upside-down when possessive billionaire Maxwell Armstrong enters the room. He doesn’t just want to buy Kit’s heart - he wants to own it.

  So he strides toward her, pulls her against his chest, gives the event organizer a blank check, and tells Kit no other man is allowed to bid on her heart.

  Only catch? Mr. Armstrong is looking for more than just a date…

  He’s looking for forever.

  It’s an insta-love V-Day! We’ve got a date auction, a billionaire with a secret, a curvy, sweet young lady, a swanky hotel, an old motel, and cuddling up with your one and only during a slasher flick (the only way to watch slasher flicks).

  Enjoy this fun, sweet and steamy little treat.

  Each book in the “The One and Only” series is a standalone and the books can be read in any order.

  Happy Valentine’s Day!

  xx, Lauren

  1

  Kit

  I pull my shoulders back while drying my hands, take a good, long look in the mirror, and give the plush white hand towel back to the bathroom attendant with a smile. I have no money on me to tip her, but I take note of what’s on her name tag so I can ask my father’s payroll manager to slip something extra into her next paycheck.

  I take another look in the mirror, grab my lipstick from my purse, and carefully apply a fresh swipe. Then I take a long, deep breath and blow it out, rolling my neck from side to side and trying to get my head together.

  It’s time for my first date, and I don’t know who it’s with yet.

  I’ve been thirsty for a date since forever ago, but my father is overprotective. He also has an odd sense of humor. He thinks this is all very funny, to let me go on a date as long as I don’t leave the premises. He chuckled when I threw up my hands in surrender and told him I’d go along for the ride on this.

  Still. The concerning part is that I have no money on me. Not only no money, but also no wallet, no spare change, not even a Metrocard to get me out of here should I decide I want to bail.

  That’s not to say I want to leave, or anything. Maybe the man who wins me will be my Prince Charming.

  Yes. I’m happy to be here despite the nerves. Maybe the nerves are part of what I like about this whole thing. I put a smile on my face, cheeks tingling the way they do when I’m excited but don’t know what to expect. Drawing my shoulders back, I make my way out of the ladies’ room and through the wide hallway to one of the ballrooms on the second level of the hotel.

  I take a chance to peer over the banister at the love-birds checking in at the front desk for Valentine’s Day. This day has always been my favorite of any holiday. Saint Valentine married young people who weren’t allowed to be wed. A chill runs up my spine.

  As my favorite TV chef always says: how can that be bad?

  I take a deep, refreshing breath and walk over to the entrance to the ballroom, where my father’s right-hand is standing.

  “You ready?” The reserved but warm older woman, Ms. Steele, opens the door for me.

  I give her a nod and walk through the big, heavy door to find the event space drenched in cool blue moonlight. Eyes turn to me, and I give the room a small wave tight to my hip before I spot my father in the corner. I walk over to him as quickly as I can in these thousand-dollar heels someone convinced me to dip my toes into at some point.

  All it took was a dip of my toe to make me want to jump in. Since that first time, I’ve been a high-heel girl. The designer doesn’t matter, and I don’t care what they cost; all I care about is how deep the arch is.

  “Kit,” my father says, putting his arm around me. “How nice of you to be here.”

  “As if you gave me much of a choice, father.” I smile up at him through my teeth and put my elbow against his ribs gently. He winces in mock-pain and puts his hand at his side. We like to tease each other. We have fun.

  My father and I are all the other has, and his overprotective nature is completely understandable. The hotel he owns has been in the family for four generations including me, and it’s natural for folks with as much money as he has to employ personal bodyguards for themselves and their family. Add to his wealth the fact that he’s an Army man, and I have a hard time being cross at him for wanting to keep an eye on me constantly.

  So this was the perfect compromise: he would let me go on a date if I stayed at the hotel and my date could be vetted beforehand. The cherry on top of this sundae is the fact that the date would be awarded to the highest bidder, with the money going to charity.

  I have to admit, there’s something about selling myself off to the highest bidder that’s alluring. Sure, most of the old men here are not exactly my type, but there’s something in the air that’s giving me a little thrill. A presence.

  A…smell? Maybe it’s a smell. Someone in here is wearing a cologne that’s doing something to my hormones, making them dance. I think they’re about to start spinning around like tops. There’s definitely something in the air sending a chill up and down my spine.

  “Thank you all for coming,” Dad says to our guests. I look up at him as my smile turns to something more confident. “If you will all follow me into the next room, we may begin.”

  Anticipation rolls through my body, sending a delicious thrill through me.

  Maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea, after all.

  2

  Maxwell

  I didn’t come here for fun, and I’m not having any.

  I came here for business. For the last six months, I’ve been tailing Ms. Kit Kensington and serving as her secondary security detail in the employ of her father.

  Ms. Kensington likes to evade her official security guards any chance she gets.

  That’s where I come in.

  Kit Kensington is utter perfection and the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on: long blonde hair, big, bright blue eyes, and a heart of pure gold. And at any chance she gets, she will dart into a subway station, jump the turnstile and have to be picked up by her guards at the next station. She’ll open up her wallet to any beggar with a cup full of nickels and she won’t even try t
o hide the hundred-dollar bills stuffed inside.

  She’s overprotected, so she just doesn’t get the way the world works. It’s preserved her kindness, but it’s also made her vulnerable.

  As if her physical appearance didn’t already do that on its own.

  I follow her sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. A man does have to sleep, otherwise I’d be on her all day, every day, and all night. She doesn’t know I exist, and that’s the only way I’ve been able to keep an eye on her. Her primary security, she knows who they are, so she knows who to evade. I remain in the shadows, and I’m always watching her.

  I met her father when we were both in the Army. The kind of bond that grabs hold in that kind of situation is one that can’t be broken. It’s one that can’t get any stronger, either, or that’s what I thought.

  Our squad was doing a sweep of a house where we had intel on a person of interest hiding. When we walked through the door, there were only two kids and a woman there, huddled on a mattress in the corner. Then I spotted a shadow moving, then racing into my periphery and up a flight of stairs. Everything happened in slow motion. I didn’t have time to think. I only had time to react.

  Kit’s father raced toward the stairs after him. Then I heard the spray of bullets. I shielded the kids, crying and trembling, from the onslaught. Her father ricocheted down the stairs and landed with a thud I’ll remember for the rest of my life. He’d been shot in the shoulder.

  Then another spray of gunfire assaulted us from behind me. I ducked and handed the kids off to another guy in our squad. For everything happening so slowly, it was over before I knew it. The next thing I remember is dragging Kit’s father out of that house, unconscious, under plumes of black smoke and handing him off to a medic. I turned around to look back at the house, and that’s when the explosion happened. I can still hear the ringing in my ears.

  After the Army, our paths diverged. He moved back to New York and took up the helm of his parents’ business, which by then was becoming one of the most successful hotels in New York. I moved to Arizona where my parents had a parcel of land, built a house for myself, and opened a private security firm. I hired veterans, made buckets-full of money, and was able to actually do some good in this world while making bank at the same time.

  After a while, I became restless. The dry, arid nights all started to slam up against each other, and it felt like one big string of days that turned into months and then years. I hired a broker to find me a tenant, had my four-bedroom house leased up for two years within a week, and zipped up my only suitcase and headed out to Brooklyn, where I was born.

  Kit’s old man approached me two weeks after I’d reached out to let him know I was in New York.

  “I can’t get her to stay still,” he’d said, sinking into the chair across my desk in my Brooklyn office. I grabbed him a cup of coffee from the small pot in the corner and he took it gratefully. “She has her own security detail, but she keeps trying to get away from them. I need someone to keep an eye on her, someone she doesn’t know is following her.

  “So she won’t know who to run away from.” I nodded. It was a little out of the ordinary, but it made sense.

  He’d slid me a photo of her and I picked it up with curious fingers, studied it. She was pretty. Really pretty.

  So the man is protective, and why shouldn’t he be? It’s standard for people with this much money to be surrounded by guards and have security on their family members, too. He’d already had a close call with his own life, so why the hell shouldn’t he want to protect the only person in the world who mattered to him? His wife had passed away when Kit was only a baby, so she really was all he had.

  But Kit wasn’t disobedient - just a little starved for independence.

  I told him with a handshake that I’d be happy to take on the job, and before the ink was dry on the contract, her picture was folded up and put into my wallet. Her father bought all of my time. I’d be on-call twenty-four seven. He even gave me a suite in his hotel so I would always be nearby.

  My life was simpler before that meeting.

  A round of applause pulls me back to the moment. The auction is about to start, so I head to the next room with the rest of the ticket-holders. I hold my scotch a little firmer when we walk through the doors, anticipation running through me like a microscopic ticking fucking time bomb.

  “She looks like the kind of girl who wants to be called bad,” a round-faced young man near me says. He still has baby fat and all. I don’t like his comment, but I tuck a growl into my chest and head to a seat near the back of the ballroom.

  I don’t understand why she’s doing this. This isn’t like her. I’ve never seen her on a date. When her father’s assistant informed me of this event I realized that I’m the kind of man who can get close to losing his cool, nearly crushing my phone to pieces in frustration when I’d learned the news.

  God please help me get through this evening. I take a sip of my scotch and try to let the burn distract me. I don’t know how I’m going to handle watching her on a date with some other man, even if he paid for it.

  Hell, especially if he paid for it.

  “It’s starting,” the guy behind me says lasciviously. A hush settles over the crowd. Lights from two corners of the room climb up the billionaire’s daughter and Ms. Steele starts to speak.

  “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Kensington Hotel’s tenth annual Valentine’s Day Auction. Past auctions have included chef-table reservations at some of New York’s most favored restaurants, private yacht tours around Manhattan Island, and fabulous resort weekends. This year we have many valuable experiences up for auction, and first of them is a date with Kit Kensington!”

  Around me, polite chatter and applause bubble over the crowd. I grab the auction catalogue from my suit pocket and flip to the page with her face and picture on it, my thumb brushing the corner of the paper. I want to tear it to pieces, I want to steal every last copy, I want to burn them all in a trash can in City Hall Park so everyone knows that Kit Kensington is for my eyes and my eyes only.

  “Kit Kensington is currently a part-time marketing consultant for the Kensington Hotel and attends Columbia University. She is five-feet, five-inches in heels, and weighs…well, that’s her business. Kit is the loving daughter of the head of the Kensington family.”

  A tick in my jaw sets my eyes on hers.

  This is sick. She might as well be up there in a string bikini with her fingers crawling up the back of her scalp, eyes closed and lips parted for how the men in this room are looking at her.

  “Kit Kensington,” Ms. Steele continues, “enjoys stargazing, constellation-hunting, reading, cooking, and baking. Her favorite recipes are Engagement Chicken and Lemon Bars.”

  I sink down into my seat and plow a hand through my hair. I don’t know how much longer I can take this.

  Kit’s long, glossy mane of blonde waves falls down her back in perfect chaos and it’s parted down the middle, highlighting each of her stunning features. Her lips are pale pink and thick like a bow, wet and slightly parted with the tip of a little pink tongue tucked beneath. Her chin is square and slim with that tiny dimple and when she turns to smile at the other side of the room, the slope of her cheekbone makes me hard.

  In thousand-dollar increments, men raise their paddles around me. A twitchy, uneasy feeling settles down into my chest. Hell, I’m no better than any of them. I want her, and I can’t help myself.

  I swallow thickly as sweat begins to form at my temples. Hell. That fucking asshole was right. She does look like the kind of girl who wants to be called bad. All of a sudden something inside me shifts. I’m not her father’s old friend and steadfastly responsible employee, watching Kit from a distance.

  Determination crushes through me. An idea crystalizes and my carefully-constructed world crashes down around me like a house of cards. I didn’t come here to get her, but now I know I can’t leave without her. I just can’t let it happen. Walking out this door without h
er on my arm is not an option.

  I can’t take this anymore. All these eyes on my girl, on my woman.

  The wealthy man’s daughter walks across the front of the room in heels that were made to make her look like perfection on a goddamn stick. The way she swings her hips back and forth like a subtle pendulum is making my mind run wild. She has the entire room wrapped around her finger - and I’m pretty damn sure she knows it.

  I raise my paddle into the air to put in my bid, and all around me other men do the same. A woman or two even do it, knocking their shoulders gently against their husbands and smiling up at them.

  The idea of anyone being with her - man, woman, who-fucking-ever - anyone but me that is, has my neck sweating and the hairs on my arms standing up.

  I take a sip of my drink. Something about seeing all these fucking eyes on her has flipped a switch inside me. I dig my nails into the armrest on my chair and I swear I feel the wood splinter beneath my fingers. My heart is pounding in my chest so fast and so hard that it could break clean through my ribs.

  I watch as she turns again and her eyes flitter over to mine. The big blue orbs of glitter and gold change, and the entire world narrows down to me and her. It’s just me and her. Me, and her.