Eventually everyone’s with me without my saying a word. Because people want to be with me. I’m the playboy with a glass in his hand and a sparkle in his eyes, the man who makes them feel like they’re part of the glamorous, carefree, lux life that exists in the lifestyle ads we pump out like useless dreams.
I start the speech, forcing my mind to timing, delivery. I feel the lift of the audience coalescing around me. Performing arts high school wasn’t a total waste.
Parker comes up and we give each other shit like we do every year, and then we talk about the charity. “Give a bit to a cause,” I say. “Who cares, it’s only money. What’s the use of money when there’s a champagne fountain?”
Parker gives me perfectly scripted shit about that. I loop an arm around him and we clink glasses and wish each other a happy new year.
I thank the caterers and the band. Fifteen minutes to hunt time. I remind people of the rules.
The quartet strikes back up.
Parker hops down.
I move to the edge of the stage and hand the mic back to the audio guy. I ask him a question about the acoustics of the place, knowing he’ll spin on it for a bit.
She’s brilliant in that blue. Did she wear it for him? I bristle as he touches her arm. Blade. Does he think he’s a tenth of a match for her?
I watch her circulate. She seemed to have close personal relationships with every last one of my employees. Mia, beloved by everybody, just like old times.
Lana’s up with the scavenger-hunt crew, comparing clipboards. They have directions for me to read off clipboards after people drink some more. This is a group that loves clipboards.
The music stops just then. I look up, confused. I’m not ready to kick off the hunt, but I see the problem. Mia. The inevitable reunion with DJ Barnes.
Tearful hugs. I shouldn’t watch, but I can’t look away.
They’re arguing, or more, bantering. Mia is turning back and forth between Ryan and DJ. She’s lit up with energy. It’s a form of her I remember, laughing and arguing. Mia pokes a finger into DJ’s chest. The oboist is shoving a microphone at her. Shivers cascade over my body. They’re asking her to do a song.
No, I think.
I stand, immobile. Parker’s back, talking. Parker’s saying my name, somewhere at the fringes of my awareness.
She’s going to sing. Something, something wrong, Max? Parker again.
I can see plainly where DJ places his fingers on the fiddle. He scrapes out the first strains. Many a New Day. That’s what she’s going to sing. One of her Oklahoma! solos.
Not in front of all these people, I think. Because it’s ours.
“What’s wrong?” Parker asks.
Wrong. Wrong doesn’t come close.
I need a bigger word, the kind of word that the Germans might invent. A word that means that you’re dreading something that will be painful, but you also very much want that thing to happen.
And that painful thing you dread and want would involve longing for moments you can never have again. And it would involve a bursting, shouting feeling inside your chest, and all the while, your teeth are clenched. Dreadshockjoy or something.
She takes a breath, and I breathe, too, because that’s what Mia Corelli does, she reaches into your chest and pulls your breath out. Mia Corelli, always longing for more. Fighting for more. All brave and beautiful and tragic, but yet always somehow out of reach. Like a not-quite-remembered dream that floats away as soon as you grab for it, laughing as it goes.
Back in your life to bring it.
She starts in, high and strong and full of emotion. Voice clear like a bell. My dreadshockjoy swells. She’s really doing it.
She looks across the room at me, eyes colliding with mine, show tune like a cannonball.
Parker’s still there. “My bad,” he says.
“What?” I say.
“I thought you’d have fun seeing her again. Delivering your sandwiches and all. I didn’t think you’d get all twisted up about it.”
I turn to him. “You can’t stand Mia.”
He holds up his hands in mock defense. “I thought you’d get a kick out of it. You’ve always had such a spark around her.”
“So you arranged for her to deliver my sandwiches? Directly to me in my office? And didn’t see fit to tell me?”
“Well…” he stammers.
“Never mind.” Everything I understood about the situation reshuffles in my mind.
I thought she’d somehow engineered it. And she thinks I arranged it…in order to what? Taunt her and boss her around? Punch down and seduce her? Of course that’s what she’d think. Why not?
God, what a dick move. And of course it’s what she thinks.
The song’s over. She’s smiling. She looks at Ryan. He smiles at her. People will start setting off with their clues. No, I think. You can’t have her.
My feet take me back to the scavenger-hunt people. I tell them I’m changing it up. We’ll make it random.
“You’re not letting them pick their own partners?” the guy asks.
“Random partners are better for team building,” I say, on full Max Hilton arrogance mode. I take an iPad. I redo the numbers, putting Mia and me together. It shuffles all the rest of the partnerships. “That’s how the partners go now. Send it out.”
They send out a new list based on my idea.
17
You have high standards. Let her know that it’s up to her to meet those standards.
~THE MAX HILTON PLAYBOOK: TEN GOLDEN RULES FOR LANDING THE HOTTEST GIRL IN THE ROOM
* * *
MIA
“Usually they let you pick your partners,” Ryan says, frowning at the app. “I can’t believe you’re with Max.”
I blink at the list. “What happened?”
“I’m seeing some comments that the partners were shuffled specifically to be better for team building and community building,” Ryan says.
Heart still thundering in my chest, I gaze across the room at Max, cold and beautiful and perfect in his tux.
Community building. Riiiight.
Seriously, Max should’ve been a spy. He’d be an amazing spy. He changed the entire course of the party and created a disinformation campaign in one fell swoop, just to ruin my date.
I should be annoyed. My face is annoyed, but inside there’s this spark of forbidden excitement.
And really, I shouldn’t have sung the song. I told myself I wanted to get some control back, but it was a lie. I wanted some connection. To rip down his façade and get through to the cotton-candy-musical Max that I fell for. It’s crazy behavior.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
Ryan smiles. “Not your fault.”
Partygoers in their glamorous garb are heading out to take selfies. People have brought awesome coats, because some of this takes place outside. That’s how you collect the clues, you do a selfie with your partner with an Instagram tag. There’s even a special glam black-and-white filter for the party that nobody else gets to use.
“A lot of women would kill to do the hunt with Max,” Ryan says unhelpfully.
“I would kill to not to do the hunt with Max. Does that mean we can have peace? Or does everybody have to die?”
Ryan smiles. “You are so funny.”
Ryan’s partner comes up. She’s a perky redhead, an intern who is super pumped about the game. She reads their first clue off her phone and tells him her theory. Everybody’s clues are different because this is a scavenger hunt created exclusively for this party. Max probably flew in a team of turtleneck-and-monocle-wearing Viennese game designers.
“We should go,” she says.
I smile. “Good luck.”
“Thanks,” Ryan says.
The intern isn’t listening; she’s staring at Max, strolling toward us, a tiger in a tux, New York’s most eligible Prince Charming.
I’m angry, but there’s something else—this warm buzz of familiarity as he nears.
People head away,
leaving us standing there, an island in the ballroom. “Ready?” Max says.
“I get it—you’re in charge, not me. You really had to change the whole game to prove it?”
“You think that’s why I changed the game? To prove a point about who’s in charge?”
I raise my brows. A yes.
He tips his head near mine. Lowers his voice. “I couldn’t let you go out there with him.”
Butterflies swirl in my belly. “Why? Why’d you have to do that?”
He comes nearer. “Because I couldn’t let you walk out of this ballroom with him. It’s not about control.”
“Why would you do it?”
People are coming up. Max is a magnet for people. “Let’s get out of here,” he says.
I narrow my eyes.
“Humor me.” His tone is serious, like this is really something.
I grab my coat and we head to the elevator. His touch on the small of my back seems to radiate across my body.
We wait with a crowd of rowdy partygoers and get in. People are talking to him, jokingly trying to get him to give clues. A few of them have bottles of champagne, and the mood is jolly.
He says that he didn’t create the game. “We’re all on equal footing,” he insists.
It’s not the elevator he got me off in, but it’s the same décor. I give him the side eye, but he not joking around.
Eventually we all spill out onto the sidewalk in front of Maximillion Plaza. It’s a magical night; snow falls in thick, lazy flakes, dramatic as a snow globe, frosting the dirty horizontal surfaces in sparkling white. The air is warm-ish, almost balmy, and the traffic sounds are subdued.
Max shakes a few hands and poses for a few selfies and then people rush off.
“So…do we have a clue to follow or something?”
Max looks up and down the street. More people are shouting to him. Waving. He waves. The partygoers want a piece of him, or at least a selfie. “I need to tell you something and…” Somebody else waves. “Come on.” He takes my hand.
We cross at a lull in the traffic and duck around the side of the Maximillion studio building—the one that used to be some kind of industrial building, the one he visits every day. He punches in a code and pulls open a door.
In we walk. The door shuts, sealing us away from the din of Manhattan on New Year’s Eve. It’s spacious inside, with just the lights of the city pouring in through the high arched windows, making glowing squares on the wood floors.
He locks the door and fixes me with a serious look. “We have to talk.”
More laughter sounds from out there. Somebody knocks at the door. “Max?”
“Christ,” he says.
“Your party just won’t quit,” I whisper.
He scowls. There’s something achingly real about him. He feels genuine; raw, even. No liquor carts in sight. “Come on.” He leads me across a giant expanse of moonlit floor past hushed workspaces.
“This game has taken a mighty strange turn,” I say nervously. “Are the enemies of yore to retreat?”
“I’m done with the games.”
We end up in an interior space lit by skylights from above. A lounge for workers, maybe.
He sets me down on a chair and bends over me, hands on the armrests. His brows are furrowed, eyes without the ironic twinkle. “I need you to know something. I didn’t arrange the Meow Squad deliveries. I didn’t have anything to do with them. I wouldn’t do that.”
“Wait, what?”
“I know you thought I did. I don’t blame you for thinking that. But yeah, it was Parker.”
“Parker?” I say. “I thought…”
“He only just told me back there at the party. I couldn’t believe it. Making you be my delivery person like that?”
“I totally thought you did.”
“Mia.” One word. My name. Mia. The low rumble of it pulls at something inside me. And I’m so acutely aware of us alone in this space, and of the dominating way he looms above me.
“Actually, I thought you’d engineered it,” he says with a half smile.
“In what universe do I engineer that? In what universe is doing lunch deliveries in a cat suit a good plan of vengeance against a rival? You have no idea how much I hate this uniform. Like, hate it. As evil master plans go? D minus.”
“You were driving me crazy. I could barely concentrate on anything, just waiting for those deliveries.” He kneels in front of my chair. “Your deliveries were destroying me, Mia.”
He’s saying some more words, but his head is in the zone of my lap, now, and it’s hard to concentrate. I imagine my lap lined with lights, like an airport runway, highlighting the forward route his face needs to travel in order to land in the safety and comfort of my pussy.
My breath quickens. He’s talking more. Something about the sandwiches.
But then he pauses. His grip on the chair arms changes as his eyes skate over me. “I don’t like how it happened. I don’t want any bullshit between us like before.” High school, he means.
“Let’s not think about that,” I say.
“We need to.”
My hormones are little luggage trucks, driving in furious circles, beep-beep-beeping excitedly. “Do we, though? Right this minute?”
His eyes go dark, and I’m stunned anew by how beautiful he is. “I didn’t bring you here to fuck,” he growls.
I have this sense that it’s not me he’s growling at—it’s more like he’s growling at the part of himself that wants to fuck. The really primal and base animal part that might grab my hair like a motherfucking lion.
“And yet…” I whisper.
“Fuck, Mia.” Again his eyes rake up and down me, and suddenly his hands are heavy on my thighs, all harsh gravity through the delicate silk of my dress.
I exhale a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
My sex heats, a glowing landing beacon, and I settle my hands onto his, slipping my fingers suggestively under his shirt cuffs. I meet his feral gaze with a sassy little smile.
Right then, it’s as if the floodgates let loose. “God, Mia.” He’s pushing his hands up my legs, taking the silky fabric of my dress with it, motions getting more frantic the more stocking he uncovers. He gathers my skirt in his fists, shoving it up over my knees.
I lift my butt, giving him an assist.
He shudders out a breath when he finds bare skin over thigh-high stockings.
He kisses the inside of my thigh, then he rubs his whiskers there, hungry, wildly, as if to mark me.
“Fuck, yes,” I pant.
He presses a thumb to my core, wet through silky undergarments, and moves it, slides it, stoking waves of pleasure while he attacks my other thigh with his hungry face.
It’s silk and sandpaper.
My breath catches. My toes curl.
He rumbles against my tender skin.
I squirm, whimpering with need.
I shove my hands into his hair. Air traffic control to Max!
And just like magic, he’s shoving my legs apart and kissing my pussy, the hot tenor of his breath against the silk that covers my clit. I hold his hair, holding on, loving him there.
He kisses me again. I’m diffuse with pleasure. My clit stands at attention, a tendril of need. The blunt pressure of his lips drives me nearly over the edge. Then his tongue is gone. He scrapes his teeth gently over my core.
I cry out, meeting his gaze.
“Need you bare,” he growls.
“Do you want me to…” My mind races with the logistics of the strapless bodysuit. “Um…”
He’s pulling at the fabric, shoving his fingers clear through the lacy part above the crotch, and then he just rips it down.
Cool air invades my hot, wet pussy.
“Taking it as a no,” I gasp.
He’s not done. “Need you spread out for me.” He pushes my legs wide over the chair arms. I’m about to protest, except his tongue is there, warm and thick against my core.
“Ohmigod.”<
br />
He licks up once, again.
My breath comes fast.
I’m so exposed to him, it’s madness, and the sexiest thing ever.
He grips my thighs, holding me apart as he licks me. He’s holding me in place as though he has me right where he wants me and he won’t be letting me go. He’s my roller-coaster and my seatbelt.
Mercilessly he licks me until I’m at the point of no return, the tippy-top of the arc, suspended before the freefall.
He draws his tongue roughly along my clit one more time. Pleasure explodes over my brain, bright behind my eyes.
I’m weightless. I’m crying out.
Max’s rumble is a merciless vibration between my legs. I tighten my grip on his hair. “Slower!”
He’s already there, following my cadence like the musician he once was.
Suddenly I’m laughing. It’s the release of pressure, and how crazy good that was, and how fast I came, and a little bit the sounds I made.
He kisses my belly through the part of the bodysuit he didn’t rip, and then gazes up at me in wonder.
“Need you inside,” I say.
Slowly he presses a finger into me.
My body shudders around him.
He doesn’t reply; he simply adds a finger.
“You,” I say. “You, Max.”
There’s something shattered about his gaze. He kisses the inside of my thigh, and then the other side for symmetry. And then he stands over me, leaving me with my legs over either chair arm.
“Stay like that,” he rumbles, undoing his bow tie in the dim light. “I’m sorry I wrecked your undergarment, but you waiting for me like this…so hot.”
“In other words, you’re not sorry at all.”
“Not sorry. I’m gonna take you just like that.” He whips off his bow tie and then he’s undoing his buttons. “You are so hot, it blows my mind.” He rips the rest of his shirt open, not bothering with the buttons, then skips to his pants.
“Cheating. One demerit.”
A wicked light shines in his eyes as he yanks off his belt. His pants are off and his cock juts upward, so thick and hard, it’s nearly against his belly. I’ve never seen his cock, but somehow, it’s so him. He has a condom, tearing it open.
Breaking the Billionaire’s Rules Page 14