Bad Hookup: Billionaire’s Club Book 4

by Elise Faber

  So, what to say?

  “Awesome, see you soon!”

  Blegh. That was way too chipper.

  “Well done.”

  Not his boss, so could be read as condescending.

  “Nailed it.”

  What, was she a nine-year-old?

  In the end, she didn’t have to come up with anything. Her inbox pinged with another message that made her heart skip a beat when she read it.

  I can smell the smoke from here. Don’t worry. I’ve included the details below so you can review and approve. I hope this Saturday night finds you safe and with a serial killer documentary streaming in the background.

  -S

  P.S. Yes, this is Sebastian

  P.P.S. I won’t bring up what happened . . . any of it.

  P.P.S.S. But I still wish you’d never experienced whatever it was that put that much hurt in your eyes. Your smile lights up the room.

  Rachel blinked back tears.

  Fuck. Why did he have to be nice?

  And this addendum to his previous message brought her no closer to the light, witty response she’d been attempting to come up with.

  Ugh. Why was she overthinking this?

  Uh, because he’d seen her at her absolute weakest and she didn’t know how to make his impression of her go back to how it was before. If she could only come up with something funny or clever enough, maybe he’d forget that she’d been cowering like a pathetic—

  No.

  She wasn’t weak or pathetic. Not anymore. She’d left Iowa and come to California to make a new life in a place that she’d always dreamed of living.

  That took big ol’ lady balls.

  Rachel was the current owner of giant lady balls. See. That meant something. She could come up with a humorous little email. No problem. Of course, she could—

  Her inbox chimed again.

  No response needed. Good night, and enjoy your doc.

  -S

  Okay, seriously?

  The man did not play fair.

  I haven’t started it yet. The Killer Chronicles, join me if you dare.

  -R

  P.S. This is definitely Rachel, mainly because my name is in the email.

  Ha.

  Beat that Sebastian Scott.

  Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately for her, he did.

  SIX

  SEBASTIAN

  * * *

  SEBASTIAN GLANCED AT HIS PHONE, read Rachel’s response, and smiled.

  Considering what he’d found out during the last few hours, he shouldn’t be smiling, shouldn’t be feeling amusement, but Rachel had struck again and he somehow found himself grinning at the pert email she’d sent.

  Rachel Morris was technically still married.

  But what she had neglected to tell him, in what was both an extremely quick-thinking and wholly effective way to keep him at a distance, was that she was not so much married as nearly divorced.

  As in the divorce paperwork had all gone through, both parties had had their say—or at least their lawyers had—and the date of finalization was less than a month out.

  So, married.

  But just barely.

  Which begged the question of why she’d told him at all and had him circling back to the notion that she’d done it to push him away. Sleeping with a married woman would tend to make the average guy back off.

  Except Sebastian didn’t consider himself average.

  Ego, much? he imagined his sister Kelsey saying.

  Okay, yes. But he’d worked hard to become the person he was, had put in hours transforming himself from the quiet nerd who’d been too afraid to chime into a conversation into a confident businessman.

  So a little ego was warranted, at least as far as he was concerned, and Rachel being married for just twenty-six more days didn’t particularly concern him.

  Not when he considered how she’d reacted to him lifting his arm, not when she’d thought he was going to strike her. He’d seen dogs cower the same way, knew it took many instances for their reactions to be so honed and instinctual.

  Someone had hit Rachel, and it had been more than once.

  Also, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that her former husband, Preston Johnston, was the likely culprit. He’d had a multitude of police reports filed against him for assault, but no formal charges brought by the local Iowan DA from the town that Rachel had grown up in.

  Hardly any effort had been required to hack into the police department and the district attorney’s records and even less to track down the records mentioning Rachel. From there, his source had discovered Rachel’s husband’s name.

  Despite Mr. Preston Johnston acting the part of a good church-going man and reveling in his roles as a pillar of the community, Sebastian had dug up plenty on Rachel’s ex.

  Sixteen reports of assault and battery from a variety of sources—former employees, restaurant staff, even several former girlfriends—but the instances that had made his blood really boil were the five reports filed by Rachel.

  They’d come with pictures.

  Of Rachel bloodied and bruised, with busted lips and blackened eyes that had been so lacking in emotion, she could have been a corpse.

  And considering some of the injuries, especially those from the final report, Sebastian was half surprised she wasn’t dead.

  Preston had beaten the shit out of her. He’d also never paid the price for it.

  Sadly, it had taken Sebastian longer to find the two extra honeymoon days they’d promised their bosses in the Berlin trip’s itinerary than for his source to access the records that were supposed to be private. It had only taken one call to the former Steele Technologies employee, who now specialized in doing exactly the kind of research that was just shy of being illegal, but which many business owners relied on to make sure their investments and prospective employees had been vetted properly.

  It was beyond inappropriate that he’d used those services on Rachel, but Sebastian couldn’t find that he gave a shit.

  He’d needed to know the truth of why she’d reacted as she had and . . . he was going to find some way to make Preston Johnston pay.

  No one should ever be allowed to do what he did and get away with it.

  His phone buzzed with an incoming email.

  Too scared, Bas? Afraid this little documentary about a guy who killed and then ate his victim’s corpses will give you nightmares?

  Well, put it that way.

  He rolled his eyes and typed back.

  I am man, hear me roar. I’m not scared of no kill-or.

  Oh fuck, that was bad. But the thought of his horrible attempt at a rhyme making Rachel laugh or even just smile a little bit, had him pressing the send button.

  Yes, it was horrendous.

  No, he didn’t care, so long as it made her burden a little lighter.

  Also, that—wanting revenge upon her ex, wanting to make Rachel happy—was going to be a huge problem. He knew it, he could foresee it disrupting all his carefully laid out plans, but he couldn’t stop himself from skipping down that particular path with a bucket of daisies held in his hands.

  And that particular metaphor was going to stay firmly locked in his skull.

  Her reply came only a few seconds later, in the form of a GIF with a hysterically laughing baby tipping backward under the force of its laughter.

  His own lips tipped—up, not backward.

  He also couldn’t resist trying his hand at adding another line to his poem, which he gave a perfectly horrible name.

  Men who Roar . . . or Maybe Purr

  I am man, hear me roar. I’m not scared of no kill-or.

  I am man, hear me purr. I’m only scared of a dude using my skin like fur.

  And . . . send. Sebastian imagined her bursting into laughter, the sparkling sound that had made his night so much better in the bar. He anxiously awaited her email in response. Something pert about him being terrible? Another GIF?

  But he waited long minutes and nothi
ng came through.

  Score zero for his rhyming abilities—

  Ping.

  I am woman, hear me roar. I need to eat ice cream-a-four?

  Clearly, I’m even less talented than you at rhyming. I’m pressing play on my murderer doc in thirty seconds.

  Sebastian sank onto the couch and cued up the movie. He had a shit ton of work he should be doing—emails that didn’t involve horrible poems to return—research to complete for his proposal to Clay, logistics to solve with his boss being out of the office for an extended amount of time.

  But instead, Sebastian put his feet up and hit play just as his internal counter passed thirty seconds then he pulled out his phone and sent:

  You’ll have to explain all the big words to me.

  Rachel’s reply didn’t disappoint.

  I am woman, I’m not scary. I can be your dictionary.

  SEVEN

  RACHEL

  * * *

  MONDAY MORNING FOUND her back at the office.

  Saturday night, well also the wee hours of Sunday morning, should have been a distant memory.

  That poem.

  Lord. They’d added so many horrible lines to that poem.

  And yet, as they’d finished the first documentary and moved onto a second and then a third, Rachel couldn’t remember the last time she’d had so much fun with a man.

  Not ever, if she were being truthful.

  Her father had been a terrifying creature, only bringing pain and fear for the three months out of the year he’d been home. Something that she’d considered a blessing then as well as now. She’d at least been able to escape him sometimes.

  Of course, without a mother and having a father who’d been gone three quarters of the year, meant she’d stayed with family.

  With her grandparents.

  Her father had hit her, had pushed her around more than a few times, but it was her grandparents who’d seriously damaged her psyche.

  They’d been there day in, day out.

  And they’d been determined that they stamp out any lick of her “whore of a mother.”

  The church and religion had been their weapon.

  They’d wielded it masterfully.

  Rachel blinked, realized that she’d been sitting in her office, staring at her computer screen for at least ten minutes. She was losing it. Seriously. But between the divorce and Sebastian and all the feelings he invoked, she was losing her freaking mind.

  It was the timing of it all. Everything was still so fresh and confusing. On one hand, she was relieved to be almost free of Iowa and Preston and her family and the memories. On the other side, she had friends at home that she missed.

  The church community had been both a blessing and a curse.

  Just because her husband and grandparents had used religion as a way to control and punish her, didn’t mean that the rest of her church had been bad. She’d had so many of the members bring her meals when she’d been “sick” as Preston had declared to the congregation. They’d given her so much of their generosity—cleaning her house, doing her laundry, filling her fridge with food.

  But they hadn’t helped her get out.

  For the longest time, she’d held that against them.

  Now, she understood they didn’t know how much of a snake Preston was.

  She’d been fooled during their courtship, and of course, they had been fooled as well. They didn’t live with him. They didn’t experience the unpredictable violence of his mood swings. They didn’t—

  A knock at her office door. “Rachel?”

  Luckily, she’d gone back to staring at her computer screen, rather than out the window, when the interruption made her jump. At least she’d given the appearance of doing something.

  “Yes?” she said, swiveling her chair so she faced the intruder.

  Her arch tone made Brian, their newest intern, pale. “I-uh—” He swallowed hard, and she took pity on him.

  “Come in and sit down.” She gestured to the chair in front of her desk. “What’s going on?”

  He walked in slowly and sat. “I’m—uh—”

  Okay, she understood he was new and that he was probably nervous and wanting to do a good job, but the kid seriously needed to finish that sentence.

  Her brow lifted when no further words came. “Today, please.”

  “I wanted to know if I could take Friday off?”

  Rachel pressed her lips together in an effort to stop her sigh from escaping. She’d been two seconds from diving straight into crisis mode, and Brian wanted to take a day off?

  “You have PTO days,” she said. “Use them. Just make sure to finish the rest of your work before you take off.”

  He nodded and relief made his shoulders relax. “Thanks. I know I’m new here, but the snowpack is looking really good this time of year and I want to—”

  She raised a hand. “Too much information.” He shut up. “Now please make sure the Pearson, the GloGlobal, and the Cruz reports are finished and on my desk by ten.”

  “But it’s eight thirty now,” he said.

  Rachel pointed to the door. “So, I guess you’d better get moving.”

  Brian’s head went full on bobblehead as he all but ran for the door. On the threshold, he hesitated then said, “Oh. I forgot to mention, someone from Steele Technologies is here to see you. I think he said his name is . . . Sebastian?”

  Shit.

  She was woman, hear her run. She couldn’t bear to see that particular someone.

  Double shit.

  She couldn’t face Sebastian. Not today.

  Flicking her eyes back to her computer screen, she waved a dismissive hand. “Tell him I’m busy.”

  “I—uh—”

  There those words went again. Brian really needed to remember how to use them.

  But the next voice stole her words right alongside Brian’s.

  “Not going to get rid of me that easily, Morris.”

  Her gaze shot up, and she saw Sebastian leaning against her open door, arms crossed casually, one foot resting over the other. A smirk teased his lips.

  “Speechless?” he asked. “Didn’t think that was possible with you.”

  Brian shifted, clearly wanting to escape.

  “Move, Bas,” she said. “Brian has work to do.”

  “Invite me in, why don’t you?” Sebastian walked past Brian and sank into the chair in front of her desk.

  “Shut the door,” she told Brian as he all but sprinted from her office. It clicked closed a second later.

  “Bas?” Sebastian asked, all sexy male and though he was confined to the chair, it somehow didn’t do anything to lessen his presence in her space. His scent trickled through the air, teasing her senses with hints of pine and spice. She’d thought him rangy before, teetering toward lean, but occupying the same area that Brian had just vacated indicated how wrong she’d been about his size.

  He wasn’t bulky, but he also wasn’t small in the least. He filled out his suit remarkably well, and the phrase that kept popping back into her mind was that he had a quiet strength.

  There wasn’t any tumult radiating beneath the surface, no mean streak lurking, waiting for the right opportunity to lash out at her.

  Or . . . he hid it really well.

  “Sebastian is too long,” she said, glaring when his lips twitched. “Don’t take it too deep.”

  His brows rose, a snort escaped. “Long? Deep?”

  She groaned and leaned back in her chair. “You’re not serious, are you?”

  “It made you smile.”

  Rachel felt her cheeks creasing into said smile and realized he was right. “You’re a juvenile.” A beat. “And why would you want to make me smile, anyway?”

  He went very still in the chair, and quiet stretched between them as he studied her. Finally, he relaxed back and crossed his arms over his chest. “You’re beautiful when you smile.”

  She froze. “I . . .”

  “And, for the record, I like when
you call me Bas.” He pulled out his phone, holding it in her direction and adding quickly, “I know you’re busy, but I’m here to exchange numbers and coordinate calendars.”

  Rachel forced herself to focus—on the calendars, not the fact that she’d had to play off the fact that she’d given Sebastian a nickname without even realizing it . . . and that she hadn’t even played it off very well.

  “How do you want to manage them?” she asked instead of commenting on the fact that he liked her calling him Bas. “Keep their separate calendars for each of them but add one joint calendar that we’ll both have access to?”

  “Works for me.” He made a note in his phone. “Do you handle all of Rachel’s scheduling?”

  She nodded. “For now. She wants to move me over eventually to help coordinate some specific projects so I don’t get stuck in the administrative assistant track.”

  Not that Rachel would have minded.

  She enjoyed organizing things, tucking them all away into their proper cubbies, fitting in meetings, streamlining her boss’s day so Heather could accomplish more in a shorter amount of time. Work smarter, not harder, and all that.

  Though Heather could hardly be accused of not working hard.

  “What about you?” she asked Bas—Sebastian. “Do you want to remain Clay’s assistant?”

  Because she was curious and wanted to learn more about him, okay?

  It was stupid, but she wanted to know what made him tick. Things like—did he often meet up with chicks in the bar and go back to their places? Or maybe, why had he disappeared without a goodbye?

  That last one had hurt most of all. But it did make more sense after discovering that he worked for Clay Steele.

  She, herself, had dropped many a plan when something desperate had come up with Heather.

  But that night had been—

  Well, it had been the first time she’d really put herself out there since her marriage.