Power Play: A Romance Collection
Page 1
Power Play
Lauren Landish
Edited by Valorie Clifton
Edited by Staci Etheridge
Photography by Wander Aguiar
Copyright © 2020 by Lauren Landish
Cover design by Eileen Carey.
Photography by Wander Aguiar.
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.
Contents
Also by Lauren Landish
Filthy Riches
Prologue
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
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Epilogue
Epilogue
Scorpio
Prologue
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
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
Epilogue
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Lauren Landish
Bennett Boys Ranch:
Buck Wild || Riding Hard || Racing Hearts
The Tannen Boys:
Rough Love || Rough Edge || Rough Country
Standalones
My Big Fat Fake Wedding || My Big Fat Fake Engagement || The Dare ||
Dirty Fairy Tales:
Beauty and the Billionaire || Not So Prince Charming || Happily Never After
Get Dirty:
Dirty Talk || Dirty Laundry || Dirty Deeds || Dirty Secrets
Irresistible Bachelors:
Anaconda || Mr. Fiance || Heartstopper
Stud Muffin || Mr. Fixit || Matchmaker
Motorhead || Baby Daddy || Untamed
Filthy Riches
Prologue
Nathan
She shouldn’t be here.
This has to end.
Now.
Pain blossoms in my chest at the thought as my hand curls into a fist. I knew letting someone close to me could lead to this. My downfall. My end. Yet, I did it anyway.
Fucking fool.
The damning words thunder in my mind as my shoes tap against the polished marble stairs.
My dark thoughts continue as I reach the second floor and fling open the ornate double doors, revealing an opulent master bedroom bathed in gray and white.
“You have to go . . . now.”
The words die on my lips at the sight before me, and my cock instantly hardens in my slacks.
Fuck, she’s so beautiful. Enchanting. Bewitching.
And I am definitely under her spell.
She’s lying on my king-sized bed, garbed in black lingerie that graces over her lush curves, highlighting every hill and valley, stark against the creamy white satin of my sheets. Her lips are parted in a sensual O as she looks at me, her eyes brimming with a vulnerability that reaches across the space between us, squeezing my heart in her iron fist and giving me hopes for something other than the future I am destined for.
“Nathan,” she moans, her voice filled with a desperate need that pulls me to her like a magnet. She knows she has this power over me. She must know, and she has to know how much I both hate and love every tug she gives, her tendrils slithering through the distance to entwine her magic around my groin and my heart at her whim.
She arches her back, her breasts pressing against the flimsy fabric, her nipples pebbling beneath the sheer fabric. “Please, I need you. Now.”
Lust rages through my blood, even as my mind screams for me to deny her, to tell her no, that this can’t happen. Not now, not again.
I open my mouth but the words won’t come, my body forcing my brain to let the traitorous thought go.
It’s then that I see little sparkly fireflies of light surrounding her body, and I realize that she’s lying on the gifts I gave her earlier, the light from the chandelier causing them to shine and glitter.
Diamonds.
My heart rages inside my chest like a caged animal as I make my way to the bed. To her.
With each step, my heart pounds harder, faster, with every beat a drum reinforcing that she has to go. I have to tell her to go.
But as I reach the bed, my hand reaches out without my consent, tracing a line from her ankle up to her thigh. Her skin is satin warmth, and I want to drown in her, bury my face in her lush center as I sip from her.
The reverberation in my mind changes, no longer saying go, go, go, but instead repeating mine, mine, mine.
She is mine, and as I fall onto her, covering her body with my own, I know that she always will be.
Chapter 1
Nathan - Six Weeks Prior
“Here are your damn diamonds,” my brother Caleb announces as he bursts through my door, a snide hint subtly cached in the crass words.
I turn from the window of my office, leaving behind the idyllic view of some of the most breathtaking scenery this side of the Mississippi to take in his appearance with a barely repressed sigh.
He’s in baggy jeans and a tank top, his hair mussed in a way intended to look careless but which takes him numerous products to achieve.
It’s a cultivated casual look that I suspect he adopted mostly to annoy our more formal father when he was alive.
And now, he continues it as a rebellion to differentiate himself from me, the older brother whose shadow he both loathes and relishes in equal measure.
Though Caleb has come in on his own, Grant stands in the doorway, ever a bastion of propriety as he needlessly announces, “Sir, Mr. Stone wishes to see you.”
The experienced professional face is carefully neutral, but I can see the hint of distaste
in his eyes, even from across the room.
He served my father for decades, and along with the business, I inherited Grant’s employ as a house manager and personal assistant. He cares for both Caleb and me in his distant way, but he decidedly doesn’t care for manners to be glossed over or skipped altogether, so Caleb drives him a bit batty.
“Would you like me to pour you two a scotch?”
“No thank you, Grant. That won’t be necessary.” He hears the discreet dismissal and with a nod, closes the door behind him. Despite saying no, I move toward the bar, pouring a generous tumbler for myself and one for Caleb.
Though Caleb takes the offered drink and trades me for the small bag he’s brought, he’s still surly. “Do you know we almost lost Jake to get you these? What makes them so important anyway? You said you’d explain once we had them in hand, so time’s up. Explain. I don’t think any of our men are worth losing over a fucking rock.”
I sit at my desk, setting my drink aside to focus on the bag’s contents, which I spread on a velvet mat. Grabbing the magnifying loupe, I hold one up to examine it more closely.
Under the magnification, I can see every flaw but also appreciate the beauty more fully in the kaleidoscopic lines and prismatic reflections.
Mindlessly, I answer part of Caleb’s line of questions.
“I did not know about Jake. Please pass along my appreciation for his dedication. I trust he’s okay, otherwise you would’ve said as much.”
I hum, turning a second stone and then a third as I appraise each one.
Caleb scoffs, interrupting my mental checklist. “That’s it? Tell him thanks?” He sighs heavily, and I can hear the eyeroll in the huffed breath.
He doesn’t have patience for the work we do. Not really, not like I do.
If you’d told me I’d be in charge of a billion-dollar jewelry company with the world at my fingertips at barely thirty, I’d have laughed at you, believing the very idea that I would ever follow in my father’s footsteps to be as far from possible as pigs sprouting wings and spontaneously taking flight.
I am not a businessman, or at least I didn’t intend to be. I’m a soldier, a man of action, not a desk percher whose big moves of the day are with a pen.
No, I’m used to guns, dust, and sand, battles of righteousness, and shows of power with strategy and war.
It was a good life, full of adrenaline, adventure, sweat, and action. I lived fast, partied hard, and loved long and strong before disappearing on the breeze the next day to do it all again a continent away.
But then my father died. Or rather, he was killed.
In a single moment, my whole world tilted on its axis, the things I knew to be true suddenly shown in all their falsehood, and my father’s business, both true and dark, was revealed.
Still mourning and angry at his murder, I was thrust into being the figurehead of his company, trading Kevlar vests for tailor-made suits, a GPS locator for a Cartier watch, and covert action for long board meetings in stuffy offices surrounded by hot-headed executives.
While I’d had plenty of training in combat, I had virtually none on how to run a billion-dollar global corporation.
All of the industry, both inside my company and outside it, laughed at the idiot ‘boy’ with no experience who dared to challenge the status quo.
They’d been hell-bent on teaching me my place in what is now my own company.
It hadn’t gone well. For them.
I might not have been a businessman, but I understand power. I know how to wield it like a weapon, sometimes delicate, and when necessary, bluntly aggressive.
The lengths some people will go to hoard it, believing it gives them some intrinsic worth that is greater than their fellow man, is the key.
But my father didn’t get that, and he paid with his life because of it, leaving behind a final, deadly example for me to learn from.
Caleb doesn’t understand it yet, but I refuse to let him suffer the same fate.
His life is one of missions, even now. He hasn’t evolved to design plans, foresee obstacles, and work toward something greater like I’ve had to do.
He’s like an excited dog who wants its owner to throw a bone. Merely chase, retrieve, drop it, and wait for the next throw, with an occasional treat thrown in to keep the cycle repeating.
It’s not a bad thing. I love dogs. It’s actually truly necessary to keep the company rolling. I need worker bees, and my brother, while usually coming off as a joking goof-off, is quite adept at being a high-level pack leader, my second in command, leading others in teams to chase down the bones I throw.
Like the diamonds in front of me.
I set down the last gem, giving my brother my full attention as he sits across the desk from me in a tufted leather chair.
“Yes, Caleb. Tell Jake thank you for a mission completed. Same to you. Thanks. These stones are vital to getting Nikolai’s cooperation. And you know we need that to move forward.”
Caleb’s reaction is instant and fiery. “That’s what these are for? You said you had a specific request for them. We paid too great a price to use them as a bartering chip for a thug like Nikolai Romanov! I told you this is a shitty course of action to begin with. No, just no, Nathan.”
He smacks his palm to the desktop, driving his point home as if we haven’t already had this fight.
But he has a point.
Nikolai Romanov is a Russian gangster and a monster in the underworld business. But along the journey of my controlling the Stone Corporation, we reached a tenuous truce. It’s an unfortunate side of my work, both as a soldier and as a businessman, playing ball with every big name in the game regardless of personal feelings about them. You simply never know who will come in handy.
But our ‘friendship’ only stretches so far, and Nikolai won’t give up what I truly need from him without a hefty price.
Normally, I’d take Caleb’s feelings on the matter into consideration, but in this instance, I simply can’t. Insuring our relationship with Nikolai is merely step one in a complex situation, every step hinging on the last, and all of them are dependent on Nikolai’s giving in.
Something Caleb fucking knows but refuses to admit.
“It’s not up for debate, Caleb. We have to do this and you know it,” I say, not wanting to rehash the fight again.
But Caleb doesn’t suffer from the same desire. “He’s a notorious scumbag, and he can’t be trusted. You know this, but yet you’re trying to get his word that he’ll give you safe passage into his territory on a harebrained mission for a gem that only exists in fairy tales and late-night gem dealer bullshit sessions. It’s the fucking Holy Grail, except it likely never existed. And even if it does, it most likely got our father murdered. This is madness.”
Though argumentative, I can hear the concern in Caleb’s words. He’s worried I’ll end up with the same fate as our father, and I can’t promise him I won’t.
But I have to see this through. Following Dad’s footsteps is the only way to find out who killed him, which is my true goal. The idea of a massive diamond would simply be a bittersweet memento of the journey.
“Nikolai wouldn’t be so stupid as to start a war on American soil, not when the government is salivating for a reason to take him into custody,” I remind Caleb. “While he’s here this month, we need to take advantage of his proximity. There’s no other way. If we can gain his favor while he’s here, he’ll grant access to the cave system and we can search. For clues and maybe more. That’s why we need to throw this party and gift Nikolai with these diamonds.”
Caleb chuckles bitterly. “Who’d have thought I’d be the one telling you not to throw a party and you’d be the one bound and determined to host a raver?”
I shake my head, and despite his mocking tone, I’m amused at his choice of words. “Not a raver for sure. But a classy get-together where we can talk to Nikolai. I’ve got everything covered, food, drinks, music, and guests.” I pause, my mind attaching to something that I’d
set aside earlier in my preparations. “Actually, we might need a better balance on the guest list. It’s a little testosterone-heavy.”
Digging into my desk drawer, I pull out a small black book. “Hold on to your arguments for a moment. I need to reserve a few hostesses to work the party. I’ve used one company before.” Before I can dial, Caleb balks.
“Oh, c’mon, Nathan! Hostesses? Are we running a brothel now? Throwing Nikolai a party, giving him expensive gifts, and now supplying the pussy. Why don’t we just throw him a damn parade too?”
I raise an eyebrow. “You know it’s not like that. The girls are merely for the headcount and conversation, and the diamonds are a gift, though one that comes with strings. The strings we’re going to pull like puppet masters to get what we want.”