by Anne Marsh
What happens when two billionaire best friends and business partners decide to make a merger in the bedroom? Find out in New York Times bestselling author Anne Marsh’s latest red-hot read!
I thought I’d met The One in college. But after nine years of marriage, one text changed everything. The next thing I knew...divorce. My best friend Hazel’s seen me through it—unfailingly logical and quirky, as always.
We run a VC firm that’s made us filthy rich. Maybe money can’t buy happiness, but winning in business is addictive. When a tipsy encounter has me remembering Hazel’s soft champagne kiss for a week, she’s what I crave. We’ve only ever been friends. Business partners. Yet when Hazel launches a slideshow and proposes we shake up singledom by pairing in the bedroom, I can’t resist.
The kiss was unforgettable, but the sex is intoxicating. It was supposed to be fun and easy. So why can’t I get enough? With a broken marriage behind me, I can’t have these new feelings for an old friend. Ones that make me want to have her permanently...
Step into stories of provocative romance where sexual fantasies come true. Let your inhibitions run wild with Harlequin DARE.
Anne Marsh writes sexy contemporary and paranormal romances because the world can always enjoy one more alpha male. She started writing romance after getting laid off from her job as a technical writer—and quickly decided happily-ever-afters trumped software manuals. She lives in North Carolina with her two kids and five cats.
If you liked Hot Boss, why not try
At Your Service by A.C. Arthur
Wild Wedding Hookup by Jamie K. Schmidt
Guilty Pleasure by Taryn Leigh Taylor
And don’t forget to check out
these other DARE titles by Anne Marsh
Her Intern
Hookup
Hard Riders MC
Ruled
Inked
Discover more at Harlequin.com
HOT BOSS
ANNE MARSH
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Excerpt from At Your Service by A.C. Arthur
PROLOGUE
SOME WOMEN DREAM of marrying Prince Charming. They fantasize about the slow, stately march up the aisle of a medieval cathedral, the big white dress and a rock the size of Gibraltar on their ring finger. Molly, my ex-wife, once admitted under the influence of tequila shooters that she phoned Westminster Abbey—a transatlantic call—at the age of twelve because she wanted to save the date. Ten years in advance. And her parents did not have an international calling plan. It took her years to pay off that adventure.
Princes don’t do it for me. More to the point, when I was twenty-one and naked on a Santa Cruz beach, I was just glad I’d dodged a royal bullet, because if Molly had truly wanted an English peer and a glass-carriage wedding, I would have moved to London and made it happen. That’s what you do when you love someone. You keep that someone safe and deliver her dreams to her, gift-wrapped with a big-ass bow. I’m not sure how I feel about ribbons on my dick, but I was definitely willing to find out back then.
“I don’t suppose you’d marry me?” I whispered against her ear. “So we could stay like this forever?”
“You’re asking me now?” She grinned up at me, heels digging into my ass as her hips moved in a way guaranteed to make me forget both graduation the next day and my big financial plans for our future. “Pretty sure we can’t stay exactly like this forever.”
Counteroffering is an art form. “Mostly forever.”
I let my mouth—and my tongue—underscore my point. She groaned something. My name, a few cute curses—Molly was opposed to swearing—and then that one word. Yes.
I remember that night on the beach, the beginning of forever. What I didn’t know then was that forever would last nine years... 108 months... 3285 days. More than five million minutes. All that time and I didn’t see the end coming. Imagine you’re reading a book and there’s another half inch of paper, or twenty percent left in your e-reader, so you’re settling in, getting comfortable because this is clearly going to be the best ending ever, and then bam. The end. The story’s done and you’re left wondering just how much damage hurling the e-reader at your drywall will cause. That was our story, Molly and me. Boy meets girl in college and falls in love. He proposes on a beach and they get married. Then they’re supposed to spend the next sixty years having hot sex, watching each other’s back and popping out a few Mini-Mes along the way. I wasn’t stupid. I knew it wouldn’t always be easy or fun. Marriage is like a roller coaster. You buy your ticket and then, once you’re on, you’re on. You don’t hop off at the top or in the dips. You ride for as long as it takes and you’re grateful for each exhilarating, wonderful, scary-as-hell second.
We got married in an outdoor chapel surrounded by California redwoods and our friends and families, and then we got on with the business of living. I started a venture capital firm with a college friend and made money; Molly earned a PhD in English. While I was busy settling down, my friends were playing the field. You’ve met them. Devlin King is scary smart, a brilliant programmer with a Machiavellian streak. He’d never hooked up with the same woman more than once until he fell for a fellow start-up entrepreneur and accidentally-on-purpose spent the summer working as her intern.
Dev’s dick was so popular it had its own Instagram...until he met Lola and suddenly he got the appeal of monogamy. It’s not that you can’t bang other women—it’s that you don’t want to because those other women aren’t her. Your one and only. The woman who makes you look up and drool like Pavlov’s dog when she waltzes through the door and for whom you’d do anything—hot sex on the beach, excruciating family dinners, half-assed home repairs, or volunteer to go and kick the ass of anyone and everyone dumb enough to hurt her feelings.
The third in our triumvirate fell hard, too. Like Dev, Max O’Reilly wasn’t in the business of relationships. In fact, he was so averse that he created Billionaire Bachelors, a dating app to connect to the many tech billionaires of Silicon Valley, including himself. He’d also launched Kinkster, mostly so he could order kinky-sex hookups the same way he ordered in Chinese food and pizza. A ballet dancer and influencer named Maple had changed his mind and he claimed to be a happy, happy man about that course reversal.
Take a note and remember that app name.
It’ll come up again.
Most days I was too busy working and plotting to take over the world, one disruptive start-up at a time, to think about Molly and me. We loved each other. We talked. Even at the end, we still had amazing sex, because practice does make perfect. Or maybe it’s just that I was willfully blind and not ready to admit that something wasn’t quite right. The realization isn’t like a dam-bursting hurricane that sweeps in and wipes out your town, while you huddle on the roof and hope to God you haven’t pissed off the local search-and-rescue team lately because you need saving. It’s slower, a steady chipping away at some essential piece of Molly and me.
I never saw it coming.
When Molly and I ended, my friends were there for me, Hazel leading the pack. Of course, Hazel being Hazel, she wasn’t rubbing my back or
listing the million ways Molly would regret ending our marriage. She just insisted that I look forward, not back. Keep moving toward the future because, she said, not even I could fund a company that would successfully invent a time machine so I could go back and fix where things had gone wrong. She kicked my ass and I liked it, and that led to kissing—
And that was where I made my big mistake. I thought there could only be one The One. I thought her name was Molly and that I’d met her and loved her and it was game over, but sometimes the universe is generous and offers second chances. I was just too dumb to see it, so I took her first offer when I should have held out for more. Because it didn’t take too many months for me to realize that Hazel was a unicorn.
No, she’s not a mythical animal. Not even close. She’s gorgeous and bold and totally sure of herself, but she’s thankfully no virgin lover, because I was already on my second chance even if I didn’t know it. A unicorn is the ultimate fantasy of the VC world—like banging triplet gymnasts with DDD boobs. When a start-up company goes public and is valued at more than a billion dollars, you’ve found your unicorn. There aren’t many of them and they’re rare, but if you back one, you’re a guaranteed legend and a filthy rich bastard.
When you find a potential unicorn, you thank your lucky stars and you put in the work to make it happen.
You do whatever it takes.
You make it happen.
You hold on.
CHAPTER ONE
Ten months ago...
“HARD AND FAST. Come on, big guy.” Hazel sucks in a breath. “Almost there.”
I brace my arms on either side of her. My nose crinkles as her hair tickles me. “If it rises too fast, it’s just gonna run out of steam and collapse. I’m in this for the long term.”
Hazel makes a mock-shocked face, her eyes meeting mine. “Mr. Reed, do I hear an innuendo?”
I highly doubt I need to answer that question, but I wink at her because that’s how we play the game. Hazel’s good people and we’ve known each other since college, after all. “Ms. Coleman, you most definitely do.”
Yesterday I was a filthy rich bastard. Today? I, Jack Reed, am the filthiest, richest bastard of them all. People dream of hitting it big—winning the lottery, cashing in at the racetrack, maybe inheriting a secret stock fortune from good old Aunt Betty. Those aren’t bad ways to fill your bank account, but trust me, doing it by using your head, by earning every penny, nickel and dime, is the best. You’re in control, you call the shots. The lucky ticket or racetrack bet? Just dumb luck—and luck is for losers.
The New York Stock Exchange is minutes away from recording the final trade of the day and everyone at the venture capital firm of Coleman and Reed is glued to their laptops and CNBC, watching what our latest start-up to IPO trades for. Our firm has spent the last three years mentoring the start-up and pouring cash into it. We found them a kick-ass CEO, refined their business plan and introduced them to industry players. Now, after multiple rounds of funding, it’s D-Day, the date they make their initial public offering, and we’ve been holding our collective breath since the shares debuted. This is the part I love—where planning and investing in the long term marries a serendipitous, disruptive idea and revolutionizes the world. Instacart, DoorDash, eBay, Snapchat, Facebook—they shook up our world and made their mark. This start-up will do the same. I know it.
The feeling of winning is addictive, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. Hazel (the Coleman half of Coleman and Reed) knows exactly how I feel. Together we run one of the most successful venture capital funds in the world. What’s VC? We’re the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus of the business world. If you’ve been very, very good and dotted all your i’s, crossed each t, we can make it rain cash and bring your dreams to life. It’s a common misconception that VC guys are vultures, looking to swoop in and take over. I don’t want to run your company or disassemble it. I want to take it public and sell it for a hundred—a thousand—times what it was valued at the day I walked in the door. Thank me and get out of my way.
We’ve been holed up in Hazel’s office all day, monitoring the IPO while the rest of our team makes a valiant effort to pretend that today is just your average, ordinary workday, when it’s all the holidays and a freaking pot of gold at the end of the Silicon Valley rainbow rolled into one. You see, Hazel and I did something different when we founded this particular VC fund. We insisted that everyone who worked here—from the guy who pushes a vacuum through our late-night sessions, to our Gal Friday receptionist, to the six analysts on our team—should have skin in the game. And to make that happen, we bumped their salaries up 20 percent and invested that extra in the fund.
As a result, Hazel and I have the richest janitor in Silicon Valley.
We also have the most loyal one.
Here in California, we’ve still got three hours of blazing hot sunshine until the close of the business day. Outside, BMWs and expensive luxury cars shoot up and down Sand Hill Road, a short stretch of asphalt that fronts the most expensive real estate in Silicon Valley. What used to be six sleepy miles cutting through western Silicon Valley is now the center of the VC universe. Hollywood has Rodeo Drive and corporate big shots have Wall Street, but my tribe rules California. The biggest players have offices here and my heart still kicks into higher gear when I spot the green exit sign Sand Hill Rd above the sun-seared brown hills. That sign is the ultimate X-marks-the-spot and here-be-treasure. Sand Hill Road is where dreams come true or go bust, the epicenter of billions of dollars and power plays.
The closing bell rings, echoed by an audible happy sigh from the outer offices, like a sirocco ripping through the desert or a giant, man-eating raptor sighting prey. The stock popped and closed four times above ask.
You know that now-famous Oprah episode where she announces “You get a car. And you get a car. And you—yes, everyone gets a free car!” That’s the prevailing mood in the offices of Coleman and Reed today. Our long-shot company just made its initial public offering and now we’re all rolling in cash. You know what’s even better than free money? Money that you earned because you were fucking right.
“Told you.” I grab the champagne flutes from the shelf above her desk.
“Show-off,” she grunts. Now that the market’s closed, she pops out of her seat. Frankly, I’m surprised she’s managed to sit still for so long. While our team celebrates, she grabs the edge of her desk, performing some kind of bendy, plié-squat thing. She claims it’s important to get up and move every hour—otherwise your chances of stroking out escalate faster than a poorly capitalized start-up plummets during its debut.
I prefer to get my exercise on the beach. Surfing works, as does running. Standing in place and bending my knees? Where’s the challenge?
“You know you can buy a new heart and a couple of kidneys with the twenty million dollars you just earned, right?”
Brown eyes narrow at me with laser focus. “Jealous, Reed?”
“Please. As if.” I blow her a raspberry because that’s what longtime friends do—they give each other shit.
“Mature.” And then she sticks her tongue out at me, finishing her reps before grabbing her coffee mug and slurping down an obscene amount of room-temperature tap water.
Hazel’s not a glass-half-full kind of person. She knows exactly how many ounces of liquid are in her oversize, llama-shaped coffee cup. Not part of the killer VC image, you say? Just wait until she looks at you. Brown eyes, long lashes, perfectly applied makeup (she did mine once on a drunken college night and I looked equally good) but you can tell right away that she’s taking you in, performing a lightning-quick analysis that would make a NASA supercomputer jealous. Hazel lives for numbers. She’s blunt and fact-oriented, and the shit that comes out of her mouth would be unbelievable except that it’s also invariably true. She’s smart and funny, and early on she nominated me to be the pretty face of the office.
&nbs
p; Her reason? People like me.
She, on the other hand, never won Prom Queen, was never picked first for kickball and never received a dozen secret valentines. Hazel can rub people the wrong way, particularly when she’s explaining why she’s right and you’re wrong. In the Hazel-verse, Hazel’s always right and she’s perfectly willing to explain at excruciating length why that’s so. Still, Hazel’s good people. If you’d told me ten years ago that she’d be my best friend and business partner, I’d have told you to lay off the pot brownies. She stormed a talk I was giving at UC Santa Cruz on statistical modeling and IPO valuation prediction, we argued about my methods (I still maintain I was right and Hazel was sadly deluded) and then we discovered unexpected common ground in a small tech company we’d both invested in. It had IPO’d while we’d been arguing, and we were both officially millionaires. She’d promptly offered to buy me a drink or a piece of cake because we were either the two smartest people in the world...or the craziest. And either way, we deserved cake.
The jury’s still out on the crazy, by the way.
Ever since that celebratory slice of red velvet goodness, however, Hazel and I have been friends and business partners. We’ve conquered mountains together and my life doesn’t work without her in it. She’s always been one of the guys, a good sport, smart, driven. She’s all the adjectives—and her amazing business abilities are the cherry on the sundae of awesomeness that is Hazel. Tact, however, is not one of her assets.
She sets down her llama mug on the coaster on her desk. “Are you taking Molly out to celebrate? Or are you just staying in and having wild monkey sex?”
They say married couples have sex ninety-eight times a year, while single people score only forty-nine times.
Jealous?
Hazel and I kept count last year. Let’s just say that she’s both single and a less-than-gracious loser.
“You bet, and you bet.”
