Heart Thief (Black Market Billionaire Book 1)

by Skylar Sweeney

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  COMING 4/10/19

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  “MOM, YOU’RE EMBARRASSING ME AGAIN!” Casey screamed from her bedroom, as if there was any need to scream. It was a three room apartment, and I was sitting on a sofa approximately five steps from her open bedroom door.

  I groaned, letting my head fall back and wishing I could afford a single glass of wine that didn’t come out of a cardboard box.

  Apparently my obvious exhaustion and general annoyance was not response enough for my daughter, because she appeared before me in all her fifteen year old glory. She was dressed in what were either the new pajamas she’d bought at the mall today or what she planned to wear when she quit basketball and took up prostitution.

  “Did you HEAR ME?!” she shrieked, hands on her hips and foot stomping the floor like a toddler.

  “No, I didn’t hear you, baby,” I said sweetly. “I’ve gone deaf, so you’ll have to start practicing your sign language. Until then, have a nice night!”

  Casey flipped her bright purple hair over her shoulder, rolling her eyes and letting out a sigh so loud it could have been mistaken for a deflating party balloon. Hello, drama.

  “That blog you wrote is horrible! I can’t believe you said all that stuff. You talked about sex!” Casey feigned vomiting, then made a face like a gnome. “You are way too old to talk about sex!”

  Oh wine in a bottle, where art thou, my handsome prince?

  “I’m thirty-six,” I snapped. “Stop talking like I’m Bettie White.”

  My daughter snorted, shaking her head in disgust. “Bettie White is way sexier than you.”

  Ouch. Okay, that was possibly true, since Bettie White was pretty badass and I was currently curled up on a couch in my ex-husband’s sweatpants and a Yankees shirt that would fit Homer Simpson, but still… ouch.

  Casey’s eyes narrowed, focusing on the laptop sitting next to me and baring her teeth. Oh, man, we needed to get her braces tightened soon. Dear God, please let today’s article get some high level traffic.

  “I don’t know why you write that stupid blog at all. It’s disgusting! Why in the world would you spend six paragraphs talking about the size of some old guy’s penis?!”

  “Rex Bennett is twenty-nine, which is definitely not old,” I replied calmly, “and I write this ‘stupid blog’ so that you can do things like eat food and wipe your butt with toilet paper.”

  The sigh that came out of her mouth this time was so dramatic it belonged on a soap opera.

  “Whatever. Just stop it, because it’s embarrassing, okay? God, you’re such a loser. You should never have left dad. That’s was, like, the stupidest thing ever. He’s making tons of money now, and all you do is write about rich people that you wish you could be. Lame.”

  Casey spun on her heel and stomped off into her room, slamming the door behind her and leaving me feeling like a pile of poodle shit left to rot on a sidewalk in the middle of summer.

  I sighed, glancing down at the computer screen, which was opened up to my latest blog post. A picture of Rex Bennett with one arm wrapped around his new fiancé and the other around his beautiful half-brother filled the page, along with the title ‘He’s Got a Big Heart: Does He Have a Big Dick?’ Casey was right. It was embarrassing. Hell, even I was embarrassed, and I spent a good amount of time contemplating such questions about sexy men.

  You would think that a BA in journalism from NYU would get you somewhere in this town, but the truth was that only one thing got you places and it was green, rectangular, and stamped with the faces of dead men.

  Of course, being a single mom didn’t help. To get your foot into journalism, you had to dedicate everything to it and spend all your time on the prowl for contacts and stories. Having Casey less than a year after graduating from NYU hadn’t helped in that endeavor, particularly since my ex-husband was officially the most incompetent father I’d ever heard of, and that was including the king from that fairy tale who locked his own daughter in a tower so she couldn’t get laid (God forbid).

  Now we were divorced and he was living in a six figure apartment downtown with a flatscreen TV, a king size bed, and a washer/dryer set. Note that this is a man who couldn’t run a load if he tried. I had twenty thousand dollars in student loans, a fifteen year old daughter with an attitude problem, and a Tupperware set with most of the lids missing.

  I sighed and dragged my computer up onto my lap, opening a new window and beginning my usual click-through of other Manhattan gossip and social blogs, browsing for anything new and exciting.

  A Total Know It All, my blog, was pretty popular and brought in just enough for us to get by when combined with credit cards and a few visits to the pawn shop, but ever since the divorce a year ago, I’d been desperately scouting actual magazines and newspapers looking for any opening that could be considered real journalism.

  I’d gotten one interview, for a social column at a local Manhattan paper called Lady Lib City. I’d been informed that they thought my style was great and they loved my writing, but they needed proof that I was capable of tracking down actual scoops now and then and not just spitting out the same old stuff in every single article.

  My main goal in life was now to find something new and exciting for my blog, something big enough to impress the editor so she would consider me for the position. I needed something good, though, some gossip about the New York A-Listers that hadn’t been heard before. Ramblings about an A-Lister’s dick size wasn’t going to cut it. After all, what New York lady hadn’t talked with her girlfriends about Rex’s dick size? The man was like a Greek god.

  I sighed, flipping idly through images of actors and politicians and local New York celebs, not giving them much thought. At least until one particular picture caught my eye.

  It was Harrison Wentworth, known as New York’s very own ‘Monopoly Man.’ He was literally the richest man in the world at only twenty-nine years old and was rumored to own a good portion of Manhattan. I didn’t write about him much since my blog was centered around social news, and Harrison had zero social life; but thanks to his maternal relation to an Irish mob boss, the investigative blogs were constantly connecting him to everything from jaywalking to money laundering to murder, because who needs actual evidence when you know someone is related to a bad guy?

  This picture, however, really stood out. The blog’s title was ‘Ole Money Sonny Likes Young Honeys’ and showed him standing outside of a building I recognized as the Rosa Parks Athletic Center for Girls. My daughter played basketball there.

  Harrison was dressed in one of the t-shirts you could buy to support the Center and that only parents bothered getting because they were so ugly. Even more interestingly, he was wearing a Authorized Pick Up wristband.

  After the Center started having problems with staff allowing parents who did not have custody to take the children, they’d started requiring that the person authorized to take the child home have a wristband to show their authority. So Harrison wasn’t simply there to watch and perv, like this blogger seemed to think (ew), but to pick up a kid.

  Harrison Wentworth didn’t have a kid. So who was he picking up at the Parks Center?

  I typed in Monopoly Man’s name and began to scroll through the articles, most of which were contemplating things like where he buried bodies in a city like Manhattan and how many politicians he had in his pocket. Oh, nice, this one showed a picture of him Photoshopped into a puke green Ford Pinto and claimed it was his getaway vehicle. Very believable.

  I sucked in a sharp breath when I came to a jpeg of him standing next to a rooftop pool, wearing nothing but blue swim trunks and sunglasses. His was seriously built, abs so cut they looked like they’d been carved from stone, along with killer biceps. His honey blonde hair glimmered in the sun, and if he weren’t scowling I might have said he looked happy. His blue eyes seemed to sparkle, anyway. What really stood out, though, was the large black tattoo over his left pec. It was a
kanji about half the size of my hand, covering a large part of his chest, right over the heart.

  I saved the photo and moved it into my editor, cutting out the tattoo then putting the new pic into an image finder. A few seconds later I got hundreds of similar images, along with a very helpful translation.

  Daughter. The tattoo was the Japanese kanji for daughter.

  I sucked in a sharp breath and went back to searching, this time looking for any mention of Harrison Wentworth having kids. There!

  I clicked on link that archived old posts from no-longer active gossip blogs. This one was from a blog called ‘Mighty Manny-hattan’.

  It’s believed that the girl in this picture, identity unknown, may be the biological daughter of Ole Monny Sonny Wentworth, the richest man in the world. According to rumor, up until this year the heir to the Wentworth fortune was raised by her uncle, Irish mob boss Brent O’Sullivan, and is a well integrated part of the O’Sullivan crime family. Though the girl’s mother is presumed deceased, it is considered likely that she, too, bore links to these renowned New York City crime families.

  The picture link was broken, so I had no clue what girl this ‘Mighty Manny’ was talking about, but I sure would like to know. If I could find a way to contact him, maybe he could send me the pic…

  Another minute of searching had me sighing in disappointment. Apparently Mighty Manny wasn’t so mighty after all. He’d died at only forty-nine.

  Another half hour of searching turned up not even a pixel of info about Harrison’s daughter, and I sighed in a combination of excitement and frustration.

  On the bright side, if I did discover that Harrison was hiding a secret daughter, I’d be offered jobs right and left. On the down side, where would I even start?

  “MOM! CAN YOU GET ME A SPRITE?”

  “You have legs!” I shouted back. “Use what you’ve got!”

  I paused at my own words, glancing toward Casey’s room. That was it. I needed to use what I had.

  Harrison Wentworth had picked someone up from the Parks Center at least once. Well, I had a fabulous source there.