Biker Billionaire #3 - Riding the Heir
(c) 2012 Jasinda Wilder
ORLY Press www.orlypress.com
This story you're ogling on your hot little digital device is 19,420 words or about 78 book pages.
WARNING: This story contains explicit sex, M/F. For adults, 18+ only.
Biker Billionaire #3: Riding the Heir
"Wedding? What wedding?" I tried not to sound panicked.
Virginia Sorrenson looked from my baffled expression to Shane's chagrined one. "I was under the impression she knew what she was getting into, Shane. This does not appear to be the case."
I turned to Shane. "What's she talking about, Shane? You said going with you meant it was a declaration that we were together. You didn't say anything about any damn wedding."
I saw Virginia's brows furrow at my vulgar language. Shane winced, and took my hand.
"Yeah, I know, and I'm sorry. It's not like it's going to be next week or anything, Leo, just..." he scrubbed his face with his hand. "Let's talk about this later, okay? In private?"
I nodded.
Virginia seemed displeased. "Shane, you should have been forthright with her from the beginning. It's not fair to her to be in the dark like this. She should know what she's getting into."
"I know," Shane said, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Can we just get home? I'll explain everything."
"Everything?" I asked. "Is there more?"
Luke spoke up. "With Shane, there's always more. He's not the most forthcoming man ever."
The three other brothers all chuckled.
"Let's just say there's probably more he's not saying than he is," Jon added.
"We're his brothers, and he didn't tell us about his patents until after he'd made his first billion," Rob said.
I choked on my saliva. "His first what?" I looked from Shane, who seemed intensely pissed off, to Rob. "His first billion with a 'B', or million with an 'M'?"
Virginia sighed. "Billion, dear. With a capital 'B'. My tight-lipped son Shane here is worth nearly as much as his father." She glared at Shane. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself. This poor girl obviously knows nothing about you, and not through any fault of her own. This is the kind of thing you can't just spring on a girl, son."
"It's not like I wasn't going to tell her, I just--"
"You want her to like you for more than your money," Virginia cut in. "I know. We've been over this. But obviously things with Leona have progressed rather quickly. If she's to make an informed and responsible decision about her future with you, then she needs the facts. All of them, dear. Not just the ones you decide to part with."
I turned away and stared out the tinted window. Our limo, which I suspected was worth more than my parents' house, was zipping smoothly along a narrow, winding road lined with spreading trees, now changing to brilliant reds, oranges, yellows and browns as fall descended on upstate New York. There was more to Shane Sorrenson than met the eye, clearly. I'd always known that. Even from the first time I met him, I knew he was more than just a biker. His carriage, his bearing, something in the ramrod stiffness of his spine spoke of breeding and sophistication. It hadn't clicked right away though, and he tried to brush it off, especially when it came out that he was the son of Henry James Sorrenson. And now, suddenly, those medical patents he'd so casually mentioned and dismissed weren't a trivial matter, and the company some little dot com existing on paper somewhere. He was a billionaire.
"Shane, you told me you owned a few medical patents," I said, after a long, tense silence.
Shane didn't answer right away. He picked at a thread on the leg of his pants, not looking at anyone. "First, I'm sorry. My brothers are right, in that I don't like to talk about myself. I don't like to flaunt my family name or my own personal wealth. Dad's money is his, earned by his hard work, over a lifetime. Mine is...well that's different. Those patents are meant to make life better for everyone, and it seems wrong somehow to capitalize on them."
Virginia huffed in irritation. "Oh for goodness' sake, Shane. Stop being so ridiculously egalitarian. Those patents are revolutionizing battlefield medicine. You've changed the medical world, son. You'd be a fool not to capitalize on it."
"Mother, I know. That's not the point. The point is, how do you tell someone your net worth without sounding arrogant? 'Hi, Leo, my name is Shane Sorrenson and I'm worth six billion dollars?' I don't fucking think so."
"Shane Alastair Sorrenson, I will not tolerate such vulgar language in my presence. This is not the United States Marine Corps."
I stifled a giggle. Shane blushed red and mumbled a very boyish, "Sorry, Mom."
His brothers all seemed to have come down with coughing fits as well.
At that moment, the limousine pulled to a stop at the top of a circle driveway. All that was visible to me, through the dark window, was a wide set of marble steps leading to a pair of enormous, dark wood French doors and thick, elegant, fluted white columns.
The door was opened by an older, thick-set man with buzzed black hair and sunglasses as well as the kind of earpieces worn by Secret Service agents.
"Ah, we've arrived," Virginia said, sliding out. The driver/bodyguard took her hand as she stepped out. "Thank you, Gerald. Leona, come with me, if you would. I'll show you the house."
I was next out, and I found myself lifted to my feet by Gerald's calloused, powerful hand. I mumbled, "thanks," to the burly man and followed after Virginia, glancing back at Shane. I would have rather had Shane give me the tour, as I hadn't had a moment alone with him since the picnic in Sudan. For all that I was irritated with him for holding back the truth from me, he was still the one familiar thing in my life, which was suddenly a very tumultuous thing. Shane watched me go, a thousand emotions shifting across his handsome features.
The front doors swung open as Virginia approached them, held by a pair of uniformed...servants, I guess you would call them. I wasn't sure. Butlers? Maids? People who worked in the house. Virginia swept past them without so much as a glance, but I thanked both of them and tried to keep up. She was moving swiftly, clad in an elegant but simple floor-length dress. The house was palatial. I'd only seen places like this in movies. This was something out of Jane Eyre or Mansfield Park, endless expanses of marble floors, grand, curving staircases and extravagant crystal chandeliers, suits of armor.
I had stopped in the middle of the foyer, which was bigger than the house I'd lived in with John. Virginia noticed I'd stopped and drifted back to my side.
"Don't let the trappings intimidate you, my dear. My husband has a flair for the dramatic. This house, if you can properly call such a monstrosity as this a house, is modeled after an eighteenth century British nobleman's estate. Something-upon-something-ford. I don't know. It's all grand and wonderful and entirely too big."
"How can I not be intimidated, Mrs. Sorrenson? This place is...god, it's incredible. I don't even know how to process what I'm seeing."
"Please, call me Virginia. And really, darling, it's just a house. A rather over-large one, but still, just a house."
I snorted. "Yeah, just a house. Okay." Virginia cocked an eyebrow at me, which I was learning was a Sorrenson family trait. "I'm sorry, I hope I didn't offend you. It is beautiful. It's just...overwhelming."
"Oh, well it is that, even to me, sometimes. Try finding someone in this house. If Henry isn't in his study, I need a search party and walkie talkies to find him. I told him we should get intercoms installed, but he said it wasn't authentic, and the electricity was bending the design enough as it was." I must have looked surprised, because she laughed. "Oh, you'll see what I mean about Henry when you meet him. He doesn't do things halfway. When he decided to do a period design, he originally wanted it to be completely authentic. All firepl
aces and lamps and outhouses and so on. Well you can be sure I put my foot down. I told him he made it a normal, twenty-first century home, with TVs and electricity and indoor bathrooms and all that, or he could find someone else to live in it with him. But he refused on the intercoms, and I didn't push it. He did give me an entire wing of the house as a walk-in closet, after all."
I widened my eyes at that. We were strolling through the house, which really was properly called a palace. There were sitting rooms with ornate, period-style furniture and fireplaces and Greco-Roman sculptures, a formal dining room big enough to seat at least fifty people, and a dozen other rooms, including a library that seemed to be a reproduction of the one in the animated Beauty and the Beast movie, with hundred-foot high ceilings and shelves of books stretching out of sight, lining every wall, with nooks and crannies and ladders and paintings.
"An entire wing for clothes?" I asked, as we neared a curving staircase wide enough to fit a Hummer.
"Would you like to see it?" Virginia asked.
Did I ever. Her 'closet' was two floors, connected by a private spiral staircase. It wasn't just racks of clothes in a giant room. It was a display, a museum, a department store. There was a room dedicated to dresses custom-made for her by all the top-name fashion designers, some in different colors of the same design. There was an entire room just for shoes, floor-to-ceiling shelves designed to display only shoes. I may have drooled, just a bit. There was another room for purses, organized by color, size, and designer. More drool. And yet another room for lingerie, and another for more mundane things like jeans and shirts and socks and such. I was speechless.
We found our way back to the shoe room. "Henry calls this my 'shoe-seum'," Virginia said. "He says I have enough shoes that if we ever went bankrupt, I could open a shoe store. He may be right, but hey, a girl can never have too many shoes, right?"
I laughed. "No, I suppose not. But then, I have three pairs of shoes at the moment, so I'm in no position to talk."
Virginia lifted her eyebrow again. "Three? Total?"
I shrugged. "With me here, at least. I have more back in Detroit, but I left everything behind when I went to Africa with Shane. He told me he'd had it all packed up and moved out of my ex-fiance's house, so I still technically own them, but that doesn't do me too much good at the moment."
Virginia led me to the kitchen, where she had coffee brought to us. "So, tell me how you met Shane. I'd ask him, but you see how he is with information."
"Well...I'd just had an argument with my ex-fiance, John. The argument itself was one of those stupid things. It had started with something dumb he said to me, and I'd gotten pissed off. But it was more than that. John was boring. I've been realizing more and more that I was only with him because it was easier than breaking up. I mean, I guess I did care about him, I'd been with him for several years after all. But...he was uninteresting." I stared into my coffee as I spoke. "It was pouring rain, and I was wearing heels since we'd come from a party, and I just jumped out of the car and ran. I broke a heel and fell, scraped my knees and hands and all that. John was following me, but I wasn't listening. And then I ran into Shane. I mean, literally ran into him. He'd seen me running in the rain, apparently, and stopped to see if I needed help. I didn't see him and ran smack into his chest. I couldn't go back home, or to John's house, I guess I should say, so Shane took me to his, and then..."
"I can guess the rest," Virginia said, a wry arch to her voice. "How did you end up in Sudan with him, though? That's extremely unusual for him."
I shrugged. "I'm an ER nurse, and we'd talked about that, and his company that he started with his brothers. He asked me if I wanted to go with him, and arranged for it with the hospital I worked at and got me a passport. It was crazy, as I'd just met him, but...I needed a drastic change. When I had that argument with John, I'd had this vision of my life with him. It was the same thing, day after day, for the rest of my life. It scared me. So when Shane suggested going to Africa with him, it was impulsive and crazy and...it honestly was the best thing I've ever done. The hardest and most frightening, too, but the best. I felt alive, really alive, for the first time. And Shane...he took care of me. Protected me."
Virginia nodded. "That's Shane for you."
This was a golden opportunity to learn about Shane, I realized. "So, tell me about him. I mean, why is he the one to take over your husband's company and not one of the others?"
Virginia regarded me carefully. "He's the best suited. The only one of them who's really capable of it, honestly. I love all my boys. They're all wonderful, capable men, and they've all done wonderful things with their lives. But Shane is the only one of them with the...business savvy." She smiled at me. "Would you like to hear a story about him, as a child?
"When Shane was a boy, he decided he wanted to do a lemonade stand. Every child has one, at some point. Well, at the time, we were living in a condo in downtown New York City. Shane set up his little stand in the hallway outside our door, and sat there for about an hour, waiting. Well, eventually he came inside, disappointed because he hadn't sold any lemonade. He went to Henry, who was on a business call, settling a multi-million dollar deal, and asked what he was doing wrong.
"Henry, without missing a beat, told him that he had to go where the business was, or he'd never sell anything. Shane took his advice to heart. He gathered his lemonade supplies and recruited Gerald to take him outside to set up. Gerald is a big old teddy bear with a heart of gold, and as much a nanny to all the kids as he is a bodyguard and driver. He helped Shane find a good spot out on Fifth Avenue, and stayed with him all day. I guess at one point, Shane ran out of supplies and sent Gerald to get more. About seven o'clock that night, Shane comes in, ecstatic but exhausted.
"He'd made over two hundred dollars, selling cups of lemonade at seventy-five cents a piece. He stuck with it for an entire week, setting up in the same spot, from morning to night, breaking for lunch and dinner, and he made over a thousand dollars.
"He was eight years old." Virginia smiled at the memory. "His brothers got wind of how much money he'd made and wanted in, so Henry told him how to expand. Henry hired a few extra temporary guards, friends of Gerald, I believe, and Shane set his three brothers up with their own stands a few blocks apart and showed them what to do. Shane gave them part of what they made and kept a portion for himself, as per Henry's instructions. Again, Shane was only eight years old.
"He has a natural mind for business, he's just reluctant to take on the responsibility, and lose his freedom in the process. I'm sure you're aware of this, but running a company like Henry's is a huge undertaking. There will be a lot of publicity, which is the biggest thing Shane's been wanting to avoid."
I absorbed this. I could see a little Shane, sitting outside in the middle of downtown Manhattan, selling lemonade. But I could also see Shane in a business suit, at a board meeting.
"So...wow." I held my coffee cup in both hands, processing what all this meant. "I guess I can see why Shane would have to be careful who he's seen in public with. If he's about to become, like, a big business mogul, his public image is important."
"Precisely. I'm glad you see it that way," Virginia said. "But there's more to it. Him having girlfriends is one thing. It's natural and expected. He's always been careful to make sure his private life is private. But he's only been working for himself, establishing his own career and his own business. Now, he's taking over Henry's company. It's an established business with a client list, an image, a reputation, investors and profit margins, and all that.
"For men like Shane and Henry, the woman in their life is vitally important. You've heard the adage, 'behind every great man is a great woman', I'm sure? Well, that's never been truer. I helped Henry start his business. I was his first secretary, and I helped design his first ad campaign. Every major decision he's ever made has gone through me.
"If our relationship suffers, or we get in a fight, and Henry has a hard time focusing on business, that can affect thousa
nds of people. I'm not exaggerating. If we fight and Henry makes a poor decision because his mind is on us rather than business, he could lose millions of dollars.
"That's what you're getting into, Leona. It's not just write-ups in the fashion rags and society columns, or appearances at galas and grand openings and such. It's business, it's your everyday life, your every decision having a domino effect on everything Shane does and down the ladder to the bottom of the company." Virginia pinned me with a hard, level stare. "Your actions reflect on him, even when you're out on the town, shopping, or having brunch with your girlfriends. Your reputation becomes his. If you're caught up in a scandal, it affects him, and thus downward to all the other stockholders and employees. Shane has never had casual girlfriends. He's had girls in his life, but it's been quiet, kept--not secret, but--"
"On the down low," I put in.
"Yes, very good. On the down low." Virginia put her hand over mine. "I don't mean to scare you or intimidate you, but I need you to know exactly what you're coming in to. What we expect of someone who intends to share Shane's life. You have to be above scandal, above reproach. We are not a family that tolerates our children making poor choices. We are a wealthy family, and we could have allowed our children to live a life leisure, but we don't. We've expected them to make their own way, and to be people who adhere to a moral standard. I don't know you very well, but I know Shane, and I know he wouldn't bring you into his life to the extent that he has if he didn't think you could meet our expectations. For yourself, you need to decide if this is what you want. Your life is no longer merely your own."
I blew out a long breath. "That's heavy."
Virginia laughed. "Yes, it is."
"And I have to decide, and soon?" I asked. Virginia nodded. "I care about Shane, and I really think there's something deeper to our relationship than sex. I'm sorry, I know he's your son, and that's awkward to think about, but I have no one else to talk to about this that will understand."
"No, it's fine. I do understand." Virginia stood, and gestured for me to follow. "Shane wouldn't have brought you here if he didn't believe in you, if he didn't think you could do it, and that there really is something deeper to your relationship than sex. He wouldn't have brought you to Sudan, if he didn't. That was a test, I think. He's always been a shrewd judge of character, and I trust his instincts."
Riding the Heir Page 1
