by Ember Flint
CONTENTS
Drunk on you
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Epilogue
Epilogue 2
Secret Billionaire Baby Daddy
Excerpt of Secret Billionaire Baby Daddy
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Drunk on you
By EMBER FLINT
37-year-old Damon Broderick is the imposing, strait-laced President and CEO of his family multi-ventures conglomerate, and romance is the last thing on his list, in fact, he is quite tired of all the debutantes chasing after him and he can’t wait to leave New York City behind and just focus on the grand opening of the Sundown Whisper Resort, the latest addition to his family’s chain of hotels in the breathtaking island of Puesta del Sol.
24-year-old Ellie Silver is a spunky and full of energy girl with a big heart and more curves than she knows what to do with. She always tries to see the bright side of things, but she’s really unhappy working as a customer service consultant for a huge soulless multinational and when her best friend tells her about an opening in one of the prettiest, most wild and quaint Florida Keys, she can’t help but think that her luck is finally changing.
In the hottest day of the summer, just as the sun goes down on the glistening golden shores of the island they both end up finding more than they came looking for.
Dear Reader:
This island-getaway romance is a summer holiday for your mind, hot like the sun, salty like the sand and filled with filthy piña-colada-sweetness to the brim.
As usual, this is a SAFE book with a scorching happily-ever-after, NO-cheating and no OW/OM drama and features a curvaceous, innocent but plucky heroine and an over-the-top protective alpha hero head over heels in love with her in seconds!
Don’t miss out on the sexy times under the setting sun, grab your sunscreen and take a plunge: you won’t regret it!
*Please note that Drunk on you is part of the ‘Sundown Whisper’s Island Series’, each one of the stories focuses only on one couple and there are no cliffhangers so the books can be read in any order and also as standalones.
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Ember Flint
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. To request permission, contact the author.
Note from the Author: this is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental. Please note that this work is intended only for adults over the age of 18 and all sexually-active characters in it are represented as 18 or over. Also, in real life, remember: always safety first.
Cover design by: Ember Flint – Pink Diamonds’ Waterfall Designs
Edited by: New Wave Romance
To the lovers of sun, sand and sunsets who wish that ‘summer love’ would lose its bad rep and have a happily-ever-after that lasts forever. This is for you.
Chapter 1
DAMON
I swipe a finger over my iPad’s screen and bring up the copy of the fucking schedule from hell that Jackson, my PA, just AirDropped on me and I sigh, combing one hand through my short hair: I have back-to-back meetings nearly every hour of every day for the entire upcoming week and this means there’s no way I can take the time to fly to the Keys to take care of interviewing temporary assistants.
Shit.
I figured I could arrange to go to Miami for a few days in mid-July and then on to Puesta del Sol Key to interview someone for the position, but then my schedule was so damn busy I could barely spare time to grab a bite and I kept procrastinating, thinking I could manage to at least go down for a few days right about now, but it seems it won’t be possible, not unless I want to cost my family’s conglomerate a couple of billions in missed deals, it’s not like they can go ahead without me, I’m the current President and CEO.
For a while, it seemed maybe my younger brother, Weston, could take the jet and fly down himself to get me out of this pickle, but as VP and COO he has been neck-deep in more logistic meetings than we could count, so it was a no-go.
I could never be comfortable conducting an interview from afar, not for someone who would have to work this closely with me anyway, and this leaves me with only one route: letting mom handle it, she’s already on the island after all.
I just have to make sure she knows what I need and, more importantly, that she doesn’t end up pulling one of her stunts.
I love her, but she does try my nerves sometimes.
Regina Thorpe-Broderick is a force to be reckoned with; she’s not like the other pearls-clutching high and mighty cold and distant socialites that couldn’t care less about their children and devote their lives to patrolling the upper echelons of New York’s blue-blooded society to keep the less worthy out.
Under the impeccable exterior there’s a mischievous, fun-loving and very down-to-earth woman that lives for nothing but ensuring my happiness and that of my brother and, while we couldn’t ask for a better mother, we have to deal everyday with her busybody attitude and her never-ending quest to see us both settled and surrounded by a gazillion of little Brodericks ASAP.
She’s forever meddling in our love lives, or more to the point: she’s forever trying to assign love lives to us, since dating is like the last thing on our minds right now, and I have to make sure there are no loopholes in my request, unless I want to give her the matchmaking opportunity she’s been waiting for rather than the simple, prosaic task of finding me a temporary PA.
I’ll have to be very careful in how I phrase this, though.
She’s been in Florida since late spring and I don’t know how many ‘just perfect girls next door’ she has tried to foist on both me and my brother in the interim.
Still, it’s not like I have a choice… I’ll just have to make sure I have ironclad terms, same way I do every day in the Boardroom, and also keep my guard up at all times, because, when it comes down to me or Weston giving her grandbabies, she’s more ruthless than any businessman we have ever slaughtered in a conference room.
She’s been hounding me to find ‘the one’ since I turned thirty, so I’ve been hearing her spiel for seven years, thank God at least we are both in agreement in our opinions of the many money-hungry Manhattan Princesses that have done everything in their power, short of murder, to sink their claws into me or my brother.
Being the only heirs to the pluri-billion Broderick empire — a multi-venture, international umbrella of companies that has been in our family for seven generations— day in and day out, since we were kids we have been accustomed to the constant scrutiny and the non-stop parade of blood-sucking leeches, eager to be in the entourage of people like us, people that can wield this much influence and have so much power, but losing our father to a stroke three years ago effectively dropped us in the center of the limelight with no possibility of escape.
We always knew the day would come when we had to step in, but we never thought it would be so soon and that it would happen so abruptly.
For Weston, in particular, things were extremely difficult at the start, we have a long standing family tradition of service to our country and when our dad left us, my brother had to abandon his decorated 14-year-long career in the Army Rangers so he could help with the management of the conglomerate.
Weston was heavily struggling with PTSD, we were grieving for our dad and dealing with the profound despair of our mother at having lost him and at the same time we were trying to make sense of our new lives, and all the while, the fucking Press seemed hell-bent on splattering our faces all over the fucking place, crowing about our staggering net-worth from the rooftops and compiling fucking inane lists of eligible bachelors that we were constantly topping.
Our uncle Elijah, our dad’s younger brother, really came through and helped us a lot, particularly during that first trying year, but since we were always looking at him for approval when it came down to the important decisions, he convinced himself that he was holding us back rather than helping us.
He is childless and insisted that the future of the Broderick conglomerate rested with us and that for that reason it would do us good to be entirely in charge and so he took a step back as VP and only retained his role of CFO to take some of the pressure off of us, effectively leaving the decision-making process completely up to us and so we went from being heirs apparent, to actually being at the helm of the conglomerate, increasing exponentially the rows of fucking idiots trying to French-kiss our asses and that was when mom turned her hobby to find marriage-material girls for us into her life mission.
In the last two years, both Weston and I have come a long way and have finally started to feel confident in our roles, despite the enormity of the responsibilities we have to face every day, and we have even started to make acquisitions of our own.
Amongst the various companies we own, there’s a chain of luxury hotels, the Broderick Deluxe Plaza Hotels, and eighteen months ago we decided to make an addition to it that’s meant to be the fucking unchallenged crown jewel of the entire chain.
We had this idea of building a luxury resort that would cater to a very moneyed and exclusive clientele by offering not only the typical lavish arrangements of any Broderick hotel, but also complete seclusion on privately owned lands without the need to fly to some remote country hours and hours away.
In order to realize the project, we bought one of the islands in the Florida Keys’ Archipelago, sitting near Islamorada, only one hour and a half away from Miami, that our mom rechristened Puesta del Sol —which is Spanish for ‘sunset’.
Building of the main structures of the Sundown Whisper Luxury Resort costed almost four-hundred million dollars, projected to be earned back with interests in less than a year, and took over one year and a half and it’s finally complete now.
The sprawling resort pretty much works as a self-sufficient town with security all over the place and privately managed lifeguards, it features a boutique fourteen-stories-tall hotel called Sundown Plaza that has its own SPA.
The resort is completely outfitted and has been fully-staffed for the last month or so.
It’s designed to have all the comforts and entertainment opportunities one could think of: there are several golf courses and tennis courts, a stunning fishing pier, an enormous water complex, a private airstrip and helipad, a huge shopping center, restaurants, bars, gyms, three multiplex and we even have our own small but state-of-the-art urgent care center.
And then there are the ocean-fed infinity pools and several Caribbean style houses with wrap-around verandas and private gazebos and comfy cabanas near the shoreline for the guests who want a different experience rather than simply staying at a hotel.
We even built cottages on the inland a short distance from the beach for our employees to eliminate the stressful need to commute.
And yet all of this almost pales if compared with the untamed natural beauty of the island itself with its colorful wild blooming jungle in the hinterland, the pristine white shores, the hidden waterfalls and the crystalline ocean all around and, according to our mom, some of the most spectacular, breathtaking sunsets known to humankind.
Both my brother and I have a micromanaging addiction and it only multiplied tenfold with this project since it’s entirely our baby, but being in charge of such diverse and complex holdings, we could not take time off to actually be in Florida and supervise the final outfitting and furnishing of the resort, not to mention we don’t know the first thing about interior design, so after we put in place trustworthy execs, we left the last arrangements, the hiring of the lower staff and the preparation for the grand opening party to our mom.
She was more than happy to leave New York City and all the trappings of our wealth behind and has been in Puesta del Sol since late spring and as far as we know, she’s having a blast and has been pretending to be just an exec and staying there under an assumed name to catch her breath and, in her words, ‘have some fun by shedding her Broderick crown’.
This resort has turned into so much more than a lucrative venture for us: it’s a thing of beauty that has restored our mother’s smile and has provided both me and Weston with many hours of uplifting endeavor, far more pleasant than the usual spreadsheets, reports and dreary meetings we have to deal with on a daily basis.
We love the place so much, we left two of the largest penthouses on the last floor of the main hotel empty to retain for our use and the resort has been such a hit that even being still ten days away from the grand opening we are already booked solid for the next twelve months and Weston and I have already started talking of a possible expansion of the resort with the construction of additional cabanas along the shoreline to accommodate more guests.
We have known for many months that we could only finally visit the finished and ready to go resort on the day of the big opening and mom was the only one we could trust with overseeing the last details of such a personal project.
Originally, we had decided we would remain there for a couple of weeks to make sure that things were running smoothly after the opening on the second of August, but our mother has been badgering us for the last month and a half about prolonging our stay and in the end we relented, because while we would still be working there, at least we would have some time off and be able to relax a little, away from the suffocating cutthroat environment of New York’s high society, which, according to mom, we haven’t done once since our early twenties.
When she first mentioned this, we were both sure she was being overly dramatic, but then she asked us if we could remember when was the last time we went for a vacation and we couldn’t come up with a single fucking thing so we had to concede she had a point. Besides, the idea of being away from all the phony fucks constantly trying to suck up to us and the relentless debutantes fucking hunting our asses really held a big appeal for both of us, so we ended up changing our plans, deciding to stay in Puesta del Sol for the next three months with weekly trips back to New York, of course.
The only fucking fly in my ointment is that while my brother’s PA is more than ready and quite happy to spend three months in paradise, my own PA, Jackson, can’t say the same.
His wife is four months pregnant and a couple of weeks ago they found out that there’s a high risk that she could lose their baby, unless she stays on complete bed rest for the time being and he was so worried that I couldn’t possibly add to his stress in such a way by asking him to be away from his sick wife for so long.
Jackson has been my assistant for the last seven years and
he is not only a close friend, but also the best personal assistant I could ask for and so I did the only fair thing in my power: I decided to send him on an early, fully-paid extended paternity leave so he could take proper care of his wife and unborn child, hence my need for a new temporary PA.
I figured since I’m going to spend the next three months in Puesta del Sol it would be best to hire someone locally, particularly because I didn’t think it would be fair to my New York headquarters’ employees to ask one of them to relocate to Florida and leave their family behind for a short-term position that will revert to Jackson as soon as his wife has the baby.
The only flaw in my reasoning was that I assumed I could travel to Florida and pick someone with relative ease and that’s how I find myself ten days away from the inauguration of our resort still with no fucking prospects of a PA in sight and in need to delegate to my mother.
Just fucking peachy.
I stand up and move around my desk, tablet in hand, and as I FaceTime my mom, I walk in my personal conference room, adjacent to the sitting area of my office, just as the video call transfers to one of the large flat screens mounted on the wall, opposite the glass and steel oval table.
My mother’s face appears on the monitor and I can’t even say ‘hi’, before she’s starting on me.
“Oh, so you do remember you have a mother then,” she says, narrowing her aqua-green eyes at me as she folds her arms over her chest.
I roll my eyes at her. “Hello, Mom.”
She shakes her head, muttering to herself. “Hello, Mom, indeed! One week without a word from you and that wayward brother of yours, and that’s all I get!”
I take a seat at the head of the table and smirk at her. “We talked yesterday, Mom…”
