GUNNER: MC ROMANCE (Forsaken Riders MC Romance Book 4)

by Samantha Leal

  “Oh my God, Sue,” he said, his breathing was ragged and he lay down flat on his face on the table, beside her.

  “Looks like we still got it,” she said with a laugh. He lifted his head to look at her and smiled, then wrapped his arm around her belly and nuzzled his face in her hair.

  “Gerard…” Sue waited a few seconds before saying. He didn’t reply, she knew he was awake.

  “Gerard…” she tried again and he said Shhhh….

  “We can talk about it later, if you really want to talk about it. Just enjoy the moment for what it is, Sue,” he said into her hair and she couldn’t help but smile. She couldn’t remember what she had been sad about a few hours ago.

  Chapter 7

  When Sue woke up, she was alone again. She stretched her arms and realized she was in somebody else’s bed and this bed was very very soft. She sat up with a start and ran her fingers over the spotlessly white bed linen, smooth like butter. She lay down again and her head sank into a pillow, which she was convinced was made from clouds or feathers.

  “Rise and shine,” she heard his voice and smiled. She sat up again and fluffed up the pillows behind her to rest against. Gerard had stepped out of the bathroom and was in a blue satin robe, through which, the muscles of his thighs peeped out, from time to time. His hair was ruffled and he had a hint of a stubble on his chin. She nearly laughed.

  “I don’t believe I’ve seen you with a beard before,” Sue said and he walked over to her side of the bed.

  “Are you implying I wasn’t man enough to grow a beard in college?” He kissed her on her lips. That kiss was enough to remind her of the number of times they’d had sex in the past twelve hours and she blushed.

  “What time is it?” Sue asked, looking around the room for a watch.

  “Where do you need to be?” he asked and walked over to the arrangement of armchairs and a coffee table by the balcony doors.

  “It’s Monday morning…or afternoon. Don’t you have somewhere to be?” She watched him slide the glass doors open and a soft breeze blew in, billowing the white lace curtains in the room.

  “I don’t remember, anymore, and I’ve ordered Luke to hold off all the messages.” He turned to look at her and Sue smiled.

  “You never played hooky in college. God forbid!” she said and her hand flew to her mouth dramatically. Gerard laughed and started pouring coffee from a French press into two mugs on the table.

  “I’m older now, and wiser,” he said without looking at her and Sue stepped out of bed. She found a matching blue satin robe laid out carefully on the ottoman at the end of the bed and she slipped into it while Gerard studied her naked body. She walked over to him and they both sat down facing each other. The balcony overlooked what seemed to be a forest and Sue assumed it was a part of Gerard’s property, his billionaire version of a backyard.

  “What did you want to talk about last night, Sue?” He was blowing over his coffee. She smiled at him and did the same with hers. He remembered the way she liked her coffee.

  “I don’t quite remember. It might have had something to do with the fact that we jumped into bed after twenty years of not seeing each other.” She raised an eyebrow and he laughed.

  “Did it feel strange to you? Was it offensive?” he asked her and sat back in his chair.

  “I can’t say that it did, but I still feel as though there is more conversation involved there. I don’t exactly know what,” she said and shied away from his gaze. She didn’t know how to talk about her feelings anymore. Vincent’s reaction to this would have been to storm out of the room, bang doors and stay somewhere else for the night.

  “Maybe. Or maybe not,” he began and she looked up at him, surprised by the response. “It was unfortunate that we broke up, that you had to experience the pain of a failed marriage. But we’ve found each other again. Yes, we had a rough start, but look at us now,” he said and smiled widely. “Do we need to analyze it? Unless this was a one-time thing for you,” he said and his smile dropped.

  Sue shook her head wildly. “No, it’s not a one-time thing, Gerard. I guess what I’ve been trying to say is that I want us to give it another try. I didn’t know if it was a one-time thing for you.” She looked away from him again, embarrassed.

  “I never stopped loving you, Sue. You left, but I couldn’t forget you.” She detected a quiver in his voice and she looked at him.

  “I was a fool. For not believing in you or your intentions. I love you,” Sue said and stifled a wail.

  “Good. I’m glad you blame yourself because I’ve always blamed you.” She jerked her head up to look at him and he was grinning. She laughed and shook her head, wiping away tears from her cheeks. He always knew how to stop her from dissolving into a crying mess.

  “Can we talk about more optimistic things now? Like when you’re moving in?” he asked casually.

  “Shouldn’t we go on a few dates first? Shouldn’t you woo me and surprise me with a key to the house?”

  “Why? To get to know you? I’ve known you for twenty-three years and nothing has changed. Other than the fact that I don’t live in my parents’ attic anymore, and I have a butler,” he said and they both laughed.

  Sue placed the mug of coffee on the table, stood up and settled herself on Gerard’s lap. They kissed, for several minutes, and finally pulled away for air.

  “I am truly sorry, Gerard,” she said while she played with a lock of his hair.

  “You should be!” he admonished her like she was a small child. “So do you want to tell the others, or should I?”

  “I feel like I’m getting my whole family back,” Sue said as Gerard nudged her off his lap and walked over to the cordless phone on his bedside table. He laughed while dialing Carl on speed-dial.

  “I get the feeling that we’ll have to throw a dinner party again tonight,” he said, just as Carl answered the phone. Sue couldn’t stop giggling while the two men talked, they were back in college.

  “You won’t believe the news I have for you!” Gerard spoke into the phone.

  THE END

  Badass Billionaire

  Leela Ash

  Copyright ©2015 by Leela Ash. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic of 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.

  Thank you so much for your interest in my work

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 1

  Riiiiing! Riiiing!

  Amy sat at her desk finishing a report to give to a judge when the rather annoying sound of her telephone interrupted her. She was careful to minimize the word processing program before she turned to the beat up telephone that sat on the desk in her cramped office.

  “Here For You, Amy Delaney speaking,” she answered, taking the receiver off the cradle.

  “Miss Delaney, this is Tabitha again,” came the static distorted voice on the other end of the line.

  “Yes, Tabitha, I was just working on your report,” Amy said, placing her forehead in the palm of her left hand, elbows on the desk.

  “Yes, I just wanted to make sure that you were going to recommend that he stay in jail…you can’t let him get out.”

  “Tabitha, as I have told you, the contents of my report to the judge are concealed until the date of the hearing,” Amy said gently, “If I told you what I am recommending, then I would lose my job and could go to jail, myself. You don’t want me to go to jail, do you?”

  “No, no…I don’t want that! I don’t know if I could keep going without you, Miss Delaney!”

  “Tabitha, it’s not me that has helped you move on, you’re helping yourself. Now please, if I’m going to finish my report and have it
faxed to the courthouse in time for the hearing, I’ll need to get off the phone. Can we talk some more at your appointment on Tuesday?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. I’ll talk to you on Tuesday, Miss Delaney,” Tabitha said, quickly disconnecting from the call.

  Shaking her head as she replaced the telephone receiver on the cradle, Amy caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror that hangs on the back of the office door. She stood up, and walked over to it, examining her reflection.

  She had always known she was attractive, with her long dark and hair and chestnut eyes, but she was a little insecure around the midline at times. She thought she looked great, but it was annoying when everyone seemed to be chasing the bean poles. Oh well, she thought, her ship would come in. Her sometime boyfriend, Todd, didn’t help matters. He was seeing other girls every chance he got. He had even had the audacity to come right out and tell her that her weight “kind of bugged him”, and that he didn’t know if he could see himself in a “real” relationship with her. God, what an asshole.

  Sadness overwhelmed her as she thought over her last “steady” relationship she had had. That would be Justin. He had joined the Marine Corps immediately after high-school, and proposed to her on his last night in Black Rock before he shipped out for Iraq in 2005. He was dead by 2006.

  This had been the trigger that led to her eating more than anything. But Amy had never been one to hide. So, rather than not fit in at all, she began to compensate for her perceived lack of physical appeal with “fat” jokes…usually at her own expense. She wasn’t even that big. She was just curvy, but she found her place making the jokes nonetheless. Sure, she had plenty of friends all through her college career at the University of California at Berkeley, but between grief over Justin’s death and her subsequent weight gain, her sex life had consisted primarily of one night stands ever since.

  “Whatever,” she thought, “I am who I am, after all.” The older she got, the less she could constantly worry about it. She had a plan to start hitting the gym soon, but in the meantime, if guys didn’t appreciate her as she was, well screw ‘em…they weren’t worth her time anyhow. Of course she still had her insecurities, but she was beginning to feel better and better about herself. She was actually beginning to sort of revel in her curves. The guys didn’t know what they were missing.

  “Oh my! Is that the time?” Amy said to herself, coming out of her mental wanderings. She had glanced at the clock on the bottom, right hand side of her ancient PC after typing in her password. “No wonder I’m so hungry!”

  It was very nearly 1:45 p.m.

  She got up from her desk, grabbed her purse, and began walking toward the door.

  “Alice! I’ll be back! I’m getting lunch!” she hollered to her supervisor, the lead at the grief counseling agency that she worked in. Entering the hallway and turning to the right, she shouted out “Hey! Hold the elevator!” just in time to see the arm of a tailored suit ending in a deeply tanned hand extend itself to hold the elevator doors open.

  Houston Storm was feeling hungry as well, and so decided to go to Giglio’s for lunch. He quickly placed a phone call to his valet, asking him to bring a car around.

  “Which car, Mr. Storm?”

  “I think I’ll take the Viper, Steven,” he answered. Hanging up the telephone hotline to his garage, he walked out of his 1,000 square foot personal office, and across the floor of offices inhabited by the rest of his staff, who handled all of the “nuts and bolts” of his company, Larger-Than-Life-Love Inc. The company controlled seven of the top ten niche dating websites in North America. Their premier website, “largerthanlifelove.com,” was deemed the most profitable web based dating site for the previous three years. Nowhere was this fact more obvious than in the lifestyle choices of the company’s founder, Houston Storm.

  Having been named the “San Francisco Bay Area’s Most Eligible Bachelor” for each of the previous four years was likely a byproduct of being named one of California’s “Top Ten Richest Men” for the previous five years by The Californian magazine. Whether it was the actual rankings, or just who he was, the fact was that he found woman falling at his feet seemingly everywhere he went. He had absolutely no problem taking full advantage of this fact either. As a result, and probably coupled with the fact that he still had not even reached the tender age of thirty five, the paparazzi had already branded him as a “bad boy”. They seemed to have no more favored task than proving their label by keeping the tabloids supplied with an endless series of shots of him and his many female guests inside his Los Gatos mansion compound.

  The truth was, however, that he had created his first website in his second year of junior college—Larger Than Life Love—in order to actually find that perfect woman. The only problem was, instead of drawing to him the kind of small town girl he really desired, his being rich and powerful brought all kinds of disingenuous women to his door instead.

  After he walked to the elevator and punched the ground floor button, he had expected an uninterrupted journey down the seventeen floors of the Yuanfen Building, which was normally quiet by this time of day, but he was wrong. On the sixth floor, his elevator car picked up a young intern from the law offices on that floor She rode down to four before getting off. The door was just closing when Houston heard the voice of a young woman, calling for him to hold the door. Extending his expensively clothed arm through the door, he beheld the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on.

  Chapter 2

  Immediately in awe of the breathtaking sight of the man wearing the suit, Amy found herself momentarily breathless. Everything about him—his custom tailored suit, his piercingly dark eyes, his deep tan, and the way his black hair carelessly waved to the right side of his perfect head—was simply … perfect. His eyes, a deep chocolate, were focused intently on her own.

  His nose sat dead center of his perfect face, with a very deeply indented bridge sitting equidistant from both of his eyes. His black eyebrows, which arched down from the outside in, gave him a shrewd look, in addition to making him appear darkly mysterious. He had a very thin chin and pronounced cheekbones in addition to a black and well-groomed goatee. His neck was very muscular, with a well-defined Adam’s apple, with just the uppermost tip of a tribal style tattoo sneaking up behind his left ear.

  His shoulders were broad, and betrayed a sense of careless athleticism, making it evident that he was once a formidable force in whatever athletic pursuit he participated in. The suit was made of the finest black fabric, and shined in the dim light of the elevator, betraying the presence of silk. Under the sporty suit coat, the dark man wore a simple beige button up shirt; with the top two buttons undone, the man looked as if he was intentionally displaying a tuft of his dark chest hair.

  Amy was a sucker for chest hair.

  For pants and shoes, the godlike man wore simple, dark blue jeans and pristine, gunmetal colored Testoni dress shoes.

  Amy stepped inside, and the doors closed behind her. She immediately felt as if every molecule of air in the enclosed space had been consumed, leaving her in a vacuum, with only the well-dressed and gorgeous stranger as company. Time seemed to freeze, as she was suspended in the elevator, which seemed hell-bent on staying still. Finally, the stranger broke the thick silence, and asked,

  “Which floor, darlin’?”

  “Ground,” she said, sharply taking in a lungful of air.

  “Where are you going this time of day?”

  “I lost track of time, and didn’t get lunch,” Amy answered. Her chest was heaving with the stress of trying to swallow the suddenly thin air in the elevator.

  “I am too, oddly enough. How would you feel about accompanying me to Giglio’s? It is rare that I get to have such a ravishing a meal-time guest as yourself.”

  “Giglio’s?” Amy asked, shocked. The restaurant had been rated as five stars by no less than seven different renowned food critics. Tables were notoriously difficult to get, and were worth over $150 per seat. “I’d love to, but I don
’t have that kind of money…”

  “Baby, I don’t think I asked if you could afford Giglio’s, I asked if you would join me.”

  “Uh…” Amy said, completely unsure of whether she should accompany the stranger to lunch. When she left her hometown of Black Rock, Arkansas to attend college at Berkeley, her father had warned her to be careful to avoid strange men…but this was no normal strange man.

  “What?” the man asked, “Afraid to accompany a stranger to lunch?” he shrewdly asked.

  “Um…yes, actually,” she answered, blushing a brilliant shade of scarlet.

  “Fine,” the man said, holding out a hand, “My name is Houston Storm.”

  “Amy Delaney,” she answered him as she took his hand.

  “There…now we aren’t strangers,” Houston Storm told her as the elevator doors opened, displaying the magnificent marble of the Yuanfen Building’s foyer. “Now, will you accompany me? There’s my car at the door…I can drive us.”

  Amy looked outside the glass façade of the building and saw a completely gorgeous, blue Dodge Viper. “Uh, yeah…I mean, yes, I’d love to.”

  “Excellent!” Houston exclaimed, flashing a smile which betrayed a perfect set of completely straight and brilliantly white teeth. “Here, let me get the door for you,” Houston said, opening the passenger side door of the Viper. “Thank you, Steven,” he said to the valet, handing the young man a $50 bill in exchange for the keys.

  When Houston cranked the car, and pulled away from the curb, Amy said “Wait…lunch service stops at two o’clock at Giglio’s. How are we going to eat?”

  The car’s clock and Amy’s cell-phone showed it as 2:02 p.m.

  “Don’t worry,” Houston said with a laugh and another smile. “I own a third of the business.”