by Cassie Cross
The Billionaire's Desire Series
Includes:
The Billionaire’s Desire #1: The Billionaire’s Assistant
The Billionaire’s Desire #2: The Billionaire’s Seduction
The Billionaire’s Desire #3: The Billionaire’s Secret
The Billionaire’s Desire #4: The Billionaire’s Betrayal
The Billionaire’s Desire #5: The Billionaire’s Heart
The Billionaire’s Desire #6: The Billionaire’s Wedding
Text copyright © 2014 Cassie Cross
All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, weather electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Cassie Cross.
Table of Contents
#1 ~ The Billionaire’s Assistant
#2 ~ The Billionaire’s Seduction
#3 ~ The Billionaire’s Secret
#4 ~ The Billionaire’s Betrayal
#5 ~ The Billionaire’s Heart
#6 ~ The Billionaire’s Wedding
About the Author
Upcoming Titles
Currently Available Titles
CHAPTER ONE
ANYONE WITH half a brain would probably tell you that falling in love with your boss is the worst possible thing you could do in the business world. But they don’t know what Abby Waters does: it’s not the love that gets you in trouble, it’s the lust. That insatiable, hormone-driven gateway drug that gives you a taste of the thing you fantasize about the most and leaves you wanting more and more. It’s an unpredictable disease; simmering one minute, burning out of control the next.
That morning, she was simmering. The object of her desire, Cole Kerrigan, had just left the office for a late-morning meeting, and her best-friend-slash roommate, Becca, was waiting for Abby to join her for an early lunch at her favorite diner.
It was a gorgeous day outside; the first one since November that Abby hadn’t needed a coat, and she was giddy at the prospect of pulling her spring wardrobe out of storage. When she opened the diner’s door, she immediately spotted Becca in the far corner, her blonde curls spilling down her back.
Like a true angel, Becca had already ordered for Abby, knowing how pressed for time she was and how rare it was for her to be able to go out to lunch. She was usually chained to her desk. Abby thanked Becca and she grinned, wearing a shade of lip gloss that Abby was certain she’d bought for herself last week. She was in too good of a mood though, so she decided not to call Becca out for being a thief.
“We come to the best diner in the city and you order a salad?” Abby asked, lifting a spoonful of the heartiest, most delicious chili the island of Manhattan had to offer to her lips.
Becca glared at her and tossed a few strands of hair over her shoulder. “You don’t get to comment on my rabbit food, Abby. Especially since you use me as a guinea pig for all that godforsaken chocolate you insist on making every day.”
Abby rolled her eyes. “No one makes you eat it. How am I supposed to eventually become New York’s premier candy maker if I don’t get some practice?”
Becca sighed, pushing a grape tomato around her plate. “Practice on the people you work with and leave my hips alone.”
“The people I work with consider themselves obese if they can’t fit into sample sizes, Beck. They wouldn’t know good chocolate if they rolled around naked in it.” Becca was tall, curvy in all the right places, and had absolutely no issues with her hips. Of course, no one could tell her that. To hear her talk about herself, you would think she was hideous.
“Besides,” Abby said. “You love me.”
“Eh.” Becca shrugged, giving Abby an impassive look. After taking another bite of her salad, she reached into her huge tote bag and pulled out her copy of The City Whisper, Manhattan’s own celebrity gossip paper, delivered to Abby and Becca’s mailbox every morning.
“Really?” Abby asked, shaking her head. “During lunch?”
“I’m an addict, I can’t help myself.” Becca placed the paper on the table and thumbed through the first few pages, completely uninterested in the ads and desperate to get to the gossip. Her impatience was one of the things Abby loved most about her. “I like to see how the other half lives.”
“They don’t eat at hole-in-the wall diners, that’s for sure.” Abby leaned over, trying to read the headline Becca was fixated on. “And they don’t read at the table, it’s uncouth.”
“Unless it’s the Wall Street Journal.” Becca quirked her brow, grinning.
“Or their trust fund statements.”
“Probably.” She flipped the page. “It’s just, have you seen the slobs that ask us out? Stained t-shirt wearing fools who live in a one-bedroom apartment with their five roommates. Couldn’t find your clit with two maps and a turn-by-turn navigation system.”
Abby clapped her hand to her mouth to stifle her laugh and stop herself from spitting out her drink.
Becca held up the paper and pointed to a picture of a hot-bodied man in soaking-wet swim trunks. “You can’t tell me this guy wouldn’t know what to do with you. Look at those abs, my god. And the shoulders, Abby. His shoulders! That muscle definition. I bet he could pick a girl up while he fucked her.”
“Okay!” Abby flicked a few drops of ice water at Becca’s face, trying to cool her down. “I get the picture.”
“I don’t think you do. Look at this man.” She turned the paper so that Abby could get a better look. “Cole Kerrigan, I would let you do such dirty things to me.”
Cole Kerrigan? Abby thought, her heart beating faster.
“What did you say?” Just the mention of his name made Abby forget her manners, and she grabbed the paper from Becca and examined it closer than she probably should have. It was him. Most of the country knew him as a 29-year-old billionaire and the city’s most eligible bachelor. And even though he was those things, Abby couldn’t help but see him as a little something more: the object of her out-of-control lust and a Grade A pain in her ass.
You see, Cole Kerrigan was her boss.
She had been working as his assistant at Kerrigan Corp. for six months, and had wanted him ever since she walked through the door for her interview. Cole made it difficult for her to like him most of the time, but it was never difficult to think about what he would look like half-naked. Thanks to Becca’s obsession with gossip and the photographers at The City Whisper, Abby didn’t have to imagine anymore.
Paparazzi, blessed be thy name.
Looking at his picture made him seem more unattainable than ever. If the size of his bank account didn’t make his life completely unfair already, he had to be gorgeous, too. Rich and gorgeous men didn’t usually go for women like Abby. At least not according to her. She wasn’t ugly, that’s for sure. She was pretty in that plain, girl-next-door kind of way. With wavy brown hair, hazel eyes, and a fairly average body, she thought she was the kind of girl that a guy hit on in high school while he was lifeguarding for the summer, then quickly forgot about
once he went off to college and realized that there was a whole world full of blondes and redheads to be had.
Cole had perfectly tanned skin and chestnut hair that Abby dreamed about running her fingers through. Clear, bluish-green eyes, like the water on an island shore. Most of the female population of the Eastern seaboard had a thing for him, and Abby certainly couldn’t blame them, although she might’ve been able to put an end to those crushes by arranging for those lovelorn women to spend one day doing her job. She dealt with constant pressure, work that was never good enough, and nightly phone calls regarding all kinds of “emergencies” that just had to be tended to when all Abby really wanted to do was get some damn sleep. Sleep during which Abby would inevitably dream about Cole doing all the things to her that Becca just described.
Abby had only seen Cole shirtless once, and that vision fueled all the aforementioned dreaming. That day, she walked into his office to have him sign a few contracts, and he was changing into his gym clothes. Abby stood there, mouth agape, and Cole said nothing. He just looked at her with humor in his eyes and his lips quirked up into a smile because he knew she was appreciating the view.
He was correct.
“See, you know what I mean now, don’t you?” Becca shoved a forkful of lettuce into her mouth. Truth be told, Abby had completely forgotten that Becca was even sitting there while she was dreaming about Cole’s half-nakedness. At that point, Abby was kind of wishing she was alone.
Fortunately she had signed a non-disclosure agreement when she started working for Kerrigan Corp. No one in Abby’s life knew that she worked for Cole, not even Becca. Especially not Becca.
“Yeah, yeah,” Abby replied, examining the picture.
Cole had just climbed out of a pool, dripping wet, dark swim trunks clinging to his muscular thighs. Beads of water glistened on his chest and in the shallow valleys of his perfectly shaped abs. His hair was flung haphazardly across his forehead, like he’d shaken his head when he stepped out of the water. He was smiling in the photo, something he rarely did at work, and Abby would’ve given anything to know who he was smiling at. She was jealous of that woman already. Given Cole’s reputation, Abby was certain that it was a woman.
The smile lit up his eyes and carved out a cute dimple in his cheek. Abby never had the chance to really look at Cole without worrying that he’d catch her staring. She was so fixated on him that it took her a while to realize that there was someone else in the corner of the picture. The someone Cole was smiling at, who was conveniently not named in the caption.
“Who is this?” Abby turned the paper toward Becca and pointed at the woman with the long blonde hair in the skimpy white bikini. She looked like she was having a blast, and never in her entire life had Abby been so irrationally jealous of another human being.
Cole’s level of beauty usually attracted the same level of beauty. Models, actresses, people you only saw in magazines. Girls like Abby—short ones with unruly hair and a need for concealer—were usually the ones Cole asked to arrange romantic weekend getaways in Paris, not the ones he asked to go with him.
“I think that’s a model. Her name is Kalia or something,” Becca replied, sounding half as interested as she did earlier. She had an incredibly short attention span.
“Kalia what?”
“I don’t know, she just goes by one name.”
“Can you imagine the kind of confidence you have to have to go by one name?”
Becca shrugged. “If you looked like that, you’d have confidence too.”
“Maybe she just has a horrible last name. Like…Funderbunk.”
Becca looked at Abby, her brown eyes full of sympathy as she reached over and patted Abby’s hand. “If that makes you feel better, sweetie.”
For a moment, it did.
CHAPTER TWO
COLE KERRIGAN stepped out of his limo onto the bustling Manhattan sidewalk, adjusting his Ray-Bans to shield his eyes from the blaring sun. As usual, the crowd seemed to slow down for him, clearing a path between the car and the front door of his office building. Women around him openly stared, while the men at least tried to not be so obvious about it.
The very second he took the first step toward the building, he saw her. Abigail must’ve had some sort of beacon implanted in her body that alerted him whenever she was around. Her presence stirred something inside of him that simultaneously made him uneasy and pumped him full of desire. She definitely made him hard.
“Abigail,” he said as he walked toward her, nodding in her direction. She preferred to be called Abby, but he couldn’t allow himself that small bit of familiarity. Every night she stayed late he had to force himself not to kiss her soft, full lips. It took every ounce of self-control he had not to ravage her. He’d never been as turned on by a woman as he was by her; she was so effortlessly beautiful, but had no idea. A lethal combination.
They walked together to the elevator lobby, the thrumming crowd giving them a wide berth. Cole pressed the ‘up’ button on the wall of the elevator bank, then turned to look at Abigail.
He could tell that she’d hurried back from lunch, because a few tendrils fell from the haphazard twist of hair piled up on the crown of her head, and her cheeks were flushed. He loved that look on her, and often thought about the things he could do to her that would make her cheeks flush even more. She was wearing a flattering button-down blouse that accentuated her curves, and her black skirt hugged her hips just so. He often thought about what it would feel like to grip those hips as Abigail rode him, her hair spilling over her perfect breasts.
It was an odd thing, Cole thought, that he could have his pick of gorgeous, scantily-clad women, but he always fixated on the curves of a woman whom he could not, and should not have.
Remembering the wool coat that he’d been carrying since he left his apartment this morning, he handed it to her, hoping its length would hide those flawless curves.
“You realize it’s sixty-five degrees out, right?” she asked.
Above everything else, Cole enjoyed Abigail’s smart mouth, and counted their verbal sparring sessions among one of his favorite pastimes. Occasionally he’d rile her up just to hear whatever biting remark would roll off her tongue.
“When I left my apartment at five-thirty this morning, it most definitely was not sixty-five degrees outside.” Cole fiddled with his gold cufflinks, hoping to distract himself. He didn’t want her to think he was some pervert, incapable of not ogling her. But his eyes went to the floor, then to her shoes, then her calves…
“So it’s okay with you if I put ‘Human Coat Rack’ as one of my duties on my next self-assessment?” Abigail shifted the coat to her other arm when the elevator door finally opened and the two of them stepped inside.
Cole reached forward and pressed the button for the 40th floor. “You can do what you like, Abigail, but that doesn’t come with a pay raise.” He stifled a smile as he heard her huff. He imagined she was probably rolling her eyes at him.
“I almost forgot,” Abigail said, holding a bag out to Cole.
“What is this?” He raised his brow, surprised at her offering.
“It’s your lunch. A sandwich.”
“A sandwich,” he repeated dumbly.
“Yes, a sandwich,” she replied slowly. “Deli meat and cheese between two slices of bread, usually paired with a pickle. Common lunch staple, popular among the working class.”
God, he loved that mouth. Cole wanted to press the emergency stop, so he could pull her close to him and feel those tight curves against his body.
“I thought you might be hungry, so I brought something in case you didn’t have time to grab a bite to eat after your meeting. If you don’t want it, I’ll put it in the fridge and have it for dinner.” As if on cue, he felt his stomach rumble, so he reached out and took the bag.
“I didn’t have time to eat,” he replied, smiling. “This was very thoughtful of you.”
“You’re welcome,” she said under her breath, even though he hadn’t
thanked her.
The elevator doors opened, and Cole stepped out into the lobby, walking toward his office with long, sure strides. He wanted to see more of that fire in her; he was beginning to need it as much as he needed air. And he had a plan. So he looked straight ahead when he said the following words.
“Cancel your plans for this evening. You need to finish the monthly sales report before you can leave.”
Behind him, he could feel her eyes boring through his back, a white-hot fire-filled stare.
He grinned.
CHAPTER THREE
I HATE numbers.
I hate monthly sales reports.
I hate this job.
Abby had been working on this data for the better part of four hours, and since it was nearly eight o’clock and she hadn’t eaten since lunch, her stomach was growling. She had been fussing with the figures, but there was one that wasn’t adding up and she couldn’t figure out where the mistake was. She knew Cole would be able to find it, but she wanted to beat him to the punch.
He hadn’t stepped foot outside of his office since three, and in her hunger-induced delirium, Abby briefly wondered if he wanted something to eat as badly as she did.
Probably not, he’s a freak that way, she thought. She wished she’d kept the sandwich that she gave him for herself.
She was just about to go over the figures again when a chat window popped up on her computer screen.
Are you almost finished?
Even in print, Cole was impatient. Abby took a few moments to respond, trying to figure out exactly what to type. She really didn’t want to tell him that there was a mistake she couldn’t find. In the end, she kept it simple.
I’m just double-checking the numbers.
She had barely hit the return key before Cole replied.
In my office immediately. Bring the report.
The report was up on Kerrigan’s intranet site in Cole’s network folder. Abby wouldn’t have been surprised if he had been watching her work the entire time and had already taken a look at the report. In fact, she figured he’d probably already located the mistake and was tired of waiting for her to find it herself. That meant she was in for a real treat when she walked into his office.
