Billionaire's Best Woman - A Standalone Novel (A Billionaire Wedding Romance Love Story) (Billionaires - Book #5)

by Claire Adams

  “Over time, I sold another program and I’d run out of reasons not to leave Yonkers. I packed and left, looking over my shoulder the whole way to the city.

  “I’d bought some commercial space and had started conducting phone interviews. I had an opportunity to really start something, but I couldn’t do it alone. By the time I’d gotten to the city, I’d already had more than a hundred people apply to code for me.

  “After some interviews, I filled out my first team, five people, and thus Farnsworth & Temple was born. A lot of people have theories about where the name came from. The truth is it sounded like the kind of name people in the banking or accounting business would use and nobody had registered it yet. More than that, my name wasn’t a part of it. I don’t know why I figured those guys couldn’t read a company charter.”

  “So they followed you.”

  “That was all Joe. My payouts had been steadily increasing right up until I cut out of there. I figured once I left the neighborhood, they’d just let me go. As much power as they had when I was growing up, that influence had already started to wane by the time I made it to New York City.

  “The first day that first office was open, though, I got a phone message from Joe saying we had to talk. He told me that his boss wasn’t happy I’d just skipped town, and that that had put Joe in a bad position. He told me he could keep the peace, but I had to keep making my payments or else something bad would happen to the both of us.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I was sick of it. I didn’t want to be a part of that any more than I ever had. Sure, I’d taken some jobs when I was younger just to get ahead, but there had to be some point where I became my own person. I didn’t want to have Joe’s crew as a permanent part of my payroll.

  “Things were picking up. It astounded me how fast everything came together with more hands to work. I was already starting to build a reputation for the software I’d sold, and I was in the process of making FinBot, the first software F&T ever kept. I knew a connection to those guys would taint everything I did in business. I wanted nothing to do with it.

  “Still, I was in too precarious a position to make many demands. It wasn’t until one of my early employees left with thousands and thousands of lines of my code and started up his own business that I started seeing the upside of my connection to those guys.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “What, have him killed?” Dean asked. He started laughing. “No, I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. I just wanted someone to give that idiot a good scare so he’d return my code. I told Joe if he could get his crew to take care of the situation without hurting anyone, I’d make it worth their while.

  “It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Not only did they not get me my code back or even stop the thief from ripping me off any more than he already had, they still came around for payment like there was something I should be grateful for. Some stuff went down when I tried to complain about it and I’ve been stuck there ever since. We don’t talk that often anymore, me and Joe, but I still drop about fifty large a month so they’ll leave me the hell alone.”

  I sat there for a minute as we drove through the city. “Wow,” I said finally. “Just wow.”

  “Yeah,” he said. I didn’t realize we were back where we’d started until Dean was pulling into the parking lot, stopping right behind my car. “I’m telling you this because I don’t want there to be any more barriers between you and me. I like you, Marcy, and I know I’ve been holding back.

  “Thing is, I’ve got a plan to separate myself from them for good. That’s ‘the problem in Italy’ your brother’s been helping me with. Nobody else at the company knows, and I’d like to keep it that way. There’s a lot even your brother doesn’t know. I don’t want to get you involved in any of this, but the truth is they already know who you are. If this is too much, if you want to call it quits and never see me again, I completely understand.”

  I didn’t have to think about it, though in retrospect, I probably should have. “I don’t want to call it quits,” I said, putting my hand on his. “I’m just getting to know you now for the first time. I’m not afraid,” I lied. “What can I do?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Gestures

  It was lunch, so I was up on the roof. A week had passed since the little tour around Yonkers, and I was still waiting for something to change.

  My boyfriend had ties to the mafia.

  It wasn’t something I’d planned, but the reality of the situation was still far off in the distance. I don’t know what I was expecting, but everything had stayed the same. Dean and I saw each other about as much as we did before he came clean with me. I’m not sure what I expected to happen, but at very least, I thought I’d have to start losing tails on the way to or from work. Nobody was following me, though. It was almost disappointing.

  Dean and I had seen each other three times in the week after Yonkers, but neither of us brought up the trip. I’d asked him what I could do, and the answer gave me in the car was still the only answer I’d been given. “Just keep your head down for now and I’ll take care of it.” For the first couple of days, it was kind of fun scanning the streets and sidewalks for suspicious characters, but before long I just felt silly.

  It wasn’t just Dean’s revelation on my mind. Things were changing at work. At first, I was just the intern everyone knew they’d eventually have to start hating. As I stood next to the concrete slab, atop which sat my plastic bowl still half-full of couscous and cucumber salad, though, I was acutely aware the hatred had begun.

  I’d been keeping an eye on Isabella, as I was sure she was going to be the first one to really cross the line, but she hadn’t done anything. The worst of it came from an intern named Johanna.

  I’d barely seen or spoken to Johanna since I started work at Farnsworth & Temple. For the longest time, I just thought she was someone’s girlfriend who came in to visit occasionally. She never seemed to be working. She was always chatting up someone, an affected baby voice issuing from her lips that may as well have been the sound of a cat being strangled for the way it set my teeth grinding against each other.

  I’d been called into Mr. Johnstone’s office a couple hours earlier. He asked how things were going at work. As far as I knew, things were going fine. I was getting used to the glares and being snubbed by my coworkers, and when Johnstone asked, I thought he was just checking in to see I wasn’t getting overwhelmed.

  “There are a couple of things I’d like to discuss with you,” he said. “Do you have a minute?”

  It was a stupid question. He was my boss. If he wanted me to have free time, I had free time. I told him I had time for him and he asked me to have a seat. I sat. He told me he was concerned about me, that he’d been hearing some disconcerting things and wanted to know if there was any truth to any of it. I hadn’t heard any new rumors about me, so he had to spell it out for me.

  “There are a couple of your coworkers who seem to think you’re going through a difficult time at home, and that it’s affecting your performance here at work. Do you know anything about that?” Mr. Johnstone asked.

  “No,” I answered. “Things are fine at home. As far as my performance here at work, I was under the impression I was doing all right. If there’s something I can be doing better, I’d be more than happy to—”

  “I haven’t noticed anything,” Johnstone had interrupted. “Then again, though, I can’t be everywhere in the building all the time, either.”

  “If there’s something specific that you’ve heard I’m having trouble with, then I’d be glad to—”

  “No, no. It’s just….” He took a breath. “I don’t want to see you start falling behind on your duties. I know you’ve got some unique responsibilities, what with being Luke’s sister and all, and I just want to make sure you’re able to handle all the added pressure.”

  “Again, sir, if there’s anything I’m not doing or anything I could be doing better, I’m certainly willing to
—”

  He held up his hand to me. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but your friend, Johanna, she’s been rather concerned about you.”

  “Johanna?” I wasn’t aware I had a friend by that name. To my knowledge, I wasn’t even acquainted with a Johanna.

  “Yeah, she started interning here a little while before you did. You know her, she’s blonde, with the, uh…” he stammered. “She’s got the, uh….” I wasn’t sure if he was trying to describe her and failing, or if he knew exactly what he wanted to say, but also that actually saying it would be crossing some sort of line.

  To save both of us the awkwardness of him potentially using Johanna’s breasts or bootie as a physical description, I simply lied and said, “Oh, Johanna. Yeah, we’re not really close. What is she concerned about?”

  He didn’t seem to have a clear answer. He talked around himself for a couple of minutes, finally ending on, “Just stay up on your work and you should be fine,” and I thought that was that right until I left his office and spotted that blonde who was always hanging out on my floor. She was sneering at me.

  I had to walk past her to get to where I needed to go, and so as I went by, I tried to diffuse the situation. “Hi,” I said, extending my hand, “I’m Marcy. I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced. You’re Johanna, right?”

  She glanced at my outstretched hand, making a sour milk face. “Why are you talking to me?” she asked.

  Suddenly, good will didn’t seem like such a motivating force. “Partially because I wanted to know what I was doing or not doing that sent you into Johnstone’s office rather than letting me know about it. Mostly, though, it’s because you’ve been staring at me since I came out of there, and it’s starting to make me a bit uncomfortable. It’s creepy. So what do you say you jam the attitude back up your ass and we go back to being professionals?”

  My heart was either pounding way too fast or way too slowly. It was impossible to tell because time had all but stopped as I stood there. I was more than a little proud of myself when Johanna closed her mouth, made a face, and walked away from me without a word.

  Before lunch, I’d asked a couple of the other interns about Johanna and what her problem was, but nobody seemed to want to talk about what they knew. As I walked away from each person I asked, I could hear them whispering. Whatever she was saying, Johanna seemed to be my biggest threat at the company. People love to say they don’t want to get involved in situations like that, but it struck me just how few of them were willing to give up gossiping rights.

  I may have been able to just tune all that out, to turn my full attention on my meal and the view around me if Johanna hadn’t come out onto the roof. The metal door was loud. I saw her the moment she stepped through the doorway and she spotted me almost as quickly. She stopped. It looked like she wanted to say something, but no words came. She just stood there. It was unnerving.

  “Hey, Johanna,” I said. She just looked at me. I was starting to get really nervous. I didn’t know why she was up there or what she was doing, and the fact that she was just standing there really got to me.

  Dean had warned me against what I was about to do, but I wasn’t convinced yet. He told me never to apologize, but whatever was going on with this woman, I just wanted it to stop. If she was going to badmouth me, well, I’d prepared for that sort of thing.

  I hadn’t prepared to have her stand about twenty feet away from me on the roof of a very tall building and not say anything. Maybe it just came down to I didn’t know what else to do, but I said, “Hey, I’m sorry about the way I spoke to you earlier. It was unprofessional and uncalled for, and I apologize.”

  She blinked a couple of times and then, just as quietly as she’d come out onto the roof, she walked back off of it.

  “That was weird,” I muttered to myself. I started thinking maybe I’d jumped to conclusions about Johanna. Maybe she wasn’t just out to get me, but maybe something was going on in her life and it was causing her to act out. The way she was just gazing at me, something was definitely off about her. I promised myself to be more understanding and, for the time being, to just steer clear of Johanna whenever possible. Whatever was going on with her was none of my business, and I wanted to keep it that way. That was going to be difficult, though.

  I finished up my meal and tossed the resealed plastic container back in my canvas bag. As I came upon the door, I noticed Johanna had pulled it all the way shut. I’d always left it cracked just a little to make sure I didn’t get stuck up here like I was on a sitcom. There was a funny taste in my mouth and a moment later, I could hear my pulse pounding in my head. I’d hoped being ostracized to the rooftop would help me get over my lifelong fear of heights, and I like to think I was making some kind of progress, but seeing that door closed sent me to my knees, feeling the concrete rooftop beneath me with my hands just to make sure it felt more solid than it looked.

  I reached up toward the door. Maybe it hadn’t latched or locked and I was freaking out about nothing, but vertigo hit me as my hand crept its way toward the knob. There was a lot of work down the drain.

  “This is stupid,” I told myself. “Even if the door is locked, Johanna knows you’re up here and you’ve got your cellphone. One way or another, you’ll be off this rooftop in a couple of minutes.”

  The pep talk seemed like a good idea, but it hadn’t worked so well. Whenever my brain hit panic mode, it started filtering every thought and every word to feed itself. It’s not something I could really control. So even though I was the one saying the words, my brain only clung to the phrase “the door is locked,” and then proceeded to imagine every bad way I could “be off this rooftop.”

  I could feel the tears streaming like hot acid down my face and I couldn’t breathe. I started digging through my bag. Since I started coming up to the roof, I’d always been sure to have an alprazolam with me in case I couldn’t deal with the anxiety. The knowledge that was there, along with the agreement I made with myself that I’d never get within ten feet of the edge of the building, was how I was able to stay calm and eat something up there—but I couldn’t find it in the bag.

  It was supposed to be in a little plastic baggie next to the ice pack in my small canvas cooler, but I couldn’t feel it. I snatched the cooler out of the bag and dumped it out, but only the icepack came tumbling out.

  “I have to get off this roof. I have to get out of here. I have to get the hell out of here.”

  I’d been too loud about how proud I was for confronting my fear of heights. Johanna, whoever she was—or thought she was—must have heard me talking about it and that’s why she came up here. It was all her fault. I was mad at myself for apologizing to her.

  She knew what she was doing to me. Without the need for an audience, she’d managed to utterly humiliate me and I still couldn’t reach all the way to the doorknob without feeling the building spin beneath me. So, when the door opened on its own, for the three-quarters of a second between the door opening and seeing who was coming out, I was overwhelmed with relief and gratitude. I’d even managed to get the words, “Thank you,” out before my humiliation was compounded.

  “Marce!” Luke shouted. “What are you doing up here? Are you okay? Jesus Christ, what were you thinking‽”

  “I just…” I stammered, “I came up here for lunch, and then Johanna was up here and—”

  “Yeah, who do you think came and found me? Marce, I get that you’re going through a stressful time right now, but ending it all is not the answer.”

  “What? What are you talking about? The door got shut all the way and I just need to get off this roof, okay? Just get me inside and I’ll be okay.”

  Luke bent one knee and gave me his hand. He helped me up and waited until I was sitting on the steps inside the stairwell before he quickly collected the dumped contents of my work bag. He closed the roof door behind him, set my bag at my feet, and sat on the step next to me. “What’s goin’ on, Marce? Why would you threaten to hurt yourself?”


  “I didn’t,” I said, looking back and forth between his left and right eyes. “Is this some kind of joke or something to make me feel better about having a panic attack at work or something? Because it’s really not.”

  “Security’s going to be up here in a few seconds. I had Johanna call them after she told me you were up here threatening to jump. You’re not in any trouble, all right? I don’t want you to think that when they get here. I just wanted to make sure someone got up here before you did something really stupid—I mean, what the hell were you thinking?”

  “Luke, I was just eating my lunch,” I told my brother as I tried to steady my breathing and dry my face. “I wasn’t going to do anything.”

  “That’s not what Johanna said. She said that she heard you crying earlier and then she saw you go up to the roof at lunch. She said she came out here and you were standing at the edge of the building and you said that if she didn’t leave you alone, you were going to jump right then and there. That’s when she came and found me. You wanna tell me what’s going on?”

  “I just told you, Luke. I was up here eating lunch. She came onto the roof, stared at me like one of those creepy porcelain dolls, and then just left. I never said I was going to do anything and I sure as hell wasn’t anywhere near the edge of the building. You saw what I was like when I saw the door was locked.”

  “You looked pretty upset,” he said, cocking his head to get a straighter look at me. “You still do.”

  “I just found out she was saying stuff about me and I kind of confronted her about it earlier. She’s probably just mad and trying to get me fired or something. I swear I didn’t come up here for anything other than lunch. If I was going to make some big suicidal gesture, I wouldn’t pack a lunch.”

  “I would,” he said and smiled. “I’d have one of those really disgusting burgers from that fast food joint I never go to anymore.”

  “You’re really going to have to be more specific,” I chuckled through what was left of my tears.