Billionaire's Bet: A Standalone Novel (An Alpha Billionaire Romance Love Story) (Billionaires - Book #12)

by Claire Adams

  I reached underneath the table and put my hand on her leg, not to be frisky but to help try to calm her down.

  “I’m glad the two of you were able to come out with us tonight,” her father said, after the waitress returned with the wine. He took a sip and then looked at Tessa. “It’s been a while since we’ve talked, and I’ve certainly missed that.”

  Tessa nodded. “Me too, Dad,” she said.

  He turned to me. “And you, Leo. I originally wanted this dinner to just be with Tessa, but seeing as you seem to be a part of her life now, I wanted to meet you as well. I might not necessarily approve of the way you two first got together, but since you are a part of Tessa’s life, I’m not just going to pretend you don’t exist.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said. “I really do. And while our relationship might not have started out the most orthodox way, I want you both to know how much I care about Tessa.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” her father said. He looked at her. “I might not approve of the way you do everything,” he continued, “but that’s normal. Your mother and I were both very pleased that you managed to get your grades back up and we hope that you’ll keep them that way, not because we want you to, but because you want to do it for yourself, to give yourself the best possibilities when you graduate.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” Tessa said. “I want that, too.”

  The rest of dinner went by smoothly, probably helped by the fact that we killed two bottles of wine, but I think everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. And when we were standing back outside again, Tessa’s dad shook my hand, and this time, he smiled and clapped me on the back.

  “Do you golf?” he asked.

  “Badly,” I said.

  “Well. We’ll have to get you out on the course sometime, if you’d like.”

  “I think that sounds like a lovely idea!” Tessa’s mother said. She hugged Tessa, and then came over and hugged me. She was a little tipsy, I could tell. “I’m so glad we were able to all get together and enjoy a meal like civilized people! I just had a good feeling about tonight.”

  “I love you guys,” Tessa said, giving her dad a hug. They said goodbye once more and then started to walk down the block toward their car. We watched them go, waving when they finally took off.

  “I’d say that went pretty well,” I said as their taillights disappeared around the corner.

  Tessa had a smile on her face. “It did,” she said. “It went way better than I thought it was going to. I’m actually really surprised. Though the fact that my mom is a little buzzed probably helped.”

  “Your dad’s not a bad guy. I can tell that.”

  “He’s not. And he wants to take you golfing. Definitely a good sign. Though don’t feel like you have to go or anything. I’m not sure how you feel about golf.”

  “Eh . . . it’s a little . . . boring. But I could probably manage for a day.”

  “We should do something,” she said.

  “Right now?”

  She shrugged. “Not right now—I mean, we should go do something different. Get out of the city for a while. See somewhere new.”

  “I sure as hell wouldn’t mind that. We could take a road trip up north or something. No real destination in mind—just a map and our suitcases.”

  She put her arms around my neck and looked up at me. “I would love to,” she said.

  I smiled and leaned down to kiss her, excited for whatever adventures lay in store for us.

  Epilogue

  Tessa

  “Tessa, it was so good to see you again.” Leo’s brother, Aaron, gave me a hug. I hugged him back, and then I watched as he and Leo slapped fives, then hugged, clapping each other on the back, the way guys do. “So glad you guys were able to come out here for so long this time,” Aaron said. “The two of you.”

  “Glad we could, too,” Leo said. He draped an arm over my shoulders. I looked over and smiled at him.

  It’d been a year since I graduated college, and Leo and I had spent most of that time traveling. Leo had started working for Xhilerator, a new digital and print magazine that focused on extreme sports, and the first article he did was a feature about his brother, who would most likely be representing the United States in the 2020 Olympics. It would be the first time skateboarding would be an Olympic sport.

  Now, Aaron was dropping us at Charles de Gaulle Airport, after we had spent a month in Paris, and we were heading back to the United States. We’d come out to visit him the summer of my senior year, but we’d only stayed for a week; I knew that once I was done with school I wanted to come back for longer. Leo had sublet his apartment while we were gone and the couple who had been staying there moved on this past weekend. We’d stay there for the time being until we decided where the next place was we wanted to go. The main reason we were going back, though? His friend Jack was getting married up in Sonoma, to Colette, whom Leo had previously gone out with.

  After we said one final goodbye to Aaron, we checked our bags and made our way through the terminal.

  “You ready to be back in the States for a while?” Leo asked.

  “Yeah, I think so,” I said. I’d been enjoying our time traveling, but there was a part of me that was eager to get back and know that we were going to stay in one place for a while. I’d been writing articles for a few different well-known blogs, and I’d just gotten word that a column idea I had pitched to the Huffington Post had been accepted. While living out of a suitcase and getting to see all these new places that I’d never been to before had been exhilarating, I was eager to get back to my own bed—which was also Leo’s bed—to wake up to the same sights each morning. I might get bored with it after a while, but right now, that was pretty much all I wanted.

  Leo and I had a window seat and a middle seat, but when we boarded the plane, whoever was supposed to be sitting in the aisle seat hadn’t shown up.

  “There’s not as many people on here as I was expecting,” I said as we took our seats. The flight over, every single seat had been filled. On this one, I could see at least half a dozen empty seats.

  “Lucky for us,” Leo said. “Though don’t be surprised if they find someone to fill it with. You can have the window seat.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s all yours.”

  But no one came to take the aisle seat, and then they made the final boarding call, and they closed the cabin door. I buckled my seat belt as I listened to the flight attendant give the in-flight safety talk, first in French, then in English.

  Leo reached over and took my hand as the plane got ready for takeoff. I liked to watch out the window as the ground rushed by, and then got further and further away, my ears popping and my stomach doing a little flip as we became airborne.

  Once we reached cruising altitude and the seatbelt sign came off, I reclined my chair and closed my eyes. Only maybe a minute had passed when I felt Leo’s mouth next to my ear.

  “You a part of the mile-high club?” he whispered.

  “No,” I said.

  “You want to change that?”

  I smiled. “Is that an option?”

  “Of course it is.” He turned around and looked toward the back of the plane. “I’m going to go into the bathroom now. Wait a minute and then come back. I’ll use the one on the left.” He winked at me as he got up and made his way down the aisle.

  I looked out the tiny window, and below me I saw the tops of white, fluffy clouds, the blue horizon seeming to stretch on forever. I was excited to be heading back the States, to get to see my parents, meet up with Lindsey again, go up to Sonoma for Leo’s friend’s wedding.

  But first: I was going to make my way to the back of the plane and see about joining the mile-high club.

  Click here to continue to my next book.

  Get Each of My Newly Released Books for 99 Cents By Clicking Here

  Click here to get my book Swipe for free

  BOSS’S VIRGIN

  By Claire Adams

  This book is
a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 Claire Adams

  Chapter One

  Ian

  This is what happens when you do favors for friends.

  Jonathan asked if I’d do him a solid and give his friend an interview since we needed to hire a new secretary. What were the words he’d used? Smokin’ hot AND intelligent? I looked over my steepled fingers at the girl sitting nervously on one of the two chairs on the other side of my desk. The chairs were maple, straight-backed, very fine craftsmanship but no cushions, so whoever was sitting there would have to perched upright, slightly uncomfortable. At attention, if you will. My own ass was luxuriating in an ergonomic leather executive chair—Tuscan leather, mahogany accents, ability to recline, retractable footrest. I was reclining now, as a matter of fact, wishing that I had not agreed to do this favor for Jonathan. I mean, this girl, Daisy, was attractive, sure, but she dressed in such a way that was trying to disguise it, with her black A-line skirt that went past her knees, her blouse buttoned all the way up, those black, school marm oxfords. This girl didn’t need a job; she needed a goddamn crash course in fashion.

  But we’d just sat down, and if I didn’t at least go through the formalities, I’d have to endure Jonathan’s bitching, and I already heard enough of that as it was.

  “So,” I said. “You’re friends with Jonathan?”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. She cleared her throat. “Yes,” she said again, a little more loudly. “We met at the gym.”

  “And you were previously employed at . . . where?” I leaned forward and rifled through some papers on the desk, though there was nothing there that would give me any clues about her previous work experience.

  “Shear Genius.”

  “The hair salon?”

  “Yes. I was the administrative assistant there.”

  “You were the secretary.”

  She shifted. “The administrative assistant. I handled all the reception duties, scheduling, payroll, filing, and some light bookkeeping.”

  I nodded. “Okay, right. So you were the secretary.” I hated shit like that; it was like calling a janitor a custodial engineer. She was answering phones and making appointments and doing reminder calls; therefore, she was a secretary. Maybe she wasn’t fetching coffee or transcribing things on a typewriter, but she was still a secretary. “That’s essentially what we’re looking for here,” I said. “Someone to answer the phones, manage the calendar, keep the office in order.”

  I decided not to mention that the reason for the vacancy was because I’d slept with the last secretary, and then there’d been this little misunderstanding about the true meaning of “no strings attached.” I had explicitly stated that, whispered it in Annie’s ear, in fact, right before I fucked her across this very desk, and she’d been more than agreeable.

  “I did all of that at Shear Genius,” she said. “I’m a very organized person, and I think the best way to ensure that a business runs smoothly is to keep things organized and maintained.” She continued to espouse on what she thought a business needed to run successfully. I tuned this out and watched her talk instead. Watching someone talk can often give you a whole lot more of information about who they are than the actual words that are coming out of their mouths.

  This was often how I’d decide whether or not my company, Hard Tail Security, was going to take someone on as a client. I was in the Marines for ten years, signing up for recruit training the day I turned eighteen. It was hell, of course, but paled in comparison to all the shit my dickhead stepfather put me through. I left the Marines at twenty-eight, after three deployments. Jonathan and I ended up reconnecting; he’d gone to college after high school and had graduated with a degree in business, but had taken an interest in Japanese jujutsu. We’d gone out to get drinks, had a few more than we intended, and started shooting the shit about how great it would be to start a security firm. Perhaps not the most glamorous or enlightened origin story, but there you go.

  We started small but grew every year—last year we provided security for the community event when the Dalai Lama came to speak; our services were also used regularly for Seamus McAllister, who ran a high-stakes underground poker club, but also when he threw his daughter’s sweet sixteen. (Besides the poker, Seamus was the biggest mover of illicit drugs in the city, renowned for his ability to always be able to escape being sentenced, though the cops and D.A. had certainly tried.) In other words: our clients ran the gamut from the holiest of holy to the morally deficient. We didn’t discriminate. Well, we did, but it wasn’t based on the criteria that some other companies might have used.

  I continued to watch Daisy talk, still not really hearing what she was saying. She was earnest, honest. She was the sort of person you could trust not to slack off if you weren’t around to oversee what she was doing. All good qualities, but the drama with Annie was still fresh in my mind—the tears, the pleading, eventually, the threats. I didn’t do well with anyone threatening me, and I finally had to tell her, in no uncertain terms, that she needed to back the fuck off. I’d never hit a woman, of course, but in that case, it had been especially tempting. She couldn’t take no for an answer. When a guy can’t take no for an answer, he’s a misogynistic asshole; when it’s a girl, she’s just persistent, or, as Annie claimed, in love.

  Not that Daisy was anything like Annie. Annie had put her goods on display from day one, favoring short, tight skirts, ultra-high heels, and blouses that her cleavage was just begging to be released from. Daisy didn’t have any of that on display, but my highly trained eye could tell that under all those prudish, dull clothing, she had a banging body.

  Annie was still calling me, was the thing. She wasn’t calling from her number—I didn’t know whose phone she was using—but I kept getting these calls from random numbers I didn’t recognize. Sure, it could’ve been some scam or telemarketer, but I knew it was her. Daisy wasn’t like her in the least, I knew that, but I didn’t want the distraction.

  Now she was looking back at me, the tip of her tongue coming out of her mouth to wet her bottom lip. She had stopped talking and was waiting for me to say something, maybe to respond to whatever it was that she’d just been saying, though I hadn’t heard a word of it. I laced my fingers together and stretched them, bending my fingers back, arms extended. This was a tactic I often used when caught in the situation of being expected to answer a question I hadn’t been listening to. Let a few seconds go by and then do something physical—it didn’t have to be anything big, it could be something as simple as smothering a yawn—and then respond however you felt. Your response didn’t even need to have anything to do with what the person had just asked.

  “We’ve had a lot of interest in the position,” I said, relaxing my forearms. I leaned my head to one side, then the other, and felt a vertebrate in my neck crack. Ah. That was better. “I don’t know if Jonathan mentioned that to you or not.”

  “No,” she said, looking down at her lap. “He didn’t.”

  “I’m only telling you this because we’ve had a number of qualified applicants. So it’s not going to be an easy decision to make.”

  “I completely understand.”

  We sat there for a minute, neither of us saying anything. I leaned back in my chair. She was waiting for me to speak, but I was enjoying watching her squirm in the silence. Awkward silences can tell you a lot about a person. Some people will immediately try to fill them with chatter; others will shut down, and others will start fiddling with the nearest thing they can get their hands on. Daisy, while she looked a bit uncomfortable, folded her hands in her lap, looked me in the eye for a second, and then looked over my shoulder, toward the window, as though something very captivating had just caught her eye.

&nb
sp; “Well,” I said finally. “Thank you for coming in and talking with me.”

  “Absolutely. Thank you so much for taking the time to interview me. I look forward to hearing from you.”

  She still looked nervous as all hell, though. “Jonathan or I will be in touch,” I said, not bothering to get up when she did. Instead, I watched her stand and smooth down her skirt.

  “Okay,” she said. Cue two point five seconds of awkward silence. “Well, um. Bye.”

  I steepled my fingers in front of my mouth again to hide my smile. “Have a good one, Daisy.”

  She turned and left as though she couldn’t get out of my office fast enough, which at least gave me a fleeting view of her ass before she disappeared around the corner.

  I wasn’t going to hire her. I’d hire the girl I interviewed yesterday, Lynn. I’d already decided I was going to do that anyway, though Jonathan hadn’t been privy to that information. I returned some emails and a few phone calls before I found her resume with her phone number.

  “Hello?” she said after the second ring, though the way she said it, I could tell she already knew who it was. There was a hopeful note in her voice that she was trying to keep under wraps.

  “Daisy,” I said. “It’s Ian Roubideaux.”

  “Hi, Ian.”

  “Hey. Listen. I just wanted to call and let you know that I’ve decided to go with someone else for the position.”

  There was a pause. “Oh,” she said finally. “Okay. Well . . . thank you for letting me know so quickly.” There was another pause. “Was I . . . was I just not qualified? I know I can do everything you said you were looking for.”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “Based on your resume and what Jonathan’s said about you, you certainly seem qualified. But you’re not the only applicant in the pool, and I actually had many qualified people apply for the position. I’ll keep your resume on file though, okay? And if something opens up in the future, I’ll give you a shout.”