Bad Boy of Wall Street: A Bad Boy Billionaire Romance

by Samantha Westlake

  Hurriedly, he scrambled for the binoculars. For a moment, he cursed this residential street for not putting out good lighting. Weren't they concerned about nasty muggers skulking in all these shadows?

  He finally found the shape of the binoculars under another paper bag, and dragged them up to his bleary eyes.

  The woman was coming out of the house. Below the binoculars, Hook's lips pulled back in an unconscious snarl for a moment. The bitch had nailed him several times with that damn frying pan! His fingers on his right hand still stung like hell, with a weird sensation of pins and needles whenever he tried to flex them. Hook felt a little concerned that he might have permanently injured something, but he couldn't take the time to go get it checked out.

  He also had a nasty bruise growing above his left eye, where that very same frying pan caught him a glancing blow when the bitch threw it back at him. If he had the time, he would love to tie her up somewhere, someplace where no one could hear her scream as he took his time getting his revenge...

  But he wasn't interested in her, at least not right now. First came the money for his employers, after all. He'd already had to deal with a call from the man who hired him, doing his best to promise the angry Hispanic voice on the other end of the line that yes, he was making progress, that he would get their money back.

  That man now had to be inside this house. Hook didn't know how he'd missed him when he first came by the old lady's house, but there was no denying now that Rob Hendricks was hiding out inside this place. The old lady, who was probably related to him, had only just come back a few minutes earlier, probably out shopping for the day given all the bags that she hauled inside.

  If the younger woman was leaving now, as she seemed to be doing, that meant that Rob and the old lady were the only two people in the house.

  But Hook had to be patient, he reminded himself. He'd gone rushing in earlier at that asshole Cartmann's house, and see what it got him? His quarry got away, he'd taken several injuries from a goddamn frying pan, of all things, and he'd had to lay low for several hours afterwards as local cops showed up and swarmed the place. He didn't think that he'd left fingerprints on anything, and they wouldn't link to his fake identity anyway, but he didn't want to take any more risks than were necessary.

  So instead of moving in, he sat in his car and munched on cold French fries as he watched the bitch get into her own little two-door car and pull out of the driveway. He wondered where she might be heading. If he moved in now, would he need to worry about her coming back, maybe interrupting him in the act of interrogating Rob?

  Hook's thoughts were interrupted by a yawn, a big one that cracked his jaw and made him instinctively push his arms out away from him. He barely avoided setting off the car horn. He was too tired right now to handle this, he groaned to himself. All the adrenaline from earlier in the afternoon, from escaping the Cartmann mansion, had worn off long ago. It had left a dull ache in its place.

  Right now, he needed sleep, more sleep than he could get from just napping behind the wheel of his rental car. He should get some rest, and then in the morning he'd make his next plan for getting his hands on Rob Hendricks.

  He'd passed a cheap little motel up the road a few miles. With a grunt, Hook slipped the keys into the ignition socket and turned the car's engine over, pulling away from his spot on the curb across the street and down the road a little bit from Rob's house. He could go get a room at the hotel, enjoy sleeping in a bed for a few hours, and then be back out to stake the place out the next morning.

  If the girl's little Mazda wasn't back in the driveway, that meant that it was just Rob and his old lady. Once she left the house - and he saw no reason why she'd want to stick around, might as well get out while she still had any life left in her, before keeling over any day now - he'd know that Rob was there alone, and could ambush him.

  Hook carefully weighed this plan as he pulled into the parking lot of the motel. He knew better than to rush into anything; slow and cautious beat out fast and hot-headed any day of the week. It was part of the reason why he was so effective, why he'd managed to stay alive so long.

  He always thought things through.

  Hook checked in at the hotel, paying cash and showing his fake driver's license to the teenage clerk sitting in the front office and looking bored. In fewer than ten minutes, he was out of the office, a room key in his hand.

  The hotel room smelled stale, like old air had been trapped for too long without being aired out, but Hook didn't care about that. He dropped right down onto the bed, pausing only long enough to kick off his shoes. He briefly considered getting up to take a shower, but decided that it wasn't worth the effort.

  Instead, he leaned back against the pillow, his hands under his head, and thought about his plan.

  Five minutes later, just as his eyelids were starting to feel heavy, he jumped as his cell phone started loudly ringing.

  "Yeah?" he growled into the receiver after answering the call.

  "Wilson. Tell me about the location of my money."

  The voice had a slight Hispanic lisp to it, low-pitched but intense. Hook immediately sat straight up on the bed, pushing the covers aside as if the man was standing in the room and looking right at him.

  "I've found the guy," he reported. Hook knew better than to lie to his employers. Some hitmen would color their results, making them either sound rosier, to avoid getting angry responses, or less successful than the truth, so that they wouldn't feel pressured to turn in consistently positive results. Hook had long ago decided that both of these situations were lies, and only told the truth.

  "And our money?"

  "Don't know yet." Hook plunged onward, before his employer could explode at him. "But I've found the guy's hideout. I know when he'll be alone, probably sometime in the next day or two. I can make my move, grab him and start interrogating him."

  The voice at the other end paused. Hook's employer didn't ask him if the hitman would be able to make his target talk. Hook appreciated that. It showed confidence in his skills - and he'd more than proved himself capable in the past.

  "What's your time line?" the other man finally asked instead.

  Hook shrugged, even though he knew that the other man couldn't see the gesture. "Depends on whether I get answers right away, and where the money is. Might be a couple days, might be longer. But I'll get it back."

  After this sentence, Hook paused for a moment. He'd had something weighing on his mind for the last couple days, but he hesitated before bringing it up to his employer. He was paid to provide results, not to ponder hunches. But when it pertained to his boss's money, Hook felt like it might be worth sharing.

  "There's something else," he said, his words slower than usual as he tried to pick the right phrasing. "This doesn't feel quite right."

  "What do you mean?"

  Hook paused again, choosing his words like a soldier picking his steps through an active minefield. "It's too neat, and too messy at the same time. I went to talk to Cartmann first, and he flipped right over on Hendricks - same story that all the newspapers have, although they've been calling it insider trading."

  "So? Doesn't that make sense? Cartmann certainly wouldn't want anyone else finding out that he's investing with the cartel's money." Hook's employer sounded impatient with this line of thought.

  "Yeah, and it made sense to me, too." Hook grimaced. "But the guy isn't acting like a thief ought to be acting."

  "Cristo, what the hell is that supposed to mean?"

  "Look, if I put myself in his shoes, on the lam with several million that I'd stolen from some very dangerous people, I'd be getting the hell out of sight," Hook explained. "Get to someplace remote where I could spend a bit of it, buy myself a new identity, maybe fake my death. Try to disappear. But this guy isn't doing any of those things."

  "So what? Maybe he's just an idiot."

  Hook didn't let himself sigh, or even roll his eyes. He kept on patiently talking. "So if he's not acting like he's go
t a bunch of stolen money, that suggests that he might not really be sitting on a bunch of stolen money at all. Someone might be playing us."

  That, at least, caught his employer's attention. "Yeah? Like who?"

  "I don't know," Hook admitted. "But trust me, I'll make sure that I find out."

  "Good." The voice of his employer hardened. "And when you do find out, you make sure that this hijo de puta pays for what he did, you understand? I don't just want him dead. I want him to be hurting so bad that he would rather be dead than live a moment longer with the effects of what he brought down on himself. You got that?"

  "Yes, sir," Hook replied, as the line went dead.

  Hook tossed the phone onto the pillow beside him, looking down at it and thinking. He'd shared his concerns, and while his boss hadn't necessarily agreed with him, he hadn't told Hook to ignore those instincts, either. Hook had spent a lot of time listening to his own instincts, and he knew when he ought to trust them.

  Right now felt like one of those times.

  Still, he thought to himself as he settled back down into the bed, pulling the pillow back under his head. He had his first target still lined up. He'd watch Rob, wait for the right moment to strike, and would interrogate him.

  One way or another, Rob Hendricks would give this hitman the answers that he sought. Hook couldn't say where the trail might lead from here, but he'd stick with it.

  And when he found the true thief, he'd take great pleasure and satisfaction in making sure that the man suffered, just as his boss had commanded.

  Chapter Eighteen

  *

  I drove back down into the heart of New York under the glow of streetlights, far too wired to even consider whether I should get any sleep before jumping in. This was crazy, I kept on thinking to myself - but I didn't turn around.

  Part of me kept on thinking about Rob, about how we'd finally connected, after spending the last week or so dancing around the issue. I'd been crushing on him hard the entire time, but now it turned out that he'd been thinking the same thing about me! Handsome, sexy Rob Hendricks, Bad Boy of the press and gorgeous movie star model, was attracted to me! He wanted me!

  I simultaneously wanted to thank this stupid magazine article for bringing the two of us together, and curse it for keeping us from truly being together. Damn you, journalistic integrity! Why couldn't I have taken a job writing for some cheap rag like the National Enquirer, one that wouldn't give a damn if I slept with the focus of my article?

  But there was a way around this. I'd already probably twisted my journalist's morals by agreeing to help Rob try and prove his innocence, but that didn't actually break the rules, right? And going to help him get the laptop from his boss, so that he could find the program on it used to break into his computer and falsify his trades, was just another step in helping him, all for the story.

  And then, after the story was written and submitted off to Sandy for review, I could pull Rob into the nearest room with a flat surface and tear his clothes off, run my tongue over every single inch of him and make him love me until we both needed to gulp down a gallon of Gatorade to rehydrate.

  Thanking my earlier self for having the foresight to install a little hands-free microphone in my car, I pulled out my phone and dialed the number of the man that I knew would be able to help me. I listened to the phone ring for a good minute or so before the connection finally went through.

  "Yeah?" answered a cranky, suspicious sounding voice at the other end.

  "Hi, Teddy?" I asked.

  "Who the hell is this?"

  Well, that wasn't the most polite response I'd ever received for a phone call. "Um, this is April," I answered. "April Carpenter? Your coworker at Grit? Fellow reporter?" I didn't know if 'honor among journalists' really existed, but I was really hoping for its existence right now.

  For a long minute, Teddy didn't say anything. But finally, just as I started to reach for my phone to see if there was any sort of connection trouble, if I'd accidentally hung up on him, he cleared his throat. "What?"

  "I need your help." There. I just threw it out there, getting it out into the open.

  "Somehow, I'm not surprised," Teddy replied, and I bit down a sharp retort. I wanted his help, I reminded myself. I'd have to put up with some sarcastic quips. "What now? Let me guess - you don't know how to get Rob to talk to you, and you want to turn the story over to a real reporter so you can get back to your puff pieces."

  "No, that's not it at all!" I said angrily, bristling. Was this really the low opinion that Teddy held of me? I'd certainly managed to get Rob talking to me! "I need your help to, um, get my hands on something."

  Teddy sighed, blowing right into the microphone. "What?"

  I opened my mouth to answer, but then thought better of just saying what I needed without any sort of context. "It's kind of hard to explain. Can I meet you somewhere? Talk in person?"

  "Damn, I should have ignored this call," I heard Teddy sigh in a softer voice. I wonder if he meant for me to hear that. "Uh, yeah. You know where The Foundry is?"

  I had absolutely no idea where The Foundry was, or even what it might be. "Sure," I lied.

  "I'll meet you there in fifteen minutes. You're buying." And Teddy hung up before I could say another word.

  After pulling over for a moment so that I could search the internet, I discovered that The Foundry was an old bar located in Brooklyn, not too far away from me. I plugged the address into my car and headed towards it, hoping that I'd be able to find a parking spot.

  Twenty minutes later, I stepped into The Foundry, blinking as I tried to figure out if I'd stepped through a wormhole and gone back in time by a hundred years or so. The interior of the bar was all old wood and antique looking leather chairs and stools, and the man behind the bar even wore a full-on, literal top hat and monocle! I felt like I'd stumbled into Victorian England, somehow.

  It took a minute or two of looking around before I spotted Teddy, sitting at the end of the bar and nursing a drink of some dark liquid in a glass tumbler. I sized him up as I approached, noting the hunch to his shoulders and the grimace on his face.

  This might not be as easy of a sell as I'd hoped.

  Since I first started at Grit, Teddy had always seemed a little larger than life, almost like a legend. Even the man's name - Theodore Beare - seemed like a falsehood, like he made it up so that no one would be able to track down his friends or family and retaliate after one of his scathing stories made it into our magazine's pages. Teddy didn't talk about his family, his outside life, or anything that he did outside of work. I wasn't sure if the man even truly had any sorts of hobbies.

  Still, I had to admit that his methods got results. While I usually stuck with my little fluff pieces, bringing in only a smattering of views and comments, Teddy's deeply critical and exposing articles, often several pages long, brought tens of thousands of hits to our site. When he released new articles, they routinely shot to the "trending" list on various social media sites, generating even more buzz. Often, the comments sections of his articles were filled with raging arguments and vitriolic attacks, but he definitely knew how to reach a wide audience.

  Now, I needed his help.

  "Hey, Teddy," I said, sliding onto the bar stool next to him. "Um, thanks for coming to meet me here, tonight."

  He glanced over at me, not offering to buy me a drink, not even really saying hello. "So what's so urgent that you need my help?" he asked.

  Ah. Jumping right to the point. "I need your help getting my hands on a computer," I began.

  Teddy frowned at me, but before I could say more, the bartender stopped by my stool, reaching up and tugging on that ridiculous looking top hat of his. "Drink, miss?" he asked.

  "White wine, please," I told him, and waited for him to move away and fetch it.

  "Where's this computer?" Teddy asked.

  "Well, that's kind of the trouble." The bartender brought my wine over to me, and I thanked him. "It belongs to a guy named Chad Car
tmann. Ever heard of him?"

  I didn't miss Teddy's eye roll, since he made no attempt to hide it. "Everyone and their mother has heard of Chad Cartmann, especially now as he fights desperately to keep his whole sketchy little trading outfit from being dragged through the wringer. But why in the world would you want anything on the guy's laptop?"

  Great. This was going to be fun, explaining to Teddy why I wanted to get my hands on that laptop in case it had the program. Not.

  Briefly, doing my best to at least sound somewhat impartial, I laid out my story of the events that I believed had really happened. Even though I left out any mention of how I desperately still wanted to jump Rob's bones and drag him off to bed for a few hours, I still saw Teddy's expression darken and his frown grow wider.

  "This seems way too involved for a story," he said, once I'd presented my case as best I could.

  That was the response that I'd feared. "But think about uncovering the truth, here!" I insisted. "If this turns out to all be a cover up, we could be the story that uncovers fraud at the top of one of these Wall Street trading houses! That's a huge scoop for us, and for Grit magazine!"

  Do you catch what I was doing here? I used "us" instead of "me". I wasn't yet fully on board with the idea of sharing the byline (and the profits) with Teddy, but I knew that I wouldn't get any further without his help.

  Teddy still wore a frown, but it didn't seem quite as focused on me as before. "I suppose it could be possible," he mused quietly. "We'd need to get ahold of the computer for a few minutes, of course, make a clone of it so that we could return the original."

  I nodded along, wondering what in the world it meant to clone a computer. "There's one little snag with that, though," I said, once Teddy's musings had lapsed off into silence.

  He glanced over at me. "What?"

  "Well, Chad Cartmann apparently brings this computer with him everywhere. He doesn't leave it at home, or at the office. He takes it with him all the time. At least, that's what Rob says." How could we get our hands on the computer if Chad never let it out of his sight?