Bad Boy of Wall Street: A Bad Boy Billionaire Romance

by Samantha Westlake

  "Sure," Rob grunted, as he heaved another shovel's worth of sand out of the hole and onto the ground beside him.

  "But he couldn't hide whatever he bought on his property anywhere, because that would be one of the places that the Feds and other investigators would check, right? He needed to hide it in a place where he could easily get to it, but no one else knew that it was his. And he probably didn't want anyone seeing or catching him hiding it, so he'd use someone else to do it for him."

  "Yeah, all of that makes sense," Rob agreed, grunting as he stepped on the blade to drive the shovel deeper in to the sand. The sand at the bottom of the hole was no longer loose and dry; we'd reached the wet, harder-packed layer. "But why am I digging?"

  "Alfred," I answered. "The caretaker at Cartmann's house. I think he's in on it!"

  Rob paused for a moment to look up at me, leaning on the handle of the shovel. "How is Alfred involved?"

  I took a deep breath. Here went nothing. "I think that Chad bought something valuable and had it sent up to his house up here," I burst out. "Then, I think that Alfred came out here and buried whatever the items were, so that the investigators wouldn't find it when they searched Chad's house."

  "Why?" Rob didn't sound disbelieving, at least. He just looked at me and waited for me to explain.

  I swept my hands around. "Didn't you say that Chad technically owned this property, but Diana put up so much of a fuss that he just dropped the issue? That means that no one would look here, since it seems like Diana's land - but if Chad really needed to, he could always go back to the survey documents or whatever to prove that anything buried here is his. It's the perfect place where no one would look, but he knows that it's his!"

  "But why Alfred? He didn't seem like the treasure burying type."

  I thought back to our visit to the Cartmann house. "Sand," I recalled. "When we came into the house, there was a pair of sandy boots sitting near the front door. I didn't think anything of them; maybe Alfred just liked taking walks on the beach. But what if he wore them when he came over here to bury the treasure?"

  As I spoke, Rob had resumed digging. I didn't know if he believed me, or if he just wanted to humor me. "It still seems like pretty thin evidence," he said - or at least, he started to say.

  As he finished this sentence, he drove the shovel down into the sand at the bottom of the hole. But instead of sliding in with a soft swishing sound, it slid halfway in - and then stopped with a loud "clunk."

  Rob and I looked at each other for one frozen moment, both of us wide-eyed.

  "No way," I whispered, but Rob had already tossed the shovel aside and dropped down to his knees, using his hands to brush away dirt.

  "Can you hold the light for me?" he called out, and I jumped to obey, moving in to aim the beam of the flashlight up and overhead so that it aimed straight down into the hole.

  As Rob brushed away more clumps of the wet sand, a sheet of dirty, stained canvas came into view. The canvas moved under Rob's touch, but there was clearly something hard beneath it, something that his shovel had encountered with that heavy clunk sound. Rob pulled away more dirt and sand, revealing more canvas, his fingers probing for its edges.

  "Here we go," he said after a minute, as his fingers found an edge to the canvas. "Now, let's see what's under here. Probably just rocks, maybe some old bricks."

  "Yeah, probably," I agreed with him, not believing the words coming out of my own mouth for a single second. This had to be it!

  Rob pulled back the canvas, revealing some rectangular, blocky shapes. "See? Bricks," he said, just before the beam of the flashlight played over them and his words dried up in his throat.

  The shapes were bricks, sure enough - but their sides and faces were smooth, not pitted like normal construction bricks. They seemed remarkably even. And as the light of the flashlight beam hit them, they reflected back a rich, lustrous gold color.

  "No way," I gasped, as Rob paused for a minute, just staring. Slowly, almost trembling, his hands reached down and wrapped around one of the bricks, lifting it up from where it sat nestled among its fellows.

  "Gold," he said in a half-strangled voice, staring at the brick.

  "And there's more," I added, tilting the flashlight down into the hole. "There have to be at least a dozen of them!"

  My words spurred a new flurry of activity, as Rob dug around, hauling the bricks up and out of the hole, stacking them up on the sand on the edge of the sandy depression. By the time he'd pulled all of them out, tossing out the canvas sheet and rooting around at the edges to make sure he hadn't missed any, eighteen bars of gold sat stacked neatly on the edge of the hole.

  Rob finally stopped, dropping the canvas back into the bottom of the damp hole as he stared at the stacked rows of gold bars. "Nine million, give or take," he whispered softly, in awe.

  I nodded, dropping down to sit on the edge of the hole. Almost unconsciously, one of my hands reached out so that my fingers could stroke along the edge of the nearest gold bar. The metal felt cool and smooth beneath my touch, like stroking the side of a brand new automobile.

  "What do we do now?" I asked.

  Rob looked at the bars wordlessly for a moment, and then pulled himself up out of the hole, sitting down beside me. "I don't know," he confessed. "I mean, we ought to turn them in. After all, even if the money belonged to the drug cartels, the government probably wants it back."

  I sighed. "Do we have to give it all back?"

  "It's the right thing to do," Rob pointed out softly.

  I sighed. "So much for you sticking to your bad boy roots."

  "My bad boy roots?" he echoed back, turning to stare at me. Even in the dim light of the reflected flashlight beam, I could see his raised eyebrows. "April, I grew up decidedly middle class, and as your own article reveals, I didn't do anything wrong!" His hands grabbed me, drawing me towards him, into his lap. "Where do you keep on getting this idea that I'm such a bad boy?"

  I started to answer, but every time I reached for words, I found myself distracted by his lips kissing me, his fingers wandering to wonderfully inappropriate places. "I don't really know," I finally gasped out, as he tugged me closer, into his lap and embrace. "Must just be something about how you look, that's all."

  "That's very frustrating," Rob murmured back to me, his voice slightly muffled as he traced his way downward, easing me backwards onto the sandy beach behind me. "It almost feels like discrimination."

  I couldn't manage to reply, as I bit my lip to keep from moaning out as he teased off various articles of clothing, the whole time continuing to complain about how I assumed that he was a sexy bad boy, after only the most carnal of activities.

  "That definitely changed my mind," I managed to get out ten minutes later, after my breathing had finally slowed to something that vaguely resembled normal once again. "Now I see you as a totally good guy."

  "Glad to hear it," Rob replied, climbing up from the hole. It turns out that being a little lower than me let him try a couple very exciting angles that felt wonderfully different and made my heart thump even faster, to the point where I almost worried that I might end up dying of pleasure, right here on the beach.

  "But we still have this," I continued, rolling over to look at the pile of gold beside us. "I know that the right thing to do is to turn it in, but a part of me just wants to keep it!"

  "Trust me, after dealing with all this finance stuff, keeping it would end up being more of a headache than we can afford, even with all that gold," Rob answered. But as I sighed, he hauled himself up beside me, dropping down to lay on his side on the sand with his head propped up on one elbow. "But I do have two words that might make you feel a little better about the whole thing."

  "Oh yeah?" I turned towards him, looking up at those light blue eyes that seemed almost to glow, even in the darkness. "And what might those two words be?"

  I saw the glint of his white teeth as he smiled back at me. "Finder's fee."

  It took a moment before the s
ignificance of these words clicked. "Maybe - it's not guaranteed," he cautioned me, as I squealed and threw my arms around him. "But if the government treats this like it usually regards most of these cases, it's a pretty good possibility. We'll have to wait and see."

  "I still like those two words," I replied, kissing him to cut off his words. "And in exchange, I can think of a couple of words that describe what I want to do to you right now."

  "And what might those be?"

  I leaned in to whisper them into Rob's ear, and he laughed, a laugh of pure happiness, as he pulled me towards him.

  Epilogue

  *

  A month later...

  "It's here! It's here!"

  I burst into the main living area of the apartment, my hands clutching the stack of magazines. As soon as I spotted the cover in the news stand outside, I'd snatched up the entire pile, dumping a twenty onto the little checkout area and dashing away without waiting for the bemused seller to hand me my change.

  After a moment, Rob poked his head out from the second bedroom, which he'd adapted into an office. "What's here?"

  I threw a copy of Grit at him, dropping the rest onto the living room coffee table as he caught the magazine out of the air. "The New York Times, silly. No, my article! What else could it be?"

  It was hard to miss. As soon as Sandy got the first draft in his email inbox, my phone had lit up with his number. Instead of calling me to badger me about the expense report or the extra time that it took for me to put it all together, he immediately heaped praise on the story, sounding half-amazed that I was the one receiving such wonderful words from his own mouth. He insisted that I get back into the office as soon as possible - and that I bring Rob, so that the photographer could get some pictures!

  "Hell, we might even be talking about the cover," he finished before he hung up, leaving me speechless as I looked down at the phone in my hand.

  It turned out that this call came at a good time; the SEC had finally started digging through all of the evidence that Rob turned over to them, and they demanded that he come down for an in-person interview - in Manhattan, at their main offices. "I suspect, however, that I won't likely still have my apartment, given how it was partly paid for and supplied by Cartmann Securities," he remarked to me after getting off the phone with the investigators.

  "Well, you could stay with me?" Even two weeks ago, I never would have imagined making such a bold suggestion - but considering how Rob and I had shared the same bed for the last couple of days, I figured that it wouldn't be as big of a leap as it might have been previously.

  "You'll have room for me?" he asked.

  I shrugged. "It might be a little cramped, but I'm sure that we can make do, and you can handle me hitting you with an elbow a couple times while I'm sleeping."

  He just grinned back at me. "As long as you let me poke at you with other things, I'll endure any number of elbow bumps. I'll go upstairs and pack."

  Sure enough, Sandy ended up pushing my story up to the cover of the next issue. The story went viral, of course, and I greeted my landlady, Hilda, with a nice big check that covered all of my back rent. I basked in the envious congratulations that I received from my coworkers - up until they started asking me about what I had in mind for my next challenge. Suddenly, going back to writing little fluff pieces about sex moves didn't seem like the right choice.

  "Well, what else are you passionate about?" Rob asked me when I relayed this new and unsettling question to him over dinner. He smiled at me across from my little dining table before taking a sip of the bottle of red wine he'd picked up to go with the pasta dish he'd cooked up.

  I frowned. "I don't really know, though! I only chose this article because it was one where I saw a connection, not because I have a deep interest in finance. Heck, I'd much rather write about buried treasure!"

  "So why not do that?"

  My forkful of pasta, halfway to my mouth, paused. "Do what?"

  "Write about buried treasure," Rob insisted. "That seems like it would be really interesting - and after the buzz from your last article, I'm sure that a lot of people would want to read about it! You could even mention the gold that we found."

  Ah, yes, the gold. After a lot of debate, Rob finally convinced me that we needed to do the right thing and turn it back over to the federal government. I was very sad to see those millions of dollars of gold bullion leave Rob's garage, where we stashed them, but in the end I did agree with him that it was the right thing to do.

  When asked about providing a finder's fee back to us as a reward for doing the right thing, the SEC investigators scoffed and told us that they'd "get back to us." We hadn't heard anything since then, and Rob warned me that, even if they did approve something, it would take months to get through all the different layers of bureaucracy.

  Oh well. At least Rob had found a job!

  That's right! It turns out that, after my article came out and showed that he was totally innocent in the whole Cartmann Securities scandal, several other trading firms came calling with job offers. Rob talked politely with all the firms, but in the end, he ended up taking an offer that, although not the highest pay of all his opportunities, came with the most free time and flexibility.

  He didn't tell me why he wanted to have more time off, but since he didn't appear to be in any hurry to move out of my apartment, I couldn't find myself to object.

  But a few days later, I got home to find him sitting on my couch waiting for me, wearing a big grin on his face that told me that he had something exciting to tell me.

  "What's going on?" I asked, coming inside and dropping my purse down on the little table beside the entrance before sitting down beside him. "Why are you smiling like the cat that just swallowed the canary?"

  "Because I've got a present for you," Rob replied, still beaming back at me.

  "Okay..." My words died away, however, as he reached back behind him and withdrew a small, square box. Suddenly, my breath froze in my throat, and I felt like a weight had just settled on my chest, keeping me from taking a full gulp of air.

  "Oh my god." My voice sounded faint, which about matched how the rest of me felt. "That's not - you're not - no, Rob, what are you doing?"

  A dozen thoughts swirled confusingly in my head and fought with each other. What in the world was he thinking? Sure, we'd totally moved a lot faster than I had in any other relationship, at least up until this point. We spent every night in bed together, and usually we didn't fall asleep right away until we'd tired each other out to the point of happy, sweaty, exhausted bliss. Amazingly, we settled into a sort of domestic balance without any problems, and coming home to Rob was the highest, brightest point of my entire day.

  But could he really be thinking of jumping in like this?

  "April, open it," Rob said, but it sounded like his voice came from a thousand miles away, barely audible over the pounding of blood in my ears. I just stared down at it, still frozen in place.

  Could I bring myself to say yes? We'd only even been together for a month - that felt like way too short of a time to be in a relationship before committing to it for the rest of our lives. But I did care about Rob, more deeply and fully than I'd cared about anyone else. But we still had more milestones to come before marriage - I hadn't even told him that I truly loved him!

  But at the same time, if I couldn't make a marriage work with someone like Rob, someone who seemed totally perfect for me, could I make it work with anyone?

  "April." Rob's voice softly slipped into my confused thoughts, and he reached out and laid his hand gently on my wrist. "Stop panicking and just open the box, please. Do you trust me?"

  I looked up into his still jaw-droppingly handsome face, those blue eyes that seemed to sparkle even more whenever he looked over at me. This man had, in just a few weeks, become a part of my life that I clung to, that I needed. Even though I'd survived without him, I now felt like I needed him, couldn't get by without him there to light up my life and make me happier th
an I could remember feeling at any time before he came along.

  "Yes," I whispered back to him.

  He smiled, gently rubbing my wrist. "Then just open the box."

  I took one last, deep breath - and then opened the little ring box that he'd placed in my hands. I closed my eyes for a moment as it opened, trying to mentally prepare myself for the sparkling diamond ring that would surely be nestled inside.

  After a moment, I opened my eyes up again, and frowned.

  "A key?" I asked, reaching in and pulling out the little silver key that had been slipped inside the box.

  Rob nodded, watching me. "Yeah. My bonus came through for signing with my new job, and I figured that I should put it to use. So I found a great deal on a two-bedroom apartment that's downtown, closer both to my workplace and also to the Grit offices - and it even comes with an underground garage, so that you can park your car! I impulsively put in an offer, but then I thought that maybe I should ask you before I jumped in and went ahead..."

  His voice trailed off as he looked into my face, trying to read my reaction. "April, you know that I love you, don't you?" he asked softly, and the words melted the ice around my frozen, paralyzed brain.

  "I love you too, you jerk," I managed to reply before bursting into tears and throwing my arms around him, clinging to him.

  He held me, strong and comforting, my bad boy who turned out to be the best man I'd ever met. "Good. Then move in with me, and keep on making me happier than I've ever been, as long as I can remember."

  I pulled back, still blinking away tears. "You ass, you made me think that there was a ring in here! I was trying to figure out what I'd say if you were asking me to marry you right here and now!"

  "What would you have said?" he asked me.

  My mouth was halfway around the word "yes" before I paused. "You know, I'm not really sure," I demurred instead, smiling at him even as the last tears sparkled at the corners of my eyes. "I mean, you do have a tendency to do jerk things, like tricking me into thinking that you're proposing. Maybe I'd say no."