by Lindsey Hart
SEDUCING
MY
BEST FRIEND
Alphalicious Billionaires
Lindsey Hart
CONTENTS
BOOK DESCRIPTION
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
EPILOGUE
PREVIEW MARRIED BY MISTAKE
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Never get so drunk that you end up posting on social media that you want your best friend to marry you.
You might wake up the next day to find his butler on your doorstep ready to whisk you away to marry his boss.
Wait, did I not mention my best friend is now a big a$$ billionaire? No? Well, then maybe I should also tell you that he took my V-Card back in college and kind of proposed to me on that same night.
Ok, to be honest, he said this, “let’s get married in ten years.”
And what did I do, I ran. Packed everything up, moved to another town and never talked to him again. I mean, he was my freaking best friend. The guy who grew up with me, wet my bed during a sleepover and with whom I shared everything. That one night was definitely not supposed to happen … even though it was like super unicorntastic and I ended up discovering how huge of a package he actually had.
BUT he was My Best Friend and You Don’t Do Orga$mic Things to Your Best Friend! Period.
Well, there you have it. Now, it’s ten years later and he is making good on his promise … without my freaking approval!
I mean you DON’T just get married to someone whom you have not seen in ten years!
And what the hell happened to the scrawny little geek I knew. Where did he lose his glasses?
And are those things my fingers touched by mistake freaking abs? Not just two or four but six of them! OMG.
This Geekalicious Billionaire is so ready to become an Alpha to get hitched. He's going to seduce her whether she wants it or not!
Hey Loves, come meet those sexy men loaded with more than just that cash package and so ready to claim their not-so-reluctant heroine. Each book is a standalone and can be read in any order. And don't forget, we are team HEA all the way!
COPYRIGHT
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, or transmitted by email without permission in writing from the publisher. While all attempts and efforts have been made to verify the information held within this publication, neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for errors, omissions, or opposing interpretations of the content herein. The book is for entertainment purposes only. The views expressed are those of the author alone and should not be taken as expert instruction or commands.
Copyright © Passion House Publishing Ltd 2019
All rights reserved.
You can contact the team at [email protected].
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lindsey Hart is a married mom and lives in Ohio with her husband and two furry ball Persian cats who consider themselves as owners of the house.
She specializes in sweet to extra hot and dirty romance and strongly believes in happily ever after. If you are looking for a page turner, then you are in for a wild and naughty ride with feisty heroines and alpha male heroes.
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CHAPTER 1
Jesse
“Yo, Jesse. Earth to Jesse.” Sam snapped his annoying as hell fingers and leaned in with an annoying as hell look on his annoying as hell face. He had a pizza stain on the left corner of his mouth and his eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep. Probably still hungover from his drinking last night. And today was only Thursday. The guy seriously had no abstinence. “You’re rich now. When are you going to grow up and start adulting? You know? Getting a girlfriend? Getting married? Moving on? I’m tired of mom calling me up, pinning all her hopes for a grandkid on me. Never gonna happen. Need you to grow a set and take the pressure off me. Don’t know why she’s given up on you, but thinks it’s still going to happen for me.”
Jesse leaned back against the leather couch in his massive living room, a sweaty beer dripping into his hand, onto his lap.
Brothers. Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t live without…
Okay. Whoever coined that phrase was wrong. Dead. Wrong.
The first part was just about spot on.
Jesse Samson could definitely not live with his brother. He used to. Back in college, they shared a tiny apartment. Since Sam was a slob and never bothered to pick up more than his dirty underwear in the morning, sometimes turn them inside out, and put them back on, there were fights. Every single day. It wasn’t that he was OCD or anything. He wasn’t even a clean freak. It was just that he hated finding moldy pizza boxes all over the apartment. Food wrappers in his brother’s bed on the odd chance he braved the space to go in there for something of his the bastard had ‘borrowed.’ God, there was one day, when he’d been searching for his phone after falling asleep on their decrepit couch, when he’d reached in and pulled out a half-eaten burger covered in blue fuzz.
It was too much. The mess. The constant parties that Sam threw. The beer bottles littering every single surface.
He’d moved out and shacked up with his bestie. Who just happened to be a woman.
A beautiful woman. A sexy woman. A girl he’d known since they were in diapers. She was always just the girl that his parents made him hang out with because his mom happened to babysit her while her mom was at work, but on the first day of kindergarten, she became his best friend. She’d pushed him down the big metal slide in the playground and broke his glasses. Not on purpose. She wasn’t mean like that.
They were horsing around at the top of the slide, too big for their little britches, and after ten minutes of encouraging him to let go, she got tired of waiting and gave him a not so gentle shove. He went flying down that metal horror, a thing straight out of every five-year old’s nightmare.
Jesse remembered the slide was so damn hot that it burned right through his grass-stained jeans. He flew off the other end, seriously sprouted a pair of wings, and landed face down in the rocks. Yes. Rocks. Someone had the bright idea to fill the playground full of abrasive rocks. So yeah. Bit it good. Got a mouthful of sandy gravel and his glasses went flying. Broke the lenses right out of them.
He’d cried. He’d cried about his scraped palms and the gravel in his mouth. He’d cried with fear and pain. And she was there. Whooshed right down that slide after him, except with far more grace. She scooped him up into her arms and held him against her warm sunshine scented chest. The curtain of her dark, fine hair enveloped him, and sh
e told him not to be scared. Told him he was a hero. That he looked like a bird. That she wouldn’t have been brave enough to go down if it wasn’t for him. Told him not to cry.
And he was done.
At five years old, he’d made a vow. Sydney or nothing.
Unfortunately, it was mostly nothing.
“So, I just met this really hot chick the other day,” Sam said slurring his words slightly.
Brothers. Can’t live without them. That was definitely not true.
He could definitely live without Sam coming over to his place a few times a week and insulting him if he could live without Sydney.
Sam has always been big, tall, blonde and athletic. Sam never had to wear geeky glasses or fill into hand me down shoes that were always just a little too big and made him walk funny. Sam never had to have his pant legs rolled up because they were a mile too long. Sam never had his cheeks pinched because he was ‘just too freakin’ cute.’
Sam was one of those homecoming, all American, quarterback types. Seriously. He was the high school team’s quarterback. He was homecoming king. His was pretty much one of those typical stories. Popular in high school. Had everything. Girls, friends, booze, a free ride in college. He liked to party, a little too much, blew it on the field, blew his scholarship, dropped out. Liked to live the glory days and hang out with his old buds every single weekend- made possible by the fact that they hadn’t moved on to bigger better things either, not even sixteen years after graduating.
Still lived in the same Cleveland suburb they grew up in.
Still partied hard and chased women, did the bare minimum to scrape by at a shit job.
Still had the nerve to come over without knocking, put his disgusting dirty shoes up on the coffee table, crack a beer he hadn’t paid for, raid the fridge for a sandwich he made with groceries that weren’t his, and tell his younger brother what to do with his life.
So yeah. Brothers. Definitely can’t live with them. Definitely could live without them. Okay, probably could live without them.
“Jesse? Man?” Sam leaned forward on the couch and did that annoying thing that he knew Jesse hated. He snapped his fingers right under his nose. “Where’d you go there? You just checked right out?”
“I’m tired,” Jesse ground out, beyond irritated. “It’s midnight on a Thursday night. You barge in here half an hour ago, take my kitchen apart, and slam up your muddy shoes on my coffee table after trailing them through my house.”
“So? You have a maid.” Sam bit off another huge portion of that sandwich he’d actually found the skills to assemble- impressive, since he was usually limited to cracking the top off a beer and chewed loudly, with his mouth open.
“That’s not the point.”
“Totally the point. If I was rich enough to not have to clean up after myself, I wouldn’t.”
Jesse rolled his eyes. “You don’t now, and never have, so what would be the difference? And mom isn’t your maid, just an FYI.”
“Shut it.”
“You live in their basement. You should at least bother to keep the stench of rotting food and old bedsheets from reaching the main floor. Do you even wash them in between… uh- sessions?”
Sam flipped him the bird and jammed the rest of the sandwich into his mouth. “That’s sick, man. You’re my brother. Not discussing that with you.”
“No, but you think it’s okay to bring home a parade of women into mom and dad’s house when you’re thirty-four years old? Tell me how exactly mom has her hopes pinned on you for a grandchild? Oh wait? She’s not seriously hoping you’ll slip up one night, is she? Because that’s just wrong. And I know mom and she wants a grandkid the legit way. Committed relationship and all.”
“You’re a prick, you know that?” There was no heat behind Sam’s words, though.
Jesse crossed his arms. He let his beer sweat away onto his lap, without taking a sip. He didn’t even want it, but Sam had of course cracked the top and passed it over, like it was his house and Jesse barged in right before midnight, not the other way around.
“Definitely not.”
“Just because you date here and there, doesn’t mean mom doesn’t know that you’re never going to give her a grandkid. Ever. Because you’re never going to be with anyone long enough to produce one. She knows that Skyndey was the only one for you. Always has. Since she won’t give you the time of day, went off and did her own thing down there in San Francisco and hasn’t called up in ten years, she knows that she’s shit out of luck when it comes to you. She’s accepted that you’re going to be single for the rest of your life.”
Sam picked up the other half of the sandwich and put it to his mouth. Raw rage rose up in Jesse, choking off his ability to be reasonable or sane or to even breathe. He could deal with the other shit, but no one- not even Sam, walked in there and called Sydney Skydney. He used to call her that all the time when they were kids, but that was a big hell no and Jesse was like a bull waiting for that red flag to be waved in front of his face.
Before he even knew what he was doing, he reached out and knocked the damn sandwich out of Sam’s hand. It hit the floor, spraying mustard, mayo, cheese, and salami all over the hardwood and up the side of the couch.
“Get the hell out,” he ground out. “Now.”
“Aw, come on, I was just having a bit of fun. It’s true. It’s true and you know it and that’s why you’re getting your damn panties in a twist.”
Jesse sat back on the couch. He realized that he’d spilled his beer down his shirt and that only made him more pissed off. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask his brother why he couldn’t just get his shit together, stop leaching off their parents- which was really leaching off of him, because he was the one who had given them the money to retire, paid them back for all they’d done for him- and grow the fuck up, but he bit it back.
Sam knew. He knew that he’d screwed up his life in a big way. He didn’t know how to fix it and even though Jesse didn’t want to feel sorry for the guy, he kind of did.
And he was his brother.
The curse of can’t live without ‘em and all that.
Instead of retorting something he’d definitely regret, he flicked open his phone and distracted himself with a few mindless minutes of browsing the black void of social media while he calmed the hell down. Since his company took off in a big way and people knew who he was, he had an account under a fake name that was kept ultra-private with only his close friends and family on there. He did it just because his mom had broken down almost a year back and begged him to make one, just so his grandma and grandpa in Georgia could keep in touch. He didn’t do calls and he was admittedly shitty at personal emails, so he kind of got her point. He couldn’t stand to see his mom crying, so he’d given in. Let her make it for him.
He rarely used it.
Correction.
He rarely used it because his mom had gone and done the craziest thing and added Sydney Underhill to it, along with most of his old high school and college friends that he was still close with.
His mom didn’t know what happened with him and Syd, so he could excuse her for that. Syd never reached out to him. Never even acknowledged he was on her friends list other than accepting the request in the first place. Probably because it was the token nice girl thing to do and even though she’d moved on with her life and moved away after he spouted off that bunch of nonsense about loving her and wanting to marry her one day, when they were both adult enough to do it, she was still nice.
Probably because to her, he’d always be that little kid she held after he’d bombed off the slide. Her geeky friend. Her roommate. A guy who was so deep in the friend’s zone, it wasn’t even funny.
Because yeah, it was definitely not funny what happened.
It ruined everything.
She’d moved away the next damn morning, just packed the most important things in her car and left. Without a word.
Ten years, one month, and six days ago.
H
e’d kept track. Because he was entirely, utterly, pathetic.
Jesse kept mindlessly scrolling, talking himself down from smashing his fist into his brother’s face, which would have been about the tenth time that month. His mom didn’t need another headache or a bloody nose to clean up, so he got himself the freaking heck under control.
His thumb kept flipping, moving that screen up, his eyes seeing none of it, until he stopped, because he’d stop every single time he saw her name. Sydney Underhill.
It was the large S that caught his eyes, but then he scanned the rest of what she’d written.
His stomach bottomed out. The world stopped. Time stopped. Everything stopped.
“Looks like you’re in luck,” he found himself saying woodenly into the room, just putting those impossible words out there because they bubbled up inside of him and erupted from his throat before he could take them back. “Looks like I’m getting married.”
CHAPTER 2
Sydney
The infuriating pounding on her door could only mean one thing.
Her mother.
Which, after celebrating her thirty-second birthday in complete style with her friends, even if it was a Thursday night and they showed up at her apartment unannounced and took her out and got her completely hammered at a really nice restaurant on really expensive drinks that they splurged for even though they didn’t have the money, was something she couldn’t deal with.
Sydney had called in sick to work. No one there knew it was her birthday the night before, so she had no doubt she’d get away with the flu she claimed to have.
Her aching head, sloshing stomach, elevated pulse, and the saliva that flooded her mouth like a warning every single time she moved an inch on her bed certainly felt like a bad flu. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d ever drunk so much. Or been so hung over.
