Irresistible (Underneath it All Series: Book One) (An Alpha Billionaire Romance)

by Ava Claire

  While all the companions on staff were thoroughly scanned (along with the clients) and offering their services of their own free will, there was still the need to be discreet and cautious. I felt like some secret agent in my black trench coat and cocktail dress, like I was headed to a gala with some dignitary. Before Jackson, that thrill only lasted until I stepped into the plush bedroom and remembered the only intrigue was that I was a highly paid prostitute and men that were swimming in money had purchased me for a few hours.

  There was something more with Jackson. A heat in his gaze, in his touch that was more than our bodies. More than lust. Lust hung in The Red Room like oxygen. Vital and inescapable and ripe for the taking. If he just wanted sex, there was an endless supply of women who would be happy to oblige.

  For some reason, he wanted me.

  That’s what I held onto as I showered and moisturized from head to toe, picking lingerie that was just as naughty as it was nice. I even replicated his gross bourbon drink from the club.

  I’d expected him to burst through the door, forgetting all about the drink and everything except-

  I shoved my key in the ignition, ignoring the whisper in my head that said it was on me for taking sex and reading something more into it. We knew how to do the bumping and grinding. We knew how to do that very well. It was the rest that made things awkward. So unbearable that he couldn’t wait to leave.

  I was burning up despite the AC screaming from the vents at full blast. The things he could do with his voice alone. The way his fingertips could simultaneously caress and punish did things to me. Just the mere thought of him had me twitching as I pointed the rental car toward the exit. None of that mattered, because the best sex in the world wasn’t worth him treating me like he’d forgotten me completely the moment he filled the condom.

  Before I could stop the words, I’d told him it was done. Whatever this, it, was. From his shrug and silent departure, it was clear I’d been wrong. Nothing was here, after all.

  I managed to leave the building with my pride, without a single tear falling. I’d take the money and chip away at the debt and the next time I was tempted to turn Pretty Woman into my own personal fairytale, I’d remember the hollow feeling that Jackson Colt left me with.

  Like the universe knew I was hanging on by the tiniest thread, they had the scissors at the ready. I was just a snip away from losing it altogether when my mother started lighting up my cell phone earlier.

  2:03 AM: (Colleen McLeod) - 911! Call me when u get a minute

  2:13 AM: (Colleen McLeod) - Did u get my text

  2:16 AM: (Colleen McLeod) - U know I wouldn't ask if it wasn’t an emergency

  I yanked my shades from my purse and shielded my eyes. I didn’t want the sun. Or brightness. Not when I was headed back to the home I couldn’t wait to escape. A home I would have written off completely, never to visit again, if it wasn’t for Rose and my insistence on helping my mother clean up her messes.

  The texts I got from Rose were the ones that got me on the road.

  9:00 AM: (Rose) - I know you’re busy but Mom said she texted you and didn’t hear back?

  9:03 AM: (Me) - Hey sis. Shouldn’t u b in class?

  I kept the thread open, watching the notification that she was typing something linger and disappear several times, like she was contemplating just how much to tell me.

  9:15 AM: (Rose) - Mom made me stay home today

  That got my full attention. It was just like my mother, to get Rose to reach out to me because that was easier than just coming clean herself. I’d learned a long time ago that while her personal life was constantly in shambles, my mother’s emergencies were often of the cosmetic variety. I had to force myself not to take her too seriously. But when it came to my sister, I’d always overreact. It was the least I could do since I couldn’t do what I truly wanted, which was to save her from our mother altogether.

  It could be a real emergency, like the one that made me take a leave of absence and work full-time, or the woman could have lost the remote or ran out of booze and she was calling me home to go grocery shopping. With Rose in the middle, I’d drop everything, and my mother knew it.

  I turned up the radio and tried to distract myself with lyrics about living it up and champagne and all the things that pop culture seemed infatuated with these days. What pop stars and famous faces would I find if I Googled Jackson Colt?

  “And that’s enough radio for me,” I grumbled, deciding I was better off with silence. Even if I had half an hour to go. If only I could silence the voices in my head.

  Had I inherited my mother’s bad taste in men? I’d spent so many years navigating her crappy love life that I had no time nor interest in building my own. There had been dates of course. Things here and there on campus. My roommates used to call me Frozen, and it wasn’t because I loved singing “Let it Go.” They’d pine and make their guys Facebook official as soon as they could swing it, then they’d cry and lament when things went south. In my world, no guy lasted long enough to make it official on social media. I didn’t let anyone stick around and make themselves comfortable. I used them, then discarded them, before they could use and discard me.

  Just like Jackson used you.

  Just like he threw you away.

  The tears I didn’t cry last night, of frustration, of loneliness, filled my eyes. Blurred my view. The similarities between me and the guy I told to fuck off couldn’t be more clear. My scars ran deep; I carried them with me. I saw them every time I looked in the mirror. What were his scars? Who hurt him so deeply that fate tossed us together? Who broke his heart so deeply that booking it as far away from me as possible was preferable to having a conversation?

  A tear sliced down my cheek. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t get to know.

  I swiped my hands over my face and sat up straight. Forward. Put the billionaire that piqued your interest behind you and focus on your endgame. Life after the debt is paid, Rose settled at Yale, and you can close the door on your mother, able to honestly say you tried your best.

  I should have been hit by the vast, seemingly endless ways my mother disappointed me, but there was only bitterness. ‘Mom.’ When was the last time I’d called her that without sarcasm? Without it being a silent plea to put away the cabernet, shut off the TV, and notice me? Notice Rose?

  When the tears wouldn’t stop, I turned the radio back on. I could weather tales of broken romance. I could even take bragging about a lifestyle I’d never lead and had only glimpsed from afar, when I was killing myself just to survive. I couldn’t take my mother. She was the one person I should be able to turn to and count on, but she couldn’t get outside of herself. She was willfully blind to the desolation she left in her wake.

  The city fell away and the distance between the woman I was trying to be and the girl I was running away from shrank. Over the bridge, the buildings didn't kiss the sky. The roads stretched their limbs since the congestion was in the rear view mirror. Taxis and luxury cars were traded for rimless sedans and minivans. The city was made for the screen, with the bustle and the smells and the business suits. This was home, where everything moved a little slower and the people didn't have time for glitz and glamour. They were just waking up so they could work hard and get back to their families, so they could go to sleep and do it all over again.

  I got so caught up in escaping where I grew up that I forgot the things that would always be home. The ‘Curl up and Dye’ just off of Main Street with the worn, neon-colored chairs and Miss Betty, an older stylist who gave me and Rose a discount because she knew things were tight at home. The movie theater that had been around since the town was founded and still had all the original seats and fixtures that looked grand, cobwebs and all. The convenience store across the street from the high school with the yellowed sign taped to the door that decreed that no more than two schoolchildren were allowed in the store at one time.

  And then there was Falcon High. Those memories were filled with projects and papers and
teachers who saw something in me that I didn't see in myself. A principal who went to school with my mother and loved to reminisce about the girl my mother used to be: gorgeous, popular, prom queen, the polar opposite of me, with zero coordination and very few social skills. The stories, and Principal Mason's eyes, always held a note of sadness. The force to be reckoned with, who glowed in old yearbooks and trophy cases for her sports achievements, was a bleary-eyed hot mess now. My mother didn't come out to support me, no matter how many times I looked out into the audience for her face. She only showed up at graduation because Grandma begged her to, and she came up with an excuse that had her shuffling toward the exit before I even gave the valedictorian speech.

  For such a smart girl, I should have gone farther than the city to get away. I should have put a body of water between us.

  Before I could daydream about the life I could have lived, an ache in my chest reminded me of something. Someone that needed me, more than I needed to run.

  Rose.

  The ache grew into a hole when I pulled into the broken driveway, the rental car jolting from the craters where the weeds tried to reclaim their territory. The shudders didn't dull my view of the porch. Rose was sitting on the bottom stoop. Her strawberry blonde hair hung like a hood over her face.

  Something was wrong.

  Something was very wrong.

  ~

  I usually kept my nose glued to the pages of a book on my walk home from school. Falcon Elementary was precisely 1.3 miles from our house and I knew every crack, turn, and crosswalk like the back of my hand. It was a walk I'd done every day since I realized that when Mom came to pick me up, she smelled more like her 'special juice' than perfume. She laughed more, which felt good, but I knew she wasn't herself and I spent those 1.3 miles on alert. Reminding her about the stop signs. Telling her the color of the lights so she'd stop and go when she was supposed to.

  I was only ten, but I knew that something wasn't right. I knew she was breaking some sort of rule because when we passed other adults and people she knew, she'd press her fingers to her lips. I preferred the company of my books, where everything and everyone were exactly where they should be. Safe, words in black and white, my friends who never disappointed me.

  When I hit the halfway mark, making a sharp right on our street, I paused at the corner. I usually lost myself in the pages, letting the story carry me the rest of the way home, but there was a smell that made me bookmark my spot with my finger and turn my nose into the wind. It was smoke, faint yet thick and when I looked up at the sky, it turned the clouds an angry gray.

  I dropped my book, and the rest of the world seemed to collapse around me as I followed the sirens. Over the two dips in the cement that I'd tripped on dozens of times. Past Ms. Mcallister's garden with her rainbow-colored tulips. I didn't stop to smell her flowers today and she wasn't knee deep in the dirt, her smile as bright as the sun above us. She was an obstacle I wasn't prepared for, smack dab in the middle of the sidewalk. She tried to hug me, tell me there'd been a fire, but I wrestled free and started running. Panic blared as loudly as the fire trucks that barreled past me.

  Mom...

  Rose...

  Our house, with its peeling white paint and chipping green shutters was still standing, but thick, black smoke was billowing out the front window.

  The fireman wouldn't let me past the broken gate, no matter how I pounded his chest, screaming my little sister's name over and over again.

  "Say-dee?"

  The tiny voice somehow reached through my wails and I whirled toward the sound. I thought I was hallucinating. The house was on fire and that voice was an angel.

  My sister stood on the sidewalk beside me, covered in a blanket, her grungy Dora the Explorer t-shirt peeking out. I had to be hard, strong, and she was the soft one. The doll with her big eyelashes and her round cheeks, her hair more blonde than red. Not like mine. Not like Mom's. I didn't even look for Mom, I just clasped Rose to my chest, tears streaming down my face until she wriggled free.

  She gawked at me, her ash stained forehead scrunching. "Are you crying, Say-dee?"

  Before I could answer, a paramedic had jerked her head from the ambulance, waving the two of us over. She claimed our mother wanted to see us, but I knew that was for her benefit more than ours. I'd never get the truth from her. A truth that I hoped to God wasn't true at all.

  There was only one way to find out.

  I gripped Rose by her scrawny little shoulders and forced a smile on my face. "What happened?"

  Rose scrubbed her tiny blue-green eyes with her fists. "Mommy was watching her stories and fell asleep. Her cigarette fell on the magazine and-" Rose mimed an explosion. “I ran over to the neighbors for help, just like you told me to.”

  I pulled my sister back to my chest, squeezing her tight as the sobs shook my body. She shouldn't have had to go to a neighbor for help. She shouldn't have to parent and watch our mother.

  "Sissy, don't cry," Rose murmured against my chest. "Mommy is okay."

  My tears were liquid on my cheeks, but my heart was as hard as the ground beneath us. "I'm not worried about-" 'Mom,' 'Mommy,' they seemed too good for that woman, so I called her nothing at all. "From now on, it's just me and you, Rose." I cradled her face in my hands and I made a promise. "Day or night, if you need me, ever, I'll be there."

  *

  "Hey there, kid."

  Any other teenager would have rolled their eyes and pointedly reminded whomever had forgotten that they were far from 'kid' territory. Rose just pushed her pale hair from her brilliant green eyes and gave me a gap tooth grin that almost threw me off the scent. Almost made me not worry. The fact that she remained glued to the steps instead of throwing her arms around me, nearly knocking me over like usual, was all the confirmation I needed. I'd been right to drop everything and come home.

  Anxiety twisted my gut, urging me to get to the root of why Rose was out on the porch, without her phone in her hand, a textbook on her lap, or surrounded by all the friends that buzzed around her like gnats. I peered at her out of the corner of my eye. We both had inherited our mother's beauty: striking features and eyes that almost looked Photoshopped because they shined so brightly. We both bit our lips when we were nervous or excited, and unfortunately, we were also stuck with our mother's propensity for not talking about our feelings. For women with skin so fair that we didn't tan, we burned, and even thought we had lanky frames that made Grandma insist we put on some weight or we'd get blown away, we had spines of steel. Our hurts, as heavy and burdensome as they were, were ours to bear. And we'd carry that cross to the grave.

  I watched Rose burrow her toes in a worn groove in the wooden steps. When our mother had almost burned down the house, she'd laughed off my sister's story instead of admitting she was at fault. The lie had been good enough for the insurance company, but she didn't spend a penny of the check fixing the broken bones of our home. There were still faded scorch marks near the window, and the house was in such disrepair that I'd seen delivery trucks eye the property warily like it was abandoned, or well on its way to being condemned.

  I'd spent my teenage years complaining, promising my mother that as soon as I got my diploma, I was never coming back. Rose was gentler and just accepted our reality as the way things were. I wanted to take her by the shoulders and tell her that she didn't have to protect our mother. It was backwards and unfair and she’d already grown up way too fast. I wanted to know what fresh catastrophe the woman who brought us into this world had wrought.

  Instead, I just listened to the wind whistle through the old, rotted trees and made small talk.

  "How's school?"

  Rose stopped burrowing for a moment and shrugged her shoulders. "Same ole, same ole."

  I scooted closer to her. "Rose, what's-"

  "How's work?" she butted in, her smile a little more mischievous, a little more Rose than the first.

  The 'wink wink' behind her question wasn't lost on me. She was the only soul that
knew that waitressing wasn't my only gig. Well, technically Jackson too, since he was also a member of the club.

  His name alone was enough to make a flutter dance through me, the wings settling between my thighs. I missed him more than I was willing to admit. I missed the potential.

  I forced him from my mind and threw Rose’s cagey answer right back at her. "Same ole, same ole."

  There were only a few inches between us and she closed the gap in a single move. She inspected my face with the thoroughness of a doctor conducting an exam. When she leaned in, turning her sea glass eyes into tiny slits of color, I half expected her to tell me to open my mouth and say, "ahh."

  "You met someone."

  I had no energy to pretend she hadn't hit the nail right on the head, but knowing I was so transparent made me want to sink into the ground. I settled for turning my head toward the street. This wasn't a gushing, happy kinda story. “Yeah, I met someone.”

  "And?!" She nudged me with her shoulder. "Details! How did you guys meet? When do I get to meet him?"

  I dropped my chin to the chest. Even with my shades hiding all telltale signs that I was bothered with how things ended, I still wasn't ready to look at my sister and give it to her straight. "None of that matters. It's over."

  "Well, we both know that ain't true," Rose scoffed. She popped her gum a few times, a sound that simultaneously drove me crazy and comforted me. "I've never heard you own up to liking a guy. Like, ever. So clearly, he matters."

  "Words like 'never' don't pack quite the punch you think when you're seventeen years old," I teased. Anything to detract from the heat that was currently baking my face. It was a heat that had nothing to do with the sun at all. If I was the kind of woman that believed in fairy tales, I couldn't have picked a better one than ‘The Billionaire and The Escort.’ Two people who were so much more than what they showed the world. A man and a woman with such passion that they could set said world on fire.