For the Win

by Brenna Aubrey

  "I wish...I wish you had said something to me on Saturday at the party. But you didn't. You left me there, standing in front of everyone."

  He closed his eyes, his jaw working. "I'm completely ashamed of that. And if I could change it, I would. Everything happened so fast. I have no excuse for how I behaved. It was cowardly. I'm so sorry, April. I should have stood up there with you."

  He opened his eyes and met my gaze again. Then he took a deep breath.

  "Those last two weeks while I was on the road, I missed you. A lot. I thought about you all the time, wondered what you were doing. I picked up the phone to text you at least a hundred times a day. I had to restrain myself. Any funny thing that happened, any iffy joke I heard, I wanted to send to you. I wanted you to tell me I was being inappropriate. I love being inappropriate with you."

  I took my own deep breath and let it go. He smiled, and reaching out, he took a strand of my hair and wound it around his index finger. "I love you, April Weiss. My very own fairytale princess."

  Tears immediately pricked my eyes, and I covered my mouth and nose with my hands. Jordan watched me carefully but still made no further move to touch me. I leapt forward and threw my arms around him, pulling him to me.

  His arms snaked around my waist, tightening. It felt so good. So damn good. He buried his face in my hair, kissing my neck, and I kissed him everywhere I could reach...his neck, his jaw, his cheek.

  "Who would have thought a beast could say such pretty words?"

  He turned his head and caught my mouth with his. My heart surged in my chest, like it had grown too big or my chest cavity was too small to contain it. It felt full, painful even. And there was too much love here for it to hold.

  "I told you, I'm the Big Bad Wolf. And later, I'm going to eat you all up."

  I smiled and nipped at his neck with my teeth. "Yes, please."

  He held me for a long time, his hands on my back, his face in my hair, his head against mine. I could have stood like that all day, it felt so good.

  "Come on, get dressed and grab some stuff. I want you to stay over at my place with me. I'm exhausted and you don't look much better." I huffed at him with mock indignation and he smiled, tapping my nose. "We can go take a nap and wake up at one p.m. to see what the stock closed at."

  "And after that?"

  He smiled. "I'll teach you how to surf."

  I quickly pulled on some jeans and crammed enough clothes and toiletries in my bag to last me a few days. Then I grabbed my laptop and purse and told Sid what we were up to. She had a huge grin on her face when we walked out, hand in hand.

  We fell asleep on a day bed on his covered back patio with the cool sea breeze blowing through the screen walls and the sound of waves mercilessly pounding the sand. He was warm and hard and--unlike the first night we'd slept together in Vancouver--a peaceful sleeper.

  He lay so still, I used him as a pillow, my head rising and falling with his gentle breathing. His heavy arm draped across my back, holding me close to him. It took me a while to fall asleep because I spent a long time watching him sleep. Then finally, I snuggled into the nook between his body and his arm, pressed my head to his shoulder and dozed off.

  We woke up to the sound of his phone beeping incessantly. It took us both a minute of stretching and blinking--the bright early afternoon sunlight streaming in through the screen blinding us.

  As if suddenly remembering, he sat up, turned off his alarm and opened the stock app on his phone.

  "DME, come on...DME, where are you? Ah! Holy shit!"

  I sat up beside him, rubbing sleep from my eyes, trying to get a glimpse over his shoulder. "Was that a good holy shit or a bad holy shit?"

  His arm wrapped around my shoulders to pull me to him, and he kissed my hair. "That was a good holy shit. A very, very good holy shit. Closing price is just over forty-one dollars a share."

  "Holy shit!"

  "I know, right?"

  "That's amazing."

  "Yep. Time for me to buy my tropical island and retire."

  I laughed, looking up into his face. He appeared pleased, but there was something else. His great victory had come at a high cost.

  I cleared my throat and he looked up from his phone. "So, uh, what does this all mean? You're unemployed. Does this mean I have to quit grad school to go to work and support you?" I joked. It was worded lightly, but there was still that issue of him having sacrificed his entire career because of me.

  He smoothed a thumb over my cheek. "Don't worry about the job. Depending on how trading continues, as soon as I'm vested in my shares, I might not need to work again for a long time, if ever."

  I pressed my lips together. "But it's not just about the money. You're not going to become an aimless beach bum at twenty-six years of age. We joke about it, but...that was a pretty huge sacrifice you made."

  "Do you still think it was stupid?"

  I shook my head. "I think you believe I'm worth it."

  His eyes glowed with something--admiration, maybe?

  "You are."

  That indescribable feeling filled my throat now and I could hardly swallow. I reached up and ran my hand over his delicious scruff.

  "Then we'll figure it out...we'll find a new dream to work on together."

  He grinned. "Maybe I'll go back to grad school and we could be classmates."

  He bent down and we kissed. It was a slow, sweet kiss. We'd rarely shared those kinds in the weeks we'd been frantically stealing time to hook up. But this was different, because now we knew...there was a future for us, and we didn't have to cram every spare amount of passion, desire and lust into the few minutes we could pilfer from a work day.

  "I don't know...royalty hardly need to go to school," I said, sticking my nose in the air with faux haughtiness. "And I think that, as a princess, I need to make my first royal decree."

  A slow smile formed on his lips. "And what is that, Your Highness?"

  "You must have scruff at all times. Just the right amount of scruff. Not a full beard and not smooth shaven."

  He laughed. "Well, that will tricky. Keeping just the right amount of scruff is an art, you know."

  I laughed. "On the days you have scruff, you can kiss me as much as you want, wherever you want."

  His eyes darkened. "Well, talk about incentivizing. That's talking like a true economic theorist. And I'll take you up on that right after I have something to eat. I'm starving."

  "So am I."

  We ate. We spent the rest of the day together, walking along the beach, talking, joking, watching the recorded interviews from the floor of the stock exchange. There was wild energy out there, and we soaked it all up hours after the fact and from three thousand miles away.

  Later that night, after watching a movie on his widescreen TV and dining on pizza and a little wine, we snuck out to the beach and made love on the packed sand under a big blanket. It felt daring and risky and fun, not unlike the other times we've had sex.

  But unlike those other times, we weren't filled with that rushed urgency to do as much as we could while we could. This time, there was a promise of a future--and oh, what a difference that made.

  Chapter 29

  Jordan

  In my dream, someone was knocking at the door. It started out as a gentle knock, and after a few minutes progressed into pounding. At the same time, my phone chimed with a text message.

  April sat up first, shockingly, and jostled my shoulder. "Some dickhead is pounding on your door."

  "Mmm."

  "It's probably whoever is texting you."

  I sat up. What the hell?

  "Maybe Sexilicious Sondra is demanding her handcuffs back. She's had enough of the waiting," she said, stretching lithely. The sheet fell away from the upper half of her body and my eyes fixed on her luscious bare breasts. Nothing downstairs was compelling enough to pull me away from this gorgeous, naked woman in my bed and the promise of morning sex...

  The doorbell began to ring--at five-second interva
ls, no less--and I'd finally had enough. I slipped out of bed and went looking for my jeans on the floor, not bothering with underwear or a shirt. Whoever it was would have to deal.

  April flopped back on the bed. "You wore me out last night with all that sex. I'm going back to sleep."

  "Get your strength up. I plan on wearing you out again when I get back upstairs."

  "Mmm," she muttered as I left the room. I flew down the stairs, yelling that I was on my way. The pounding stopped.

  When I whipped open the door, ready to tear somebody a new one, I stopped short.

  "You look like hell," I said. Adam hadn't shaved and appeared as if he'd been on a red-eye and slept in his clothes. Not unlike me just twenty-four hours ago, in fact.

  "You, on the other hand, look like fresh morning dew."

  I laughed and stepped back to let him in, combing a hand through my hair, which I was sure was sticking up in eighty different directions.

  "I would have said you look like a million bucks, but that's now chump change for you. It's actually more like forty-one, thirty-two a share."

  He broke into a grin. "I'm still in shock about that."

  "Congrats, man. You are the first official billionaire that I have ever been friends with..." If we were, indeed, still friends.

  Adam walked into the living room and looked out onto the beach through the sliding glass door. He folded his arms across his chest.

  "Sit down. Can I get you something? I can start some coffee..."

  "I'm good," he said, turning around to look at me. "I've been sitting down a lot lately. I'd rather stand."

  That meant he wasn't staying long. "Where's Mia at?"

  "She had to go straight to school this morning. It was hard enough for her to miss the one day."

  "So, umm. I just wanted to say again that I'm sorry--"

  He held his hand up. "Don't. You don't need to say it. I'm sorry, too. I didn't handle that well at all."

  My eyebrow twitched as I tried to hide my surprise. Getting an apology from Adam was about as rare as a gamer nerd at a frat party.

  I shrugged. "I dropped a bomb on you out of nowhere. It's understandable."

  "And I am still pissed about that. Mostly because it sucked being on the stock exchange floor without you. This was supposed to be our crowning moment. Our first huge milestone."

  I looked away, shifting my weight from one leg to the other. "It sucked not being there, man. But I watched it all on the Internet."

  "I don't want to do the rest of this without you, Jordan. The company needs you too much. I need you too much."

  "But you get why I had to, right?"

  "No, I'm still not getting that part." He frowned. "Can you just...explain again?"

  "About it being unfair to punish just her?"

  "But would you have done this for anyone else? Why her?"

  I jammed my fists in my pockets. "Because she's..."

  He folded his arms across his chest. "Go on..."

  "Because I'm...."

  "Yes?"

  "It's different with her man. I'm--ah hell, I love her."

  Adam sucked his lips into his mouth for approximately two seconds before he burst out laughing. "Shit!" he said. "Emilia's going to be so pissed she didn't hear that straight out of the horse's mouth."

  I grimaced. "Sorry to disappoint."

  "So yeah, we already figured that out. It was just fun getting you to admit it. Damn, I should have recorded it on my phone."

  "Fuck you."

  He whipped out his phone and pressed the record button. "Can you say it again so I can send it to her?"

  "You'll have to beat it out of me, dude."

  "That can be arranged." He tucked his phone back into his pocket and sobered. "So, after I leave here, I'm going to contact April and offer to let her finish her internship. Then you're going to have to figure out a way to dodge the bullets after you tell David that you despoiled his daughter on camera."

  I gulped.

  "And then, you are going to have to get your lazy son of a bitch ass dressed and into the office before I have to fire you."

  "So about David..."

  Adam glanced away for a minute, clearly uncomfortable. "I have no idea how David will take this, to be honest. That's going to be on you--and on her. I had Walt's team track down the people at the company party who tweeted and posted those photos of her. They've been asked to look elsewhere for jobs. There were five, and three of them were interns. Cari, the one who tore April's swimsuit, was already dismissed with no recommendation." He paused, shifting. His gaze flicked away from mine. "I think it would be appropriate to inform the officers of what happened. That's not going to be easy for you..."

  I took a deep breath and let it go. "I'll take my lumps. It's only fair."

  He smiled. "And, of course, I'll have to document all this humiliation so I can savor it for years to come..."

  "That's out of the question," I said, grinning. "No deal."

  He paused, almost at a loss for what to say, and then met my gaze again. "So we're good?"

  "Yeah, except you don't have to go anywhere if you want to speak to April."

  His brow went up and he threw a glance at the stairway. "You want to get her down here so I can talk to her, then? And for God's sake, put a shirt on."

  It took me a little time to quickly explain to April what had happened and then convince her she looked decent enough to go downstairs. She washed the sleep from her face, got dressed and pulled her hair back, but still mumbled about how she looked terrible. Impossible, in my opinion.

  Finally, she came downstairs. By this time, Adam and I were both drinking fresh cups of coffee in the kitchen. April was pale--more so than usual--and looked sheepish, but quietly congratulated Adam on the successful IPO. He thanked her and explained that he wanted to offer her the chance to finish her internship at Draco.

  She took a deep breath and let it out, stirring her coffee while appearing deep in thought. Then, she looked up. "Thank you for the offer. And thank you for taking Jordan back. He shouldn't lose his job over what was basically my fault." Adam's eyes widened and I frowned, about to open my mouth to object. She stopped me, holding up her hand. "I hit record on my phone without his knowledge. He would never have done something that stupid."

  "I've done stupid shit before. We all have. Adam has too." Adam rolled his eyes at me and returned his attention to April.

  "How did it end up on the Internet?" he asked.

  April straightened and looked at me. "Well, even Jordan doesn't know this because I just found out. I'd always thought it was an accident. Just so you know, I'm probably the most non-tech-savvy person you have ever employed. But my roommate traced what happened using my phone and figured out that one of the other interns--Cari--found the video on my phone when I showed her some pictures, and she sent a copy to herself and uploaded it." She turned to me when I reacted to this news with a curse. "With everything going on yesterday, I forgot to tell you. Sid figured it out the night before."

  Well, now I was really pissed. Adam rubbed his forehead, taking that in. "Wow, she ended up being a real troublemaker. Wish I'd known that six months ago."

  April sighed. "I wish I'd had the guts to tell you sooner...but I should warn you now that she has a thing for you and it's a bit obsessive." Adam colored but didn't look the least bit surprised. Then April licked her lips and squared her shoulders. "When she started plotting to try to get Mia out of the picture, I finally figured she'd lost it. She was trying to pressure me and others to do her dirty work for her."

  Adam and I both straightened and looked at her, alarmed. Hell no. I was about to speak, but Adam cut me off. "She was planning to do something to Mia?"

  April looked down into her coffee, coloring. "At the party, Cari wanted me to tear Mia's dress and pull it down, saying she would expose me if I didn't. When I refused, she grabbed my swimsuit and did it to me instead."

  I exchanged a look with Adam. Wow...that was some crazy shit
. I knew the girl had been a bit touched when I'd caught her threatening April, and now I regretted not letting her go on the spot. But I'd been more concerned about covering my own ass so that none of this came out...

  I watched April while she looked at Adam with no small amount of fear. Adam's jaw tightened. "Well, thanks for letting me know. I'll handle this, and you don't need to worry about her anymore."

  Her shoulders rounded with relief. I knew it had taken a lot to tell him all of that. But I was glad that she didn't need to be reminded to speak up for herself.

  She blinked and looked out the window, her chin held high. "I have to be honest. I'm not brave enough to walk back into Draco after what happened on Saturday. But I'm grateful for what you did on my behalf--dismissing the people who posted the pictures and all of that."

  I frowned, disappointed, but could I blame her? I cleared my throat to get her attention. "I'm going to butt in here and say that I think you do have the guts to go back in there. I know you do."

  She shook her head. "That's easy for you to say. They don't all know it's you in the video."

  I nodded. "You're right. That's why I'm going to tell them."

  She straightened, eyes locking on mine again. "Jordan--"

  I held my hand up. "We can talk about it later. I'm not going to force you to go back there if you don't want to, but...I sure could use your moral support when I go back."

  Adam glanced between the two of us and pushed his coffee mug aside. "I'm going to get going. I at least need to show my face over there before I go home and crash."

  I walked Adam out, and before he left, put my hand on his shoulder. "Thanks, man."

  He shook his head. "It's what friends do." And he was gone.

  When I went back inside, April hugged me around the waist, holding me close for a long time, her head pressed to my shoulder. I ran my hand down her silky hair. "We'll figure it--"

  "I'll do it. I'll go with you. I was almost done with my project, anyway."

  I kissed the top of her head, something like pride glowing in my chest. "You're sure?"

  She tilted her head to look up at me. "Yes. Now kiss me before I change my mind."

  I did just that. Long, slow and deep, our lips and arms locked. I was reminded of that morning sex I'd been deprived of... But there was still some ground we needed to cover.