by Lexy Timms
“Simon, sweetie.” Her vision blurred with tears. She tried to fight them back, but it was no use. Tears rolled down her cheeks and she started sobbing. Her heart felt like it was going to burst and she gasped for air. Already she was a blubbering mess, and he hadn’t even asked her yet.
He opened the box, and though her vision was a blur she saw the glint of a ring. “I love you. With everything that I have. With my heart. And my soul. And my mind. You and Finn are my family. I never want to go a day without either of you. Not one day. Will you marry me? Will you be mine for the rest of our lives?”
Unable to stand, she sank to her knees and threw her arms around him. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
She felt Finn’s tiny arms wrap around both of them. “I had the ring this whole time. Dad thought he lost it, but I had it.”
“Dad?” She pulled back to look at her son. “You called him ‘Dad’.”
“He’s my dad no matter what,” Finn said. “Even if you say no.”
She stared at Simon. “You thought I’d say no?”
“It was a possibility,” he said, and shrugged. “So, help this poor guy out, still on his knees. Heather, will marry me?”
“Are you kidding? Of course I’ll marry you.” She rained kisses on Simon’s face and started laughing through her tears. “Did Finn know about this?”
Simon laughed and held her tightly. “I asked him this morning.”
She pulled back to look at her son. “You asked Finn?”
“Of course. I’d never do anything without thinking about how it would affect him,” Simon said.
Now she really was crying and she got to her feet, pulled her son into her arms, and kissed his chubby cheeks. “No wonder you two were acting so weird.”
Finn giggled and she set him back down. “Bet you didn’t guess what was gonna happen.”
“I didn’t guess.” She gazed at Simon, still on his knee.
He opened the box to take out the ring. A ring with the biggest diamond she had ever seen in her life.
She gasped. “That ring cost more than ten-thousand dollars, didn’t it?”
Simon took her hand and slipped the ring onto her finger. “Heather, that’s the one and only promise I’ll ever break. Because I love you and I’m going to spoil you today. And now that we’re engaged I’m going to spoil you for the rest of our lives.”
The rest of their lives. They were going to live together. Watch Finn grow up. Grow old together. One day they would tell this story to their grandchildren.
She took his hands and he got to his feet. “We’re engaged. Holy guacamole, Simon.”
“You said holy-guaca-moly,” Finn started giggling. “That’s silly.”
“We’re going to be a family for real now,” he said.
“We’ve always been a real family,” she told him.
Simon’s eyes were shining and he quickly looked down to focus on Finn. “Hey, buddy, since you kept the ring so safe, do you want to be my best man at the wedding?”
Finn nodded excitedly. “Yup. Hey, can I get the biggest slice of cake?”
“You sure can,” Simon said.
“I love you, Mom,” Finn said. “I love you, Dad.”
Simon blinked rapidly and lifted Finn up with one arm, then took Heather’s hand with his free hand. The hand that had the ring on her finger. He brought her hand to his lips and the gesture melted her heart.
“Let’s go to the top of the lighthouse,” he told her.
She smiled, too overcome with happiness to do anything more than nod. The sun finally sank behind the clouds, but the darkness never came. Instead, a beam of light emanated from the lighthouse, casting its warm glow over the sea.
As they gazed up at the light, she knew that their love would be the same. No matter how dark it got, the two lights in her life would always light her way.
THE END
BILLIONAIRE SECRETS SERIES
The Secret
Freedom
Courage
Trust
Impulse
WORTH BILLIONS
EXCERPT INCLUDED!
Worth Billions Blurb
SMALL TOWNS ARE FOR small minds. I left for college and never looked back.
Ensconced in my luxurious, and lucrative, vineyard, I barely ever spare a thought for my old life. Until I got word that my self-declared ‘godfather’ had passed and put me in charge of his estate.
Now I’ve got to go back to the town where the cows outnumber the people to put his affairs in order. I expected to see familiar faces, a little order, a lot worse for wear.
What I didn’t expect to see is the fresh-faced female who snuck into my bed, and who’s trying to sneak into my heart. But can I trust her, or is she after my bank account and not my affection?
Warning: This is a steamy romance story that includes adult content suitable for readers 18+
Chapter 1
Grayson
My hometown smelled like shit. Literal, ethereal shit. Cow shit. Horse shit. Chicken shit. All sorts of shit. Such a fitting omen for my return to the awful place. Why the hell Anton had put me in charge of his estate was beyond me. I was sure the man had family other than me. But I sort of owed it to him to settle his estate. He took me in during the roughest time in my childhood and never once asked me for anything.
Well, he almost never asked.
He called himself my godfather, but the only fatherly thing he ever did was cuss me for wanting to play football before rolling over and accepting it. He said I’d never make anything of myself playing football professionally. That being big didn’t mean I could make it in the big leagues. He advised me to take a safer route. To made an honest, decent living.
Hopefully, he was eating his words and proud as hell of me now.
I plugged my nose as I tore down the main streets of my hometown. Stillsville, Illinois. The name was fitting. Stillsville. The damn place was stuck in the past. They’d rather have their buildings and their heritage rot away than come into the twenty-first century. Or even the twentieth for that matter. I tore down the highway and made my way through the small streets, blasting by people I didn’t want to see. I’d moved away and never looked back for a reason, but now Anton had dragged me all the way back.
With his fucking death.
I’d been up since dawn, riding in my private jet. Landing at O’Hare I’d picked up the rental my assistant booked. There was nowhere to land an airplane near Stillsville. The damn place didn’t even have an airport big enough for me. That summed it up really. The little town hadn’t been big enough for my efforts. For my dreams. For the hard work I put into my life.
I’d been so glad to see it in my rearview mirror when I left all those years ago.
It was just as well my jet couldn’t land here, I didn’t want this town to know how well I was doing anyway. I didn’t care about their respect or their nods of acknowledgement. I didn’t care about their congratulations or their asinine questions about what I was doing to earn my billions. If they found out how much money I had, their hands would be out in a heartbeat. The mayor would be hitting me up for donations, trying to schmooze me over fried foods and bullshit alcoholic drinks I could make better in my sleep. They’d all want something from me, and they would all feel entitled to it because ‘they had a hand in raising me’ or some bullshit.
No the fuck they didn’t.
Stillsville looked just like I remembered. Old. Neglected. Dilapidated. Some of the shops I remembered were already closed down, likely due to their inability to keep up with progress. These people had no idea what kind of world we lived in outside their city limits. They were stuck in the past, and would die there.
Just like Anton had.
Industrial America was on the way out. It already had been when I was a boy, and nothing had replaced it. People in my hometown voted for worthless politicians running on a platform of bringing the industry back, then sat back and watched as their life savings was sucked dry by higher taxes and unde
rhanded government tactics. They sat on their asses waiting for absolutely nothing, yet continued to vote on hope. They went all in, hoping for the past to come back. Instead of other options, like learning a new trade.
Or getting out of the damn place altogether.
This town’s all about family. Heritage. Don’t you turn your back on that, hear me boy?
Football? The hell’s gotten into you? Work with your hands, son. That’s the only way to earn a living.
I could hear the familiar voice of my father in my head as I passed through downtown Stillsville. It was slowly being choked off by weeds and stagnation. Even the concrete of the sidewalk was giving up and surrendering to the unyielding vegetation. It made me sick to look at it. To see all the people that surrounded me as a boy just dying in this poverty, helped along by their own stubborn refusal to change.
Choking on the weeds that pierced through their empty shops.
It didn’t take me long to get to Anton’s house. It sat at the edge of town on a massive piece of land. Though it was one of the largest properties in the area, it was small in comparison to my home in California. People in my hometown thought a two story five-thousand square foot house was too much.
Imagine how they’d gawk at my twenty-thousand square foot vineyard home in the middle of the Napa Valley.
As I rolled up Anton’s tainted driveway, I was hit with memories of my past. Memories of when I came to live with the old man at the start of my senior year in high school. I remembered stumbling onto his porch, bruised and battered, and hiding how absolutely petrified I was. I’d gotten into yet another fight with my pathetic excuse for a father, and my mother was drowning in too much booze to do anything about it. I was just looking for a place to stay for the night. I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to eat. I just wanted to shower and go the fuck to sleep.
Anton never pressured me at all.
He’d calmly made me dinner, then showed me to my room. Told me I could stay as long as I wanted. As long as I respected the rules of his house and respected myself in the process, I could stay.
Shaking my head at the memory, I parked at the end of the driveway and looked over at the small house.
Well, small for me.
Not small for the town.
That house had been a beacon of hope for me. I thought it was the largest place in existence. At seventeen, I thought Anton was rich, retired and living off his seventy thousand a year.
Seventy thousand.
I pulled that much in nearly every day.
That final confrontation with my father kept replaying in my mind as I sat in the rental car. He had been so angry that I wanted to play football. So disappointed that I wanted to go off to college. He expected me to work in the factories with him so he could show off his big old boy to all his big old friends. In his mind, raising me right meant me following in his footsteps, and when he didn’t like what I had to say, he tried to beat me into submission.
Over, and over, and over again.
That next morning was the best morning of my childhood. I woke up to Anton fixing a Russian breakfast. He told me of his childhood in Russia. About how finding bread involved creative interpretations of ownership. Stories of women selling themselves for food for their children and men exchanging manual labor for weeks of their time just to secure three loaves of bread and a bag of fucking rice.
Anton was the first adult to ever earn my trust. So much so that his house became home to me. It was the first place that ever felt like one. But even Anton had his faults. The idea of my playing professional football was beyond him. Just like it had been beyond my father. And though it didn’t spark abusive sparring matches, we did argue about it. He told me he expected me to go to college. To make something of myself so I could stick it to my father. Yet again, I was slapped with the expectations of another.
With no regard for the expectations I had of myself.
Now I looked at Anton’s house and sighed, saddened at how dead and empty it looked. My safe haven—my beacon of hope—had slowly crumbled with the rest of the town around it. Even though it was kept up more than most of the homes, with a mowed lawn, tailored landscape and a power-washed exterior, I could still see the age on it. The inability of the house to grow with the times. I walked up to the front porch and pushed open the front door.
That old man never did lock his damn front door.
I respected Anton enough to follow his wishes. Though I fused my own into it. I ended up with a scholarship to play football in college. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offered me a full fucking ride to play football and I took it. And Anton was proud, which was more than I could say for my father, who fucking followed me from town all the way to the damn college before campus security stopped him from getting out of his car to talk with me.
Playing all through college, I racked up enough points on the field to get professional scouts looking at me. I even signed a professional contract to play five years with the NFL. I fucking did that. On my own. With no help whatsoever.
Then I fucking blew it with that damn injury.
I walked through the only place I’d really called home as a kid. The house looked pristine. Not like it had been virtually abandoned for over three years. It made me wonder how often Anton had the place cleaned. Or if he’d had someone renting it out or something while he was in the nursing home. Seeing it kept up gave me some hope that maybe someone had come into the old man’s life before he died. But the cleanliness only served as a contrast to the dead town around it, and my anger flourished again. Did no one care for their shit around this fucking place? Anton cared for his shit. Obviously. Could no one take a cue from one of the pillars of the community?
Because that’s what Anton was.
A strong pillar in our town, even when he moved in as an outsider.
I wandered around the house, taking it all in. Before I knew it, I was standing in front of a familiar door. The door to the room Anton had showed me to on that first night. I pushed it open and took a look around. Such a small room. With nothing but a bed that still had the same damn sheets on it I used to sleep on. Small specks of dust floated around, but I could still smell the cleanliness. That lemon smell that came with every clean small town home, tainted with the faintest odor of bleach. Even now, I felt comfortable within the walls of this room. Safe and protected from the big, bad world outside. I couldn’t help comparing it to my new life.
This room was smaller than my bathrooms.
Certainly smaller than my closets.
I sat on the edge of the bed and closed my eyes. I remembered telling Anton the day I bought the vineyard. He was absolutely stunned. The concussion I’d suffered on the football field during my last year of playing professionally took me out for good. The doctor said that another hard whack could make me a vegetable for the rest of my fucking life. So I took half of my saved millions and invested it into a rundown, beat-up vineyard in Napa Valley. I got that place for a steal, too. I sold off all their product for half price to raise some capital up front to breathe life back into the place, and now I was making a solid two billion a year from it.
Billions more than I ever could’ve made playing professional football.
So much had changed in my life since I left Anton’s house over a decade ago. College. Football. The injury. The money. All of it, bringing me to this exact point in time. Staring at the four walls that took me in when I had nowhere else to go.
Being there without him felt wrong.
“What the fuck,” I said with a groan.
I put my head in my hands as the headache overtook my vision.
Headaches. I got them sometimes. Courtesy of my concussion. We won that game, thanks to the moves I pulled on that field. But they were moves that ended my career. Sometimes I missed it. I’d get into the gym and work out my frustrations until I was pouring buckets of sweat off my body. I loved the physical activity. I loved the hitting. It helped with my anger. My aggression. The
hatred I still had for my father. I made working out and practicing my life when I played professionally, but now sometimes it felt like my damn headaches ruled my world.
Laying on the dusty bed, I shielded my eyes from the light.
So much had changed, and I didn’t know if I liked it. My changes had been in a positive direction, but I’d hoped my small town would’ve changed at least a little bit, too. At least kept up with the times enough to aid in its own survival. But on the contrary, it seemed everyone in the damn place was content to drown in their traditions rather than rising above their comfort level and keeping the place afloat.
It made me angry.
It angered me that they talked about tradition without upholding any sort of standard to it. It angered me how they preached about family, but were willing to watch the other drown. It pissed me off that people talked about hard work, but that same work was only hard if you never made any money for it. People looked at my bank accounts and thought I was getting a free ride. Like my billions had been bestowed upon me from some damn tree in my backyard. They had no idea the hours I sunk into that vineyard. The hours I sunk into the gym. Into training. The injuries I dealt with and the migraines I suffered through out of passion for the sport of football. They didn’t know the risky business deals I made and the countless nights I spent learning about wine, crafting flavors, planting and growing grapes, and harvesting them at just the right time.
Countless hours of sleep lost to bring myself to this point.
Being home was a stark reminder of everything I never wanted to be in my life. That was the source of my anger. It made me sick to my stomach that Anton’s death had brought me back. That his funeral and his estate had brought me back.
Because it meant I was alone.
Now I was officially completely alone.
Chapter 2
Michelle
“Are you familiar with pivot tables?”
“With what?” I asked.
