Investigated Billionaire - The Complete Series Box Set (An Alpha Billionaire Romance)

by Claire Adams

  A lot can certainly change in five years, but a lot stays the same, too.

  I turned him down that night at the junkyard, but I did eventually relent and allow him to marry me — part of the deal was that he had to say it like that whenever he told anybody.

  “You want to head to Mr. Landau’s place with me?” he asks, finishing up signing whatever it is that he’s signing. “There’s lunch in it for you if you do.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” I say. “I’ll go with you and you can eat out.”

  “That’s what I just said.”

  I give him my corniest wink, saying, “Is it?”

  “You know,” he says, “I could swear I’m married to a teenage boy.”

  “That’s disgusting. You’re way too old to be with a teenager.”

  So, this is our life. We work together, we live together, I make juvenile comments, and we laugh about them together.

  All in all, it’s not so bad.

  The only thing I really miss when I left the city, and this was a surprise to me, was Mags.

  Yeah, she was my secretary — excuse me, assistant — and I never really treated her that well, but she was always there in the background making my life run just a little bit smoother.

  The good news for her is that she finally landed herself a millionaire, though he’s a lot younger than what she had in mind. Still though, she tells me, with the sheer volume of alcohol he consumes on a daily basis, it can’t be too long until he keels over.

  I guess you’ve got to have goals.

  Jace finishes up and we walk out of the office together. I forward any calls to my office to my cellphone, though I’m not anticipating any calls.

  “So, after I start at the station, what are you going to do for a secretary?” I ask.

  “I thought you were very adamant about being called an assistant,” he says.

  “I am, but I’m sure whatever bimbo you hire is hardly going to measure up to my incredible skills.”

  “You are by far,” he says, “the worst assistant I’ve ever had.”

  “You do remember that Yuri got you fired from your last job, right?”

  “Yeah, but at least she knew where the pens were,” he says. “I’ve got someone lined up. I still have to do a final interview, but she comes highly recommended.”

  “It’s nobody I know, is it?” I ask.

  “You don’t know anybody,” he says.

  “I have friends.”

  “Oh, right,” he says, “your coven. Forgive me if I don’t count the hateful women you bring over to my house as anybody.”

  “They’re not hateful,” I tell him. “They’re spirited.”

  “So, I was thinking,” Jace says. “After your clinical trial, maybe we could start trying to build our family a little bigger.”

  This is about the only thing we argue about anymore. Okay, we argue quite a bit about a great many things, but this is the only topic that isn’t complete bullshit.

  “You keep saying that we should build our family,” I tell him, “but what you’re forgetting is that it’s my vag that family’s going to have to come out of, and I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to figure out what that must be like, but I’ve seen pictures and it doesn’t look great.”

  “I’m a doctor,” he says. “I’ve seen women give birth before.”

  “Yeah? How was it?”

  “It was thoroughly disturbing,” he says, “but I hear they give you some pretty killer drugs.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I tell him.

  We pull up to Mr. Landau’s house and Jace asks me if I’m coming in.

  “Why? So he can stare at my boobs while you’re doing unspeakable things to him in the name of medicine?”

  “Give the guy a break,” Jace says. “He’s got cancer. He may never see a nice pair again.”

  “I have a brain tumor,” I tell him. “Does that mean that I get to scope out all the junk I want?”

  “Are you coming in or not?”

  “Fine,” I groan, “but I’m going to have to insist on some quid pro quo.”

  “Well,” Jace says, “you may have to do most of the work, but I’m sure Mr. Landau would be all right with that.”

  “Not what I meant.”

  Jace gets out of the car and, hesitantly, I get out as well.

  We walk up to the house, and I can’t help but think how much differently my life would have been if any other doctor had walked into the room that day I had my first seizure.

  Attraction often has more to do with proximity than it does with any kind of actual chemistry, but with Jace, somehow I’ve found both.

  He’s still a pain in my ass, but I do love him. Yeah, it’s probably going to be a while before he convinces me to squeeze out a kid or two and it’s just as possible that that never happens, but I do know that I’m glad to be spending my life with him.

  “Do you really think he’d go for it?” I ask as Jace rings the doorbell.

  “Who?” Jace asks.

  “Mr. Landau,” I answer. “You’ve seen his bits; do you think it’d be worth my time or would it be like trying to make it to England in a rowboat?”

  “Seriously, I’m married to a teenage boy.”

  “Seriously, that’s gross.”

  We’re waiting at the door for a few minutes.

  “You know what we forgot?” I ask him.

  “What’s that?”

  “Mr. Landau did say that he couldn’t make it to the door,” I answer. “Do we just let ourselves in or what?”

  “Call him back and let him know that we’re coming in,” Jace says. “I don’t want to give the poor guy a heart attack.”

  “How sensitive of you,” I answer.

  I give Mr. Landau a call and he gives us permission to enter, so we do. Jace calls out for him and, from the back, a feeble voice answers.

  “Do you really think he’s at risk for a heart attack?” I ask as we’re making our way down the hall.

  “Actually,” Jace answers, “his heart is probably the only part of him that’s still holding strong. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” I tell him.

  We get into the room and Mr. Landau is lying in bed watching the morning news.

  “How are you doing today, Mr. Landau?” Jace asks.

  “Oh, I’ve been better,” the man says.

  “Well, let’s see what we can do about that,” Jace says. “I hope you don’t mind, but I brought my assistant along with me today.”

  “I can see her,” the man says. To prove it, his eyes move to me and settle on my breasts as they always do.

  “Dr. Churchill?” I ask.

  “Yes, Assistant Miller?” he returns in his ass-hat way. This is why I didn’t take his last name.

  “You’re certain the patient’s cardiac health is stable?” I ask.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Well, like you said, I should give the poor guy a break,” I tell him and lift my shirt. “Is that better, Mr. Landau?”

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  SECRETS

  By Claire Adams

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 Claire Adams

  Chapter 1

  “I’m fine Rebecca, the taxi just turned down my street.”

  “I’ll just stay on until you get inside the house.”

  “Seriously Rebecca, I’m not going to get murdered in two blocks. It’s Bain, Missouri for gosh sake!”

  My ability to humor Rebecca and her mothering significantly decreased the more exhausted I was. We had been friends for most of our lives, but she stil
l didn’t think I was capable of taking care of myself.

  “Are you at the house yet? Did you get inside?”

  “I’m paying my taxi driver now,” I sighed as I walked up to the door to my house and looked for my keys. Unfortunately, I had forgotten them inside the house. Nothing to worry about though; I had a spare key, somewhere.

  “Walking up to the door…unlocking the door… going inside,” I lied to her.

  “Alright. Remember to take some Tylenol and drink some water. Do you have orange juice for the morning?”

  Since losing my parents, Rebecca had tried to fill in the emptiness. Her heart was always in the right spot, but she never understood what it was like to be without any family. Moving into my grandparent’s house and remodeling it was the best way I could cope, at least for now.

  “Yes, I will drink orange juice, take two pills and call you in the morning.”

  “Great, yes. Call me when you get up,” Rebecca said.

  “Ok mother Rebecca. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  With Rebecca off the phone, I went to work looking for the spare key. I remembered putting it somewhere around when I had visited my parents and my mother was too sick to get up to the door. But after she died I had moved the key again.

  Really it shouldn’t be all that hard to find a key, but when you forget things as fast as I do, you would understand. This key was going to be near impossible to find.

  After searching the mat, flowers, and all the rocks around my grandparents old Victorian home, it finally dawned on me that I had put the key over in the neighbors’ rocks. The fake rock that held the spare key fit perfectly with their rocks and since the home had been empty for at least five years, it seemed like a good place to hide the house key. Now if only I could remember which rock I was looking for…at two o’clock in the morning, it was amazing how every single rock looked exactly the same.

  Well this was just perfect. On my hands and knees in the grass was not how I wanted to be spending my Saturday night. I was crawling around in the wet grass and looking for the key to my dead parent’s home. Well, the house was actually my grandparent’s home, and then they passed it to my parents and finally on to me.

  Why couldn’t I just have a normal life? Like those girls at the bar tonight. They had the kind of busy lives with friends and parties all the time. But no, I had by far the most boring life in the history of Bain. Fixing up my grandparents’ house was the only thing interesting on my calendar for the next three weeks. Oh, how I longed for some excitement, but instead I was here digging through rocks and grass in the middle of the night.

  The rock that held my house key eluded me. I screamed out in frustration and threw a rock from the neighbor’s yard to my own.

  “Can I help you?”

  My breath caught as I looked up to see a strongly built man standing at the corner of the house. He looked to have been just woken up and stood there with sweatpants and no shirt.

  The no shirt part is what had me so distracted. Even in the moonlight I could see more muscles on his stomach than I probably had in my entire body.

  “Um. Well, I uh…I’m looking for my house key.”

  “And you keep it in my flower bed?”

  The way he stood there looking at me, it was like I amused him. He watched as I struggled to stand up and then fidgeted with my dress. As much as I tried to hide the level of my intoxication, I’m pretty sure there was no hiding it. The look on his face showed enough pity toward me that I knew he could tell I was drunk.

  “I’m uh, yes I did hide it here. It’s a rock. Well, it looks like a rock. It’s a fake rock with a key in it. But I can’t find it because they all look the same.”

  I watched as the mystery man walked closer to me and looked at the rocks surrounding the house.

  “What’s your name?” he asked me.

  “I’m Katelyn. Katelyn Peterson.”

  I waited for him to respond with his name, but he did not. Instead, he reached down and grabbed a rock from the back of the pile of rocks. He handed it to me and I instantly knew that it was the rock I had been looking for. It was light and I could hear the jingle of the key as I moved the rock in my hand.

  “There you go Katelyn.”

  His voice was smooth, seductive and sexy, which was hard to pair up with the body that stood in front of me. The man in front of me looked more like a killer than a seducer. The muscles in his arms bulged with definition. Not bulk, but a refined sense of power. Even the way he clenched his jaw made me think of someone who was hiding something and wasn’t going to let you find out.

  “Wow, thank you. That was pretty amazing. How did you know which one it was?”

  “Just luck I guess,” he said as he looked me over.

  I dropped the rock as I tried to get the key out and he quickly retrieved the key from the grass. I’m not sure if he was so helpful because I was annoying him by waking him up in the middle of the night or if he was just a nice person.

  He took the key and walked over to my front door. I tried to keep up, but my short legs and high-heels were no match.

  By the time I got to my door, he had it opened and stood there with the key in his hand.

  “Goodnight Katelyn.”

  His hand touched mine as he passed me the key and instantly my body reacted with a surge of energy. I didn’t know who he was, or why he was living in the old abandoned neighbor’s house, but he could touch me with those hands any time he wanted.

  Chapter 2

  “So how long have you lived here? I didn’t know anyone had moved in,” I asked the gorgeous mystery man.

  “I just moved in.”

  “Ahh, so you’re new to town? How’s that going for you? Wait, why did you come to Bain? It’s not like we are a happening town.”

  As I kept talking I tried to force myself to be quiet but I just couldn’t stop. The more I looked at him, the worse my tongue-tied condition got. The light of my porch intensified his muscles and I’m pretty sure my brain actually stopped working.

  I tried not to make a fool of myself, but his body was just too much for my brain to comprehend. He had muscles so defined he looked like he could be one of those Navy Seals or something. I fixated on his naked chest with the desire to feel it against my body. Every impulse jetting through me said not to touch his chest. Yet my hand had a mind of its own.

  Sure enough, without warning, and likely fueled by the large alcohol courage I had…

  …I touched his chest.

  Right there on my front porch in the middle of the night and without warning. My drunken hand reached out and touched his chest! It would have been bad enough if that’s all that happened, but I couldn’t stop myself. My verbal garbage kept coming out.

  “Oh my god, you work out. Yeah, you definitely work out. Is that all you do all day long is workout?”

  He stood there with the same calm and cool look as when he first saw me on my knees in his flower bed. Hmmm…he seemed to be the quintessential strong silent type. His face was serious and observed me with just the slightest bit of a smirk forming at the corners of his mouth.

  “To answer your first question, I’m here to relax and get away for a little while,” he said, and looked down at my drunken hand still sitting on his chest. “Yes, I work out.”

  Maybe it was the alcohol wearing off, but I suddenly realized my hand was on his chest and I removed it. My eyes looked at his and then down at his chest again. What had come over me? This was not my usual behavior. Then again, a sexy guy like this on my front porch was not my usual evening either.

  I could feel the flush of embarrassment start filling up my face. I stopped looking at his chest and made eye contact with him, but that was worse than looking at his chest.

  “Oh, alright. Yeah, I kind of thought that you were a workout kind of guy. I like to run. But I don’t get out as much as I would like and I certainly don’t run for long distances. Maybe down a few blocks and back. Like one mile tops. I take pictures. That’s what I li
ke to do. You know…photography and that kind of stuff?”

  I wanted to stop talking. I just couldn’t send the impulse from my brain to my mouth to make it happen.

  “Well, you have a nice night Katelyn.”

  He turned to walk away and I stood on my porch and watched him. I waited for him to look back at me, ready with one last wave goodnight. But he didn’t turn around.

  “Goodnight!” I yelled as he disappeared around the corner of the neighbor’s house toward the back door.

  I closed my front door and stood inside pondering who this man was and what he was doing in tiny little Bain, Missouri. He had this quiet calmness about him that was fascinating. I had never met a man who seemed to have so much self-control, like a vigilant soldier with his senses finely tuned.

  I turned the lights off in my house and tried to look out at the neighbor’s house. I just wanted to see if there was any movement inside of his house. Perhaps I secretly wanted to get one last peek at that chiseled chest of his? But I was disappointed and there wasn’t a single sign of movement throughout his house.

  As I drifted off to sleep, I couldn’t help but fantasize about being with the gorgeous neighbor. I had not even considered another man since Michael’s death, so it surprised me how easily this man was filling my thoughts. Normally the memory of Michael and our six years together caused me too much pain to even think about it for long. He had been my first love, my high school sweetheart. After losing Michael a year before, I never thought I could ever move on. Maybe my interest in the gorgeous stranger was a signal that I might be ready now.

  As I drifted off to sleep, I saw the stranger’s face in my mind: his chiseled serious face, with just the right touch of softness. His demeanor was so relaxed and calm for such a late hour. It struck me as odd that he was so readily awakened in the middle of the night, but I was happy he did wake up. Getting to meet him was just what I needed to give me hope that someday I could move on from my grief about Michael’s death.

  Chapter 3

  “Are you alright?” Rebecca said loudly into the phone.