Personal Disaster (Billionaire Secrets Book 3)

by Ainsley Booth

  The knock at the door comes thirty seconds later. I jump at the surprise, then panic. I can’t actually answer the door naked. I grab my sleeping t-shirt and pull it on, then run to the door. A quick glance through the peephole has my heart hammering a mile a minute because Marcus is on the other side.

  And he looks good. Even through the fisheye distortion.

  I pull the door open and he laughs as he steps inside, big and broad and mouthwateringly good looking. His gaze flicks down to my shirt, then back to my face, hot and laser-focused. “You’re not naked.”

  “Had a little freakout about answering the door in absolutely nothing,” I whisper as we come together, his lips brushing my forehead as I breathe in the scent of his skin. His hands smooth down my back. “But I’m naked under this shirt.”

  He pauses for a beat, his hands tightening on my waist, then he groans as he palms my bare ass.

  I gasp as he hauls me up against him, then his mouth is on mine and my legs are around his waist. He growls words that make me ache for more. Need. Crazy. Beautiful. Soft. Good. Taste.

  Somehow we get to the bed. It’s only when I try to rip his shirt off him that I realize it’s a nice button-down. And he’s wearing dress pants, too.

  “You dressed up? You look really good,” I say. “Take off your clothes.”

  He grins. “You’re the boss.”

  “We have unfinished business,” I pant, stretching beneath him.

  “I know.” He tugs on the hem of my shirt, his knuckles grazing the crease between my leg and my pelvis.

  I shiver, and his gaze turns molten.

  “Hi,” he whispers, his voice suddenly husky.

  I give him a faint, desperate smile. “Hi.”

  His hand hasn’t moved. His fingers are just inches from my bare pussy, and we’re frozen in a locked-gaze tableau.

  “I missed you.” He lowers his head to kiss me again, and I part my lips, my eyes drifting shut as his tongue slides against mine. “So much,” he adds against my mouth as he eases back. “And I want to take you so hard right now.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Please, Marcus.”

  He crushes his mouth to mine again, and twists his hand at the same time, nudging my thighs wide. His touch is deft, erotic, and just hurried enough to reassure me that I’m not the only needy one here. He finds a way to ask me, in words or actions, if I want each step. His fingers inside me, his mouth next. Territory we’re both happy to revisit. But he stops me when I try to roll him onto his back and telegraph my intent to taste him.

  “Later,” he growls. “I want inside you.”

  I grab a condom and slap it into his hand. He rises above me, rolls it on with quick, efficient movements, then he tumbles on top of me again. The next moment is a heady, throbbing pause as our bodies fit together. My legs curl up and spread for him. All of his muscles flex and shake as he levers his torso up, his hips down. The room is silent, our breaths loud, and the whole time, his attention is locked on my face.

  Watching me, wanting me. I get lost in the heat in his eyes, and the rest dissolves away.

  The thick press of his erection notches into place. He grins down at me as he drags his hand back up my body, his knuckles skating over my belly, around my breast, and up onto my neck. “So good,” he murmurs, his eyes turning liquid. “You feel amazing already.”

  The first stretch takes my breath away. The second makes me groan. He’s perfect. Perfectly big, perfectly thick. Just the right size to make my brain go swirly and my pussy clench tight.

  And the sound he makes as he bottoms out? Oh, sweet mother of mayhem, I’m going to remember that forever. Deep, guttural, needy… Yes. This was worth the flight to Denver.

  A hundred times over. I wrap my arms around him as we begin to move. He plants his arms on either side of my head, caging me in.

  I wrap my hands around his thick biceps. I love the feel of his skin, the solid flex of his muscles. I love the way he smells, the heat rising between our bodies, and the heavy weight of him on top of me.

  We kiss again, and need ratchets inside me. More, yes, that, please.

  Each thrust of his hips lights me up inside. Each adoring pass of his hand—on my breasts, my neck, his fingers on my lips—draws me higher and tighter, until I’m flying with how good it feels. Yesterday I was in Washington, chasing a story. Now I’m in Marcus’s arms again. Lucky doesn’t begin to describe how I feel.

  “I want to see you,” he says roughly. “Do you like being on top?”

  “I like everything.” I’m breathless and high as a kite, and as he slides out of me, a mad hunger takes over. I scramble after him, climbing on the second he rolls over.

  I want to ride this man forever. I want to fuck him until I ache, until I know I’ll feel him for the rest of the week, and then I want to fuck him just a little bit more to make sure.

  He’s just so…

  Perfect. I smile as I roll my hips, as I raise up and lower down again, seating him deeper inside me.

  “That good?” He looks up at me from beneath hooded eyelids.

  “The best,” I whisper. “You’re so big.”

  He licks his lips and runs a lazy hand up my thigh. “You’re tight and warm and I just—” He thrusts his hips up, making me gasp. “You make me big. You do this to me. All yours.”

  His words send a powerful thrill skittering under my skin.

  He’s all mine? Excellent.

  I lean forward and brace myself against shaking headboard. “Are you mine to do whatever I want?”

  “Anything,” he growls.

  I trail my fingers over his cheeks, across his lower lip. His tongue slides out and snakes around my fingertips.

  I shudder as I drag those wet fingers down his body, slowly, carefully, until I touch us both where we’re joined. I’ll have to figure out some crazy things to do to him later, because right now, I just want to come.

  “Fuck me,” I whisper.

  His gaze darkens and he settles his hands on my hips, holding me tight as he moves beneath me. My breasts sway and bounce, my clit rocks against my glancing fingertips, and deep inside, he swells even harder than before.

  I close my eyes and tip my head back. God, yes. “Marcus.” I breathe his name, over and over again, until I’m crying out at the same time as my body climaxes.

  He shouts his own release, jacking his hips in a final, brutal thrust which he holds deep inside me for a long, throbbing beat before collapsing back against the bed.

  I tumble to the side, still shaking from the after-effects of my own orgasm.

  “Good morning,” he finally says, his voice rich with laughter.

  “Yeah. Nice to see you again.” I bite my lip and twist to find his gaze on me, warm and inviting.

  He looks around, his gaze lingering on the shadowed corners and the faded wallpaper. He gives me a lazy wink. “Nice hotel room, by the way.”

  I giggle. “Do you have someplace nicer we could be?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  When we leave the motel, I don’t see Marcus’s truck anywhere, and ten seconds later a black sedan pulls up.

  He gives me an inscrutable look, so I don’t bother to parse what it means—but even if I had, I wouldn’t have expected it to deliver us to an airport—and not the one I arrived at last night, either. We’ve gone across the city to a regional airport.

  I press my lips together because the Uber driver doesn’t need to know I have a million questions.

  And Marcus is already fully aware. Out of the corner of the my eye, I see his mouth twitching. He’s enjoying this. Well, that makes one of us. I don’t even know what this is.

  Marcus thanks the driver, shoulders my bag, and offers me his hand. “Coming?”

  “Well, obviously,” I murmur. “This could be a great story.”

  He laughs. “For our grandkids or a newspaper editor?”

  “Why would you make me choose? Both sound like excell
ent options. I mean, depending on how this plays out.”

  He stops in the middle of the quiet terminal and kisses me softly, his hand squeezing mine between us. “I’m picking you up at the airport and taking you to my place. Nothing headline worthy here.”

  “Mmm.” I glance around. “I was expecting more of the, uh, pick-up truck variety of ride. Not James Bond helicopter, or whatever you have planned.”

  He laughs. “No helicopter. And next time, I want you to tell me you can come out here, so I can fly you.”

  I push at his chest. “No! I’m not having you buy me plane tickets so we can have sex. Even if it is awesome sex.”

  He doesn’t move. “Really awesome. But I wasn’t talking about a plane ticket. I mean, I can fly you.”

  “Oh. Oh. You mean…literally…you can fly me…” My eyes go wide. I can’t help it. That is not a normal offer. “I’m good with Delta. Me and economy class, we’re like…” I twist my fingers together. “Plus all the points, you know. I like those.”

  “Sure.” He grins. “Are you freaking out?”

  “Yeah. You own a jet.”

  “A small one.”

  “You just fly yourself around wherever, like other people take a car.”

  “Something like that.”

  “So last night, when you called me…”

  “I’d flown to Washington. I had a nap, and I flew back.”

  “I thought you made excellent time. But then you distracted me with your penis and I forgot to ask about that.”

  “My penis?” He’s laughing at me again. Should I have said cock? Delightful erection? The vocabulary rules for dating way outside one’s socio-economic status is not clear. He owns a jet.

  Marcus is in fact the guy I thought I might uncover for a juicy story. And then I went and fell madly in lust with him instead. “Can we not have this conversation in the middle of an airport?”

  His grin gets wider. “Sure. Let’s go have it on the plane. Do you want to sit in the co-pilot’s seat?”

  My laugh only has the tiniest edge of hysteria to it, and I’m quite proud of myself. “Sure. That sounds super normal.”

  We stop at a desk where Marcus signs off on a flight plan, then we head outside.

  There’s a little plane right in front of us.

  It’s…cute.

  And small.

  And we’re totally getting on it.

  Marcus has a plane.

  I’m freaking out.

  This is great.

  But as soon as he shows me inside, my freakout fades. It’s not a big plane. It has four seats in the main cabin, two right behind the cockpit, and that’s really small.

  On the other hand, the whole thing is fancy. Sleek white and black detailing, lots of leather with red stitching. This plane wasn’t cheap.

  He said he’d show me who he was.

  Yeah, but I thought that meant going to his cabin in the woods and talking about our feelings. Maybe dig into why we don’t like our parents as much as we should.

  “Do you like your parents?” I blurt out.

  He looks up from where he’s checking some very complicated dials and switches in the cockpit. “In small doses.”

  I let out a sigh of relief. “Great. That’s something we have in common.”

  “We have lots in common.”

  “Do we?”

  He gestures for me to squeeze into the other seat in the cockpit. “Sure.”

  “We don’t know each other.”

  “Then we have forty minutes to fix that before we land and I kidnap you.”

  “Cabin in the woods?”

  He laughs. “Not a lot of trees around my place. But it’s got a cabin feel.”

  I have to admit, skipping the four-hour drive from Denver to Rifle is lovely. And Marcus at the controls of a plane is an impressive sight. Plus we actually do get to talk about things we have in common.

  Which is apparently coffee, sex, and disappointed parents, although the scale is a different.

  “They liked the idea of me being a tech leader and being on the pages of Fortune Magazine,” he says quietly.

  “Ah.”

  “How about you? Why’d you ask about parents?”

  “I, uh… haven’t had any babies yet.” My cheeks flame hot. Why did I bring up that line of conversation anyway? Ridiculous. “My brothers are younger than me, and all my cousins have kids, and… it doesn’t matter. Thanksgiving will be swell, let’s just say that much.”

  “You could skip it and come with me to Jake’s wedding.” The radio crackles to life, air traffic control advising him he can begin his descent, and the conversation is put on hold, which is for the best, because I don’t know what my answer will be.

  When we land, he introduces me to a scruffy kid named Jeff who is apparently going to park Marcus’s jet for him, but the rest of their conversation is totally normal. Then we head to the dusty parking lot, where his truck is waiting for us. Actually normal.

  We stop at the bakery, then the grocery store, more normal, then head out of town, climbing into the hills around the valley.

  I’m not surprised when we drive down a long, winding lane and find what is definitely not a cabin in the woods. “Nice,” I say when I find my voice.

  It’s a modern bungalow, crawling along a ridge. Low-profile, very high-tech. Definitely contributes to the super-spy alter-ego theory I have going.

  The garage door opens automatically. He parks, then we walk back out to the driveway and up the front walk.

  He stops me in front of the main door and turns me around.

  The view is spectacular, the valley spilling out below us, the mountains glowing pink and orange in the distance on the other side.

  “I’m a full-time park ranger,” he murmurs in my ear. “And very private, for obvious reasons. This is hard to explain. But I told you I’d show you who I am. I was a seed money investor in Starfish Instrumentation. That proved lucrative.”

  I turn around, genuinely confused. “Why is that a secret?”

  He rolls his neck and gives me a rueful smile. “Well…” He reaches past me and touches his hand to a sensor, unlocking the door. “Come on in.”

  “If this is where you tell me you’re a spy, I’ve already figured that out.”

  He laughs out loud at that. “Not a spy.” He sets my bag down inside the front door and gives me a chance to look around.

  It does have a cabin feel inside, I guess. A reclaimed wood table dominates the space in the main room, with an open kitchen at one end and an oversized, well-worn sofa overlooking the valley at the other.

  But I think there’s a lot more house that crawls off in either direction, and Marcus is looking at me like he’s trying to figure out how to say more.

  Of course there’s more.

  “You don’t need to—” I cut myself off and start again, because he wants to share, and I don’t want to stop him. “How many people know you’ve invested well?”

  “Not many.”

  I close the gap between us and wrap my arms around his tense body. “Thank you for trusting me.”

  “I didn’t expect you to rocket into my life,” he says gruffly. “I’m not transitioning well.”

  “By the standards of dating people in D.C., you’re doing just fine. Once I went on five dates with a congressional aide before I found out he was married.”

  That gets me a serious growl.

  “I didn’t sleep with him.”

  “Good.”

  I laugh. “Anyway, I’m sorry I freaked out that you own a plane. You live in the middle of a big state, far from your friends, and you have the means, so that makes sense.”

  He leads me to the couch, where he flops out and tugs me down on top of him.

  I nestle my head into the curve of his neck.

  “I like flying,” he says. “I thought about qualifying on bigger planes so I could work as a pilot. I still might. That’s my next back-up plan if the park service gets too political.”
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  “You wouldn’t go back to investing?”

  He clears his throat. “I never really left it. That’s, uh, another thing. On a very part-time basis, I’m also something of a venture capitalist. I have a cousin who shares my love of the environment and together we run a non-profit that invests in big ideas.”

  Huh. “Cool.”

  We lie there for a few minutes, his hand trailing lazily up and down my back. The whole time, my brain is spinning, and finally I crane my neck up and give him a curious look.

  “What?”

  “What kind of big ideas, exactly?”

  “I just gave this guy I know some money to invest in wind-powered shipping.”

  My lips repeat those words. Wind-powered shipping. “Like five hundred years ago?”

  “It wasn’t that long ago that we stopped using sails, but yeah. Like that. It’s a renewable resource, and with a combination of carbon-fibre sails and smarter engines, we can cut the energy consumption of massive ships by up to ninety percent.”

  “And this guy you know? Shipping?” I spin through the rolodex in my head. I scramble off him and start to pace. “Is that Ben Russo?”

  He stands, too. “You already know we’re friends.”

  “Right. But that was like, college drinking buddies. Not… You invested in Toby Hunt’s company as a start-up. Now you’re a major investor in the future of Gladiator Industries.”

  “Minor partner in one project.”

  “Stop correcting me. This isn’t on the record and I don’t really care about the details.”

  “You asked.”

  “I was not prepared for the answer. So you’re like…” I try to do the math and give up. Marcus is definitely a billionaire. That’s a whole new level of we have nothing in common. “Okay. Does this place have a big-ass bathtub? I want a bubble bath.”

  “It has three. You can take your pick—on one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  He grins wickedly. “I’m joining you. You can feel free to grill me some more.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  MARCUS

  POPPY in a bubble bath is exactly as hot as I imagined, which shouldn’t be where my head is at right now, but I can’t help it.