by Kira Blakely
“It was eventful,” Nash said, releasing me so that I fell back down on the couch with a thump.
He looked handsome in his pinstriped suit, his tie loosened at his neck. His hair looked disheveled like he had been running his hands through it all day. His jaws were clenched, and they looked sharp and rugged. He was standing in front of me with his legs spread apart, concentrating on my face like he was trying to draw some energy from it.
I still didn’t want to broach the subject. “I met Nell for lunch today and she said that she’s bought us tickets to Ibiza for next month,” I said, changing the topic.
Nash’s eyes shot about the room nervously, I was expecting to him to burst into anger any moment now. God! What had his father said this time?
“Oh yeah?” he said, trying to force a tone of naturalness to his voice. I knew him too well by now to know to believe it. “Just the two of you? For how long?”
“Ten days. We haven’t gone away for so long, and now that I’m living at the other end of the city, I think she feels like we don’t see each other enough,” I replied.
“That’ll be nice. You need to get away, catch a break from all this,” he said, his voice finally softening.
Looking up at his face, I wrapped my arms adoringly around his slim chiseled waist. He felt warm to the touch, but now that I was close to him again, I could see that his cheeks were flushed.
“I don’t need a break from you, Nash. That’s not why I’m going away with her,” I said softly and our eyes met.
Nash nodded and remained silent, allowing his hands to rest on my shoulders for a while.
We were staring at each other, like really staring, just silently without a word. And it felt like we could keep doing that for ages.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked, breaking the silence after what felt like at least ten minutes.
Nash drew in his breath and shook his head. “About my visit to Father? No, I don’t,” he said, pushing me slightly away from him.
My brows furrowed immediately, and I scrunched my face at him. “Nash, I think we should talk about it. You need to get it out of your system. You look wrecked,” I said, a hint of concern coloring my voice now.
Nash shook his head again and walked over to stand in front of the fireplace.
“I’m not wrecked because of him. I’m nervous about something else,” he said, pushing his hands into his pocket.
I crossed my arms over my breasts as I faced him, my brows still furrowed.
“You’re nervous? Nash Preston, nervous?” I said with a laugh, but only a soft smile graced the sides of his lips. He hadn’t found it funny. Shit, he was really nervous! Something terrible had happened.
“Yeah, I always get nervous when I do something for the first time, I’m only human,” he said, and I was shaking my head in confusion.
“What have you done, Nash?” I asked, my terror rising now. I tried to think of all the things I thought Nash was capable of doing. Had he abused his father? Smashed a flower vase? Destroyed one of his father’s prized family portraits? Nash’s calm level headedness dictated that one of those acts would be considered by him to be immensely violent.
“I haven’t done anything yet,” he said, interrupting my thoughts.
I noticed how the look in his eyes was changing now. He didn’t look as nervous anymore, instead he was extracting a hand out of his pocket. And then he was kneeling on one knee. And on one open palm lay a blue velvet box. Still unopened.
“Bonnie Veronica Calhoun,” he said and stupidly, the first thought in my head was; when did I tell him my middle name? I wasn’t thinking straight. My hands flew to my mouth, and not a word came out.
“Will you do me the honor of marrying me? I know I don’t deserve you, but you will make me the happiest man alive,” he continued.
Even before he had completed the sentence, I had hurled myself at him. I was bent forward kissing him, my hands weaving through his hair. I had never been happier.
“Yes, of course, I will! Yes, I will,” I gushed, red in the face and hot tears pricking the back of my eyelids.
Nash stood up, grabbing my chin and pulling it to him so we could kiss.
“How long have you been carrying this around in your pocket?” I asked when I pulled away from him, gasping for air.
Nash popped the box open to reveal a teardrop-shaped pink diamond ring, bigger than any stone I had ever seen. “Not long. I didn’t second guess this decision, Bonnie. The right time to ask you is when I thought of it. Which was right now,” he said, as he slipped the ring onto my finger. It fit perfectly, glittering in the dim light of the living room.
“You just bought the ring?” I asked, laughing uncontrollably. This was actually happening, the man who I always thought was out of reach, out of bounds, had just asked me to marry him. I had spent all my college years, and the years after, judging him and judging myself. I should have followed my heart from the start; I should have known that Nash Preston was always the man for me.
“No, it’s my mother’s. It’s been passed down in my family for four generations. I had it in my study, I picked it up before I came in here,” Nash was laughing. The nervousness in his gaze had gone now; he looked like he felt he was finally free.
I stared down at the ring, which sparkled as I moved my finger. When I looked up at his face, Nash was smiling again.
“Before she died, she told me to give it to a girl who Father disapproved of. She knew him better than anyone else,” he said, placing his hands on my waist. Nash kissed me again, tenderly on my lips and then my cheeks.
“So, when Father made it clear to me today that he disapproved of you, I knew it was a sign. I knew it was now or never, and I had finally found the woman I was supposed to spend my life with,” he continued after he was done kissing me. When our gazes locked again, we both knew what was going to happen next. Nash was already unbuttoning his shirt.
Billionaire’s Protest
BOOK 2
Chapter 1
I held my protest sign as high up as I could, but it obviously wasn’t high enough. My friend Marla would have been quick to point out that was because of my slight height, which she, being my best friend, has never allowed me to live down. I clutched the edges of the neon poster board with my hands and held it over my head, aware that the glitter and pink letters didn’t exactly look like they belonged to someone who was twenty-eight.
“You stand tall despite your proximity to the ground, Lily,” Marla would have said encouragingly.
Zoe, Marla’s six-year-old, had helped me make the sign the previous night. She had turned her nose up when I showed her my usual white poster board and black permanent markers. That was my idea for entertainment for a babysitting night. She had brought her own craft kit instead, and what Zoe wants, Zoe gets.
So, it was neon paper, pink letters, glitter glue, and some cartoon cutouts of birds. I had to concede though, it did stand out from the rest of the crowd. Well, the neon sign and the hand-made conch shell earrings. And not to forget, the bulging purple bag hanging across my body, which I had stuffed with extra art supplies and the tons of “emergency” things that I always carried with me. Yeah, I definitely stood out.
These wanderers are lost! was my slogan, with the cartoon birds lining the edges of the protest sign. If I could get noticed, at least I would get my point across.
Now I held the sign up over my head and screamed again, “These wanderers are lost. Don’t build the wind farm!”
I was yelling at the top of my lungs, my voice drowned out by other voices around me. Nothing was going to deter me from standing there; something needed to be done. Argent Energy Systems. It’s more like Argent Enemy Systems. I smirked to myself when I stopped for a moment to catch my breath. We were going to show them. We were going to make sure they heard our voices and knew that we weren’t going to forget about our feathered friends. These bastards were going to hear us and know that we weren’t going to just sit back and watc
h while the wind farm destroyed the habitat of the Green Gleneagles.
“Stop killing Mother Nature!” a woman beside me yelled, and then turned to me with a sour face and a crude look in her eyes. “I’ve been yelling my throat hoarse, and these fuckers have been cooped up in their offices all day.” She leaned in toward me to make herself heard.
I rolled my eyes in disgust and started yelling again, waving the sign over my head to stress my point.
The protesters had been barricaded by rope so we didn’t block the path between the front entrance of the Argent office building and the parking lot. There were a few cameras covering the protest on the other side, with their lenses turned toward us, just waiting and hoping for the moment when our peaceful protest erupted into violence. I could picture it as a headline in the newspapers the next day: Tree-hugging loonies kick a white-collar human in the balls.
I rolled my eyes again at the scavenging cameras and screamed my slogan aloud.
I had counted ten uniformed policemen already, standing with their arms crossed over their chests. They formed a human wall on the other side of the barricading rope and were glaring us down. I caught the gaze of one of them, who happened to turn his eyes on me.
“Don’t build the wind farm, sir,” I called out to him from my post, shoving some of my auburn curls behind my ears.
The policeman looked away, almost like he was embarrassed, although he knew as well as I did that my shouts weren’t necessarily meant for him. I was just trying to make myself heard.
“Sir. Sir. Sir! Don’t build the wind farm,” I yelled at him, pushing my way through some of the other protesters. I was aware of stepping on other people’s toes as I made my way to the front of the rope, but this wasn’t the time to apologize. The lives of endangered birds were at stake, and the clock was ticking.
“Do you know that only 160 Green Gleneagles are in existence today?” I screamed at him now that I was closer.
I’m still not sure why I decided to lecture a policeman. In that moment, this cross-faced policeman was the only person I could vent my rage at. He was still looking away from me, pretending that he couldn’t hear what I was saying.
“The species will die out if we build over their habitat,” I yelled at him, now very close to his face. I could feel the coarseness of the rope digging into the top of my belly, but I pressed myself against it to get as close to the cop’s face as I could. He was much taller than me, and he loomed over me with a look of disgust on his face. What a piece of unthinking meat.
I propped myself up on my toes, with the sign still held over my head, just so I could reach him better.
“Don’t you feel guilty about killing an entire species of birds? They will have nowhere to live,” I screamed.
“Back down, Miss.”
I had finally extracted a reaction, and that made me feel victorious. I held my position, still on my tiptoes.
He whipped his head around to look at me directly. He looked like one of those hardened cops who’d seen a couple of years as an undercover agent in the mafia. Severe scars marred his face, and his lips were set in a firm, thin line. He was at least fifty years old and had no time for some students protesting for the life of birds. I knew his type; I was well acquainted with them, and I detested him just as much as he detested me.
“Back down, Miss. I won’t tell you again,” he said, while I glared into his eyes. He must have seen my nostrils flaring and the way my cheeks reddened with rage.
Marla would have placed a hand on my shoulder and asked me to back off, but I was holding my ground.
“Spill blood now if you have to, Officer. You’re spilling the blood of those birds anyway,” I snarled at him.
To my absolute shock, the man turned to one of his colleagues and laughed like I’d made some kind of joke.
I gritted my teeth and felt my breath catch in my throat from the anger coursing through my veins.
I backed down. Not because he asked me to, but because my toes were giving way, and I couldn’t hold that position for much longer. I clenched my jaw at him and yelled out my slogan at the top of my lungs for good measure. I knew what these guys were doing. They were hoping for a violent reaction from us. Well, they weren’t going to get it from me. Not from me. I was going to take it out on my punching bag later, but I wasn’t going to be violent now.
A group of employees emerged from the office building right then, and all protest signs and voices turned to them immediately. The people behind the cameras anticipated some action and turned their lenses, swinging from us to the employees.
It was unclear whether these people were just walking to their cars, or if they were about to make some kind of official comment on behalf of their company. Either way, I was quick to notice their sharp suits, polished shoes and clean-shaven jaws. They looked at their watches and each other, like they had important things to do, like save the world. Oh, the irony!
They walked as an entourage, slowly and silently, entirely ignoring the raging voices and abuses being hurled at them for what their company was in the process of doing.
Of course, I was incensed. Just seeing their smug corporate faces was enough to make me lash out, and I screamed as loud as I could. At one point, I was even jumping, holding my sign up, just so that they might see it over the heads of the other protestors who engulfed me on all sides. Then the pushing began.
My small frame didn’t allow me to see clearly where the shoving was coming from. My heart raced, because I knew something was going on. Someone had been hit, maced, or was being arrested. All I knew was that people were pushing against me. Elbows were being thrust in my direction, until one caught my face with a crackling thunder that sent me rolling backward.
I was falling back, my sign was ripping in slow motion, and I no longer had control over my body.
Chapter 2
My head hit the concrete. I knew that because when I blinked my eyes open, a dull ache pounded at the back of my skull. For a few moments, I had no idea where I was or what I was doing there. I was helpless as a five-year old who had just fallen off her bike and scratched her knees. I stopped myself in time from calling out, “Mommy?”
The noises around me were loud, and now the sounds were different. They weren’t simply rage-filled shouts of protest. A skirmish broke out around me, but I couldn’t quite catch what anyone was saying.
I was on the ground, curled up in a fetal position with hazy vision that was only now beginning to clear. I had no idea what had happened until I felt blood trickling down my nose. Oh, yeah, someone had elbowed me directly in the face. Man down. Man down. The words rang in my head, but nobody was really paying attention to the girl on the ground. More punches were being thrown around, and I wasn’t sure who was fighting whom.
The fog cleared as my thoughts pieced together, and I could finally see what was happening. A man clutched some other man by the throat and his fist was bunched up, poised for another punch.
The hit I took must have disconnected some wires in my head, because the man holding the other one by the neck looked unrealistically gorgeous to me.
His hair was thick, neatly styled waves of sandy blond, like he was red-carpet ready, on his way to attend the opening of a film. His profile was visible to me, his nose sharp to match his chiseled jaw. His lips were thin but luscious, like they were made of some sort of velvet.
He loomed over me, holding the other man back by his neck, the muscles in his arms bulging. The spotlessly white t-shirt he wore clung to his broad chest. His shoulders were wide and strong, and his torso narrowed to where his jeans clinched loosely at his waist. What a beautiful man. I smiled, reminding myself that I was probably concussed and hallucinating.
The other man swung at him, and this Greek god ducked and avoided the thrust, punching him on his side instead. If I could, I would have cheered. What was even going on?
My body was reacting physically to this man’s presence, and he hadn’t even looked at me yet. He probably didn�
�t even know I was lying there on the ground staring up at him, googly-eyed.
His jaw was clenched tight as he glared and fought off the man. The other man’s attempt at a punch to his jaw only met with this Greek god ducking and taking him out with a crashing blow to the stomach. The other man flailed his arms, but the hunk twisted his arm, pinning it to his back. Someone else joined the fight and he fought this one off, too, with one quick sucker punch that made my gut soar.
I realized suddenly that it was no time to be aroused by a man. I was lying on the ground, possibly badly injured, in the middle of picketing for the habitat of an endangered bird species. But I couldn’t help but gawk at this man before me. He sent electric waves down my spine, and I couldn’t stop looking at him. Where did they manufacture the likes of him? And what was he doing at an environmental protest?
I tried to straighten myself up, hauling my body up using my elbows.
“Just stay down!” he said to me, and I collapsed back on the ground.
What the actual…?! Did he just turn to me and ask me to stay down? Or was I imagining that, too? He knew I existed. He knew where I was. Did he know that I had been staring at him, too? This was all too unreal for me. What was going on?
“You punched a girl, you idiot!” he roared.
His voice was like an elixir, smooth and deep. He could be the voiceover for a documentary on kitchen sinks, and I’d watch it, just to hear him speak. Surprisingly, his tone of voice didn’t match his actions. Even though he was fending off punches and teaching bad guys a lesson right in front of my eyes, he sounded calm and professional.
Goose bumps rose on my flesh as I stared at him. My mouth literally just fell open. What was happening to me? How was I slowly melting there, just looking at a stranger? And why was he barking out orders to me while fighting people?
