by R. S. Elliot
Beauty and the BOSS
Book 1 in the Billionaire’s Obsession Series
R. S. Elliot
Contents
AUTHOR’S NOTE
1. Luke
2. Emily
Prequel
3. Luke
4. Emily
5. Luke
6. Emily
7. Luke
8. Emily
9. Luke
10. Emily
11. Luke
12. Emily
13. Luke
14. Emily
15. Luke
16. Emily
17. Luke
18. Emily
19. Luke
20. Emily
21. Luke
Epilogue
Afterword
Sneek-Peek into Book 2 of the Billionaire’s Obsession Series
Chapter 2
© Copyright 2019 by AmazingLifeForever
All rights reserved.
It is not legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental.
Created with Vellum
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Welcome to my world of sexy, contemporary romance where you will find Billionaires, Alpha heroes, Bad boys and some extra naughtiness! If you are looking for something sweet, sexy and with a happily ever after, then look no further!
Beauty and the BOSS is Book 1 in my Billionaire’s Obsession Series which comprises of 5 Hot and Steamy Full Length Romance Novels.
Each individual book in this series will be a standalone and offer an HEA and can be read in any order but I would strongly propose to read the prequel first and then follow the reading sequence from Book1 to Book 5 in the series.
Grab the FREE Prequel to Beauty and the BOSS at the following link: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/sdttkzrxl9
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Chapter One
Luke
I arrived at Vernon’s party a half hour late. Late enough to show I didn’t want to be there, but not late enough to get on my sister’s bad side. The space they rented on the top floor of a premier New York hotel encased in glass, offered a view of the skyline that would have been breathtaking if my own view at home didn’t rival it.
As with all Vernon parties, the cream of the city’s business class was here: high rolling investors mingled with heiress debutantes, and families who made their fortunes in mutual funds or startup schemes shook hands with each other politely. The Vernons were old money, but they stayed in the game through their sizable investment portfolio and charitable giving. This small bites and champagne hour was in honor of their youngest son, Eric, who recently found moderate success in some business venture or other. In my mind, his success was entirely unremarkable, because the greatest windfall that had ever happened to him was his marriage to my sister, Sarah.
“Luke!” Sarah said when she saw me. She was hanging on Eric’s arm, thronged by a group of men in suits who were having a somber conversation about something, probably money. A glass of champagne bubbled in her hand, and she radiated a rosy glow that her dress matched. She was thrilled for her husband, so I could at least pretend to get along with him for an hour. For Sarah, if for no one else.
I crossed the room to my sister and brother-in-law, ignoring the heads that turned when I did. A novelty for the first year or two of SkyBlue’s success, I got used to the glances I got when I was out. Those who didn’t recognize me saw a man in a suit that cost more than a month’s wages. Those who did probably knew my reputation as one of the youngest and richest C-suite executives in the city, valued in the hundred millions. Some of them had probably seen the write-ups in Forbes, GQ, or Popular Science. I tried to keep a low profile, but when you dared to be wealthy, young, and the face of a company that manufactured controversial self-driving cars, the press were hard to shake. People stared.
“Sarah,” I said warmly, and kissed my sister on the cheek, light enough to not disturb her makeup or get any of it on my suit jacket. I came straight from the office and was wearing the same Tom Ford number that had seen me through a hectic ten hours of work.
“I‘m so happy you came!” She crooned, and she did look happy. I gave her a smile that probably looked closer to a grimace. According to my little sister, I should make more of a concerted effort to socialize in my off hours, or at least allow myself to have off hours in the first place. This gesture of good faith was the first attempt I made to take her advice in several months.
“Of course, I came.”
I turned my attention to her husband, and the smile became harder to hold.
“Eric,” I said, and extended my hand stiffly.
Eric Vernon gave it a weak shake, a courteous smile flickering across his face before he turned back to his inane conversation about cryptocurrency with the other men around him. I always considered Eric a bit boring and had of course been prepared to hate him when Sarah told me she fell in love with someone who swept her off her feet and proposed within a matter of months. He had seemed reckless to me at the time, and I didn’t want any man wrecking the life Sarah worked so hard to build for herself.
It turned out that he was an acceptable, even diligent husband, but a terrible business partner. He had offered to invest money in SkyBlue when the company was still in its infancy when he was still attempting to get on my good side, and I had foolishly taken him at his word.
The money had never shown up.
“I’m going to get a drink,” I said crisply.
Sarah opened her mouth to say something, maybe to insist that I stay and socialize, but then Eric’s arm wrapped around her waist, one of the other men said something that made her laugh, and I made a break for it. I slipped through the sea of shined shoes and glimmering dresses to the discreet white table that had been set up along the back wall. It was indicative of this kind of function: three types of wine, crackers with elaborate spreads and dressings, and fruit tartlets for dessert. Everything was of course, impeccably made and shipped in from one of the best Italian restaurants in the city. I popped a few rosemary crostini topped with whipped chevre and caviar into my mouth (it would have to suffice for dinner since I hadn’t ordered anything into the office) and poured myself a half glass of the driest champagne I could find.
“How can you drink that stuff?” A woman’s voice, dulcet with flirtation, said behind me. “Wouldn’t you like something a little sweeter?”
I closed my eyes and swallowed a groan. Whoever it was, I didn’t need it tonight. It was probably some diplomat, or socialite, or investment banker who would make eyes at me for a half an hour hoping for a one-night stand or a sugar daddy. I was too tired.
I turned around, trying to keep my expression neutral. Claire, Eric’s youngest sister, was gazing at me from under her lashes, running her finger coyly around the rim of her champagne glass. The last time I had seen Claire was at my sister’s wedding when
she was an awkward overgrown teen in an ill-fitting bridesmaid dress. Now, she had lost some of her baby fat and filled out in womanly curves. Her bedazzled kelly green dress flaunted it with a plunging neckline, but I wasn’t sure she was old enough to drink the fizzing mimosa in her hand.
Claire was, unequivocally, the last thing I needed tonight.
“I prefer a balanced drink,” I said, throwing back half my champagne in one swallow. “Too much sugar gets overpowering. You lose the individual notes.”
“Oh, sure,” Claire said sagely, as though she was a regular sommelier in training. She wasn’t an unattractive girl and had piled her long chestnut hair up on top of her head in a messy, sexy half-done way. Her high cheekbones caught the light and gleamed with a golden shimmer, and her breasts were... very present. I allowed myself an indulgent glance before reminding myself that she was Eric’s sister and needed no more encouragement.
Claire glanced appraisingly into her glass. “Mimosas are nice, but I prefer cocktails. Bacardi, Maker’s Mark, that kind of thing. You know what they say.” Her eyes sparkled at me, devilishly. She was going to make some poor man very happy with that chaotic sexual energy, but I didn’t want to play with her kind of fire. “Liquor is quicker.”
“That’s true,” I said weakly, and silently berated myself for not following my usual routine of politely turning down my sister's invitations, sending a have fun without me text, and then going home to read emails and press releases before falling asleep sometime around two in the morning. It wasn’t exactly fun, but it was a well-worn path to stability and success that I could trust, and it didn’t have any Claires on it.
“So, what notes can you pick up?” She asked, nodded to my glass. “In that.”
I sighed. I was in no mood to give a tasting lesson, and I wasn’t very good at it, to start.
“Oh, I don’t know, apples, pear? The usual white fruits. Maybe something floral.” I took another sip, pulling the wine through my teeth. “Lavender? I could be wrong.”
“That’s so cool. Could you teach me how to do that? I’m a quick study, and I’m good with my tongue.”
She was staring me down with those impish eyes, wanting to make sure the implication hit home. There was no getting rid of her. Just as I was debating telling her to find some other guy to harass, I was hit in the legs by a tiny body moving at immense speed.
“Uncle Luke!” My nephew Ryan shrieked in delight. His reddish hair was askew, the tail of his dress shirt had been yanked out of his slacks, and he had a smear of something that looked like strawberry sauce on his face. Obviously, he had been having a better night than me.
I had never been happier to see my seven-year-old nephew.
I discarded my champagne glass and bent down to sweep him into my arms, hoisting him up onto my hip with a grin. He was light for his size, and I was a sucker for picking him up whenever he asked or when he got tired. When Sarah and I took him to see Aladdin on Broadway, he had complained that his feet were tired while we were standing in line, and I carried him, like a big sap, for the rest of the night. That was to say nothing of the souvenirs and root beer float I bought him on our way home. Sarah told me I was going to spoil him, but I didn’t care. What was the point of having all this money if I didn’t spend it on Ryan, and the other people I cared about? My parents had never been able to do that for Sarah and I. I wanted Ryan to know how cherished he was.
“Look at you!” I said, forgetting about Claire entirely. “You’ve gotten huge!”
Ryan squealed with laughter as I hoisted him up onto my shoulders, clinging to the model car he had been toting around like a security blanket. He had been nonverbal the first three years of his life and was still a shy kid despite becoming an avid talker in his first-grade class. He always carried some little toy around with him to make him feel safe. He was into vehicles right now; it had been dinosaur shaped sponges last week.
“What car is this?” I asked.
“It’s a Corvette!” Ryan explained and made an engine noise with his lips.
“A classic, nice choice. A bit flashy for me, but I’m a boring old man.”
Ryan found this self-depreciation so funny he burst into laughter again, and I couldn’t help but smile. Ryan was my favorite relief from the world of boardrooms and press meetings. He was brighter by a mile than I was at that age and was always inventing contraptions with Legos or trying to take apart his mother’s cell phone to figure out how it worked. It had been that demand of knowledge and his determination to get it. I considered it my mission to make sure Ryan always had the support he needed to cultivate those interests and become something great.
“Ryan, I was talking to Uncle Luke,” Claire said, sounding all the more miffed for the thick layer of false sweetness she slathered on to her words. “Why don’t you go find mommy and let the grown-ups talk about grown-up things.”
“He’s fine, Claire,” I said, adding internally and the two of us have nothing to talk about.
Claire chewed on her lip in irritation but didn’t say anything else. Instead, she fixed herself another mimosa and slithered away into the crowd, defeated. Something told me I wouldn’t be seeing the last of her, but for now, I was grateful for the reprieve.
“Can we go to the pool?” Ryan asked, running his toy car along the highway of my shoulder.
“The pool? Buddy, it’s dark outside. We’re in our nice clothes. We can’t go swimming right now.”
“No, not swimming! I just want to look at it.”
“You just want to go stare at a pool? While there’s this whole party going on right here?”
“Pleeeeeeeease?”
“Alright, alright! You win.”
Ryan hooted in triumph as I moved towards one of the sleek glass doors that led out to the sizable rooftop pool included with this premiere event suite. Multicolored lights pulsated gently beneath the water, reflecting off dark lacquered tiles giving the whole deck an elegant feel. The noises of the city drifted up from the pavement below; honking horns, shouts of laughter, screeching tires, and a distant drum line rhythm. When they said New York never slept, it was true, and I knew we were in the throes of the late-night rush of bodies from bars to restaurants to clubs to music venues.
“There it is,” I said, pulling my nephew off my shoulders and setting him upright on the ground. “Go hog-wild. But don’t get your clothes wet, or your mother will kill me.”
Despite being high-spirited and sometimes stubborn, Ryan was fairly well-behaved and placed himself near the edge of the shallow end of the pool where he could watch the lights beneath the water change color. He ran his car along the edge of the pool’s tile, sometimes gently dipping its wheels in the water and glancing up at me to see if this was forbidden or not. I let him have it.
“Daddy is from Chicago,” He said, with the grave, wise air of a child who had just learned a new fact. “And mommy is from Queens.”
“That’s right, good job.”
“Chicago is in Illinois.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Are you from Illinois, Uncle Luke?”
“No, I’m from Queens, too, kiddo. I grew up in the same house as your mommy. She’s my sister, remember? Your mommy is my sister, which makes you my nephew.”
We had gone over all this before, back when his class had been studying family trees. Ryan had been thrilled to connect all the little paper leaves he cut out and scrawled our names on to stick to his tree. They must have moved on to geography now, by the sound of it.
“Did you and mommy live in a house when you were kids?”
I thought back to the cramped, squat roundhouse we shared with three other families. It faced the streets where children played in open fire hydrants one day and ducked behind cars to avoid drive-by shootings the next. Ryan had never even been to a neighborhood like that before; he probably couldn’t even wrap his tiny brain around what the experience of poverty was like, not even around something as simple as not having his room all to himself.
“We did, but we shared it with some other kids as well.”
“Your friends?”
“Some of them, yeah.”
I thought of Nico, gap-toothed and smiling with his olive complexion that tanned deeply in the summer, and of Marcus, bookish but spunky and always smelling of the shea butter his mother worked into his tight coils of black hair. I also thought of the bigger boys, with their shit talk and split lips, who liked to hang around our stoop smoking cigarettes and swapping tall tales. As I got older, they became insistent I start rolling around with the gang they had joined, for my own protection, they insisted, and so I could learn how to be a man. Marcus and I always refused, dealing with their slurs and put-downs, but they almost got Nico. He got spooked the first time he saw someone get shot and showed up back on his mother’s porch rattled and tear-streaked. We had all stayed out of it after that, and Nico and Marcus had grown into men I was still proud to call my friends.
“Some of them weren’t so nice, though. They liked to fight.”
“Mommy says I’m not allowed to hit.”
“That’s right; we don’t hit.”
“Have you ever been in a fight?”
“A couple of times, when I was younger.”
Ryan seemed delighted and scandalized by this in equal measure. What he didn’t need to know was that I developed a reputation as a scrapper in my middle school years, throwing punches at guys way out of my weight class. I was so angry; at my father, for being so absent, and at my teachers, for not believing that any of the kids from my neighborhood were worth anything. Mad at the whole damn system that kept my family trapped in a cycle of debt and scarcity. The only one who could talk sense into me when I started seeing red and itching for a fight was Martha. Aunt Martha, to be specific, though we weren’t related. She was a middle-aged woman who lived across the street from me and had raised two children of her own while also, somehow always looking out for the neighborhood punks.
