The Boss (Billionaires of Club Tempest #1)

by Sloane Hunter

  This suspicion was confirmed on Friday afternoon when I brought his lunch in while he was on the phone.

  “Mr. Bloom, can’t you— Yes, yes, I realize that. But—”

  Sam was turned in his chair, facing the windows, but I didn’t have to see his face to know he was unhappy.

  I quietly placed the containers of Chinese on his desk along with chopsticks and napkins, trying not to listen to the angry, garbled sounds coming out of the receiver.

  “But Mr. Bloom, you can essentially name your price here. Within reason, of course, but this could be extremely lucrative for you.”

  Another roar of disjointed sounds erupted from the phone. I glanced over just in time to make eye contact with Sam. He placed a finger to his temple in the shape of a gun.

  “Well if you change your—” Sam stopped speaking abruptly and let the phone drop loosely in his hand. “Goodbye,” he said to nobody in particular. I paused awkwardly as he turned his chair around and shook his head.

  “You still aren’t right,” he said.

  Was he talking to me? He raised an eyebrow at me, waiting for a response.

  “About what?” I asked, confused.

  “Do you know who that was?” he asked, nodding at the phone.

  I shook my head.

  “That was Ed Bloom, owner of the Starling building. I’ve been trying to have more than a three-second conversation with him all week. Well, I finally got it and I believe his words were, ‘Stop fucking calling me, you monopolistic bastard’. He doesn’t want to sell, for any price.”

  “It sounds like I was a little right,” I said and immediately cringed. Do you want to lose your job, moron?

  He shrugged. “It seems like it now, but you’re not. And I’ll prove it to you. There’s something this guy wants. Maybe it’s not money, but I know money can buy it. All I need to do is figure out what it is.”

  “Money can’t buy everything,” I said.

  He looked up at me. “It can buy everything that matters.”

  “Love?” I asked. “Friendship?”

  His jaw set. “Money can most definitely buy friendship.”

  “But is it genuine?” I countered. “Would they still be there for you if you didn’t have any money tomorrow?”

  “No, but that’s because I’m not using my money to pay for it anymore,” he said.

  A laugh escaped me. “That’s the most convoluted thinking I’ve ever heard.”

  He shrugged and a small smile played at his full lips. He turned again toward the windows. “I’ll figure out something to give them,” he said.

  “And what if they won’t take anything?” I asked.

  “Well, I might lose my job,” he said casually.

  “Seriously?” I asked, astounded. “You started this company. I didn’t know you could be fired.”

  “The board could vote me out as CEO. It’s a distinct possibility. The Astor renovation has already started and there’s no stopping that boulder from crashing down the mountain. The shareholders are going to be out a hell of a lot of money if I don’t pull this off.” He sighed. “But it’s okay. I have time. Nobody except Cordon and me — and I guess now you — know that Ed Bloom isn’t selling. I have time to try to convince him.”

  I watched him carefully. He said it all very evenly. Seriously, but with little emotion. I pictured how Troy would have acted, if something like this happened to him. I couldn’t even think of anything comparable because Troy never worked a day in his life. But he was frequently inconvenienced by the slightest thing and it was often enough to send him into a tantrum. If he were here, in Sam’s place, it wouldn’t surprise me to see him sweep everything off the desk and stomp from the room, maybe punch a hole in the wall on his way out.

  Sam, on the other hand, looked relaxed and contemplative. He acknowledged that things were tough now, but, beneath that, there was confidence that everything was going to work out, and, if it didn’t, he would survive. I couldn’t help myself from finding it unbelievably attractive.

  Sam sounded like he was done with me, so I headed for my desk. At the door, I stopped and turned back to him. He was still facing away from me, looking out his window. “And love?” I asked

  “What?”

  “I asked you if money could buy love.”

  He paused. “And I said it could buy everything that mattered.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Sam

  It was only ten o’clock, but Mac was drunk. He’d been drinking since one — sampling the stock probably — and was in full on feck-the-world ranting, much to the displeasure of the group.

  “I’m telling ya, boys. Back in Dublin, we’s was fecking on top of our shite. Those feckers didn’t know feck all about nothing but we showed ‘em a thing or two. They sure as feck regretted that they’s was in the front when we’s was comin’ up.” He continued, but the next sentence made even less sense.

  Mason, Henry, and I watched in bemused silence. The Knights had started at the Tempest, as we did every Friday night with cards and a few games of pool, washed down with a healthy round of drinks before we drifted out into the city. We’d lost Keegan and Twain at some point early on, and now it was down to the four of us. Mac had been drunk back at the Tempest too, but still intelligible. He’d quickly deteriorated the longer we were out, but, while he was starting to get a bit irritating, none of us particularly wanted to deal with trying to put him in a cab.

  Mac stumbled over a sign announcing discount shots and Mason moved to steady him. Mac shoved him off.

  “Keep yer hands to yerself or I’ll show ya what yer messing with,” Mac slurred.

  Mason and I exchanged a look.

  “Mac,” Henry said impatiently.

  “Wuh,” Mac asked. He looked between the three of us, unsure who’d said his name.

  “You’re drunk, you Irish fuck. Go home before you scare off all the women.”

  Mac scoffed and it left his mouth with a spatter of saliva. “I don’t get drunk. And ya goin’ scare them off with that ugly mug of yers.”

  “I hate to break it to you,” Mason said. “But you definitely do. And we’re looking for a good time tonight. Not to babysit your drunk ass.”

  Mac whirled on Mason, hostility flaring in his green eyes. “Ya think ya can tell me what to do? Ya pansy feck. I’ll break both yer goddamn hands and try painting like that ya soft prick.”

  The abuse passed right on by Mason and he stared coolly at our friend. “I think if you weren’t drunk, you’d realize exactly what you were saying to me.”

  I could see Mac struggle to understand Mason’s words and, in that moment of confusion, the anger was replaced by some form of clarity. “I’m sorry, Mason,” he slurred. “Ya know yer a right good fellow. That I’d fecking kill for ya. I’d kill for all of ya.” His voice was getting louder again, announcing to the street.

  “We’re not asking you to kill, Mac,” I said. “We’re asking you to get in a cab and get your drunk ass home. Sleep it off and come out with us tomorrow night.”

  But Mac waved me off. “Hell no, brother. I’ve got one more stop left in me.”

  I looked at Henry, who shrugged. “I’m not his mother,” he said. “If he wants to pass out on the street, let him.”

  “Fine,” I said to Mac, “but try to keep it under control. I’m tired of walking around. I just want to sit somewhere for a while.”

  “Yeah,” Mason agreed. “We’ve been standing on the street half the goddamn night. Let’s find a place already.”

  “Didn’t we decide on a place?” Henry asked, running a hand through his brown hair to spike it up again. “I really don’t want to go to McNaulty’s again. I think I got food poisoning there last time.”

  “Bogart’s?” I tried.

  “Whiskey selection sucks.”

  “The Village Station?”

  “Too crowded.”

  “Durban?”

  “God, all the college kids.”

  I threw up my hands. “O
kay, if you’re going to shoot down all my ideas, why don’t you decide on a place?”

  Henry considered for a moment and said, “How about The Black Shade Saloon?”

  I shrugged and looked at Mason who was trailing behind, examining some graffiti. “I don’t give a fuck,” he said. “All I want is a place to sit and a glass in my hand.”

  I didn’t even bother asking Mac, who was up ahead, trying and failing to click his heels together. “Black Shade it is then.”

  The Black Shade wasn’t a far walk so we continued on foot instead of calling a cab. It was a warm summer evening, beautiful in that city-at-night way. Flashing lights and passing cars, groups of people trailing up and down the sidewalk, heading to their next destination. I loved the city at night. It promised possibility and excitement and relief from the problems of the day.

  And the problems of the day seemed to get larger with each one that passed.

  The Astor renovation was going well; that wasn’t the problem. It was that damn secondary building, the Starling, the one I’d risked my career and reputation on. In all the trouble of trying to get the board to vote my way, I hadn’t even considered the possibility that it might not be for sale. The building was a mess, old and crumbling. Whoever owned the place obviously wasn’t putting money back into it. I assumed the owner would be happy for a large payout and a chance to get the crummy building off his hands. I shouldn’t have assumed and I was paying for it now.

  At first the owner, Ed Bloom, wouldn’t even return our phone calls. Then he’d called back and told my lawyer to stop calling, the building wasn’t for sale. Then I’d personally left him messages asking for a conversation. Those went ignored too, but I was calling so much at that point that I figured eventually he’d talk with me just to get it over with. That would be when I’d hit him with the figure we were willing to give, and he’d come to his senses.

  It hadn’t worked like that. I’d told him the figure — it was the only sentence I really could get out — but it went ignored in a rant that rivaled anything I’d ever heard from Mac. The guy had told me flat out — the building was not for sale. Not now, not ever. Stop calling. Sprinkle in a healthy dose of expletives and you’ve got the just of the discussion.

  Maybe, at the beginning of the week, there would have been a chance to reverse all this, to fling myself at Tom’s feet and beg for mercy, give up on the Astor and the Starling and hope to god I could keep my job. But I’d given the go to start the Astor renovation already and now it was too late to go back. Maybe I should have waited until there was a solid contract with the Starling people, but my teams had already waited long enough. I had no idea how long negotiations would stretch, and we needed to make up for lost time to avoid displeasing the investors. Not that they were going to love this. I’d made my decision based on the odds and my instincts. Usually they were solid. This time they weren’t.

  In a way, maybe it was good that I was fucked. I never was the begging type.

  I’d spoken to Ed this afternoon and I knew that I probably should be in the office, trying to brainstorm an idea to save my ass. But I also knew my mind was fried from the past week and that if I didn’t get a little tension out then I wasn’t going to be much use anyway. Better to have a night out, relax, and come into the office tomorrow fresh with a new outlook. It wouldn’t be the first time I got a drunk epiphany in the middle of a bar crawl. But I had no expectations for anything like that. Tonight was about taking my mind off work. And off Beck.

  Even with the mounting pressure of the company weighing on my back, my thoughts seemed to be turning just as frequently, if not more so, to my assistant and the look on her face this afternoon when I’d told her that love didn’t matter. She’d left without another word, but I could tell that my words had disturbed and surprised her. Hell, they’d surprised me, borne mostly out of my frustrating conversation with Ed Bloom. But I wouldn’t take them back.

  After all, how could love be that important, if I’d gotten this far without it? I’d had longterm girlfriends in the distant past, ones I’d said the l-word too, and they back to me. But even at the time, I’d suspected they said it for the same reason I did: because it was just something you said, something that was expected after several months of dating. But those relationships had always been built on the physical. Every emotion was just going through the expected motions.

  There was only ever one person that I knew truly loved me. Her name was Mary Callahan, my mother. She’d loved me when I was nothing but a scrawny trouble-maker without a penny to my name and few manners to speak of. She’d loved me despite my flaws, or maybe because of them, and she never let me settle for anything less than what I was capable of. And I loved her too. She was the only person I ever respected in my youth, the one I attributed with steering me on the path to success.

  And she also proved my point because, if we had money back in those days, she would still be here. So fuck you, Beck. Money might not be able to conjure love out of nothing, but it sure as hell can keep it around.

  And what do you know anyway?

  I tried to steer my mind off my assistant. It was no mystery why I often found myself wondering what she was up to on the other side of my office wall. I could picture her jotting down notes, a pen clutched in slender fingers, the other twirling a strand of blonde hair. I felt a small jolt whenever she asked to transfer a call and her voice pulsed with that soft Southern drawl. Against all odds, I was getting hung up on a girl. Of course it had to be at the worst time with the worst person, but it was happening all the same. Beck was a stunning combination of crazy sexy and wry wit with a dash of complete I-don’t-give-a-fuck. Did I love her? No, but I did want to have sex with her again.

  Shit, I was trying to steer my mind away and I only got myself more deeply entrenched. That was it. I had a new objective for the evening: get laid and erase Beck from physical memory. Maybe then, I could get back to fully focusing on work.

  Mac actually seemed to be walking more or less upright by the time we reached The Black Shade. Henry, on the other hand, was slowing down.

  “Damn,” he said. “I don’t remember this place being that far away. We should have taken a cab.”

  “If you don’t use your feet more, you’re going to get fat, old man,” I said.

  Henry laughed. “When you’re as rich as I am, you don’t have to worry about such things,” he said.

  “You sure about that?” I replied. “Because from what I’ve seen, our peers tend to go to pudding once they hit forty.”

  Henry lifted up his black t-shirt to reveal a chiseled set of eight-pack abs. “Don’t think I have to worry about that for a while.”

  “Urg,” Mason said. “Keep your clothes on, Henry.”

  “Sure,” he said smugly, “but only so you two can have a chance with the ladies too. Speaking of which…”

  I followed his gaze to the front of the line waiting outside of The Black Shade. A group of girls had their backs to us, but damn, what backs they were. And from the noises floating over to us, it sounded like they were having some trouble with the bouncer.

  “You’re too drunk. I don’t care. Get out of here.”

  “I’m not drunk!” one of them insisted. “I wasn’t stumbling. I tripped. You try walking around this goddamn city for hours in heels.”

  Henry grinned back at me. Mason rolled his eyes, but there was a smile on his face. I looked back and found Mac a short distance behind us, staring at the sky.

  “Mac,” I hissed. “Come on, bud.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Just tryin’ to find a star. Do ya think—”

  But I didn’t hear the rest of his sentence because just then, as Henry approached the girls, a moment away from being the hero, I heard a very familiar voice with a very familiar accent say, “Come on, Alice. Let’s just go somewhere else.”

  “But we waited in this long-ass line!”

  Come on. What were the odds that I’d run into Beck on two separate nights, in two sep
arate parts of a city this big? They had to be astronomical. For a brief moment, I hoped I could stop Henry and we could pass by unnoticed, but he was in full savior mode and— Great. Mac was right behind him.

  “Kyle!” Mac announced the bouncer’s name instead of spoke it. “How ya doin’, you fat feck?”

  Kyle didn’t appear to have an ounce of fat on his two hundred and twenty pound frame, but luckily for us, he didn’t seem to take offense to Mac.

  “MacKenzie Walsh,” he said, frown breaking into a grin. “You’ve been away awhile. Thought you found a new favorite bar.”

  Mac clapped his outstretched hand. “Course not. The Black Shade always has my heart.”

  I was sure if I cared to look closely, Kyle left that handshake with a couple hundred dollar bills to shove in his pocket. When you’re rich, the rules don’t apply. It was something the girls seemed to have picked up on because they all looked incredibly irritated at the sight of this drunk Irish guy in a rumpled three-piece suit buddying up to the bouncer.

  “Are you letting him in?” the one who’d “tripped” demanded.

  “Are you still here?” Kyle asked them.

  “Is that any way to talk to my friends?” Mac slurred.

  Henry pushed him a bit to the side. “They’re with us,” he said. He looked a little annoyed that Mac had dove in and stole his thunder, but he made up for it by looking dead-sober next to Mac. He shot a wink to a slight brown-haired girl who grinned back. None of them had seen me yet, but it was coming.

  “Let’s just go,” a male voice said from the back of the group. It belonged to a young guy in his mid-twenties with thin black hair and a scowling face. One of these girls had to be with him, and he didn’t look too pleased on our group moving in. That’s why you travel in numbers, kid.

  “No,” the girl Henry had eyed insisted. “Let’s go in.”

  “But—”

  “You have about two seconds to move before I kick someone’s ass,” a voice shouted from further down the line. The sentiment was echoed by several other calls.

  “Well,” Henry said, unperturbed by the line’s hostility, “we’re going in. You ladies are welcome to join us at our private table.”