The Billionaire Bargain Read online

  The Billionaire Bargain

  By L I L A M O N R O E

  Copyright © 2015 by Lila Monroe

  The Billionaire Bargain

  Cover Design: British Empire Designs

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including emailing, photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For the real Grant Devlin

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  ONE

  Is death by lobster tank too merciful?

  It’s a serious question. See, my so-called “best friend” Kate has decided that just because she’s happily paired up with the boy of her dreams, it’s her mission to spread the sweet sweet joy of monogamous bliss to all and sundry, but especially to certain people who “are married to their job,” and “going to give themselves an ulcer,” and “it’s just one blind date, Lacey, jeez, you need to loosen up.”

  My blind date was so loosened up I was afraid he was going to slide off his chair into a puddle under the table.

  “And that’s why I, like, definitely think we should take a like, more s—shur—shurious—serious look at the whole, you know, aliens seeding the Earth with life thing,” he slurred, narrowly missing stabbing the waitress with his fork as he gestured grandly. His other hand came within inches of sending his wine glass flying onto the wall of the cheap Chinese restaurant he had insisted we go to because their crab rangoon was “fucking awesome” (it was not awesome. It was a significant distance from awesome. If it had to walk to awesome, it would crumple down from heat exhaustion and be picked at by vultures who would eventually turn up their beaks at it because in case I have not made this terribly clear, this was not great crab rangoon. It tasted like someone had stuffed a fish into a sock and left it out in the rain).

  “It’s like…obvious. I mean—where do people fucking shink—think the pyramids came from? The pyramids, man.” He shook his head in a way that he probably thought made him look wise and thoughtful, but actually made it look like he was about to topple into his plate of crab rangoon. “The Illuminati, they don’t want you to, like, know. The truth!”

  I stared at the lobster tank in front of me, the crustaceans clicking their claws as if pleading for mercy.

  Me too, lobsters. Me too.

  “Well, that is certainly an opinion,” I replied. This was about a hundred times more diplomatic than I felt like being, but dammit, this was my first date in over a year, and Kate wouldn’t throw me under the bus this bad, right? This was probably all just a hilarious act this guy put on to weed out the girls who were only into his unkempt surfer good looks? There were probably some secret good qualities of his that I could uncover with time, right? At least the time to finish this very expensive and rapidly-becoming-indispensible drink?

  “Certainly an opinion—thassa—thassa helluva—did you like, even listen?”

  Okay, either this guy was hiding his good qualities with all the skill and dedication of a highly trained CIA operative, or he was just a douche-bag.

  “Look, I’m sorry, we’re probably not going to agree on the aliens thing. Can we talk about something else? What about—”

  “Well, you don’ have to be so stuck-up about it. All up on your high horse, with that sorority—no, superi—superiorally—ority complex.”

  Douche-bag alert! Douche-bag alert! Ding ding ding we have a winner! Please come to the stage to collect your free microwave oven and your ticket to The Hell Out of Here As Soon As Humanly Possible!

  I opened my mouth to say something I probably would’ve regretted later in the date post-mortem with Kate when suddenly, my phone started to vibrate.

  Bzzzzzz! I bit my tongue and dove into my purse, pulling up my text messages. It was from work, and contained only three characters: 911.

  Saved by the bell. Er, buzz. Whatever, close enough!

  I stood.

  “Sorry,” I said with all the sincerity I could muster, which was not exactly the most sincerity in the world. I was definitely not going to be taking home the Oscar for Best Actress. “I have to go. Work emergency.” I was already pushing in my chair.

  “You’re shitting me,” He whined: “It’s a Friday.”

  “It’s an emergency,” I said.

  “Why you gotta be susha—such a bitch,” he whined into his empty glass. “You don’t have to make up an excuse, God, why are all women such fucking—”

  Dodging through the smoky air past waiters and busboys carrying enough deep-fried meat to clog the arteries of a medium-sized country, I made my escape.

  “It was just a pity date anyway!” he yelled after me. “Like I’d want to date a fat bitch like you!”

  “Oh no,” I muttered under my breath. “However will I deal with the loss of such a Prince Charming?”

  But my eyes still stung with barely suppressed tears as I stepped out into the cool night and raised my hand to hail a cab. I knew I shouldn’t care what some asshole with a distorted view of female beauty and an overdeveloped sense of entitlement thought, but it got so hard sometimes, you know? San Francisco maybe wasn’t as shallow as L.A., but still, there were times when the population of California seemed to be about thirty million blonde, size zero, surfer babes with long legs and zero cellulite, and then…me.

  Lacey Newman. Always-tangled brown hair harboring enough static electricity for a storm cloud, skin that went scarlet as a lobster instead of tanning bronze, and curves that, while technically all in the right places, also proved that you could have too much of a good thing.

  My phone buzzed again, another 911 text. I tried to console myself with the thought that even if my blind date tonight hadn’t been Major Sloshed from the Planet Disaster, the work emergency would have called it to a halt anyway. With work the way it was, my love life wasn’t going anywhere in a million years.

  Yeah. Real comforting.

  TWO

  I’d had plenty of time on the cab ride over to cycle through all the self-pity, righteous indignation, and relief that my exit had brought me, and by the time I tipped the driver I had settled into a low steady thrum of anxiety about the text message—I’d put out so many fires this week alone, what could possibly have gone wrong now?—and a grim determination that whatever had gone wrong, I was going to grab it by the neck and get it back in line.

  Yeah, I know—I bitch a lot about work, but at the end of the day, Kate is right: I’m married to it. Maybe it’s not the healthiest marriage, but this company has done so many great things in the past; I just know that it could do more in the future. And I could be a part of that. I could be a pioneer, charting new waters, ushering in a whole new world of—

  Okay, okay, I’ll stop it with the speechifying. Let’s just say that despite the downs part of the ups and down—and no, it’s not a small part—I’m committed to my job, and I’m in it for the long haul.

  The doors to Devlin Media Corp whooshed open when I flashed my work badge across the reader, and I stepped into what looked like a medium-sized spaceship. I’ve worked here for a few years now, and maybe it’s goofy of me but that first view always takes my breath away. The wide-open space that opens up before you as you step in, modern art chandeliers with environmentally friendly light-bulbs shining down on all
that chrome and white marble and crystal, sculpted in sophisticated curves, framed by exotic wood paneling polished to a deep glow…

  I hurriedly made my way to the boardroom, where the architects had continued the theme of‘what if the starship Enterprise were made of polished exotic wood and marble?’ Not even the dimmed lights and the janitor’s bucket in the corner could diminish the majesty of this place. Even being called here with a cryptic text message in the middle of the evening couldn’t pop my bubble.

  No, it would take my lovely supervisor Jacinda to do that.

  “Where the hell have you been?” she shouted, jabbing her long lime-green fingernails in my face.“You need to take this job seriously, this isn’t some Intro to Basket-Weaving class you can blow off when you feel like it—”

  “I was here before you—” I began, too startled to remember the first rule of Surviving the Supervisor: don’t engage.

  “Don’t make excuses!” she snarled, revealing the popcorn kernel trapped in her Invisalign braces. Lovely.

  “I wasn’t—” I know, I know, I should have quit while I was only slightly behind, but in my defense, that gross popcorn kernel was really distracting.

  Jacinda got up in my face, so close I started to worry that her rage might fling the popcorn kernel out of her teeth and onto my face.“There are lots of girls out there who’d kill for this job,” she hissed,“girls who know how to show proper respect to the chain of command, girls who respect workplace dress code—”

  “I came straight from a date—” I protested, because when you’re fighting a losing battle, you might as well throw fuel on the fire of your enemy’s victory and really piss them off, right?

  I’m kidding; actually she just made me so angry that she fried the connection between my brain and my mouth. I completely forgot anything to do with phrases like‘disengaging,’ ‘common sense,’ and‘oh god Lacey shut up before she has a nuclear meltdown.’

  “—girls who actually earned their degrees with their brains instead of on their knees! Now sit down there—” she all but shoved me towards the broken chair in the dimly lit corner of the room—“and take notes. And I better not catch any spelling mistakes this time!”

  “On what? My laptop is—” I started to gesture towards the office.

  “Sit!” she snarled.

  I sat. I dug a steno pad out of my purse with a mental thank-you to my mom, whose complete cluelessness about modern-day admin assistant jobs was now coming in handy (I think she got her ideas from Mad Men)—and, oh shit, no pen? Fine, Jacinda was getting these notes in eyebrow pencil.

  What’s going on?” one of the suits leaned over to whisper to me. I shrugged, taking to the higher ground of not replying, A bitch rampage, obviously.

  Even though it would have been the perfect comeback. Sometimes the higher ground is just not very comfortable.

  Jacinda made a speedy circuit around the table, slapping down newspapers with the next day’s date on them. The pictures on the front pages of the various newspapers revealed that this was not the case. They showed Grant Devlin, sole heir of Devlin Media Corp and our boss on a pleasure cruise on his speedboat, working on his tan, consuming his weight in champagne while a bunch of bikini-clad refugees from the Playboy Mansion hung on his arm, wearing so little you’d think there was a fabric shortage and—

  Oh shit.

  The biggest photo, the one on the bottom, the one I somehow hadn’t seen while I was obsessing over my boss’ taste in bimbos—

  His speedboat was smashed. Completely totaled. Chunks of fiberglass littered the sand and there was a stain on the helm—was that—no, it couldn’t be—blood?

  “Is he okay?” I blurted before I could remember Jacinda’s order to keep silent.

  Elephants never forget and neither did Jacinda; she was glaring daggers at me.“What did I tell you—” she started through gritted teeth.

  “Your concern is touching.” In strolled Grant, picking at a loose thread on the cuff of his thousand dollar suit. Not a scratch on him, the bastard. I took a deep breath and tried to slow my speeding heart. I hadn’t been worried, not me, move along, nothing to see here. The asshole was fine. He was always fine.

  And also fine, if you take my meaning. Which made the asshole thing insult to injury.

  “I don’t see the problem,” Grant continued in an unconcerned drawl like slowly spreading honey.“I’ve paid off the damage, and no one was harmed. It was just some fun that got out of hand.”

  “The share price is already falling,” Mr. Lee pointed out, voice quavering. Looked like it was his turn on the chopping block. Nobody liked to contradict Grant Devlin, but it had to be done if he wasn’t going to run the company into the ground. So they took turns.“It will fall further. Wall Street is worried about you at the helm, and things like this don’t increase their confidence.”

  Grant just shrugged.“I can’t help it if Wall Street can’t separate my professional and personal lives.”

  I mentally built an entire lobster death tank just for him. With radioactive mutant lobsters. Poisonous radioactive mutant lobsters. With lasers and chainsaws. Would little lobster handguns be overdoing it?

  It’s just—aaaaaargh! Such. An. Asshole. And he was never going to change!

  This week it was a crashed speedboat, last month it was blowing a quarter million on a roulette gamble in Monte Carlo. Not two months ago, we just barely managed to keep the papers from reporting on his trip back home to Australia to—I swear I am not making this up—competitively wrestle crocodiles.

  I mean, for one thing, it would be a hell of a lot cheaper to just change your name to Steve Irwin if you’re that committed to perpetuating Australian stereotypes. For another thing, leaping onto the back of the largest and deadliest reptile known to man, and rolling around with it in the mud, is shockingly not the greatest way to promote investor confidence!

  I had worked around the clock for days calling in favors and making thinly veiled threats to keep that little escapade out of the headlines, and what was my thanks? Certainly not the words“thank you” from those entitled lips, and even more certainly not anything like a pay bonus or a promotion. To give me any of those things, he would have had to be aware of my existence first, and to a high-flyer like Grant Devlin, I might as well have been invisible.

  He got under my skin so bad, strolling around squandering the family fortune like money grew on trees—well, for him it must have seemed like he had the deed to an entire money orchard, since he sure as hell never worked a day in his life. No, all his energy went into finding something to shock the jaded palates of the rest of the elite—and quite often, succeeding.

  Plus, did he have to be so damn handsome?

  You might think I’m exaggerating his attractiveness. I’m not. Picture a handsome man. No, more handsome than that. Square that jawline, brush those brown curls with gold, darken those blue eyes till they’re almost black, deep sapphire pools made for mooning over. Deepen that voice till it’s like dark chocolate, and thread it through with a sexy chameleon accent—one second so crisp and upper class it might almost be British, the second relaxing into long lazy vowels that conjured up visions of him kicking back beers on a sunny Australian beach, surfboard planted in the sand as he contemplated the rolling waves with a practiced eye. Strip away any hint of fat over that lean, muscular sailor’s physique; evenly tan his smooth skin until he’s a bronzed Adonis.

  For intrigue, add just a few scars on his powerful arms—sometimes a wide-eyed young intern might ask where he got them, and he’d flex his arms and tell a completely different story than he had the last time, each more improbable than the last. And whether it featured great white sharks, modern-day pirates, or a knife-throwing bet, that wide-eyed intern would swoon right into those arms, disappear at the end of the day into his limo, and moon around the office for a couple of weeks, constantly checking their phones for texts that never came, until they quit or until security had to boot them from the building for trying to a
mbush him outside of his office with pleading love notes and recriminations.

  But I’ve gotten off-topic. Back to your mental picture of a handsome man. Now picture an entire team of crack tailors working night and day to create the perfect suit, cut to hang just right on his body, tight across shoulders you could build a house on and an ass that belonged in an underwear commercial. Imagine the world’s greatest stylists converging upon him with mousse and hairdryers until not a hair was out of place except the ones he intended to be, each chestnut lock artfully tousled for maximum effect.

  And then he smirks.

  Now freeze that perfect, sexy, infuriating bastard at that exact moment in time so that nothing ever musses him or ruffles his feathers or causes a single blip on the horizon of his life, and you’ve got Grant Devlin.

  “I’ve drafted a public statement of apology,” Jacindasaid, breaking me out of my rage/reverie. She pulled it up on her computer, projecting it onto the screen. I scanned it quickly—typical corporate bullshit. You’d need Indiana Jones and Lara Croft working together to uncover any trace of an actual apology underneath all the not-our-fault clauses and straight-from-a-thesaurus vocabulary.

  I rolled my eyes. Nobody believed these things at the best of times, and this was definitely not the best of times. Investor confidence was going to crash at least as hard as Grant’s boat.

  “Do you have something to contribute?” Grant asked.

  Shit!

  I shook my head and bit down on my tongue, hard, hoping he wouldn’t push it. What had I been thinking, letting something like that slip through? I did not want to lose this job.

  He just smirked and looked out the window, bored, not a care in the world.

  And I absolutely did not notice how very sexy his profile was against the dark night sky.

  THREE

  The night was dark but the light of dawn was just peeking over the horizon like a shy child when I finally got out of the meeting. I stood at the edge of the sidewalk waiting for a cab, the red neon lights of the businesses across the street suggesting a warmth I didn’t feel. It was only a little cool out; I’d have been fine with a light jacket, but this damn date dress was thin and filmy and offering an all-access pass to the breeze. My feet ached, confined to cheap heels for far too long. I vaguely remembered something I had read about heels putting your feet into two of the three positions needed to break your ankle. But I didn’t dare take them off yet—I was still within shouting distance of Devlin Media Corp., and I didn’t trust Jacinda not to swoop down on me like some kind of corporate vampire and start screaming about my unprofessional behavior.