The Billionaire Bargain Read online

  Where the hell were the cabs?

  Footsteps behind me, and then Grant was at my side, whistling a jaunty tune as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

  “Mr. Devlin,” I acknowledged, not making eye contact.

  His car pulled up, all polished black paint and classic lines like something out of a film noir classic. Hell, for all I knew, it probably was out of a film noir classic. He’d probably peeled a million off his billfold and plunked it on the table for a ride out of The Maltese Falcon on a whim.

  “May I offer you a ride?”

  “No thank you,” I said stiffly.

  “Are you sure?” He drew closer, solicitous but with the slightest smirk in his voice, and I looked upautomatically to confirm that it was reflected in his face.“The taxi drivers do seem to have abandoned us to our fates.”

  This was more words than he’d said to me in all the previous year, and I was fighting a losing battle not to get flustered, his exotic accent making everything sound like entirely new words.“I’ll be fine. I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

  “And how do you know I’d be inconvenienced? Maybe I’m going your way.” I tried not to read anythinginto the glint in his eyes when he said those last three words. There wasn’t anything there. Of course there wasn’t.

  "I seriously doubt that.”

  “How will you know unless you tell me?”

  Reluctantly, I gave him my address. He punched it into his iPhone—he probably wouldn’t even know where to look for that crummy part of town without his fancy technology—and handed it to the driver without a second glance. He opened the door and gestured for me to enter.“After you…”

  He trailed off, and I realized that he had no idea what my name was. A whole year being his personal clean-up artist, and the man couldn’t pick me out of a line-up.

  No fucking way.

  “Lacey Newman,” I replied, from between gritted teeth. I didn’t know whether to be humiliated or angry as hell.

  Angry won. But I still got into the car.

  In the car, there was a long awkward silence—at least, awkward for me. Scratch that, it wasn’t just awkward—it was excruciating. My fingers fretting nervously at the edges of the leather seats, I cast around desperately in my mind for something to say or do; my mind ran into a big blank empty wall of nothing.

  Meanwhile, Grant—the one who actually should have been feeling awkward, since he was the jerk who was flushing the company down the drain—was just fine. He opened up a polished cabinet that definitely didn’t come factory standard, and started mixing himself a drink with a speed and skill that suggested this was his normal routine.“What a night,” he said.“Well, morning now, I suppose.”

  “Mmm-hmmm.” Oh brilliant, Lacey. Way to go. You’re definitely going to impress your boss with this display of your sparkling wit; you’re giving him so many reasons not to discipline you for that unprofessional eye-roll. Though depending on the kind of discipline…I could feel my cheeks flushing and I mentally scolded myself for that train of thought, which was both pathetic and pointless.

  “It ended with a bit of whimpering from those fussbudgets and mama’s boys in there, but at least it started with a bang.” He mimed his speedboat—his speedboat that probably could have paid for the entire block I lived on—exploding, and laughed, throaty and deep.

  And then I stopped feeling awkward, because I was too busy feeling absolutely fucking furious.

  “Mmmm-hmmm.” I thought about my student loans, the interest only ever creeping higher as I made payment after payment, none of it ever seeming to make a dent in the Everest-high mountain of debt I’d had to accrue to apply for this gofer admin assistant job in the first place. My knuckles went white where they gripped the seat as I fantasized again, only this time it was about slapping him.

  “In more ways than one,” he added, raising his eyebrows at me, I guess just in case I was a cloistered nun who hadn’t gotten the blatantly obvious double entendre.

  “Well, I’m glad you had so much fun,” I snapped before I could get a hold of myself.“Some of us actually had better places to be than work tonight, but as long as you got laid and destroyed some property I’m sure it was all worth it.”

  He raised an eyebrow coolly.“Oh, hot date?”

  I got a rein on my mouth just in time, and pulled hard. There is not a‘snappy comeback designer’ position waiting for you in the wings, Lacey!I took a deep breath.“None of your business. Sir.”

  The nice thing about the word‘sir’ is that it’s technically respectful, but you can still cram all the loathing of the entire phrase‘you ostentatious, arrogant, overly-attractive-just-to-be-cruel asshole’ into that one syllable.

  “Not so hot then?” He paused for half a second, and when I didn’t leap in to deny it, those perfect teeth flashed in a predatory grin that could have been used to sell any and all brands of toothpaste, forever.“It looks like I saved you, Miss Newman. I believe thanks are in order.”

  Of all the conceited--

  “Let me guess: some overweight bore in a Star Wars T-shirt, practically wetting himself at the chance for an intelligent conversation with you. Or a limp-wristed mama’s boy too scared to tell his parents he doesn’t like girls.” He leaned back in his seat, satisfied with his judgment, and dug in with a little verbal twist of the knife:“That’s about the type of parasite to go for you, with your lack of confidence—”

  “You have no idea who I am!” I burst out, tact forgotten. Tact? What was tact? Sorry, Doc, I must have been hit over the head and gotten a case of tact-amnesia.

  The bastard just raised one eyebrow so perfectly sculpted that it would have Michelangelo smash his David in a fit of rage and sorrow at never being able to recreate it, and then go down an easier career path, like Renaissance-era Italian politics.

  Grant leaned close, his eyes pulling me closer as well, like the Earth being pulled into the sun’s orbit.“Oh?” he murmured.“And who are you, then? Who’s Lacey Newman?”

  I was definitely not going to be distracted by his proximity, or the way he smelled so good, like cologne and a hint of rum and just a hint of sweat. Like he was good to eat. Like—

  “Lacey Newman’s the girl who scraped and grubbed and fucking sweated blood to get the scholarships to go to Stanford.”

  I felt all that old anxiety and anger and shame wash over me, the memories of sitting in the admissions office with my thrift-store clothes pressed and mended as presentable as I could make them, a smile pasted on my face as I prepared to scrape and plead and do whatever I had to do to make those moneyed old people feel good about giving me the education I needed to make myself the person I knew I could be.

  “I’m the girl who worked five jobs just to make ends meet until I got this one, and I did a damn good job at every one.”

  My anger mounted, heat building inside my head and chest as I remembered flipping those burgers, scrubbing the vomit out of those carpets, holding the phone to my ear at the call center and trying not to let anyone hear me cry as the person at the end of the line screamed profanities and abuse into my ear, knowing I wasn’t allowed to hang up on them.

  “I’m the fucking person who has to clean up all your messes, and you know what? It is getting damn old!”

  “You’re blowing it all out of proportion,” Grant protested, eyes flashing as he leaned further towards me. The top button on his collar was undone. I could see one tiny curl of chest hair, glinting gold against his tanned, muscled— “This will blow over, these things always work themselves out—”

  “They work themselves out because people make them work out,” I said.“Including me.”

  My heart was hammering and I wasn’t sure if it was because my mouth was kicking my job over a cliff like a crazed lemming or if it was his mouth so close to mine, his full lips slightly open in a pout as obnoxious as it was sexy. Damn, I needed to get out of this car!

  “If you showed up for work once in awhile, you’d see how precarious
the whole company is.” I couldn’t stop myself from glaring at him after this last outburst.

  For the first time since I’d met him, Grant looked lost for words. He looked lost in general. He opened his mouth to respond, then closed it. I thought I saw his expression shift like he’d made a decision—his jaw tightening, his chin setting, God, why was determination so attractive?—and he opened his mouth again, but at that moment the driver braked, and I saw the neon lights of the Steddy TattsParlor just below my apartment.“Goodnight, Mr. Devlin.”

  His hand was on the door handle before I’d even gotten it halfway open. His fingers were over mine. They were warm and strong.“There’s no need to pretend you live in this hellhole just to win the argument—”

  Anger gave me the strength to wrench the door handle out of his grip.“‘This hellhole’ is my home.”

  “Surely we’re paying you enough that—”

  “Some of us have student loans, not a trust fund.” I slammed the door and charged out into the cool night, fumbling with my keys as I hurried to my apartment door, hoping he wouldn’t follow, so I could calm down. Hoping he would follow, so I could tear his entitlement apart some more. I saw his car still idling there as I closed the door, and just as I was considering the various strengths and weakness of different rude hand gestures, it pulled away and disappeared into the early morning fog and gloom.

  I stomped up to my apartment, still pissed, and pulled a carton of orange juice from the fridge.

  And then I froze with the carton still in my hand, realizing that I might have just gotten myself fired,

  FOUR

  The next day, jittery from lack of sleep (I kept waiting for the phone call telling me I was being let go) I made my way carefully across the marble floor of the Devlin Media Corp lobby carrying the Unholy Grail—by which, of course¸ I mean Jacinda’s coffee. And I do mean carefully. My heels might be sensible but my supervisor certainly wasn’t, and if I spilled one drop of the nonfat organic free-trade low-sugar gluten-free raspberry-blackberry-French-vanilla latte with extra strawberry whipped cream and a dusting of white chocolate sprinkles that Jacinda had sent me out on a quest for, she would have my head.

  I wish I was being figurative when I said that.

  “Hey, girl!” Kate called out to me from her receptionist desk where she was comfortably ensconced amidst her natural habitat of phones, candy, and water-cooler gossip. “Did the witch send you out for more sugar-free unicorn blood?”

  “With an extra shot of newt’s eyes and a scoop of ground virgin’s heart on top,” I deadpanned. “Locally sourced, of course.”

  “Of course,” Kate agreed, eyes wide and innocent. “Hey, you still up for happy hour drinks tonight? There’s a two-for-one special on margarita pitchers down at this new place, and Stevie tells me they are divine.”

  “It sounds fun,” I said wistfully. “I’ll text you around four, okay? I should know by then if the crone is going to keep me afterwards to clean up any messes that have spilled out of her cauldron.”

  “You gotta stand up to her!” Kate said, frowning. “Your social life is dying, girl. It’s on life support. We’re paging the doctors, the CPR is having no effect, apply 30 ccs margaritas, stat! There’s more in heaven and in earth, Lacey, than is dreamt of in your philosophy of work.”

  “You’re mixing your references,” I told her, mock-frowning. “What was that, E.R. and Hamlet? I would not watch that spin-off.”

  “Stevie’s doing this whole Shakespeare thing for grad school,” Kate said with an eye-roll and a sigh so long-suffering that paleontologists could have carbon-dated it to the Mesozoic era. “I swear, I hear those lines in my sleep. Sometimes with scholarly commentary? Speaking of that which by any other name would smell as sweet, how’d things go with Jason the surfer boy-babe? Was he hot enough for you, or what?”

  “Don’t ask,” I said. I tried to fit as much foreboding into those two words as possible, but unfortunately, Kate has built up an immunity to foreboding. This is what happens when I talk to people about my love life; they develop an incredible tolerance for hearing about complete disasters. I should train news reporters to cover hurricanes and earthquakes.

  “Well, now I have to ask,” Kate said with an eye-roll so dramatic it could have applied for its own actor’s union card. “Spill!”

  I sighed, resigned. “Well—”

  And then my phone rang, the Imperial March ringtone I had saved for Jacinda. I popped it open, mouthing apologies to Kate. She rolled her eyes again. Girl was going to sprain a muscle doing that someday.

  Jacinda’s voice rang shrill as a police siren through speakers, stabbing into my eardrums like an icepick: “Where the hell are you? I’ve been calling for ages.”

  I quickly checked my phone display. Yep, this was her first call this morning. Her Bitch to English dictionary must have been out of date. “I, uh—”

  “Whatever,” she interrupted, displaying a less than Sherlockian interest in uncovering the truth, “I’m not interested in your excuses. If you haven’t gotten my caffeine to me in the next five minutes, so help me God—”

  I mouthed more apologies to Kate. She pouted, rolled her eyes—seriously, I was starting to worry about the strain on those muscles; was I inadvertently setting her up to need eye surgery before her time?—and mouthed back, Happy Hour. You will tell me EVERYTHING.

  • • •

  Jacinda kept steamrolling over my explanations all the way through the lobby, up the elevator, down the hallway and into her office. Let me tell you, trained operatic sopranos could have learned a thing or two from this woman about breath control. She didn’t even pause as she hung up the phone, breathlessly launching headlong into another attack as she clicked it shut and switched to berating me to my face.

  “Why the hell didn’t the Chronicle get the press release? Every bitty little broadsheet in the Bay Area is running our apology today, and you somehow manage to miss the fucking Chronicle? This completely undermines my credibil—the company’s credibility, it’s like you’re trying to run this place into the ground—”

  The paper didn’t have the press release because last night, Jacinda had snatched it out of my hand at the last second and insisted that she needed to make some last-minute changes and would personally see it to the newspaper herself, since “who knows if you’ll even make it there; wouldn’t be surprised if you got distracted halfway there by all the pretty colors.” There was no point in bringing this up, though; Jacinda wasn’t interested in the truth, just spreading around blame.

  I stared at a point just to the right of her immaculately constructed blonde beehive, just close enough to look like I was looking her in the eye, and tried to appear contrite and ashamed. The faster she felt vindicated, the faster this conversation would be over, and the more likely I could get through it without bursting into tears.

  Oh God, please let me get through this conversation without bursting into tears.

  Someday it was going to be different. Someday all my hard work and sacrifices were going to pay off. Someday I was going to be the one running the show, not scrambling around like a gofer for some incompetent ass getting paid twice what I did for a quarter of the work.

  “Are you even listening to me, you flaky little—”

  Yeah, and someday pigs will fly.

  • • •

  It was almost noon, and I had just finished cleaning up this latest of Jacinda’s messes, while also simultaneously manning the phones. It’s a deceptively simple phrase which translated to “answering complicated technical questions, soothing people’s nerves, suggesting things in ways that could make people think they thought of it themselves, transferring calls to answering machines, and being the safe receptacle for all the anger and frustration that people wished they could take out on the people actually responsible if those people didn’t also hold their jobs in the palm of their hands, so the girl on the phone would have to do.”

  What was Jacinda doing, you ask? Well, those l
ovely nails of hers don’t maintain themselves. She had checked herself out for an hour-long break to get a touch-up at her favorite salon. Truly, the life of an executive is a hard one. Good thing they have all those stock shares, luxury homes, and tax breaks to keep them warm at night.

  I leaned back in my chair, squeezing my eyes shut for a second as I stretched the tight muscles of my arms, neck, and shoulders before relaxing into what there was of its ergonomic support. There was about as much ergonomic support in this chair as there was in a medieval rack, but beggars can’t be choosers.

  “Feel like grabbing lunch?”

  I gave a startled yelp and almost fell out of my chair as I sat up. “Grant—Mr. Devlin—I didn’t see you there!”

  A glint of amusement danced in his eyes. “It is a bit tricky to do that with your eyes closed. If you find out the secret, do let me know.” He leaned on my desk, his white linen shirt gapping open teasingly at the neck. How the hell did he manage to even lean sexily?

  “Uh, yeah, right.” Trying to save face, I scrambled for a notepad and pen. “Um…lunch, you said? I’m supposed to stay at the desk, but I can call out and order you some—where do you want—or, uh, what?”

  That damn smile just got wider, like he was the Cheshire Cat. “Actually, Miss Newman, that was an invitation. You have gotten those before, haven’t you?” He didn’t wait to hear my answer. “There’s a lovely new Thai place around the corner I’ve heard good things about. Care to have lunch with me?”