The Billionaire Game Read online

  A rustling sound. “Ah, this looks familiar. Was it on sale at the local craft store?”

  The direction his voice came from made me realize what he was touching, and my blood boiled like a pot left on the stove by a harried executive.

  “Not unless Michaels has taken to selling spider-silk gossamer, and if you get any dirt on that, I will be charging,” I snapped, throwing the concept of diplomacy right out of the window. Diplomacy? What’s that? Never heard of it. “I had to buy that in bulk and it cost an arm and a leg, so if you could not grub around in things you don’t understand—”

  “I assure you, my hands are very clean,” Asher smirked. “If you’d like to inspect them…”

  Unbelievable. He was blatantly flirting with me now, even as I was fitting his girlfriend for lingerie. And what’s worse, it was making me blush. I never blush. I have a strict no-blushing policy that I instituted in seventh grade and never looked back. Oh damn, it was spreading down my chest, my skin flushing hot beneath my clothing as my nipples hardened.

  “Just keep them out of the materials,” I shot back, pleased to note that my voice was firm but no longer in danger of being mistaken for a harpy’s. The customer is always right, even when you could cheerfully contemplate kicking them out of a window. Or at least chaining them to a bed until they’ve learned a lesson. Thoroughly.

  Asher seemingly complied—at least, I couldn’t hear him moving around anymore—but kept talking, sounding interested. “Bulk, huh? You see enough demand for that particular material to make it worth the investment?”

  “Long-term, yes,” I said around the pins I was holding in my mouth as I adjusted the fit of the violet silk teddy. I felt my shoulders relax—I so rarely got the opportunity to talk shop, and it was nice for someone to be taking an interest. “It’s versatile, and laying in a good supply will keep me from having to run after manufacturers to meet client deadlines. If I’m not constantly extending deadlines, clients will be more satisfied and more likely to recommend me to their friends.”

  “That’s how I came to her,” Dove put in. “Through friends. Jessaminda—you remember Jessaminda, sugar dumpling, she was hanging all over you at that premiere—she had that sex tape leak with her in that utterly divine babydoll, and I thought, ooooh, I just have to get one of those. Except different, of course.”

  Hey, it wasn’t an ad in the New Yorker, but I’d take my advertising where I could get it.

  “An excellent business strategy,” Asher said, his tone so neutral that for a second I was sure he was being sincere, and in the next sure he was mocking me.

  Jeez, Kate, self-doubt much?

  Like I’ve said before, it’s a hell of a lot easier for a statuesque redhead to get compliments on her looks than it is for her to get compliments on her artistry or business acumen. And once she’s got them, how is she ever supposed to trust them?

  I remember in college when my art mentor Professor Carey told me I had real talent, that with my vision and my head for business I could make it as far as I wanted to go; I remember that soaring feeling of joy in my stomach.

  And then I remember how he put his hand on my knee, and began to stroke my leg as he told me how he just wanted to guide me on my path, and how much he could help me if I would just help him, and I remember that crashing sensation of my stomach dropping down to the floor as I realized that it had all been lies to butter me up, and I remember the tears rushing down my face as I fled from his office.

  I pushed that memory away violently. “All right, let me just tuck in this little bit here…” I said, adjusting the fabric. “There! Take a look. This is basically what it’ll look like when it’s all done next week.”

  Dove paused from making kissy-faces at Asher over the top of the changing screen to look at herself in the mirror, and an expression of awe bloomed across her face. An almost disbelieving smile dawned as her hand—so slowly she seemed almost unaware of it—trailed across the sheer fabric cupping her pert breasts. I watched her shoulders straighten as that smile grew wicked, predatory, and delighted; a little sway sashayed into her hips as she twisted to look at herself from another angle. Oh yeah, Dove had definite plans for this outfit, and she was going to see them through.

  And I felt the last of the tension go out of my throat and shoulders. This was why I did what I did—this was why I emptied out my rent budget to get ahold of luxurious fabrics, this was why I gave myself migraines tracking down old-fashioned lace-making techniques, this was why every spare moment I found my hands sketching a new design, trying to find a way to convey sleekness, sophistication, daring, and sexiness, all in the minimal amount of cloth.

  I did it all for the looks on the faces on my clients when they gazed at themselves in the mirror wearing one of my creations and realized that they were powerful, gorgeous, sexy goddesses; that they deserved to have self-confidence, to have fun, to have good things.

  “You know what, Kate?” Dove breathed. “I think I will take a peignoir too.”

  “I’ll just add that to the order, then,” I said with a smile.

  Mission accomplished, NASA. The eagle has landed, and it is looking fly as hell.

  #

  Events conspired to sour my mood a little after that, and by ‘events,’ I mostly mean ‘Asher Young.’

  Dove had barely redressed and come out from behind the changing curtain when he glommed back onto her like a leech—not that she seemed to mind—and began pelting her with questions: well, what color had she chosen? Was it low-cut? How easily would it hold together if someone were to, say, try to rip it off? He tickled her and she giggled like a hyena every time she refused to give an answer; I bit my tongue and resisted the urge to tell him that I suspected that he was the kind of guy who read the last page of a mystery story first and then told everyone the ending, and therefore had a special place waiting for him in hell.

  They were both still giving each other mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as they headed out the door.

  “It’s not their fault,” I reminded myself once they had left. “You’re not in a very pro-couple mood, remember? Asher and Dove could be a pair of graceful monogamous-for-life swans and you would still want to wring their necks. Or penguins! Everybody loves penguins! But right now those smug little mated-for-life fuckers in tuxedos can go fuck themselves.” So maybe I was feeling a little bitter.

  I decided to distract myself by cleaning up. I was just starting to transform my studio back into my living room—and mentally calculating how long I could live on Whole Foods samples (a little trick my best friend Lacey had taught me) and coffee shop jam packets; surely it would be worth it if I could just put down the money on an actual studio space—when the doorbell rang. With a sinking heart, I went to check it, and my worst fears were confirmed.

  Like the terrible icing on the worst ever cake, the person at the door was Stevie.

  He was trying to peer through the peephole, the lens making his eyeball bulge, his nose seeming to swell. “Kate? I know you’re in there. I watched your ‘clients’”—he did the actual air quotes around the words, like this was still the nineties—“take off, so it’s just you and me. I’m taking back that magazine.”

  I bet my landlord let him in, even after I told him not to. Damn. Mr. Briggs was an old sweetie, but he had all the memory retention of a piece of soggy Swiss cheese. He couldn’t seem to hold it in his head that Stevie and I were no longer together; though, in all fairness to him, the fact that he had absorbed that we had once been together was pretty impressive, given that he regularly forgot that WWII had been won seventy years ago.

  “Look, you can drop this whole act,” Stevie said, lowering his voice as if he was about to tell me a secret. “You don’t have to pretend to be all intellectual anymore, okay? It was cute how you tried to do literary analysis on those ‘classics’—” he did the air quotes again—“to get my attention so I would date you, but it’s over and you need to let it go. Props to you for pretending to read them all the time, tha
t was a real commitment, but since we’re not together anymore you can drop the whole façade and go back to reading whatever fashion magazines you usually read.”

  He kept on talking, but his words fuzzed out in my brain and I felt my incandescent rage grow suddenly ice-cold and hard and pointed. Stevie needed to shut the hell up, and he needed to do it right now.

  Luckily, a Girl Scout is always prepared.

  Or is that Boy Scouts?

  Whatever, I was never in either of them. But what can I say: I’m always open to inspiration.

  I pulled the string I had run over the edge of my door earlier, to a little contraption I had rigged up just after he called, and armed just after Dove and Asher left. And through the peephole I watched three gallons of expired aquamarine dye cascade over Stevie ‘Jackass’ Jacobs.

  My deposit on the apartment was going to be completely gone to pay for new hallway carpet, but it was totally worth it to hear Stevie screaming like a toddler, as if it were actual acid and not blue-tinted water spilling all over him.

  He shook himself, spluttering, blinking dye out of his eyes. “You bitch! You fucking crazy bitch! Over a goddamn book!”

  “Magazine,” I corrected.

  I turned away from the door with a little smile on my face, humming a happy tune.

  That was it. I was keeping the thing, on principle.

  TWO

  Later that evening, fireworks burst overhead, eager laughter swirled around me, and an attentive waiter pressed a mojito with freshly crushed mint into my hand. Ah, this was the life.

  “This is the life, right?” Lacey said to me with a grin. She looked resplendent in a knee-length dress of shimmery golden gauze, accentuated by moonstone clasps at the shoulders, and an ebony belt that brought out the deep brown of her eyes. “Would you believe Grant wanted to have this fundraiser in a stuffy old ballroom? On a beautiful clear night like tonight?”

  “It’s a good thing he has you to talk him out of it,” I said with a playful dig at Grant’s tuxedoed ribs. “I would not have wanted to miss this.”

  “I second the motion,” Grant said, raising his glass as if for a toast.

  Tonight’s dance/banquet/concert/general purpose give-us-your-money event was to raise funds for Grant’s latest favorite charity, a group that bussed kids in homeless shelters to the library every day, and watched over them while their parents were out working or looking for jobs. This time last year, the only charity Grant Devlin had been interested in was the Society for the Relief of Young Bimbos, but Lacey had made him a changed man. These days he actually sought out opportunities to do good on his own without any prompting, and when he encountered a cause that didn’t have a fundraiser—or even one that did, but didn’t seem big enough or glamorous enough to raise the necessary awareness or funds—he made one.

  “So, how much are we getting so far?” I asked Grant.

  He pulled up some numbers on his phone. “Oh, about seven million,” he said off-handedly. “But I think we can get it up to nine million by the end of the night, maybe even eleven. Thanks for donating those items to the auction table, by the way.”

  “Well, I just hope you guys aren’t counting on me for that last two million,” I joked, trying to cover up my blush. Anything close to a compliment about my work tended to do that, and being asked to donate an item for a high-end auction definitely counted as a compliment. “I mean, I’m good, but I’m not sewing blood diamonds onto the fringes or anything.”

  “Every little bit helps,” Lacey put in. “And don’t underestimate yourself, Katie. I’m pretty sure I saw Mariska Hargitay giving them the eye at the auction table earlier.”

  “Detective Benson from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit?!” I squealed, traveling up the scale in about three seconds.

  Grant rolled his eyes fondly. “I’ll leave you two ladies to the fangirling. I’ve got to circulate, press the flesh.”

  Lacey made a mock-warning face. “Press the flesh, huh?”

  Grant kissed her cheek. “Only of the oldest, ugliest, and most wealthy couples in the western hemisphere, I assure you.”

  Lacey gave his butt a little swat. “Well, alright. As long as they don’t press back.”

  They gave each other a lingering kiss on the lips before Grant headed out, and I looked steadfastly away, trying not to feel the jealousy worming up inside me. It was easier with Grant and Lacey than it had been with Dove and Asher, probably because I knew and liked the former. But it was still hard, to see that affection and to know that it was going to be awhile before I had that level of ease and comfort and love with another person again.

  Lacey turned around just quickly enough to catch the chink in my armor, and her eyes went wide with sympathy. She patted my arm and lowered her voice. “How are you, really? Is Stevie still being an ass?”

  “Calling that douchebag an ass is an insult to both donkeys and human anatomy,” I snapped, boiling over like Mount Vesuvius. “I can’t believe what I ever saw in that guy! I want to find a time machine and travel back in time and slap myself in the face the second I said yes to a date with him, and then slap him, and then slap him again, and then maybe push him in front of some oncoming traffic!” My volume had reached the point where people around us were pricking up their ears, so I took a deep breath and continued, slightly more quietly: “Or maybe just leave an anonymous tip with his advisor that half his thesis is plagiarized from the undergrad kids he T.A.’s.”

  “It’s not too late to do that, is it?” Lacey asked, righteous indignation lighting her face up. “He shouldn’t get away with that!”

  That’s my Lacey: valiant champion of underdogs everywhere. I felt a rush of affection for my best friend, and gave her a little shoulder-shove.

  “Ah, that smarmy jerkwad would just have an excuse ready and waiting. Believe me, he’s agreed with so many of his advisors’ opinions that the man thinks the sun shines out of his ass and is responsible for our temperate California climate.”

  Lacey made a sympathetic noise. “That sucks. Sorry it’s so hard right now.”

  “He’ll get what’s coming to him eventually,” I prophesied, though I wasn’t sure how that was ever going to happen, especially when I had trouble getting him to just leave me alone. Maybe an intervention by the United Nations? “I don’t want to spend this whole evening moaning about Steve the Thesis Hunter. Let’s talk about something happy, like kittens or my imminent business success or how fly you look in that dress. Present from Grant?”

  “Bought this one myself, actually,” Lacey said proudly. “From a designer I discovered while we were in Milan. Although—” and her eyes sparkled with mischief—“you could say that what I’m wearing underneath is a present for Grant. From me, and indirectly, from you.”

  “You go, girl!” I said. “Damn, but I remember when it was like pulling teeth to get you to wear my designs for a man. It was all, ‘Kate, he’s an asshole,’ and ‘Kate, I don’t like him like that,’ and ‘Okay, yes, Kate, we slept together and it was amazing but now he’s brooding at me like he thinks he’s Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights’—”

  “I never said that,” Lacey said, laughing and giving me a playful shove. “You’re the one with all the fancy literary references; I just go for my spy shows and the occasional movie. Though if you’re looking for a Heathcliff, I think Mr. Dark and Broody over there has been giving you the eye.”

  I followed her gaze to a waiter who indeed had a very brooding brow, with a low tumble of dirty blonde hair, flashing dark eyes, and slacks that clung nicely to all his…attributes.

  “Mmm, yummy,” I agreed. “I can’t go hit on someone on the job, though; I get enough of people doing that to me all day long to ever turn it around.” I spared him one last regretful look. Oh, but those shoulders would look nice framed against my bedspread…

  “Girl, we need to find you a distraction,” Lacey said, slinging her arm around my shoulders. “Want me to be your wingman? Grant’s got a lot of yachting friends th
at, were I not happily about to be hitched, would catch my eye. And possibly also other parts of my anatomy. So. See anything you like?”

  She was happier and more relaxed these days than I’d ever seen her before in her life. And I was happy for her. Of course I was. Really.

  It was just hard, sometimes, realizing I had gone from the happy-go-lucky friend with a bag of good advice to the moping downer who needed to be cheered up.

  “How’s that wedding coming along, by the way?” I asked in a change of topic so transparent you could have used it in manufacturing windows. “Got everything sorted out?”

  Lacey sighed, just slightly put out. “We had to delay again, because we’re going to be in negotiations with Genji Inc. in June. It’s just as well, though, since that timeline works better for my parents—something about Mars being in the fifth house—” she rolled her eyes fondly; Lacey’s parents are great people, but man, sometimes they are exactly like the cartoon picture you would find next to the word ‘hippie’ in a kids’ dictionary—“and it does give me more time to get the details just perfect.”

  Uh-oh. When Lacey spends time obsessing and over-thinking little details, it’s usually not long before a freakout and tears are on their way. “What kinds of details?”

  Lacey grinned. “Well, I had a little attack of traditionalism, and I thought: you know what I want? A trousseau! You know, the collection of linens, and clothes, and lingerie that a bride traditionally—”

  “Lacey, I know what a trousseau is,” I said. “Do you need any tips on what companies make good stuff?” I could feel my stomach doing a completely unfair little roll and sink. Lacey’s wedding is a big deal, I reminded myself. She’s bought your designs plenty of times, there’s no reason she’d be obligated to buy from you this time. She needs it to be perfect, and professional, and and—