Billionaire’s Quarry: A Billionaire, Bad Boy, Romance (An Alpha Billionaire Romance Boxed Set) (184 page)

A baby! Already…

Eden’s Ending

Our daughter, Gwen, was born on a Tuesday morning in the month of April. It’s been four years since that day. My connection to my mate is still strong, but thankfully not the same. With the pregnancy, we found the child connected us even more so than we already were.

I experienced everything Alyssa did throughout the pregnancy and the delivery. Thanks to that knowledge I now have a new respect for mothers. The whole thing is hard, and the end is a nightmare of squeezing pain.

But in the end, you get this perfect little person and somehow it makes it all worth it.

Thankfully, that condition is gone, and I can feel only my feelings, and she can only feel hers. We still have our telepathy, and it keeps getting stronger.

With the arrival of our own child, we became aware that many children needed our help, so we’ve moved our foundation in that direction. Not only feeding and educating children but also setting up programs for people to spend time doing meaningful activities with them.

Educating their parents about how to make a happy life for them. Putting family first and material items second. Building homes for needy families and helping the parents get educations if necessary.

To build a better future for their children, was my mate’s idea and I quite like it. We want to make the world a place where the importance of the family is in the forefront again. Like it once was.

My wife is a professional speaker now and holds seminars on the importance of finding a balance in relationships. Her disdain of the ancient ways made her seek education, and she found Anthropology is what excited her the most.

She’s on her way to a Master’s degree. She says she’ll be content to stop there, but my bet is on her getting her Doctorate. My wife, Dr. Alyssa Fontaine. I like the sound of that. 

Kyle has an MBA and his own band. He and Laura married and still live outside of Austin and have two children now, both boys, and a farm full of animals and a yellow lab they treat like one of their children.

Laura has just started college. She wants to be a school teacher. It turns out she loves kids and teaching them things. She found that out, helping with our foundation.

Me, I’m into spreading the word of our creator. I studied religions from all over the world, then majored in Philosophy. Now I am the Pastor for our organization and also for, The Rising Spirit Church.

We have a little television program that comes on Sunday nights and a following of a few million people from around the world. It’s a nondenominational church, of course, we welcome all kinds.

It’s getting to be time for dinner. The whole clan is coming to the mansion this evening. Scotty is introducing us to his new girlfriend. It’s not his first girlfriend, but it’s his first serious one.

Scotty turned out to be a player in more ways than one. Those days might be numbered now as he talks about this girl constantly, a sure sign.

My mate is at the door to my office. I can tell she’s ready for us to go downstairs. I walk to her and take her hand. A flash of her naked body, lying across our bed with a large stomach, blasts through my mind.

“Where’s Gwen?” I ask.

“With your father, he took her for a walk,” she tells me. Her hair is curled and falling down around her face. Her lips are so red and shiny, and I can’t focus.

I can only think about how beautiful she is and how much I want her. Oh Lord, help us, here we go again. And I couldn’t be happier.

By Michelle Love

DESCRIPTION

Older sister Cosima takes a vacation to The Maldives, the place her father grew up, and while she is there, meets a handsome, charming stranger. Deciding to throw caution to the wind, she spends a very sensual, very erotic couple of days with him, both of them agreeing:
no names, no strings, and no inhibitions
. Cosima has always guarded her heart
fiercely,
so when she returns to the US, she is amazed to find herself thinking of her lover – and even more amazed when he shows up in New Orleans as the billionaire owner of the hotel she and her firm of architects are designing. Arlo Forrester, though, doesn’t seem all that surprised to see her
…
and soon Cosima realizes that he deliberately tracked her down despite their agreement. Not knowing whether to be irritated, or delighted, Cosima finds herself falling for the property
magnate,
but when his ex-lover follows him to New Orleans, Cosima finds herself the target of a hate campaign. Will she decide Arlo’s love is worth the pain and what will it cost her to find out?

Torn
…
Asunder

Cosima thanked the young boy who had brought her luggage to the villa, gave him and tip and then, at last alone, flopped down onto the bed and sighed. The flight from the US had been long; she had flown through Paris and had been delayed there for nearly
twenty-four
hours.

Now, though, she kicked off her shoes and padded out onto the deck. The clear azure water of the Indian Ocean swirled beneath the villa, and the sun beat relentlessly down. Cosima leaned on the railing and looked out to the small island; one of the many islands of The Maldives. She breathed in a lungful of fresh air and felt herself relax. It had been a hard year. Her job at one of the most prestigious Human Rights law firms in New York had drained her and then, of course, when her family had
been threatened
, she’d had to leave abruptly, change her name, her identity and relocate to New Orleans.

She gazed out over the ocean. She always felt closer to her late father here, even more than when she was in Jaipur. He had been born in the city but when his family was exiled to the tiny island nation and spent most of the rest of his life here. Cosima planned to revisit all of his old haunts while she was here
…

‘But not tonight,’ she thought now, going inside to change in her two
-piece
. ‘Tonight is just about relaxing.’

She slipped out of her cotton dress and into her bikini, stretching her long, lithe body into a yoga pose to get rid of the last vestiges of plane cramp. She shoved her long dark hair up into a bun and went out, diving off the deck in one graceful motion.

The feel of the water streaming past her limbs was heavenly; she swam a breaststroke hard for a few minutes, feeling her muscles unclenching then flipped onto her back and floated, letting the vitamin D from the sun sinking into her pores. Her dark copper skin gleamed gold in the golden skin and Cosima felt the tension of the last few months slip away.

She had been twelve when her father died, killed in a car bomb blast in London. She and her younger sister, Harper, had been with their mother that night. Monica Lascelles had been the ‘It’ girl of the 1960’s, had unashamedly romanced some of the most handsome, richest and eligible bachelors of the time. Even when she reached forty, she was still a stunning woman and still commanded
six-figure
sums for her pictures. She’d been all set to marry an English nobleman when, at a very exclusive private party, she’d caught the eye of the young Indian prince who was visiting on a diplomatic vision. Prince Arjun Malhotra was ten years younger, confident and the most
good-looking
man she’d ever seen. Two weeks later, causing scandal both in India and the UK, she’d married him in a registry office in Paris. Cosima was born a year later; Harper two years after her older sister. They spent their time between Jaipur, London and New York and although Cosima and Harpa lived a happy childhood, tensions in the families of their parents grew unbearable. Finally, after
his father was murdered by his own bodyguards
, Arjun was exiled from India on pain of death. He took his family and left forever, his heart breaking and
eventually,
Arjun divorced Monica after discovering she was sleeping with just about all of his friends. But for a few of the more extreme anti-royalty nuts, banishment was not enough. They hunted down and killed every member of the Malhotra family
…which
was when Arjun sent his children to New York to begin new lives under new identities. He was set to join them a few days later – but instead, one night, he got into his chauffeured car and was blown to bits, along with his driver and a couple of innocent bystanders.

Cosima never got over it. Harpa, from whom they’d shielded the worst details clung to her sister; their mother, ever the attention seeker,
wailed
and tore at her clothes in grief.
Even then, Cosima could see her mother as the vain princess, as her mother did interview after interview, draped in the saris that Arjun had gifted to her, smoking exotic cigarettes, waving her cigarette lighter around imperiously as she told her life story over and over, every time embellishing it just a little more and forgetting that she and Arjun had been divorced when he died.

The FBI had told them they would have to change their names, move somewhere no-one would find
them,
or they’d never be safe…but Monica wouldn’t hear of it.

‘They don’t want us. If
they
did,
they
would have killed us at the same time as my darling Arjun.’

Cosima would roll her eyes. If Monica had
actually
been in love with Arjun, the man and not Arjun the Prince, she might have had more
sympathy,
but Cosima knew for a fact her mother had had a string of affairs beginning after Harpa’s birth. When Cosima was sixteen, she moved out and applied to the court for legal custody of Harpa. She got it, so impressed was the judge who saw the serious young woman, already two years ahead in her education. Cosima took the last of her trust fund and bought her and Harpa a small apartment in New York City. Her mother had bleated and whined but soon found that life without her daughters left her a lot of freedom to do whatever she wanted.

Now, at twenty-eight, Cosima was a highflyer at her architecture firm, and about to become a partner. They specialized in designing boutique hotels; Cosima had an exquisite eye for color and design and soon she was a name to
be reckoned
with in the industry. That she was beautiful didn’t go
unnoticed,
and soon the attention transcended the architecture
world,
and
she was being courted by major publications
. She had
resisted,
and one journalist had taken exception to her reticence and researched her background. The
expose outed
her as a Malhotra
heir,
and the FBI moved quickly to move her and Harpa out of New York when she’d received a death threat.

Cosima floated in the warm water of the Indian Ocean and sighed. Harpa had been devastated to leave New York, her job as a stylist, and their relationship had suffered as a consequence. Cosima had persuaded a reluctant FBI not to take them out of the country;
instead,
they relocated to hot, sultry New Orleans. Cosima, thanks to a few wise investments, was taking some time out before deciding what to do next – she already had offers from some of the biggest firms in New Orleans. Harpa was back styling for, to her dismay, far less glamorous clients than in the Big Apple – and now they had new surnames too: Bedi. Cosima and Harpa Bedi. Cosima felt so disloyal to her father’s memory and his
name,
but it couldn’t
be helped
.

Cosima swam back to her villa, and stood under the shower, shampooing the salt from her hair, soaping her body until she felt clean and refreshed. She toyed with the idea of heading onto the island for
supper,
but she wasn’t even hungry yet. The complimentary fruit basket stood on the table in the main
room,
and she picked from that, trying to decide where to go to eat. The small island was so compact that she could walk into the small town in less than five minutes. Glancing at her watch, she decided to catch up
on
some
reading,
but less than a half hour later, she had fallen asleep, the book slipping to the deck and the sun beating down her.

Arlo Forrester took two bites of his fish then sat back to people watch as he ate. He loved it here on this tiny
island; somewhere
he wouldn’t be recognized or harassed.
Solace,
he thought,
that’s what this place was, a haven.
He noticed a few young women glancing his way and smiled.
That’s one complication I don’t need.
Arlo Forrester was almost forty, never married, just out of a long, long term relationship with Sabine Karlsson, the supermodel-turned-photographer, within whom he’d shared a bed and a life with for the last fifteen years. And still might have been
being
it not for his ex-best friend, Cole
…who
had been sleeping with Sabine for the last five of those years. A random comment at a party had led Arlo to
discover
their secret and that was that. Arlo Forrester didn’t do second chances.
Ever.

So, after Sabine had tearfully moved out of his luxury penthouse, Arlo had decided.
No more commitment.
After all, with his dark good looks, his long
legs,
and hard body, it wasn’t as if he would go without sex for long. He had enough respect for a
woman
that he would explain his mindset to them before he took them to bed – but he found
most
while agreeing beforehand, would always, always think differently afterward. That wasn’t arrogance, just his experience.

So, no commitment and from now, he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to stick to that.
I can even do without sex for a while,
he said to himself now;
just hang out with my friends, with myself.

Although I might make an exception for her
…
Arlo sat up as a stunning woman walked into the restaurant. Actually ‘stunning’ was a gross understatement; the woman, in her mid-twenties, had dark skin, a body that was slender and yet curvy in all the right places, dark
hair
that reached past her waist and an air of independence that he found compelling.

The maître d’ led her to the table two down from him, and she sat facing him. He could hear her chatting in perfect Dhivehi….well, to his untrained ear at least. She was wearing a simple dark gold dress, her feet bare, no jewelry, and no make-up.
Christ, who needed
make-up
with skin like that, those huge dark eyes rimmed with the thickest darkest lashes.
His groin tightened as he watched her order a drink, then as the waiter left, pull a book out from her bag and began reading. He squinted to see what she was reading and grinned.
Harry Potter.
He liked
that; he
liked she didn’t try to impress the people around her with a literary classic. She looked totally absorbed in the book too – he watched her smile and frown as she read and even start when the waiter brought her food, thanking him with a smile that made Arlo’s stomach warm.

Damn…
She looked up as if he’d said the word out loud and their gazes locked. A flush crept up her
face,
and she looked away. Arlo grinned as she looked flustered, and then studiously ignored him as she ate her food. He relented, giving her privacy, but kept her in the corner of his eye as he finished his
own
supper.

Forty minutes later he saw her call for the check and tip generously, gathering her book and her bag to leave.
Hell, what now, Forrester…decide? Are
you
going to let her go?
Arlo sighed.
This
….this
wasn’t what he needed right now, she was a complication but,
god dammit;
she was the most exquisite creature he had ever seen
…
He rubbed his hands over his eyes.
So much for self-control, man, when a pretty face can distract you just like…

‘I’m going to the bar. If you want, you can join
me,
and I’ll buy you whatever drink is your poison.’

He looked up, shocked. The woman stood at the side of his table, looking down at him
. Oh hell
, close up,
she
was even more enchanting, and worse, he could smell
her
perfume
…a
clean, heady scent that sent his blood rushing to his groin. She nodded briefly, smiled and walked off in the direction – the easy, relaxed gait almost a sashay
…
and
dear lord,
the dress was backless, showing a long expanse of café-au-lait skin.

Jeez…
Arlo called for the check, hurriedly signing it and over-tipping.
Be cool, man, keep her waiting for at least ten minutes
…ha. No way. Arlo followed the goddess into the bar as if she had him on a leash.

She sat down in a private
booth
and smiled as he sat opposite her.

‘Hi.’ Her accent was a sexy mix of American and Indian, and her smile
…

‘Hello. I’m – ‘

‘No names.’
Still,
she smiled. ‘I figure we can do the whole getting to know each other thing. You tell me your
life; I
tell you mine. Or we can just get right to what would be inevitable.’

Arlo chuckled. ‘You’re confident.’

She inclined her head gracefully. ‘But hopefully not arrogant. If you’re not interested, that’s
absolutely
fine, no hard feelings, let’s have a drink and say goodbye.’