The Billionaire Game
By L I L A M O N R O E
Copyright © 2015 by Lila Monroe
The Billionaire Game 1
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.
Dedicated to my bras and panties. Now that this book’s written, I’ll take you out on the town.
Is it possible to murder somebody over
a phone line?
‘Cause if so, I definitely needed
to start working on my alibi.
“Kaaaaaaaate,” my
ex-boyfriend Stevie whined through my cell phone speakers, sounding
like a puppy who’d been told Mr. Bone was going away forever
and never coming back, “you’re making a big deal out of
nothing! I bought it, it’s mine, so just give it to me, okay?”
“Wow, Stevie, that’s real
mature,” I shot back, trying to hold my phone to my shoulder
with my ear while I balanced three different boxes of lace. I had a
business appointment for Trifles by Kate—the name of my
lingerie business—in less than an hour. “I thought you
were going to grad school, not kindergarten. Did you walk into the
wrong school? Quick, look around and count the number of pictures
drawn in crayon to make sure.”
“Kaaaaaate—”
Unbe-fucking-lievable.
The worst part was, I should have seen
this coming. The clues had all been there. But no—when we first
started dating, I was actually charmed by Stevie’s persistence!
I’d been like,
wow, this guy is willing to keep asking me
out after I’d shot him down five times? Well, I’d better
give him a chance!
Wow, this guy Facebook-stalked me and
called all my friends when he didn’t know where I was for three
hours? What compassion and concern! Wow, this guy read through my
diary until he found all the red flags I’d written down about
our relationship, and then confronted me with them and accused me of
emotional dishonesty? Well, I guess he really cares about our love!!!
What a fucking joke.
And that had been the theme of our
relationship, my rose-colored glasses making every fault into a
virtue.
I’d thought his interest in my
designs and my business meant that he recognized my artistic talent
and supported my dreams—until I realized that he would have
told me the sky was a brilliant russet red if he thought it’d
make me go to bed with him.
I’d thought his love of
Shakespeare meant he was intelligent and sensitive—until I
realized that his true love was making other people feel less
intelligent by quoting the Bard at them until they shut up.
I’d thought his possessive
jealousy of other guys was cute and meant he really loved me—until
he stormed into my job at Devlin Media Corp. accusing me of flirting
with guys at the receptionist desk, and caused a huge scene that
probably would have gotten me fired if my best friend Lacey weren’t
helping run the company these days.
Of course, no matter what Jekyll and
Whiny Baby Hyde act Stevie was pulling these days, I could be counted
on to behave myself like a mature and responsible adult.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
I snapped, barely managing to unload the boxes of lace onto the table
before they tumbled out of my arms. Damn, where the hell was my Thai
silk? My client was begging for satin, but if I could show her how
much better the texture was—dammit all to hell, how could so
much stuff be hiding in such a tiny apartment? “Stevie, it was
a gift! You do understand the concept of a gift, right? When two
people love each other very much, or when one person loves the other
and the other one is under the influence of a haze of possessive anger
that he thinks vaguely resembles love—”
“God, Kate, if you could stop
being condescending for two whole seconds—”
“You don’t even like
detective stories!” I exploded.
And there was the heart of the matter.
This was the thing that was really getting to me, at the heart of the
whole petty ordeal: the knowledge that Stevie was trying to take away
something he knew I loved, out of spite, just to hurt me.
“Whereas detective stories are
completely my jam! They are jam that is in my locked cupboard, with
duct tape on the lid, with a big fat sign pasted over the label
saying PROPERTY OF KATE! That is the extent to which the property
rights to that jam reside with my person!”
Stevie sighed as though I had dumped
the weight of a couple of the bigger planets onto his shoulders.
“Kate, you know I can’t understand you when you go into
this crazy talk.”
“Crazy talk?!” I stabbed a
sewing needle into my dress form’s bust with vengeful
satisfaction.
Is this a knife I see before me?
Fuck, but I was
going to be mentally quoting Macbeth for awhile. If that didn’t
mean Stevie owed me, I didn’t know what did. “Crazy talk
is claiming ownership of that original edition of Graham’s
Magazine with
The
Murders in Rue Morgue
when you don’t
read anything published after men stopped wearing ruffs!”
“Look, I invested a lot of money
in this relationship,” Stevie whined. Hard to believe I had
once thought his pouting was adorable. Even harder to stomach that
thought. “I just think I should get to recoup some of my
losses—”
“I’m a person, not a
fucking small business loan!” I snapped right back at him. “And
don’t try to act like you know anything about ‘recouping
losses’ when you failed right out of Business 101 in undergrad.
Unlike some of us.”
“Oh, right, I forgot, you’re
a complete maven,” Stevie hissed, starting to lose his cool. I
was suddenly glad of the miles between us; he had a nasty temper. Not
that he’d ever actually hit me, but sometimes the look in his
eyes… “I’m amazed you even deign to talk to the
lower classes, since your little hobby is taking off so well. Let me
guess—you got three whole orders this month. Have Steve Jobs
and Warren Buffet called you yet?”
“Actually, I have a client coming
over right now,” I said, turning to rummage around in my fabric
basket in further quest of the Thai silk.
I didn’t find it, but I did find
some lovely Gros Pointe de Venice lace in a terre d’egypt
color, and three boxes of gorgeous aquamarine dye that I’d lost
sometime last year. But now, I saw, the dye was as expired as my love
life had recently become. I chucked the boxes across the room with a
huff.
“So as intellectually stimulating
as chatting with you always is,
goodbye
.”
“I’m coming over—”
he started firmly, and I jammed my hand down on the End Call button
with enough satisfaction that if it had been money, I could have
bought all the silk in Thailand with millions to spare.
On second thought, I might have some
plans for that blue dye.
#
The doorbell rang.
“Coming!”
I did one last check in the mirror to
make sure I’d erased all signs of my earlier rage and
frustration from my face. My reflection looked back at me,
unconvinced, long red curls framing a heart-shaped face and
blue-green eyes. I forced a smile—there, that was better. No
one wanted to buy things from a girl who looked like she might go on
a homicidal spree with her sewing scissors.
“Come on, girl,” I told
myself. “Chin up. Tomorrow is another day.”
At least my reflection couldn’t
disagree with that.
The doorbell trilled again, and once
more immediately after that, impatient. That’s the downside of
working with models: they think time travel’s already been
invented. They totally do not comprehend a world that doesn’t
respond to their whims, like, yesterday.
I took one more nervous look around my
apartment, suddenly worried, like I always was before my clients came
in, that it all looked completely unprofessional. The silks, satins,
and laces lay in wicker baskets arranged by country of origin,
thickness, texture, and color. The curtains were drawn, hiding a view
of my parking lot that was less than scenic—unless minor drug
deals were your thing, in which case, yes, totally scenic, you would
not believe how scenic this parking lot was. I had lit a pair of
cheap lavender candles to try to cover up the burnt popcorn smell
from upstairs, and I thought it was working. Well, mostly it seemed
to be making it smell like burned lavender, but it was the thought
that counted, right?
I kicked a pair of dirty socks under
the couch, peered through the peephole to make sure it wasn’t
Stevie setting the record for Fastest Douchebag On Land, and let Dove
Steele and her boyfriend in.
I say ‘Dove Steele and her
boyfriend,’ but it would probably be more accurate to say
‘whatever strange symbiotic organism Dove Steele and her new
boyfriend had melded into, which interestingly enough didn’t
seem to need to breathe.’
“Hello, Kate,” Dove gasped
around his lips, her hands sliding into the man’s very packed
back pockets—not that I was looking—while his hands
roamed her back, pushing up her long bleached blonde tresses as well
as the translucent gauzy fabric of what could liberally be called a
tank top, until I started to worry that all of us were going to be
arrested for public indecency. “This is Asher. Asher Young.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” I
said.
Neither of them even looked at me as I
held the door open. Someday I ought to figure out how to bottle and
sell the invisibility field that models give off, obscuring all other
women around them; now there would be a successful business venture.
I bet the Department of Homeland Security would give me a mint.
I mean, I might not be a supermodel,
but I do have my high points. I’m not exactly the Wicked Witch
of the West. Show me a guy who doesn’t like a tall redhead, and
I’ll show you a guy who hasn’t met me yet. Lack of
self-confidence in the looks department isn’t my thing: I save
all my insecurities for my business.
They’d barely made it through the
door before they started groping each other again. These two were
taking it beyond public displays of affection. This was a public
display of…I don’t even know what. Probably something
illegal.
Not that I could entirely blame them. I
mean, Dove was a supermodel, with all the slender limbs, blinding
Colgate-white smile, and camera-ready hair that word implied. And
this new man of hers…
Well, hot damn.
Jet black curls spilled across his
forehead over cat-green eyes with lashes that a million girls would
have killed for, and an honest-to-God chiseled jawline complemented
the slope of his powerful shoulders. He was muscled but lithe, the
sleeves of his T-shirt stretched tight, the hem of it lifting to
reveal sculpted abs that were made for running your fingers down. His
bronze skin dimpled in his right cheek when he smiled.
And I believe I mentioned the state of
his back pockets, hellooooo, yes I would like a side of that meat,
ring it up and wrap it for delivery, please.
Not that I was susceptible to such
mind-numbing hotness.
The model somehow managed to detach her
mouth from Asher in a process only slightly less complicated than a
NASA liftoff. “Kate, I’m so delighted we could finally
make this work with your schedule!”
“Yeah, the day job keeps me
jumping,” I said, fetching the changing screen for her. “Thanks
for being so understanding.”
Asher reached out to help me with the
heavy changing screen, holding it steady while I guided it into
place.
“Thanks.”
“Not at all,” he said,
flashing me a dazzling smile. He was looking at me as if I were the
only woman in the world. That is, if I were the type to fall for that
kind of thing. Which I wasn’t.
I tore my gaze away from that searingly
hot mouth as Dove squealed from the other side of the screen. “You
liking so far?” I asked.
And then I heard another gasp- this one
from Asher.
“Is that an
original
copy
of Graham’s Magazine? With
The
Murders in Rue
Morgue
?” he whispered.
There was awe in his voice as he lifted
the magazine from my shelf, reverently handling it in its plastic
archival sleeve. Holy shit. His cool demeanor had most definitely
left the building, and I felt myself flush with pride as I started to
answer him, but then Dove peeked over the top of the changing screen,
light dancing in her eyes.