The Billionaire Player (In Too Deep)

CHAPTER15

TANNER

Afew weeks after the getaway with Larisa, I was finally getting back to a place where I wasn’t thinking about her so much anymore. I still felt like she might be the one that got away and that I would think about her every so often for the rest of my life, but the fact was that she had gotten away. I’d let her get away and I stood by my decision not to pursue her.

And it had been a decision. A deliberate, conscious decision not to make more assumptions about what she wanted and to let the poor woman be. She hadn’t even made the bid on me herself. Her friend had done it, which meant that I wouldn’t even have seen Larisa again after the auction if Brit hadn’t intervened.

Larisa herself had made it perfectly clear why she’d gone on the weekend trip, and it hadn’t been to explore the possibility of a relationship with me. It had been to get out of the city, to relax, and to take a break from work. No more and no less.

There were definite things I could’ve done in order to get in touch with her again, but I’d left those avenues unexplored. The weekend had happened, it had been fun, and it was in the past. The auction had never been intended to create lasting relationships.

The money for the project had been raised and the bidders—or their proxies, in my case—had gotten the weekends with us that they had been promised. It was done, and I was trying to move on.

Steph startled me out of my thoughts when she suddenly clapped her hands in the backseat of my car. “Oh, I like the look of this one. Don’t you love this entry? I love these gates. They’re so elegant and old school.”

Jeremiah laughed where he was seated in the passenger seat, staring at the metal gates in front of us while I pulled up to the intercom. “If that’s your way of telling me you want gates like these at our new place, consider the message to have been received. We’re not looking for us today, though. Remember? We’re looking for Tanner.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get ideas for what I want to do to our place out of the city once we move. We’ll need top-notch security to keep the kids safe, and this place happens to look like it has it.”

“Tell me again why we’re here?” I said. “Aside from Steph getting ideas for top-notch security for a house she’s not living in yet to protect kids you haven’t started conceiving yet. I did mention that I don’t want to move yet, didn’t I?”

“Yes, but you don’t own any property and you kept raving about the damn lake house, so I talked you into buying a place of your own out of the city,” Jeremiah said. “That’s why we’re here. Where’s your head at?”

I shrugged, pressing the button to wind down my window so I could reach the buzzer. “My head is fine. I didn’t mean it literally. I know why we’re here in that sense. What I don’t know is why we had to come and look at this place today when I’m not even going to be living here.”

“You won’t be in the apartment forever,” Stephanie said, reiterating what I’d told her a couple of weeks ago when this had first come up. “Once we move out, you said you might start looking for a place to go yourself. You don’t want to move into a house you’ve never seen before when the time comes, and who better to help you purchase your first place than Jeremiah freaking Williams?”

“That’s me,” he said jokingly, puffing out his chest. “I prefer Jeremiah fucking Williams myself, but I appreciate the point you were trying to make. I am the king of real estate in this town.”

Laughing at their banter, I pressed the button on the intercom and stared at the gates as they began to swing open. They were made of solid metal, with an intricate design of a crest etched into the front.

Steph was right about them being nice, but I couldn’t imagine actually living here, coming and going through these gates every day. I was perfectly happy in the apartment where I had been for years, and if these two hadn’t begun talking about moving out once they started trying to have a family, I’d never have considered moving out myself.

Jeremiah had finally popped the question and slid a beautiful, intricately designed rose-gold ring with a diamond the size of a baseball onto Steph’s finger. They were planning a small, destination wedding somewhere exotic—the location was still being decided—and once they got back from their honeymoon, they planned to get started on baby-making.

I also had a feeling that they were going to move just after they got back, even if they hadn’t said it in so many words. It made sense, though. That way, once there was a bun in the oven, they would be settled in their new place and they could focus only on getting a nursery ready instead of a whole house.

When that happened, and it would be soon considering that they wanted to get married within the next few months, it would be the end of a bittersweet chapter in my life. Living across the hall from my best friend had been a blast, but it was always going to end at some point.

That was why, when they’d started talking about it and Jeremiah questioned me on investing in real estate, I’d agreed to let them help me look for a place. We’d seen a few houses so far, but none of them had struck me as quite right. All of them had been too sleek, too soulless.

None of them had felt like I’d be able to make them mine, and if I was going to be moving out of our beloved building, I sure as hell wanted to go someplace I actually liked being at. Since I’d kept going on about the lake house, Jeremiah had suggested looking at properties out of the city with a bit more space. This one was on a couple of acres and about an hour away, which was great.

It was the last one we were going to look at for the day, and apparently, it had a small dam right on the property. For that reason, they were both really excited about it. It was the closest I’d get to the lake house around here, they’d said. I’d started getting a little excited about it myself, but now that we were here, I wasn’t so sure.

I loved New York, but I could definitely see myself spending weekends in this neck of the woods. For now, anyway. We’d also looked at a few different places in the city to live in permanently, but none of them had spoken to me either. What this place had to offer definitely appealed to me, but my problem with it so far was that it would need a lot of renovation, and I just didn’t know if I had time for a project like that.

The hedges outside the gates were a little unkempt, and as I pressed forward on the accelerator and crept into the yard, I realized it was a theme that continued. There were sweeping gardens on either side of the paved drive, but the grass was so overgrown that I’d probably have been able to cut a maze into it. Although there were signs of landscaping, it was obvious it had been a long time since anyone had tended to it.

At the end of the drive stood a large, Tudor revival house with creeping plants on the walls. The white paint was chipped in places, not just around the plants, and since the roofs were so steeply pitched, even I could see they needed work.

I’d been getting more involved with investing and I wanted to be able to focus on that without having a house’s remodeling hanging over my head. Especially since it wasn’t something I knew anything about, other than that building and renovating were usually a money pit that ended up taking a lot longer to get done than the original estimates might’ve indicated.

As we pulled to a stop, Steph shot me a smile in the rearview mirror. “Now, remember what we said, the realtor here is a friend of ours and she’s already told us it needs a bit of work.”

“A bit?” Jer coughed and twisted in his seat to stare at her before swinging around to face me. “Look, I can already tell you this is going to be a ton of fucking work, but that’s why the place is priced like it is. If you put in the time, which you’ve got, and the money, which you’ve also got, it’s going to be one hell of a smart investment, though. Just give it a chance, okay?”

“I will, but I don’t know about something like this,” I said. “I realize that it’s a great investment because of the location and the price, and I also know that I didn’t like the places you’ve shown me that were move-in ready, but this is the entirely opposite side of the spectrum. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”