Bad Billionaire (Bad Billionaires 1)

I’d been out for a matter of hours. How the hell did he know? “Listen,” I said. “I think you figured out I don’t work for you anymore.”

“Sure you do,” he said. He cleared his throat, just a quick split second of sound, and I realized he was nervous about something. “You’re out, and you need work, right? You need money. I have a job. I need a driver.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I tried to keep my voice calm. “I just did two years. I got out this morning. I’m not driving shit.”

“You are driving shit, or you know the consequences,” Gray said. “Your crazy-ass buddy, who lives in your old apartment now. You drive for me or he gets a visit.”

So he knew that Max had moved to town. Fuck. I stomped down my anger and did a quick calculation. Something was different, an undercurrent I felt in my gut. “I don’t take orders from you,” I told him. “I did two years for you, and I never gave you up. We’re done. Unless you’d like me to make some calls and tell the cops who set me up for that TV gig.”

“It wasn’t supposed to go down like that. That was a mistake.”

“It sure fucking was. Did it feel good to give up your own brother?”

“I had no choice in that. Listen, Wilder, the point is that you’re not done until I say so.”

My gut instincts spoke up again. Gray was trying to scare me—because something had scared him. Suddenly I was sure of it. “Until you say so?” I said. “Or until Craig Bastien says so, since you dance to his tune?”

There was a beat of silence. Gray was small-time, but Craig Bastien was not. Gray was stolen TV’s, but Craig Bastien was drugs—lots and lots of them. Craig Bastien could eat Gray for breakfast. Maybe he already had.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gray said finally.

“You think I don’t know where all that Oxy came from?” I said to him. “You think I don’t know who was behind that part? It sure as hell wasn’t you. What did he threaten you with, Gray? You got someone he’s gonna kill if you don’t move his product?”

“It’s me he’s gonna kill, dipshit,” Gray said. He sounded shaky now, worried. Gray had never been all that tough. “And probably you, unless we all do what he says. I do the jobs he gives me, I take the money he cuts me, and I don’t ask questions. And so far I’m still alive. I suggest you do the same.”

I looked around my nice house. Gray had no idea I was in Diablo right now, no idea of what had happened to me. People are gonna be all over you when this gets out. So far I’d just been a low-level driver. What would a drug kingpin like Craig Bastien do if he found out I was worth a billion dollars?

“You get a message to Craig Bastien,” I said to Gray over the phone. Maybe it was a dangerous way to go, but when had I ever cared about danger? A man who has nothing to lose is incapable of being afraid. And despite the house I was standing in, I was still a man with nothing to lose. “You tell him to drive his own fucking getaway van. I quit. And don’t fucking call me again.”

I hung up. I looked out the window a little longer, staring at the koi pond and its scum. I decided I wasn’t going to clean the scum off just yet. The scum was moving into the neighborhood for now. Everyone was going to have to deal with it.

I grabbed the keys to my old Chevy and headed back out the door.

Eleven

Olivia

Since the night Devon Wilder had come into my apartment, blown my mind, and nearly broken my bed, I’d gone back to normal life on the surface. I knew he was gone, that he wouldn’t contact me. I understood his reasons. So I’d gotten up the next morning, taken a shower to clean my bruised, shaky, and satiated body, and gone to work like normal. He’d said he’d contact me when it was safe, and I had believed him. Okay, then. I’d wait.

I’d been waiting two years.

I pulled open the drawer of my desk at Gratchen Advertising and took out my purse, preparing to leave. I was now in my third year at this place, and I was still a junior designer—the promised promotion hadn’t showed up yet. Neither had the promised raise. The advertising business was competitive and cutthroat, my bosses told me, especially in downtown San Francisco. Everyone was fighting for the next client, and only the best would move up. And the best, at least right now, wasn’t me. They made that clear.

So I was still living at Shady Oaks, still driving my sometimes-working car. I worked, and did art class every week, and worked some more, putting aside savings from every measly paycheck. I didn’t date. I was the definition of a woman in a rut,

in every possible way. That was going to end tonight.

I slipped off my low-heeled sandals and turned off my computer. In my purse, my cell phone buzzed.

I answered it quickly. It was six thirty, but there were still a handful of people in the big open office, hunched over their desks in the quiet. “Hey, Gwen,” I said when I saw the caller ID.

“Hey,” my sister said. “We still on?”

“Just getting my shoes on.”

“Please tell me you mean spike heels.”

“Um, no.” Gwen could walk in spike heels—it was what made her a successful strip-o-gram girl. I couldn’t.