Bad Billionaire (Bad Billionaires 1)

I walked to one of the garage lockers, unzipping my coverall. “I take it this means I’m done my shift,” I said, pulling the coverall off and wadding it up.

“Ha ha,” Chaz said. “Funny guy.” It was a bluff, and we both knew it. Chaz was scared of his brother. If Gray wanted to see me, there wasn’t a single thing Chaz would say about it.

I was wearing jeans, work boots, and a long-sleeved gray thermal. I had grease on my hands, but Gray wouldn’t care. He cared more about promptness than cleanliness. I pulled on a black nylon jacket and zipped it up to my chin.

“See you tomorrow, boss,” I said to Chaz.

“Hurry up,” Chaz barked as I walked to the door. “He’s in a shitty mood today.”

It was cold and foggy out—basically a textbook day for San Francisco. I’d grown up in LA, but after my mother’s death I’d had to move around to escape the foster system. I’d ended up here. It seemed weird that I’d like a city full of hipsters and would-be internet millionaires, but I did. Besides, the hipsters and millionaires never ventured this far south from downtown. This area was populated with warehouses and industrial units instead of Victorian mansions and trolley cars. That was fine with me. I just wanted to do my work and drive.

And it wasn’t LA. I had bad memories of LA—very, very bad memories. The kind I never talked about.

I did occasional runs down to the Mexican border, or up to the Oregon one. Hours alone on the road, watching for cops, with nothing but a stack of neatly wrapped drugs for company. But mostly I did other driving gigs. Stolen goods, guys who needed to get to the state line, guys who needed to be picked up at the state line. I’d driven at least ten loads of medicinal weed, complete with permits, which the cops couldn’t take me for. As long as I didn’t get taken down by hijackers and get my head blown off, I made money and drove in a pleasantly fragrant van. Easy work. I had a reputation as a trustworthy guy who could avoid the cops when needed and never dipped into the product.

The sun was beginning to set as I pulled up in front of Pure Gold and parked. Pure Gold was the strip club where Gray Jensen liked to conduct business. He didn’t own the place, but he practically lived there. He said it was because the noise in the club prevented anyone from catching his conversations on a wire. That sounded smart, but we all knew it was because he hoped one of the girls would finally fuck him.

It was barely seven o’clock, so there wasn’t much action in the strip club yet. The stage was still dark, but there were a few customers at the tables, and a couple of girls were circulating, looking for early-evening lap dances and tips. Gray usually worked from one of the VIP booths, so I nodded to the bartender, Henry, and started to walk on past.

A woman stepped in front of me, blocking my way. It was Amy, one of the strippers. She was wearing a naughty schoolgirl’s costume, consisting of a black push-up bra and a scrap of plaid skirt that barely covered her ass. Her blond hair was pulled into pigtails. She gave me a smile. “Come have a drink with me, sexy,” she said.

“Hey, Amy,” I said. “I have to go see Gray, but—”

She reached out a hand and put it on my waist beneath my jacket, curling her fingers around me and moving close. Her eyes stared into mine. “Have a drink with me, sexy,” she said again.

She was giving me signals that she had something to tell me. I wasn’t happy about it, but I followed her to the bar, where Henry poured a shot of vodka and pushed it toward me. “What is it?” I asked Amy.

She moved close to me again, her hips nearly brushing my jeans, and looked up at me with a smile that was meant to fool anyone watching us. “There’s something going on,” she said.

“Oh yeah?” I picked up my shot. “What?”

“I don’t know.” She licked her lips and continued to gaze up at me. She was a very good actress. “People have been coming and going. People we usually don’t see.”

“People like who?” I asked.

She shrugged, licked her lips again, pouted a little. “People like Craig Bastien.”

Fuck. Gray was unpleasant, but he was basically a petty criminal, hitting the easy money. Craig Bastien was into drugs, and hard. I wafted my shot under my nose, then downed it. “Okay,” I said.

“I think whatever job is going down is one of Bastien’s,” Amy said. “Gray is looking a little scared.”

“Got it.” I put down my glass. I’d have to think of a strategy. I could drive a few packets here and there, but big-money drugs weren’t my thing. “Thanks for the warning.”

“Don’t do it, Dev,” Amy said, still looking flirtatiously at me. “Whatever it is.”

“I may not have much of a choice.” I patted her arm, disengaging it from around my waist. “Thanks again. Now, I need to go see him. He’s waiting.”

“I get it.” But she moved closer still, running her fingers down my chest and my stomach. “You know, I keep forgetting how hot you are. God, all these muscles. You should take me back to the dressing room sometime.”

I frowned. I’d never fucked Amy, or any of the other girls in Pure Gold. I had nothing against strippers—some of them liked a good hard fuck, just like other women—but I hadn’t had any woman in a while, by choice. “Maybe sometime,” I hedged.

Her fingers dropped to my belt buckle and toyed with it. “I haven’t had a cock in weeks,” she complained.

She was starting to make my dick hard, I admit it. I’m a man, and we’re wired to respond to hot strippers in schoolgirl outfits coming on to us. But I’d been unenthused about mindless, quick-fuck sex for a while, though I couldn’t explain it. I told myself it was just my mood, but I’d never done this self-imposed

celibacy before. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, and I didn’t want to think about it.

Besides, Gray was waiting, and—maddeningly, unaccountably—my neighbor’s image came into my mind again. The dip of her clavicle, the line of her mouth, her graceful hands. Shit, she was cockblocking me, and she wasn’t even in the room. Still. “I’m sure you can find one anytime, a sexy girl like you,” I said to Amy, and then I walked away. “Thanks for the drink,” I called over my shoulder.