Dirty Sweet Wild (Bad Billionaires 2)

“The one where you try to get rid of me,” he corrected me. “It won’t work.”

I turned to stare at him, but the lights went down, and the curtain rose, and everyone applauded, and the play began.

By the intermission, I was a bundle of nerves. It wasn’t just the play—which was intense, beautiful, dark, and perfectly performed. It was the fact that I’d spent over an hour sitting in the tension of the theater box, painfully aware of Max sitting next to me, watching raptly. Devon, on my other side, fidgeted more frequently, until each time Olivia put a hand lightly on his knee.

When the intermission lights went up, Max left the box without a word, presumably in search of a men’s room. Olivia noticed and stood abruptly, saying she’d be right back. It took me a second to realize she was leaving me alone with Devon.

As if he was reading my mind, I caught Devon looking at me with an amused look in his green eyes. “She wants us to get along,” he explained.

I frowned at him. “I thought we already did.”

He shrugged. “It’s important to her,” he said, as if that was all the reason he needed. He nodded toward the stage. “Do you understand this play?”

“I haven’t read it, but I know the story,” I said. “We had a Shakespeare course in acting school.” I blinked at him, realizing what he was implying. “You didn’t know the story already?”

He stared at the stage, looking deep in thought. “I don’t think it’s going to end well,” he commented. “I think it’s going to go badly for him. Don’t tell me if I’m right or not.”

I stared at him for another second, realizing exactly why my sister was a bit obsessed with Devon Wilder. He’d put on a suit—which looked pretty freaking good on him, I had to admit—and sat through a Shakespeare play that he’d never heard or read a word of before. Shakespeare. And he was following it, the same way any other guy would follow the latest Fast and the Furious movie. Anyone who took a glance at Devon Wilder’s past—at his criminal record and his two years in prison for driving the getaway van after the robbery of a TV store—and thought they were dealing with an idiot would have a very big problem.

A lot of San Francisco drug dealers had learned that exact lesson when he’d shut them all down after they’d tried to blackmail him and hurt Olivia. There wasn’t one of them left to threaten him now. They’d all been scooped up in a massive sweep he’d engineered with the cops.

Complicated didn’t even touch Devon’s surface. Like Max Reilly, his best friend.

I realized his green gaze had landed on me, and one of his eyebrows went up. “What?” he asked me.

The words popped out of my mouth. “Which one is smarter, you or Max?”

“Max,” he answered immediately. “Easy. I’m usually catching up to him. You know he lent me books while I was in prison, right?”

“No. I didn’t.” I could picture it, though, and I liked what I saw. “From that big collection he has in his apartment?”

He glanced at me again, and I realized I’d just admitted I’d seen the inside of Max’s apartment. “He hand picked the books he brought,” he explained. “Usually stories of guys gone wrong and paying the price.”

I looked away, trying not to laugh.

“I didn’t have much else to do in there,” Devon said. “He was the only person who came to see me regularly while I was inside.” He leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, a pose that made the fine fabric of his suit do interesting things on his torso. “I owe him for a lot of things. That’s just one of them.”

I couldn’t help it; my curiosity was killing me. “You two grew up together in LA?”

Devon nodded, still staring at the stage. “I don’t know how much Olivia has told you,” he said. “My brother and I pretty much had no parents. Our father split and our mother was barely around. Max’s mother worked shifts, and his father was a drunk. The three of us—me, my brother Cavan, and Max—ended up together pretty much all the time.”

I was quiet, trying to picture that. Devon’s brother had left ten years ago, I knew from my sister, and hadn’t been heard from since. Devon was trying to find him so he could claim his part of the inheritance.

“My brother Cavan was the troublemaker,” Devon said, “and I was the enforcer, the guy you didn’t fuck with. But Max was the sane one. The smart one. The one you always went to when you got in a jam, because he could figure a way out.” He paused. “I never thought I had much of a future, and neither did Cavan. But Max was the one who was supposed to have a good life.”

I looked down in my lap, thinking about Max’s leg, his scars. A case of PTSD that nearly killed me.

“Enlisting was supposed to do it,” Devon continued. “It was supposed to get him away from his toxic parents, away from LA and us, send him into a better life. When he left, he had a nice girlfriend and a good future. He was gone for four years. And then he came home.”

“I’ve seen his leg,” I said, trying not to let the words he had a nice girlfriend burn my stomach. “What are you getting at, Devon? Do you want me to stay away from Max? Is that it?”

He glanced over at me, amusement in his eyes again, since I’d just admitted I’d seen Max without pants on. “The opposite, actually. He needs

someone to shake him up. The real Max I know has been buried ever since he came home, but I know he’s in there. I think you’re already bringing him out.”

“How can you say that? You’ve seen us together for all of thirty seconds.”

He actually laughed at that, the effect sort of spellbinding. “Thirty seconds are all I need, Gwen.”