Heart of the Billionaire (Taming The Bad Boy Billionaire 7)

“What did she do to me?” He was out of bed in a flash, but he swayed dizzily. “Granny!” he yelled with a vengeance.

A deafening silence echoed back. Had I been the wagering sort, I would have bet the old woman was off in the gun shed, polishing her rifles in case of a merman invasion.

“She said dinner’s at seven,” I ventured tentatively.

James whirled around in a rage, but his gaze and his tone softened when he laid eyes on me again. The anger melted off his face, and he opened his arms, looking appalled and ashamed all at once. “Oh, honey, it’s your first international abduction! I’m so sorry. How are you holding up?”

Holding up in this tropical paradise, with the man of my dreams, a man who was just stopped from making one of the biggest mistakes of his life? If this is an abduction, consider me a fan of kidnapping!

I stepped into his embrace with a martyred expression but couldn’t fully hide my smile as I gazed around the magnificent room. “Holding up? I’m not sure people just hold up in a mansion like this, James. I guess I’m doing okay. At least I’ve been conscious all this time.”

“Good.” He kissed the top of my hair, completely missing my sarcasm as the last of the drugs cleared quickly from his head. “I’ll fix this, Della. I swear I will. We’ll be out of this hell-hole and back to London before you know it.”

My smile faded a little as I glanced longingly around. The house was just a short way inland, but I could still see the sparkling turquoise water from the window. A salty breeze mixed with that ever-present aroma of flowers and whispered through the gauzy curtains like a dream. “London? Sure. Great,” I said, sounding quite unimpressed with the idea.

I almost added, “I hear it’s raining there,” but the look on James’s face made me reconsider. The man was incensed, and it wasn’t often that he found himself outmaneuvered, let alone in his own living room, betrayed by his own best friend and accosted by his grandmother.

Without another word to me, James stormed out of the room and down the hall like the god of thunder himself, albeit still swaying slightly from his sedated sleep. “Nick! Where the hell are you? Nick!” he boomed.

I scampered after him, watching as he kicked open door after door, searching for his friend. His hair flew out behind him like a dark cloud, adding a touch of frenzy to his face as scores of the frightened wait-staff scurried away.

“You better be awake, America! It’ll be no fun killing you if I can’t hear you scream!”

Finally, he found them behind the last door. Abby was still calmly reading her magazine. She had resumed drinking her mimosa, now that she was safely on the ground, and Nick was still passed out cold on the bed beside her, sleeping like the dead.

“Hey there!” She looked up brightly and bookmarked her page with a dog-ear fold. “You’re awake.”

James’s eyes narrowed into a glare. “For your sake, Abigail, I hope you played no part in this.”

She pushed to her feet, scrunched her face up in a frown, and tilted her head in mock confusion. “Wait. Correct me if I’m wrong, James, but didn’t you just get beat by a woman, a very old, wrinkled one with a cane? I think you’re slipping.”

I wouldn’t have poked that fire with a ten-foot pole, and I thought Abby absolutely fucking nuts to tease him, but then again, she’d known him a lot longer than I had. Plus, in the Land of the Rich and Reckless, it seemed kidnappings and threats and deception were par for the course.

James’s eyebrows lifted dangerously, but before he could respond, there was sudden movement on the bed between them. Nick lifted a hand to his face and let out a soft groan. His blue eyes fluttered open, then shut again as he tried to shake off the drugs and force himself awake. “What the... What happened?” he stuttered, squinting in adorable confusion as he struggled to lift his head. “I don’t...” Just a second later, those eyes landed on James. “Shit,” he said, knowing he was in a whole pile of it.

“Shit is what you are, you two-faced son-of-a-bitch!” James cried, with all the fury of a redneck in a bar fight. He leapt on top of Nick, gripped fistfuls of his collar, and slammed his head against the mattress.

Abby promptly dived between the two, but that was only to carefully extract her mimosa before retreating back to her armchair and reopening her magazine, content to let them fight it out on their own.

Of course it wasn’t much of a fight. I knew James wouldn’t ever actually hurt his friend.

Also, despite being well aware of the danger about to befall him, Nick wasn’t exactly able to move. “Wait!” he cried as James picked up a pillow. “I didn’t... I didn’t know she was gonna drug you, man! I figured you guys would talk, and then you’d come to the island and talk it out and—”

“You’ve always been a shitty liar. You knew exactly what she was planning!”

“Wrong! I’m an astounding liar,” Nick argued, doing his best to fight back, considering that half of his body was still paralyzed from Granny’s secret recipe. “This is ridiculously unfair, you know. I can’t move my hands!”

“Okay, that’s enough,” I said and bravely placed myself between them. I eased James back with gentle, coaxing hands. “Honey, given that Nick was drugged the same way you were, maybe it’s safe to say he didn’t know what your grandmother had planned.”

“Exactly,” Nick said, sitting up and stretching out his arms.

James pulled out his cell phone and angrily pushed a few buttons, then slipped it back in his pocket and sighed. “No reception. What a shocker.”

Abby smiled. “Great. I get Nick all to my self.”

My heart leapt tentatively in my chest, but before I could ease the tension by making some sort of impromptu silver-linings speech, he was off again, practically jogging down the hall like the hounds of hell were behind him. The three of us stared at the doorway for a moment before hurrying after him, racing down the winding staircase and out into the open air.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Nick asked in alarm as James hopped into the nearest golf cart and revved it to life. “Dude, it’s an island. There’s nowhere to go, unless you plan on taking a long-ass swim.”