Baby Love: A Bad Boy Billionaire Romance (2 page)

A half hour later, Roger and I were sitting on my sofa getting lap dances from two of the women. He smacked the round ass of the blonde wiggling over him. I was eighty miles away in my mind from the curvy brunette grinding against my lap. “When do we start filming?” I asked Roger over the music.

“Can we talk about this later?” he asked me pointedly.

“What? You can’t multi-task? Must be why my net worth’s higher than yours,” I shot at him.

That got his attention. “We start filming next month. Everything’s in place; we just need your money and for you to sign some papers. The network will send some over here later today.” He shoved his face into the ass of the stripper on his lap. “I fucking love you, man,” he said, coming up for air a moment later.

I laughed. “Yeah, it’s super creative of me to be a playboy billionaire. I don’t know how I do it,” I said drily. “Not that I’m complaining.”

“I don’t get you,” Roger said, finally peeling his eyes away from the woman on his lap.

“In college you develop the social media app to end all social media apps and sell it after twelve months of development. You do this while you ace your classes at Harvard on a full-ride scholarship. Then you lead their football team to conference victory after conference victory. You’re a deca-billionaire at twenty-one. You join the NFL anyway. You have three Superbowl wins in as many years. Your brother…well. You know. Then you just…retire. Fall off the map. Disappoint your entire city by doing it.” He shook his head and put his hands back on the waist of the stripper. “But who can blame you? You’re young, hot, and rich. You want to go out on top. But dude. You’re Tony fucking Stark here. Single. No interviews. Nothing. You can have all the women you want in the entire world shipped to your front doorstep, and you do.” Roger rejected the shot of tequila another blonde woman brought to him, her tits jiggling. “Shit, man. I wouldn’t leave this penthouse either if I were you. No fucking way.”

“Well, that’s all about to change, isn’t it?” I said. “I'll be back on television. Four weeks and counting until I’m back in the public eye. I better clean up my behavior.” I paused before bursting out in laughter. I grabbed the woman grinding on me and pulled her into my bedroom. “I’ll start tomorrow, though.”

Roger held up another shot glass in a salute. “Tomorrow is another day.”

CHAPTER TWO

RACHEL

The buzzing of incandescent lights overhead felt like it was driving a drill into my skull. The woman sitting at the wooden desk across from me was tapping her manicured acrylic fingernails against the keyboard.

I was almost certain that she was doing it just to make me more flustered. I imagined that her computer screen, which was turned away from my view, wasn’t open to digital paperwork. I felt like she was actually just playing an old Mavis Beacon typing game to pass the time. I indulged this bitter fantasy.

Letters crossed my eyes as I remembered the cascading initials that fell from the top of the screen. In my mind, the woman caught them with her claw-tipped fingers, drumming out a staccato rhythm as she rushed to complete the challenge in front of her.
K, S, L, J, M, N, Q
…I wondered if she was on the expert level with a waterfall of symbols to catch her off-guard. Maybe an ever-elusive tilde followed by a shift-necessary dollar sign, a question mark, an asterisk?

“Ms. Cobb?”

I jerked out of my typing-game reverie to see the loan officer smiling condescendingly at me. An overly-gelled curl had fallen out of her perfect topknot. She looked ridiculous and a petty part of me was thrilled that her perfect veneer was crumbling. Not that it mattered. She was still in control here, not me. And she knew it.

“Ms. Cobb, I’m sorry to say we won’t be able to help you with the loan for your business. With your credit history, your outstanding business and personal debts, as well as your unusual business concept, I’m afraid we just can’t extend any more money.”

I wasn’t disappointed. I just felt numb.

This was lender number thirty-five. My one, borrowed-from-my-sister-Callie, designer-label business outfit was due for a dry cleaning. No matter how much I aired out the Italian silk white blouse in the window of my bedroom, I couldn’t hide that it needed to be cleaned.

But dry cleaning cost money. And I’d barely had money for the bus fare over here.

I picked a piece of lint off of the wool of the sleek, charcoal skirt to keep the loan officer from seeing the tears forming in my eyes. These people had been my last hope. I stood up in one swift motion, extending my arm robotically. I was dissociating from my body. I saw with dismay that my three-day-old gel manicure was somehow already chipping.

How was that even possible?

“Thank you for your time,” I intoned to the woman, who grabbed my chipped-nail hand with her pristine one. Hers was clammy.

I stepped out of the lobby of the enormous bank, my heels clicking across the marble flooring and echoing up into the polished-wood ceiling and into the humid and windy Chicago day. I nearly screamed into the wind. I could smell a thunderstorm brewing. In my haste, I’d left my apartment without a rain coat.

I should have known better. It was summer in the Windy City; the two things you could count on were wind and thunderstorms in the late afternoon. As if on cue, warm raindrops hit my face. I put my head down and trudged toward the bus stop just as my bus pulled away from the curb with a screech of squeaking hydraulics.

I still had enough dignity to not run after it screaming. I checked my watch. It would be another twenty minutes before the next one came. I knew the water would likely ruin Callie’s impeccable Versace shoes. But there was no way I was going to go barefoot on the streets of this city.

I dug into my purse and pulled out my wallet. I had three dollars in it; just enough to go squat in a Starbucks until the rain passed. I crossed the street and passed a man on the sidewalk holding a worn, folded cardboard sign.

“Out of work. Need meds.  N-E-thing helps. God bless,” it said. I felt my stomach turn over. The smell of iced coffee had already hit my nose as two well-dressed young professionals rushed out of the warmly-lit coffee shop. They nearly tripped over the guy, knocking over his cup of coins onto the sidewalk. The woman grimaced sheepishly but didn’t bother to apologize or offer to clean up the mess.

The man leaned forward with dirt-covered knuckles to pick up the pennies and quarters off of the piss-stained ground.

I rushed forward to help him, hoping I wouldn’t rip the skirt in half as I did so. I gathered up the coins that were out of his easy reach and scooped them into the worn Styrofoam cup.

“Thanks,” he said, tilting his head forward in appreciation.

I took the crumpled wad of dollar bills that I’d reserved for my iced coffee and shoved them into his cup, walking away in the wind that was rapidly gaining power. There was nowhere free to go in this city outside of libraries; but that was the case everywhere in this capitalistic society.

I cringed as I thought about how capitalism was exactly the problem I was trying to solve with my business. It was the ultimate irony that I still had to play the game to try to break the game, even in a small way.

I assessed the sky, which was spitting out more and more raindrops by the minute. There was the possibility that I could run from overhang to overhang to dodge the water that was about to pummel me from the sky.

The library was only two blocks away. If I ran, I could make it. I remembered reading once that Jennifer Garner had trained for an acting role by running a track in five-inch heels. If she could do it, so could I.

In a moment of good luck that had been avoiding me for the better part of the last year, I made it to the brass doors of the library just as the heavens opened. The rain was so heavy it felt like God was dumping several million garbage cans full of water onto the streets. I stood with a knot of other people in the threshold of the library. We all watched the water come down.

A young white guy with hipster glasses held up his iPhone. “My weather app says it’ll be fifty minutes more of this.”

Several people groaned and I barely resisted the urge to join them in the disappointment. So much for missing rush hour traffic on the bus lines. Hopefully Callie wouldn’t be too worried about me. I couldn’t afford a reliable cell phone and had no change to use the payphone on the wall.

I was a millennial oddity out of fiscal necessity, not by choice. I turned into the library, the dusty smell of old books, paper, and hushed silence washing over me like its own rain. I went into the periodicals section and grabbed a newspaper without looking at what it was. I just needed something to make it look like I was busy.

I hated accidentally making eye contact with strangers and did my best to avoid it if at all possible. I could daydream while I held the messy newsprint in my hands. That was the best I could do for now. An old man who smelled like musty mothballs had fallen asleep in the worn armchair next to me. The soft snore emanating from his wrinkled mouth reminded me of a kitten purring. I settled into the chair and opened the paper.

My stomach flipped and my heart beat a little faster as my eyes rested upon the image above the fold. The handsome, gorgeous, sculpted face of Chicago’s own billionaire Chosen One, Zane Reid, smoldered up at me.

It was rare to see a photo of him these days. I remembered a time not too long ago that he had been on the cover of the Sun-Times on a weekly basis, though it was usually a photo of him in football gear holding the winning touchdown ball as his teammates swarmed him on the field.

The headline read
 
Reid to Join
Boiler Room
As Newest Investor
. 
The story detailed how he was moving the most popular primetime show on television to Chicago. I’d caught a few episodes here and there. Okay, that was a lie. I’d been engulfed in more than one binge-watching marathon of all five seasons over the course of the last year of my unemployment. The show was a humiliating, ridiculous affair. It involved ninety-nine percenters begging for money from one percenters.

Yet I’d eaten up every second of it in secret while Callie was at her professional, lucrative job as a lawyer, Callie’s dog curled up next to me on the sofa.

The thought of Zane being on the show was an even more enticing proposition to me; not to be 
on
 the show, but to watch him for an hour each week in private. I blushed at the thought, looking around me nervously and pulling the paper up around my face. He was rich, handsome, and a living legend. Who didn’t blush looking at him?

***

“It’s just me!” I called down the light-filled hallway of Callie’s house. Fresh flowers were sitting on the polished, burl wood table. I looped my messy keychain onto the hand-carved wooden hook rack by the door. Callie’s was there as well; hers was an engraved, polished silver monogram key fob. Mine was a Stormtrooper LEGO figurine with the printed face long worn off.

Those two key fobs were a wonderful metaphor for the contrast in our lives.

“Oh thank God!” Callie cried from the kitchen. I turned the corner to find her standing in the kitchen in her designer dress, a glass of red wine on the countertop. “I was so worried.”

“Rainstorm,” I explained. “I didn’t want to ruin your shoes so I holed up in the library for an hour until all the water drained off the sidewalks.”

Callie waved a hand in the air dismissively. “Don’t worry about it, honey, I’ve got plenty more pairs where those came from.”

The acid taste of bile filled my mouth as I considered the ramifications of that statement. I knew that she hadn’t meant it 
that 
way, but still it was hard to not take it as an insult. “Is Patrick coming home for dinner?” I asked, tossing my purse onto the counter and sitting on a polished chrome barstool.

“He’s bringing home Lou Malnati’s,” Callie said, tapping into her smartphone with one thumb.

“Whoa, really?” I asked. That was my favorite pizza and Callie hated it. Too much sodium and fat, according to her. I gazed down at my increasingly round midsection. The only good thing about my recent weight gain was that my rack was now bigger than Callie’s. I swept my long auburn hair over my shoulder. I needed a cut but couldn’t afford it.

When Callie ignored me for the contents of her phone, I knew not to interrupt her any further. She was likely sending a decision-making email that would impact the lives of all five hundred people at the law firm where she was partner. I drummed my fingers on the countertop and stared around at the gleaming kitchen. Her husband, Patrick, had recently supervised the redesign during their full-apartment renovation. It was a tasteful blend of country and modern, just like Georgia debutante-turned-city-girl Callie.

I never had a debutante ball. My mother had given up on me by then.

When my sister had offered to let me crash here last year, some of my fellow students at the university were empathetic. They thought that “I’m crashing with my friend and her husband” was going to involve me sleeping on moldering futon. I hadn’t disabused them of that notion. My eviction was bad enough and I didn’t mind the undeserved sympathy for my living situation. The truth was that instead of a
 
moldering futon? I was living in the second master bedroom with an en suite Jacuzzi tub. Callie and Patrick refused to let me pay for rent as well. I doused my guilt by walking their dog, Peaches, every day for two hours through the city.

It kept me fit, got me out of the house, and made Peaches sleep like a baby at night, which was a first for the puppy apparently. I loved Callie and Patrick, but I had to admit that the dog was a vanity project for them. They really shouldn’t have become pet owners.

The front door opened and Patrick called out. “Hey!” he yelled.

“In here, honey!” Callie called back.

The smell of the pizza arrived before Patrick did. That was good. I was starving.

“I got the deep-dish Hawaiian, just like you like,” he said to me, setting the heavy brown box on the counter and kissing Callie on the cheek. She blushed slightly. They really were in love.