Billionaire's Tragedy (Standalone Book) (Billionaire Bad Boy Romance) (2 page)

CHAPTER
THREE

Linc

I'd
left the station pissed
that Russo had gotten the last word, but bolstered by the fact that many others
thought he was as much of an ass as I did. I headed out to my car and told my
driver to head for the nearest coffee shop. I needed caffeine and I wasn't in
any mood to have to wait for an assistant to run out and get it.

I thought about what Mo
would say about the interview, and I grinned thinking about how she'd skewer
Russo in her cute, Southern accent. Mo Warren was a force of nature and had
been my mother's best friend since childhood. She was the daughter of a man
who'd put all of his money into the oil business in the early 1900s and had hit
it big. However, he'd been loath to raise his children as part of the moneyed
class, so she'd had a surprisingly normal childhood growing up in Richmond.

She'd graduated from the
University of Virginia, then married Robert Warren, whom she'd met at a college
mixer her sophomore year. Robert had a degree in business, and Mo's father had
hired him to run the southern Virginia office. They happily presided over their
little corner of Norfolk until one winter afternoon, on his way back from a
meeting with a group of investors, Robert was run off the road in a rainstorm
and died on his way to the hospital. Mo was devastated, but her father was a
tough, Irish man who refused to allow her to wallow in pity and regret, so he'd
given her Robert's job and told her to learn the ropes.

It was a controversial
decision, and many of the clients balked at having to deal with a woman, but Mo
had quickly learned the job and surprised everyone except her father when she
landed a number of important clients within a year. There was no going back,
and from then on, Mo moved up the company ladder as she prepared herself to
take over for her father.

Unfortunately, that would
be sooner rather than later as Morris McIlherny had a heart attack and died at his
desk six years later. Mo took over the company and ran it until she realized
that she could make more money selling it, so she did.

After she sold the oil
company, she invested the profits in a fund that allowed her and her family
members to live off of the interest generated, and she swore that she would
never worked for another person again.

I'd grown up with Mo as a
doting, if tough, aunt. I fully expected and welcomed her presence at every
holiday celebration or major life event, and she'd never once disappointed. Mo
always brought the biggest and best gifts and had the most exotic tales to
tell. She was tall and lean and had a laugh that spread out, enveloping us like
the warm, hand-knit sweaters she'd bring back from Scotland and Iceland or the
handmade blankets she'd found halfway up a mountainside in Peru. Mo was as much
a part of my life as my parents were, and when they'd been murdered, she'd
immediately stepped in and taken care of all of the logistical issues while I'd
tried to cope with the brutal loss.

The first couple of days
after my parents had been shot, Mo made all the arrangements for
identification, funeral services, caskets, burial plots, and lists of people
who needed to be notified. She'd called the insurance company, the lawyers, and
sorted out all of the details that I had no idea even existed. No one had
prepared me for my parents' deaths, but Mo seemed equipped to deal with every
aspect of it, so I let her while I mourned.

She had also made the
decision to spirit me out of the country while the authorities investigated the
crime. She'd told me that it would be easier for me to grieve the loss and then
find a way to live a life outside the spotlight if I wasn't constantly being
sought out for interviews. She even convinced me that it would be beneficial to
change my last name from Massey to my grandmother's maiden name, Redding. At
the time, I thought Mo was being unbelievably paranoid, but in the end, she'd
been absolutely right.

I never knew when or how
she grieved the loss of her best friend, nor did I ask, but the older I got,
the more I understood her approach to things and why "suck it up and walk
it off" was her motto.

While I'd grown up
comfortably upper class, I hadn't become rich until after my parents had been
killed. My father had known that he had a job with the potential to put him in
harm's way, and as a result, had taken out an extremely large life insurance
policy on both he and my mother. I'd been shocked when I'd received the
settlement: a whopping twenty-seven million dollars after attorney fees and
taxes had taken a bite out of it.

My best friend's father
was an investment banker, who'd been coached by Mo to keep everything as quiet
as possible. When I'd turned to him for advice, he'd told me where to put my
money so that it would grow quickly, but safely. I followed his instructions,
and by the time I graduated from college with my business degree, I was sitting
on a bank account that totaled more than fifty billion dollars.

I knew that there was no
way I would ever be able to spend that kind of money in my lifetime, so I set
about formulating a plan that would allow me to avenge my parents' deaths
without turning me into a thuggish criminal. I didn't want to kill Davis Russo,
despite the fact that there were thousands of people who would have been more
than willing to help me accomplish the task. No, killing him would have been
too easy and completely unsatisfying. What I wanted was to bring the man to his
knees in a public forum where he would be forced to admit to all of his
hateful, immoral actions.

I didn't want to even the
score. I wanted to win.

I returned to school at
Georgetown the next year and quickly began working my way through a second
degree in engineering. I felt the need to do
good
in
the world, so I pursued a project that would make guns safer and worked with a
couple of computer programming grad students to come up with smart gun
technology. We'd realized that if guns could be linked to their owners through
some kind of personal identifier, it would become much more difficult for
people to illegally obtain weapons or for people who didn't have access to
accidentally shoot a weapon that wasn't theirs. In the beginning, we saw it as
preventative safety for children, but as we progressed, the additional benefits
awed us. It wasn't long before we were shopping around for a manufacturer who
might be interested in testing the technology.

I landed a number of
internships with some of the big names in gun manufacturing as a means of
trying to test out the idea. None of them were open to our idea, and we soon
found out it was because they had made a deal with the devil – Davis Russo. The
former preacher had made his way up the ladder of the AWN and had maneuvered
his way into being voted president of the organization in such a short time
that most believed it was because he had dirt on the top members.

Whatever his tactics, the
fact remained that he'd taken hold of the reins of power at the AWN and had no
intention of letting go. Every time I'd approached a manufacturer about
implementing smart gun technology, they'd stepped back and found a reason to
end my internship early.

As I searched for a new
position, I made sure to keep my personal life under wraps to ensure that no
one knew about my background or my vast wealth aside from my best friend Brant
and his father. It took a while, but I finally found an internship and later a
job with IMPACT Weapons.

By that time, I had put
the idea of smart gun technology on hold knowing that eventually I would garner
enough knowledge and experience to either partner with a known manufacturer or
strike out on my own. I was patient and worked hard, and it didn't take long
before I began moving up the ladder of success in their research and
development division. Six years after I'd first been hired, I took over the top
position in R&D and began testing the waters. Since IMPACT was an outlier
in the gun market, they weren't as beholden to AWN as the more mainstream
companies were, but they were still wary of attracting the attention of Russo
and his thugs.

When I first floated the
idea of smart gun technology, the owner and CEO of IMPACT, Wyatt Sessions,
balked at the idea. He told me that while there were lots of ways he was
willing to buck the system, having a showdown with Davis Russo wasn't one of
them. I pushed for a reason why, but he wouldn't budge and he never told me
why.

It was at that point that
I knew that if I ever wanted to make smart gun technology a reality, I'd have
to go it alone. So, a few months later, I resigned from IMPACT and formed my
own company, GRIPTech. I'd brought my programming cohorts on board and hired Brant
as my legal counsel as I searched for a manufacturing company who could produce
my design. It had taken three years to locate a company in Maine that would
make the guns and a tech company in China that would make the grip. The only
problem was that the experiment would eat up three-quarters of my bank account
with no guarantee that the technology would catch on.

What I needed was
legislation that would force gun owners to convert their weapons to smart
technology, but that relied entirely on my ability to persuade the gun-backing
members of the Senate that it was worth writing and passing, and I knew that if
Davis Russo got wind of it, he'd shut it down before it even had a chance.

So, I'd hired a lobbyist
to make the rounds, meet with Senators, and explain the logic of a gun safety
bill from a conservative perspective. It had gone over fairly well until
someone had spilled the secret to Russo and he'd lowered the boom. He'd simply
shifted the money the AWN donated to opponents of those who supported gun
safety legislation and quickly cleared the way of obstacles. It was sleazy and
low, but that was Russo.

Six months ago, I'd moved
to Washington and began doing the work myself. The only way to fight Russo was
with money, and I had plenty of that – at least for the time being. What no one
knew was that I was playing a dangerous game with my finances and that if the
gamble failed, I'd be broke in almost no time.

But if that's what it
took to wipe that sly grin off of Russo's face, then I was willing to roll the
dice.

#

"
Right
here, Mick," I said to my driver as we pulled
up in front of Bean Bros. The drive over had intensified my need for a good
strong cup of coffee, and this place was the only one in town that made it the
right way.

"I'll be right back,
sir," Mick said as he reached for the door handle. "The usual?"

"No, I got this
one," I told him as I quickly got out of the car. "You want anything,
Mick?"

"No, I'm good,
sir," he replied and then started to say something else, but stopped and
simply nodded. He'd been my driver long enough that he knew when to back off
and let me do my own thing, and I needed to work off some of the tense energy
from not punching Russo in the face.

In three strides, I was
pulling the door open with more force than necessary. The bells attached to the
handle rang loudly, causing people to look up. I waved an apology for the
disruption and headed to the counter. There were two people ahead of me: a
young guy who was in the process of trading a five-dollar bill for a cup of
black coffee and a shapely redhead in a fitted black coat who had her back to
me, waiting to order. I sighed loudly to express my displeasure at having to
wait and questioned my decision not to let Mitch handle the coffee run.

"Next," the
barista said and waited for the redhead to give him her order.

"I need a black
coffee with enough room for cream and sugar, a latte with skim milk, and a
decaf Americano," she said. "Oh wait, it's a decaf latte and a
regular Americano with skim, I think. Shit, hold on." She pulled a phone
out of her pocket and began quickly texting.

"Ma'am, if you'll
step out of line while you figure out what you need, I'll be able to help the
gentleman behind you and then take your order," the barista suggested.

"No, seriously, I
know what they wanted! Just give me a second," she said without looking
up. My blood began to boil as I watched her tap away at the phone screen.

"Excuse me, but I'm
really in a hurry," I said as I moved around her, accidentally nudging her
with my elbow.

"Did you just shove
me aside?" she demanded as she turned around, ready to fight.
"Seriously, dude, did you just shove me aside so you can get your precious
coffee?"

"No, I did
not," I said as I stared down at the woman and found myself unable to look
away. Aside from her flaming red hair, which tumbled out from under her black
wool cap, she had the most piercing green eyes I’d seen. They were shaped like
cat's eyes and when she narrowed them as she began to berate me, they gave her
an air of danger. Her lips were painted a deep red and my gaze bounced between
her eyes and lips as she yelled.

"You Washington big-wigs
are all alike; you think just because you're on television saying things,
you're somehow better than the rest of us who aren't," she spat.
"Yes, I saw you on
Talk of the
Nation
this morning – you and that scumbag, Russo. God, the two of you
should just go put on boxing gloves and beat the crap out of each other, it'd
be a lot more interesting than the feigned debate you pretended to have
today."