Breathe: A Billionaire Romance, Part 1 (6 page)

I was glad to have an early lunch drink with my big fish of the day.

Glad, indeed.

M
y phone buzzed in my purse, and I could feel the straps vibrating faintly against my forearm. I groaned. I knew it had to be him. He was never good at just letting me do my thing without constantly checking in. It was almost as if he was worried that I might go eat a long brunch without him, or that I might have some sort of fun whilst on the clock.

“Grab my lunch,” the text read, and I immediately whined out audibly.

I knew when he meant “grab my lunch” he meant “grab my lunch on the other side of town because there’s one sandwich shop in all of New York City that makes the perfect tomato mozzarella Panini”.

But I did.

God help me, I did it.

I drove across town, waited in line for hours, drove back across town, and was stuck in lunch-hour traffic for an additional hour—all for a fucking sandwich.

And as soon as I walked into the office, something told me that I shouldn’t have gone.

The whispers were almost deafening as I walked through the office. It was as if everyone was talking about me, as they watched intently as I walked across the entire length of the large cubicle-filled room.
What on Earth were they talking about?

The heels of my shoes clanked and skidded against the carpet, as I walked with more hesitancy with every step. I watched as the faceless office drones eyed me up and down as I walked, but only, they weren’t faceless this time. I noticed every single person looking at me; I noticed their expressions; I noticed every single characteristic, every mole, every wrinkle; I noticed it all... and they seemed to notice me, too.

My brows contorted into confusion. I hadn’t done anything worthy of the rumor mill just yet; so why was I being targeted?

“Have you talked to Derek?” Leslie finally asked, grabbing ahold of my shoulders as I approached her. She was in front of me, squaring me off so that I was staring back at her deep blue orbs.

My eyes fluttered as my focus went away from everyone else and fell onto her.
Derek? What did Derek have to do with anything?

“What do you mean? What has the asshole done this time, fallen off the face of the Earth? Because honestly that would be preferable to working for him,” I blurted, rolling my eyes.

“So you have talked to him today then,” she muttered, her arms falling away from me.

My eyes furrowed once again.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the man is on total douchebag mode. As if he wasn’t bad before, he’s gone fucking mental. He is firing people left and right and throwing fits in the middle of his office. He’s completely snapped.”

I blinked... that’s all that I could do.

What was going on with him?

He was always a little bit of a jerk, but firing people wasn’t something that he typically did.

Something was strange. Something was off about him.

And it was then that I knew that my day—although I had told myself not to let anything get to me—had been immediately been made unpleasant. No matter how good the meeting with Mr. Darango was.

“Is he in his office?” I asked, a little scared to deliver the sandwich that had taken me hours to get.

She nodded, and as everyone else continued to stare on towards his door, I found myself journeying towards it.

It seemed like only a split moment had passed until I was actually standing in the middle of his office with his sandwich in hand.

“Here’s your lunch,” I said, just before placing down the brown paper bag on his desk gently.

“Not hungry anymore,” he said in a tone that I hadn’t quite heard before as he glanced up towards the bag.

Was he still not eating?

And why the hell hadn’t he even looked at me?
He was looking at the bag. Not at me.
Did I really not deserve even a word of thanks for traipsing over the entire city just to get the sandwich?

Was he really that inconsiderate and uncaring?

I sighed. There probably wasn’t a whole lot of his admirable-self left. And I wasn’t quite sure what got to him—if it was the cruelty of the business-world, or if it was the money... but something had. Something had gotten to him for sure.

He was a total douchebag. That was all there was to it. So I couldn’t be upset about it. I couldn’t let it get to me. I had to just work.

Work.

Work.

Work, work, work, work.

I honestly felt like it was all I ever did though.

“I need to go home a little early tonight.” I found myself back in his office mere minutes later going through files, hoping that I could get the request out of the way and hoped—despite what others were saying—that he would understand.

I mean, he should have. I told him about the pending audition weeks ago when I found out about it. Sure, I didn’t expect her to get it, but I told him that it was a possibility nonetheless, and he said that it wasn’t a problem. So surely he’d understand.

“No can do,” he replied, going through folder after folder, as if he was hunting something down.

“But I really need tonight off; I told you about this weeks ago.”

“I said no,” he replied sternly.

“My roommate needs me!” I shot back at him, a little more aggressively than I had originally intended.

“Does she need a kidney?” he asked, nonchalantly, still not looking up at me.

“No.”

“Anything else medically related?”

“No.”

“Then she doesn’t need you.”

I wanted to growl directly
in
his face. I wanted to punch his face. That smug face. That smug smirking face....

That gorgeous face....

“She has an acting thing,” I said softly, almost defeated.

“She has a play or something?” he asked, just before looking up at me. His interest was seemingly piqued for a moment. At least he was looking at me.

“No. An audition for one though!” I said enthusiastically. I was so proud of Polly. I knew how hard she worked just to get the audition.

He rolled his eyes and glanced away from me again. His head fell back to the folders, his eyes transfixed on them. “She’s useless. She just has an audition. That’s not a gig,” he said, with what I deemed to be poor, uncalled-for taste.

“What?” I asked.
How dare he?
He had no idea how many hours of work Polly had put in for this audition. She had worked hard just to get to the audition stage. He obviously had no idea how the acting scene worked in this city. You didn’t just have open auditions like a school drama. It was a cut-throat business that left many broken and battered, emotionally and physically, along the way.

It was serious.

And she was serious about it.

And I for one supported her and her decisions. I wanted to be there for her.

“I said loser actresses in the city think that they can get big just because it’s a ‘city of opportunity’ but the truth is, she’s a failure. She doesn’t have a dream yet. Tell her to call you when she’s done something worthy of mentioning to your boss again. Because right now, I’m upset that you wasted my time.”

My mouth fell agape. I couldn’t believe the words that I was hearing.
How could anyone be so mean?

“Don’t talk about her that way!” I unintentionally blurted out. I tried to stop the words from coming out, by physically lurching after them with my hands—but no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t going to have the ability to catch them and pull them back in. “She’s my friend,” I managed to finish.

“Well, that says a lot about you, then. Your choice in friends is a huge tale on who you are as a person,” he replied, nonchalantly, as if he didn’t even have a care in the world as to what we were talking about.

“You have no friends!” I pointed out, angrily.

“Excuse you?”

T
he office air was tense, as I watched people run in and out of Derek’s office throughout the day. I wasn’t sure what was happening. I just knew that several had been in, and none looked too pleased when they left.

It wasn’t until Julie-Anne, one of the women who worked across from me in a cubicle, walked up to me, her eyes puffy and face red.

It didn’t take an expert to know that she had been crying, especially by the smeared mascara beneath her swollen eyes.

I wanted to ask what was wrong, but by the expression on her face as she walked towards me, I knew that there was no need to ask. I was about to find out without asking.

“If you know what’s good for you, you will run,” she blurted out loudly, yet not in a volume loud enough to quite be considered an exclamation. And without any further examination, she left.

I knew, though, I knew that she had been fired.

“Are you ready to go?” Derek asked sternly, storming out of his office, with very little real regard to me. He barely even looked at me, and he certainly wasn’t asking as he crossed in front of my cubicle.

It was a rhetorical question, if I had ever heard one. His snooty, jackass of a voice was really telling me to get my hump off my desk and get to his house now. But he was far too refined to ever behave like that, far too posed and dignified to ever be truthful about what he meant.

My daddy was a totally different kind of man. He would have told me to get my rear end up and get to stepping towards my car. Because if he was ready to go, then damn it all, everyone else should have been too.

But rather than harp on it, or rather than question his motives aloud, I merely shrugged it off and nodded.

I
was
ready to go.

I was always ready to go when it came to Mr. Sholts. I knew to be.

So without further instruction, I made my way to the parking garage to retrieve my car and sadly head towards his apartment rather than Polly’s audition, like I had promised.

The parking garage—like every other parking garage—was dark, and I hated going in it—just like I hated going in every single other parking garage known to man. Especially in the city. It was hard to be aware of your surroundings, and that was something I was always taught to do. I tugged at my purse, opening it a bit, so that I could pull my keys out.

I had forgotten where I had parked, so I eagerly pressed the button on the key ring so that it would honk, and with any luck also scare away nearby creepos.

But it didn’t work.

Because the biggest creep of all was one that I would never be able to get rid of.

“BOO!” Derek shrieked from behind me.

I felt my heart leap into my fucking throat and wondered if it was possible for a thirty-year-old woman with no prior medical issues to have a heart attack.

Because it certainly felt like one was coming on.

“Do you seriously always lose your car? Start writing that shit down.”

I had to admit, though. It was nice seeing him be light-hearted for once. Especially after the horrible day everyone just had with him.

“Get in with me,” he said, as his black SUV pulled up beside us.

I watched as Fredrick, his eldest and most beloved driver, made his way out of the vehicle, likely to get our doors for us.

“But my car...” I began, but knew it was a lost cause.

“You don’t know where it is anyway,” he replied, smirking cockily. “That won’t be necessary, Fredrick. I’ll get the door,” he said uncharacteristically politely to the elder gentleman. The old man, skinny and frail, nodded and slowly let himself drop back into the car. The door shut with ease, and I wondered how long Fredrick was going to exist in the world, let alone as a driver for a spoiled billionaire genius.

“Get in,” he motioned with his head as he pulled the closest door to me open and held it in place. “I’ll send a car to take you home tonight and to take you to work in the morning, and then you can get your car when you’re ready to leave the office. But I need you to work in the car on the way to my place today.”

I looked at him, without blinking. As if I hadn’t already worked all day, I also had to do it technically on my off-hours, in the car and at his place. I always worked at his place after hours, though. It was part of the job description—well, sort of. It was part of my “assistant” job description. But working in the car on the way to his place? It was as if he didn’t understand that I was a human and that I got tired, too.

Or perhaps he just didn’t care.

I sighed, knowing that I had to agree. I walked towards the black, lengthy car with real leather seats—I could smell them from five feet away—and got in.

“D
o me a favor,” he finally spoke after what seemed like decades of silence before glancing up at me from his phone. “Go into my calendar and delete all of my dates.”

“For tonight?” I asked.

“Forever.”

My eyes furrowed in confusion, and I hesitated for a moment. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I could only stare in disbelief.

“Why?” I asked.

“Did I ask you to ask me why? Just delete them. I won’t be going out with any of those women.”

Instead of debate, I merely shrugged and did I was asked. It was his deal if he regretted it tomorrow.

“Done,” I said, glancing up and just as I did I saw a small, young-adult Golden Retriever standing, dirty and sickly looking on the side of the street.

“Oh!” I sounded. “Fredrick, stop the car!”

But he didn’t stop. He kept driving. I mean, for downtown New York, though, I could have still gotten out and I was about to. I reached for the handle, but Derek stopped me.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

“There’s a dog out there!” I cried out, hoping that he would understand the need for urgency. “I need to go help it!”

“Are you stupid?” he snorted. “There could be a dude somewhere nearby ready to carjack or kill us if we stop and check on that mangy thing.”

“Wow.” I couldn’t really comprehend what I was hearing. And I certainly couldn’t voice how idiotic he sounded to me. “You really have no faith in people. Where I’m from, people give the benefit of the doubt.”

“You obviously haven’t been in New York very long,” he huffed. “Screw the dog. You’ll understand one day why I say that.”