Her Second Billionaire (10 page)

Holding fast, though, she had simply typed:

Please leave me alone.

And, like magic, he had.

The ache that his respect for her wishes created in her was so contradictory yet so pervasive it made her question her own sanity. Why was she so drawn to this guy? What was so special that she would override her own moral code for him?

Ah, but you didn’t
, her conscience reminded her.

Oh, how I want to
, she retorted.

Dylan stared at the computer monitor, completely unsure and yet painfully, deeply certain of what he was reading.
Mike and Laura?
Mike was hitting on Laura at the online dating site? What? He scrolled through the history of the chat window and realized that – that the first chat took place the morning after his date with her.

Oof
. His stomach twisted and his balls felt like lead. Stretching his neck and clearing his throat, he fought back a tearful rage.
Ease up, Buddy.
Last time you let your temper flare you had a $400 door to replace.

Now, he’d been a bit confused when he woke up that morning and she had been gone. But he’d had plenty of encounters where that happened – yet he’d expected her to answer one of his phone calls or his texts. She had plenty of opportunities.

While he wasn’t quite ready to stomp over to her house and hold a boom box over his head, with Peter Gabriel’s
In Your Eyes
blasting from it, he was definitely in that uncomfortable zone where he expected to have a second date with her, anticipated it – really, frankly was excited by the prospect of it and had been stymied by her refusal to talk to him.

Mike had
sniped
her? This wasn’t a rare baseball card on eBay, for fuck’s sake.

Even though it had been less than twenty-four hours since he last saw her, and he knew he shouldn’t be so eager, it stung. He had an inkling about why she was blowing him off now – some inkling. A 6‘5” inkling.

And according to the times on the chat window, it looked like within a few hours of leaving his bed, she was planning a date with—Mike?

Mike? Mild mannered, boring old Mike?

This didn’t make any sense! Dylan was the one who went out and found someone for them. Dylan had found Jill, who had been their one and only.

Jill.

He sighed, his shoulders slumping, and he leaned cradling his face in his hands, a wash of nostalgia, of mourning, of pain came over him. And this time he let it. Normally, he pushed it away, manned up and did what a lot of guys do – went for a run, watched the football game, ate too many wings, pumped iron. But right now he let his feelings sink in. Watching her die had been one of the most – no,
the
most difficult thing – Dylan had ever experienced. The helplessness had nearly killed him, too. Mike had just retreated into his own world. Running tens of miles, half marathons, day in and day out until his shoes wore out within weeks, until his feet blistered, until he put his body into a state of pain that let some of the agony in his heart leak out.

Dylan wasn’t like that. Dylan had fought and fought, and fought some more. Had argued with the doctors, had argued with Jill. Bargained with God and anyone who could help. Tried to convince her to try all sorts of alternative therapies that he had read about on the Internet, from vitamin C to certain yoga positions to chelation – and while the doctors said none of it could hurt, none of it helped.

Jill had gently accepted her own fate after a valiant struggle; Dylan had never accepted it. Ever. And now here he was, a year and a half after her death finding someone like Laura, hoping that maybe she could help to repair some of the scars that were still fresh from Jill’s death.

And then Mike goes and turns into a snake.

Why would he do this? This wasn’t Mike’s style at all. He wasn’t the type to poach a girl. Mike was the beta. They joked about it. Dylan was the alpha and Mike was the beta and that was just the law of nature and how things worked between the two of them – between the three of them, with Jill. Jill had liked Mike’s sensitive touchy-feelly, new-agey nature and she’d loved Dylan’s arrogance.

Oh,
that
had hurt. She had called him arrogant all the time, as if his self-confidence didn’t have a bedrock foundation for his firm grounding. Here he was a fire-fighter, a paramedic – built, a former model and he was
arrogant
? He could wave it away most of the time, but now he just chuckled to himself, thinking about the times she had put him in his place. Frankly, he had needed that, needed her steady, sardonic wit, her –

“Oh, stop it Dylan. She’s gone. Just stop it.” He looked up stared at the monitor again, and the nostalgia came to a screeching halt.

He narrowed his eyes.

It was time for the alpha to put the beta in his place.

Whistling some Lady Gaga tune that he’d caught in the car in the long drive home from the mountain, Mike was feeling pretty pleased with himself. He had just proven that he, on his own, could catch the same woman Dylan could catch.

And boy,
what
a catch Laura was. Way more than he ever expected. She was absolutely, positively nothing like Jill. And yet, he had a feeling that if the two had met, Jill would have really liked her – and probably would have given her approval. Laura accepted the fact that he was quiet sometimes and he was able to sit in absolute silence with her, out in a field, staring at the mountain. The two of them could just coexist in peace together. You couldn’t find that in many people. Very few, in fact.

Jill had been one of them. Dylan definitely wasn’t, but he had other traits that made him worth being with, hard as it may be these days to remember them. And so, as he pulled into his parking spot his mind was filled with nothing but plans to see Laura again. A niggling irritant scratched deep within his brain, though, ruining the absolute perfection of this new beginning.

Dylan.

He had to tell Dylan at some point and it wasn’t going to go well. He and Dylan had been together since high school and he knew him backwards, forwards and upside-down. Even though Mike’s intentions were pure, Dylan would view this as a threat, as a challenge, as some sort of – as Dylan put it – alpha-beta problem.

Mike just rolled his eyes and ignored the alpha-beta crap, because he knew that on the surface he looked like a beta. They weren’t wolves, though, and this wasn’t a pack; they were human beings who were complex and nuanced. He could show Dylan, and himself, that he was capable of going out on his own and finding a woman.

Well, OK, that wasn’t quite accurate.
Dylan
had found the woman. Fair enough – but he could go out on his own and test the waters. Make sure the woman was attracted to him on her own and not as part of some package with Dylan at the lead.

And he had just done that today. Quite pleased with himself, that sense of pleasure faded, like a light switch being flipped off, the second he walked in the apartment and saw Dylan’s face.

“You slept with her, didn’t you?” Dylan wasn’t just pissed. Betrayal was too mild a word to describe his feelings. Dylan was itching for a fight, his fingers clinching against his hot palms.

Mike walked through the door, a cheerful smile on his face, a loose, languid quality to his joints that made Dylan want to throw him against the wall and beat the ever-loving shit out of him for taking his woman.

Their
woman.

Funny, how history seemed to repeat itself. This was exactly what had happened with Jill almost ten years ago when they’d all first met. Mike would deny it, but the reality was that Jill had been Dylan’s girlfriend and Mike had been the interloper then. So, even though Dylan knew that they had this running joke, that he was the alpha and Mike was the beta, Mike was neither – he was really just a snake.

A snake Dylan couldn’t live without.

“You son of a bitch, you went and – you found Laura and you – the morning after my date with her, you contacted her and got her to go out with you!” He couldn’t help but stammer, and the sputtering made him feel small and insignificant, reduced to babbling like a lovesick teen. Fury plumed in him, hot and fast, with a taste like blood.

Mike stopped dead in his tracks and shoved his hands in his pockets, staring dead ahead at Dylan, eyes boring into his.

“Yep.”

That enraged Dylan more than anything, because he knew at this point Mike would only give one-word answers. Like a robot, the man shut down and steeled himself, becoming an impenetrable fortress of quotidian bullshit. “You knew how important this date was, you knew that I was checking her out for
us
, not just for me, you jerk!” Dylan seethed now, his anger fueled by Mike’s withdrawal. “Why in the hell would you go behind my back and contact her? And a few hours after I slept with her!”

“I didn’t know you slept with her!”

Dylan cocked his head, rolled his eyes, and made an
Oh please!
gesture. “Right, like any woman I wanna sleep with isn’t going to sleep with me on the first date!”

Mike let out a puff of laughter. “Do you know how much you sound like a total douche?
Like any woman I wanna sleep with is gonna to turn me down
,” he mocked, his hands gesturing like Dylan’s, chest puffed up and prancing around like a peacock. Animated, mocking Mike was way worse than Robot Mike.

Dylan could feel his heart rate zoom, and, he feared, his skin turn green as he morphed into something so angry he couldn’t control it, a firefighter, billionaire Hulk.

And it was all aimed right at Mike.

Her Two Billionaires
will be published in December 2012.

Her First Billionaire – a sample…

Read how it all starts, with Laura, Dylan – and Mike’s entrance at the end – as the two men find their way to bringing Laura into a most unique, and decidedly hot, forever threesome. Here’s a sample from Laura and Dylan’s story:

“Hot, luscious piece of ass who can suck a golf ball through forty feet of garden hose seeks rippling-ab’d firefighter who has a tongue that thrums like a hummingbird and enjoys painting my toenails and eating Ben & Jerry’s out of the carton while watching Mad Men.”