All That He Loves (Volume 2 The Billionaires Seduction) (27 page)

It worked, although $200 in a bunch of twenties is a lot less impressive than two Benjamins.

And it made me feel sad when I thought about our evening together. But I quickly pushed those thoughts to the side.

“Lily, you shouldn’t have done that,” Anh gasped as we followed the maître d’ to our table.

“Hush,” I said. “Tonight I want to indulge and go crazy.”

And we did. $50 entrées, a $200 bottle of wine, and three different desserts that we shared.

I had her howling as I recounted what had happened with Bryce. After that we laughed and hugged and made toasts and talked about the future.

It took me a couple of glasses of wine, but finally I got up the courage to ask her.

“Did you mean what you said about quitting Exerton and coming to work with me?”

“Hell yeah,” she said and hiccupped. Anh was kind of a lightweight when it came to alcohol.

“No, I’m serious.”

“I know. And my answer is hell yeah, I’m serious, too.”

“It’s not going to be stable like your job at Exerton.”

“I know,” she said, and grinned naughtily. “I want to go to the beach in the middle of the day sometimes when there’s nothing to do.”

“That would be awesome.”

“Hell yeah it would,” she hiccupped, and drank a little more wine.

“Um… as far as money…”

“We’ll talk about that when we’re not drunk,” she said.

“Well, I wanted to make you partner,” I said. “Fifty-fifty.”

“HELL YEAH!” she whooped, then covered her mouth daintily and looked around the restaurant in embarrassment. Once she was sure no one was going to throw us out, she said, “Lily, I really, really appreciate that, but you don’t have to do that.”

I cocked my head. “Are you just being polite again?”

“A little,” she said with a mischievous smile. But then she grew somber. “But seriously, that’s… you worked hard for this…”

“I did last week, but otherwise I got it handed to me on a silver platter. Besides, we’ll be splitting the work fifty-fifty, too.”

“Oh, well, in that case, hell yeah – partner!” she said, and clinked my wine glass with hers.

“We should wait until the next job comes in,” I cautioned her. “And that could be a long, long time.”

She shrugged. “I’ll wait to quit till it does.”

As it turned out, she only had to wait until 10AM the next morning.

I got the call from a small tech company in San Diego at 9:15AM. The CFO had been a fraternity brother with Scott Shaw and had heard him rave about me for half an hour the previous night – which is why he wanted to book Ross and Associates consulting as soon as possible.

After a brief conversation planning everything out, I said goodbye to the CFO, called Anh at her office, and let her know I’d just booked another job – for $30,000 plus expenses.

She turned in her resignation letter 15 minutes later.

Everything after that was a blur.

I actually booked two more jobs in the next three weeks – all because of Scott Shaw’s recommendations. I called him to thank him the first time, then sent him $500 bottles of scotch for the next two.

I got a little note back:
Keep this up, and I’m going to ask you out again.

I didn’t reply, but it made me smile.

Anh had originally given two week’s notice, but the volume of work was so great that she called her boss at home over the weekend, apologized, and told him she would be leaving Exerton effective immediately. Even though he was normally more civil than Herr Klaus, her boss still went on a profanity-laced tirade – whereupon Anh promptly hung up on him.

“That was the best hang-up of my
life,
” she announced.

“Are you sure you should have done that?” I asked nervously.

“Why shouldn’t I have? He called me a bad word. A
couple
of bad words.”

“What if you need his recommendation later?”

“For what?” she scoffed. “I’m a
partner
now.”

“Yeah, but…”

“Lily, we’re going to make this work. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me in my career – and I am
going to make it work.
”

“Okay,” I agreed reluctantly. “But maybe you still shouldn’t have hung up on him.”

“I’m a powerful person now,” she said with mock self-importance, “and powerful people hang up on jackholes all the time.”

Fake it till you make it, baby.

Anh was doing it even better than me.

Six weeks passed. We spent two weeks in San Diego, then flew to Colorado for another two, then went back to LA for the third gig. $90,000 plus all expenses paid.

I was freaking out. In a good way, of course.

The work was hard – harder than anything I’d ever done in my life. It was grueling… but it was mine. I was the one calling the shots. I was the one saying ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ I was the one people spoke to with respect. I was the one people were calling, asking if I could possibly help them out.

Of course, having Anh with me made it
so
much easier. Everything that happened, she was with me every step of the way. And with her experience in management and delegation, she saved my bacon a couple of times. Making her partner was the best decision I’d ever made.

Things got so busy we even hired a couple of Anh’s friends to help out. One became the fulltime receptionist, and the other became our Powerpoint/Excel/IT/computer guru.

By the sixth week, we began looking for an office.

Two more jobs came in as referrals.

By the eighth week, we signed the lease for a small space in Santa Monica. It was inside a large office building that housed much bigger companies, but it was a steal for the location, and we had big glass windows looking out over a pretty residential neighborhood full of palm trees.

Throughout all the craziness, I spoke with Sebastian at least once a week and kept him updated on my progress.

“Maybe I should quit here and come to work for you,”
he marveled at one point.

I laughed. “I think your current boss might get pretty angry with me.”

“Let him. I’ll have to come in as a partner, of course.”

“Well, aren’t you the hardnosed negotiator.”

“Let’s not forget, you couldn’t have done it without me.”

“True,” I said nervously. I owed a
lot
to Sebastian – but I was pretty sure working with him on a daily basis would drive me insane. Actually, working alongside him for one
day
might drive me over the edge. “But we’d have to discuss it.”

“And I could live with Javier instead of us dating bi-coastally – ”

“You saying you’re bi?” I joked.

“COASTAL,”
he said loudly.
“Of course, I’ll need you to pick up all my relocation expenses… and my hotel stay while I sell my condo in Manhattan… and I’ll need a per diem, of course…”

Nervousness became panic. “Um…”

“Lily… you DO know I’m joking, right?”

“About which part?”

“All of it. You’ve done incredibly well for yourself, and I’m very proud of you, but I’m never leaving Connor.”

“Oh. Haha,” I said weakly – partly because any mention of Connor’s name still had the power to sucker-punch me.

“Connor’s very proud of you, too.”

Mixed emotions rose up in me. Pride and gratitude, mixed with sadness and anger.

The sadness and anger won out.

“Then why doesn’t he ever call?” I asked bitterly.

“There’s some pop psychologist who says that if you break up with someone, it’s like breaking a bone – you need to give it time to heal. For a relationship, it’s about six months.”

I didn’t feel like I would
ever
heal. So far, only the chaos of my new job had been able to distract me from the pain… and then only during working hours. “So?”

“Every time you see or talk to the person before you’ve healed, it’s like re-breaking the bone. I think he subscribes to that theory.”

“Is
he
trying to heal… or does he think
I
need to?” I asked, seriously miffed.

Even if I did need to heal, I didn’t need him being Mr. Patronizing ‘I know what’s best for you’ about it.

Sebastian’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper.
“He’s seriously fucked up, Lily.”

Again, mixed emotions: overwhelming sympathy, and – no, I’m not proud of it – giddy elation. That he missed me enough to be ‘fucked up’ over it.

“What do you mean?” I asked, my own voice dropping to a whisper.

“Well, for one, any time he’s not in business meetings, he’s getting plastered. I’ve never seen him drink heavier than this the entire time I’ve known him.”

“Not even… after Miranda?” I asked, allowing myself to hope.

“Please. After Miranda he was like a bull in a china shop, always in a rage, going around destroying everything in his path. Now he just goes home and sits in his penthouse and stares out the window at the city lights and drinks until he passes out.”

The elation was starting to fade, and I felt horrible for him.

Until a little voice whispered,
All he has to do is pick up a phone.

“And he’s always looking at something,”
Sebastian said.

“What?”

“I don’t know… something he carries around in his pocket all the time, but he always puts it away when I walk in the room. And he stares at his phone a lot.”

“Like… he’s thinking about calling me?” I asked, my eyes filling with tears.

“Maybe.”

“Then why doesn’t he?!”

“Because he’s Connor. The man may be a brilliant businessman, but he’s one of the stupidest idiots I’ve seen when it comes to knowing what makes him happy.”

“Do… do you think I make him happy?”

“Lily, PLEASE. Don’t YOU be a stupid idiot, too.”

I smiled a little through my tears. “Should
I
call him, then?”

“NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT.”

“Okay, Jeez,” I said, holding my phone out about a foot away from my head. “Way to rupture my eardrum, by the way.”

“Well don’t be stupid, then. I’m working on something, and if you call him, you’ll just screw it up.”

“What are you working on?”

“You’ll see,”
Sebastian said coyly, then became all business.
“He’s coming, got to go.”

“Sebastian – ”

“Ciao!”

Click.

I sat there at my desk, staring out through the glass windows at the palm trees in the late afternoon sun.

What did Sebastian have in mind?

Why was he being so secretive?

And how long would I have to wait to find out?

I remembered telling Anh that she should wait to quit until we got another client… and then the magic call came the next morning.

I hoped that this would be that easy, that I would be spared the agony of waiting and uncertainty… but no. Sebastian didn’t contact me for another week.

I actually found out beforehand, but I didn’t put 2 and 2 together.

Not that it was entirely my fault; I just couldn’t have imagined Sebastian was
that
devious.

The answer came on the social page of the Los Angeles Times. I didn’t read the paper regularly, but Anh did, so we got it delivered to the office.

We were taking an afternoon break as we planned our next consulting gig. I was drinking coffee and answering emails. She was sitting across the desk and reading the paper when she suddenly looked up at me with something akin to horror.

I glanced up. “What?”

Her eyes flitted back and forth between me and the paper. “Uhhh…”

I frowned. “
What?”

“Hypothetically… if I knew something that I knew you’d want to know, but it wouldn’t help you and would probably just make you upset, should I still tell you?” she asked in a miserable voice. “…hypothetically.”

Terror of the unnamed and unimaginable surged through me. I clicked through a list of things she might be talking about – my parents were in an accident, my brother was hurt, Connor –

Connor.

The newspaper.

There was something in there about him.

Our eyes locked, and she knew I knew.

She started to move, but I was too fast for her.

I lunged over the desk, grabbed the paper, and yanked it out of her hands.

“Hey!” she shouted as I flipped it around and scanned the open pages.

Again, I clicked through a list:
he died. He’s got a new girlfriend. He’s married.

None of my options were the right ones, but the headline still felt like a punch to the gut.

‘Naughty Billionaire Plans Gala At Dubai Hotel’

The ‘naughty’ part triggered horrible flashbacks to the photographs, but the real pain lay in the second half of the sentence.

Connor was coming back to LA.

There was a black-and-white picture of him accompanying the article, but at least I was spared the sight of him with some Playboy Playmate on his arm. It was actually an older shot, one of the photos I had in my secret computer folder that I opened late at night when I was having a glass of wine and nursing my pain.

I started hyperventilating as I read the article.

Billionaire Connor Templeton, fresh off a sex scandal two months ago, is making a triumphant return to Los Angeles Friday night to simultaneously host a charity event and celebrate the launch of his new business venture.

Friday night.

TONIGHT.

I would have started flapping my hands in panic if they weren’t gripping the newspaper so tight that my fingers were turning white.

The invitation-only party will benefit the H2O Now Global Clean Water Initiative, and will also promote the beginning of his new solar energy company, Templeton Solar, which has passed all the necessary regulatory hurdles and is expected to break ground in Nevada next month. When asked why the party is being held in Los Angeles, a representative of Mr. Templeton’s said that “the event is to raise awareness. All of Hollywood’s biggest stars and environmental allies will be there, as well as business luminaries and political figures from across the country.”