Arrangement With A Billionaire (Bad Boy Billionaire Brothers #1) (32 page)

She was going on a date with Arturo on Friday. They were going to be seeing each other.

That was a pretty good happy ending. It left her stomach tingling and her skin warm and her thoughts mushy and flowery. Arturo loved her. She repeated that over and over inside of her head.

He
loved
her. That was what happy endings, or good beginnings, were made up of, right? Love and other cozy, happy thoughts?

Now she definitely had her answer when it came to her own feelings. She knew for a
fact
she loved him back, otherwise, knowing that he loved her wouldn't make her so damned happy. She didn't even know what to do with herself. It was kind of ridiculous in the best possible way.

Also, she had been serious about her contract. Isla owed Arturo two weeks worth of work, and she didn’t like owing debts.

T
he End

“
T
hat was incredibly mean
, sir.”

Arturo looked to his assistant, Sylvia, who was still managing a smile even though what he’d done was supposedly mean.

“I wasn’t that bad,” he said. “Besides, I offered her back her family’s company, didn’t I?”

Sylvia smiled, then shook her head. “Just don’t be too hard on her. All she did was tell you to fuck off.”

“Right, and now she needs something from me.”

“I tell you to fuck off all the time, and I need my pay checks from you every two weeks.”

“Right, but I’m not trying to get your panties off.”

She eyed him in that moment, her head tilted to the side., and it wasn’t hard to admit for him to say to himself that she was pretty. Beautiful, even. He had no problems flirting with her, but it had become obvious a long time ago that she was never going to go for it, so their flirting had become more of a fun game he knew he was never going to win.

“Why aren’t you trying to get my panties off?”

He raised a brow at her, and then a slow smile pulled at the corners of his mouth.

Sylvia raised her hands and stepped back, a big grin on her lips that showed off her perfectly white teeth. “Don’t get any ideas. I was just asking.”

“I don’t know. I guess I’ve been forgetting. Or I’m just not interested in you anymore,.” Arturo said. It was a lame excuse, but he really didn’t know what else to tell her.

Sylvia planted her hands on her hips, tapped on one of her feet—which he had no idea how she managed to do that while wearing high heels—and gave him that
look
he knew so well. The one that told him she thought he was both full of shit, and being an asshole. “You know, I really don’t know why we didn’t hook up. That would’ve been perfect, like every boss and employee romance I’ve ever read.”

“You like reading that stuff?” he asked. “I thought I was paying you to work, not to read.”

“You are, but I read sometimes anyway, which reminds me, I have some reading to catch up on.”

With a grin and a swift spin in the opposite direction, Sylvia turned to go back to her desk.

Arturo blew out a sharp breath when she was gone.

He liked the flirting game he played with her. It was made more fun by the fact that there was no risk of having sex with her and ruining the fact that he had her as an awesome assistant. Also, he would sooner fuck his sister than Sylvia. Not that he had a sister, but still, the point was the same. Playing games was one thing, but actually getting her naked? Now that he knew her and was friends with her?

Pass.

Isla, however…

Arturo moved to the window overlooking the city and the ocean, a city he now practically owned, considering all this the shit that had been dumped on him since dear daddy went away.

Was she downstairs right now? Marching out of his building? Walking to her car? Or storming to it, more likely. Despite how hard up for money she claimed to be, every little rich girl stayed a rich girl even when the money got tight. Arturo couldn’t imagine her using public transportation.

She was probably so amazingly pissed off at him. Just thinking about the angry look on her face was enough to make his cock twitch and his pulse race, as though he hadn’t just fucked Angela in his back office.

That was very interesting.

“
I
can’t believe
your girlfriend got us our pillows,” Silvio said with a moan.

His voice was muffled because of the way he pressed his face into his pillow as he lay crookedly on the sofa. It made Arturo want to walk right over to him with the pitcher of ice water and dump it over the idiot’s head, but he just couldn’t bring himself to be that cruel.

“She’s not my girlfriend.” They were lovers, technically, but even that seemed too intimate a word to describe her.

Orlando gave Arturo a
look
, the one he tended to be on the receiving end of whenever he said or did something untoward.

Like announce to his brother that Isla was not important enough to even hold the title of girlfriend.

Arturo stared at his brother, daring the man to say anything.

Orlando didn’t. He shook his head and returned his attention to the papers he’d been reading.

And he was reading them in a pair of cotton pajama bottoms and a navy blue T-shirt. Isla hadn’t just brought their pillows from home, but also their sleepwear.

There was no way a good girl like her had rifled through their drawers. She must have sent Martina to fetch them, which made sense because Arturo didn’t sleep in anything. He preferred it that way. Martina would have noticed, considering she did the laundry, and so for Arturo, a pair of his favorite joggers were packed. He was wearing them now

Isla must have realized the same thing when Martina had brought out his clothing. Had it shocked her? Or would it arouse her? Had she helped Martina pack at all, or just asked the woman to send everything over?

Martina had insisted that it was Isla’s idea. It brought about a warm feeling he wasn’t used to, knowing Isla had thought of him and his brothers like this. He wasn’t sure if he liked this feeling or not.

Not that he could think much about fucking her in the state he was in now, and considering how shitty he looked the last time she’d seen him, and right now, it was likely the last thing on her mind as well.

Though, the extra gestures had been…appreciated. He would give her that. It definitely felt marginally better in here now that it was clean and they all had something from home.

They’d been running on fumes. Isla had been right. Arturo hadn’t realized things had deteriorated to the point that the empty takeout containers were forming a small mountain in the trash bin. He’d been so focused on work that he hadn’t allowed Sylvia to do more for him than remind him of calls he needed to take and meetings he needed to cancel.

If he continued with dodging his work like this, he might just put himself out of business.

That would make Vincenzio all the more furious with him. He should probably do it. Sell the entire fucking thing off. That would teach the old bastard a thing or two, wouldn’t it?

But even with everything happening around him now, he had to admit, Isla King wasn’t the stuck-up princess bitch he’d thought she was that day they’d first met.

Orlando certainly liked her enough to keep coming to her defense. Arturo was going to have to have a talk with his younger brother, and soon. Apparently, where Isla was concerned, Orlando seemed to think Arturo was the big bad wolf.

The fact that she’d brought them back their pillows and some clothes to sleep in, instead of just to wear around the office, only seemed to endear her more to his brothers.

Silvio looked at him, and even when his eyes were half lidded and tired from only averaging two to three hours of sleep a night, he still had that look that Arturo knew too well. “So, not your girlfriend, huh?”

A hot, swelling something rose up in Arturo’s chest. “Don’t even think about it.”

Silvio grinned tiredly at him. “Okay, whatever you say.”

“Just do me a favor and wait until I’m not fucking her before you try to make a move, and even then, don’t do it.”

“If you don’t care, then why are you getting jealous?” Orlando asked.

“Why do I need a reason?” Arturo shot back. “I’ve been jealous when I’ve been with women I didn’t even like. Fuck off.”

“We’re all tired,” Silvio said, sitting up and stretching his back until Arturo heard a popping noise. “Let’s just work on this. I want to get this over with.”

Arturo knew it would never be done and over with. So long as Vincenzio was alive, he was going to be stirring up shit while in prison, trying to get out.

There were too many people who thought he was innocent, who thought Arturo had lied on the stand just to send him away and take the company for him and his brothers.

Thankfully, this was one of those times when the law’s stubborn refusal to reopen cases was working well in Arturo’s favor. That did not mean he didn’t have to work his ass off to find ways of discrediting everything the old man was saying from prison.

It was the fact that they were all so tired that made them stop arguing so easily. Arturo felt he was close, though. Just a hundred or so more calls to his lawyers, the DA, and the people whose palms he’d greased on the inside of that prison, and he’d have a better idea of what was going on.

Doing all of this while in his joggers was a big help.

A
rturo swirled
his phone on his desk, watched it spin, stopped it, and then looked at the screen. He slid through his contacts, stopped himself, and then spun the phone again.

He slapped his palm down on the screen once more to stop it, looked through his contacts again, and then quickly put the screen back to sleep before he could think too much about calling her when he knew he shouldn’t.

He had nothing to say that he could utilize as a normal conversation. The silence that would stretch between them was already something he could hear in his own office. It was better to not have to listen to it coming from her.

Still, he spun his phone, stopped it, looked through his contacts, and then turned off the screen again.

He was never going to get any work done like this.

U
SA Today Bestselling
and award winning author Mandy Rosko loves writing paranormal romances with werewolves, dragons and people with special powers. She is the author of the Things in the Night Series, Night and Day, the Dangerous Creatures Series and Alpha Bites. This is her first Contemporary Billionaire Romance. Favorite authors right now are anyone who writes dangerous and tortured heroes ;)

See you in 2017 for Silvio’s Story! Follow me on
Wattpad
for early chapters this Summer!