Billionaires, Bad Boys, and Alpha Males (56 page)

“Lindsay,” Chace said,
 
“Will you marry me?”

“Yes,” she said.
 
She was crying now, tears streaming down
her face.
 
He wrapped his arms
around her and kissed her.

She was dimly aware of everyone clapping in the
background, and her mother saying, “Oh, thank God.”
 
But then it all faded away, and it was
just her and Chace.

“Don’t cry,” he whispered, wiping a tear from
her cheek.

“I’m crying because I’m happy,” she said.
 
“I love you so much.”

“I love you so much, too.”
 
He kissed her tears away, then smoothed
her hair back, the way he’d done a million times before.
 

“Everyone’s staring at us,” he whispered.
 
“It’s kind of weird.”

She laughed, then wrapped her arms around his
neck and closed her eyes.
 
She
thought about second, third, fourth chances, and about how she was glad she’d
taken a risk and put her faith in happy endings.

“You saved my life, Lindsay,” Chace whispered
into her ear.
 

She pulled back, leaned her forehead against
his.
 
“No,” she said.
 
“You did that.”

Chace pulled her close one more time.
 
And as the room filled with happiness
and love and good wishes for the first time since his dad’s party a year and a
half ago, Chace whispered into Lindsay’s ear one more time.

“No,” he said,
 
“We did it.”

And then he kissed her again.

The End
of No Good For Anyone

FOR HIS
PLEASURE (For His Pleasure, Book 1)

By Kelly Favor

© 2014 All Rights
Reserved

Monday came too soon for Nicole Masters.

The most important day of her life, and
she felt ill prepared.

Nicole hadn’t slept the night
before.
 
Instead, she’d spent hours
laying out different outfits, going through possible interview questions.
 
Her stomach churning, she’d taken six or
eight Tums, read article after article about Jameson International on the
Internet, and of course, she’d also researched Red Jameson, the high profile
CEO and founder of the advertising agency.
 
At only age thirty-two, the man was already a legend in the advertising
world and a heartthrob in the rest of the world.

While playing around online, she’d even
run across a web forum seemingly devoted to discussing Red’s every
relationship, both real and imagined.
 
The forum participants gossiped endlessly about celebrity women he’d
been spotted with, and then discussed (in great detail) what they would do if
they had five minutes alone with him.

Red Jameson had been featured on the
cover of both Forbes
and
Rolling
Stone.
 
He was just
that
cool.

Finally, around five-thirty a.m., when
the darkness was starting to give way to a gray and foggy morning, Nicole began
drifting to sleep.

Her alarm woke her just half an hour
later.
 
She groaned and sat up,
feeling like she’d spent the previous night drinking tequila.
 
Or maybe bashing herself in the head
with a hammer.

Either way, she had to pull herself
together.
 
She ran to the bathroom
and started the lengthy process of getting ready for the day.
 
Shaving her legs in the bath, washing
and conditioning her hair.
 
As she
rinsed the soap out of her eyes, images of Red Jameson flashed in her
mind.
 
He was staring at her and his
expression was one of disapproval.
 
He shook his head.

No.
 
You can’t have the internship,
Nicole.
 
You aren’t ready for the
real world.
 
Maybe you should have
gone to grad school instead.

When she opened her eyes, her heart was
pounding.
 
Think positive thoughts,
she admonished herself.
 

This
interview is going to go wonderfully.
 
I deserve this internship.
 
I’ve got all the skills they require and that’s why I’ve made it this
far.

Nicole nodded, heartened by her own
propaganda, and applied moisturizer to her skin.
 
Her skin was smooth, silky, and
pale.
 
It was one of her attributes
that seemed to get the most comments from men and women alike.
 
She rarely had a blemish on her face, or
any kind of acne.
 

Other than her nearly perfect skin,
Nicole had always considered herself rather average.
 
She wasn’t too tall or too short.
 
She wasn’t too skinny or too fat.
 
She had breasts but not the kind that
men tended to stare at like salivating dogs.
 
She liked to run two or three times a
week, so she had some muscle tone, but wasn’t ripped like some of the girls
around town.

Her hair was brown and she usually wore
it back in a simple ponytail.
 

Today Nicole needed to be sophisticated,
though.
 
Jameson International was a
cutting-edge ad agency, and she couldn’t come in like some hick with hay in her
teeth.

So she was dressing up way beyond
anything she felt comfortable in.

She’d even gone into credit card debt
yesterday at Prada, buying a full ensemble: high heels, skirt, blouse,
purse.
 
The entire thing had come to
just under two thousand dollars.
 
She’d spread it across two cards.

TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS.

More than she’d spent on clothes all of
last year.
 

But this wasn’t for just any old internship.
 
Nicole had beaten the odds just getting
this interview, and now she needed to knock it out of the park.
 
She needed to look global, she needed to
look rich and worldly or she didn’t stand a chance.
 

Out the door and on the train, she tried
to stay calm.
 
Focused on a little
breathing meditation she’d learned from a hippie ex-boyfriend.
 
He’d taught her to meditate and he’d
also tried to convince her to give him a rim job, which Nicole had politely
declined.

They’d ended soon after that.

A short walk from the train to midtown
and she was suddenly there.
 
The
large glass building that stretched almost to the sky.
 
Jameson International.
 
It looked like a block of onyx.

Nicole’s breath caught in her chest.
 

She shook in her heels for a moment.

And then she went inside.

The main entrance was huge, with immense
marble floors and a fountain.
 
Men
and women in suits with perfect hair were filing through the doors and waiting
for elevators.
 
At the large
security desk in the center of the room, three black men were checking in
guests.
 

Nicole approached them with a smile.
 
None of them smiled back.

“Name please?” One bald man asked.
 
He glared at her like she might be a
potential terrorist.

Her voice came out so low that she needed
to start over.
 
Nicole cleared her
throat.
 
“I’m Nicole Masters?
 
Here for an interview at eight-thirty?”

The man nodded and turned to his
computer.
 
He typed quickly.
 
Nodded.
 
“Sign in please.”
 
He tapped a clipboard next to her on the
desk and she quickly wrote her name and the time and date.

“Look over here please,” he said, and
when she looked at him, there was a sudden flash in her eyes.

“Just a moment.”
 
Seconds later he’d printed out a picture
of her and made a laminated badge, which he handed to her.
 
“Please wear this at all times while
you’re in the building, Ms. Masters.”

She glanced at the badge.
 
In the picture, she looked like a
cross-eyed Japanese woman.
 
“I wish
you’d at least told me to smile,” she joked.

He reacted as if she’d never spoken.
 
“Take the elevators on your left up to
the fifteenth floor.
 
You’ll be
meeting with Glen Goldman.”

“Thanks,” she whispered.

Her stomach was churning, anxious.
 
She dug in her purse and grabbed a
couple of Tums, chewed them as she crammed into the elevator with the perfect employees
of Jameson International.

She disembarked on the fifteenth floor as
instructed, into a wide hallway with black marble floors.
 
To the right was a closed oak door.
 
To the left was a set of glass double
doors, and behind them, a waiting room of sorts.
 

She walked through the doors.

There was a striking, tall blond woman
behind an immaculate desk.
 
She wore
a Bluetooth headset and sat in front of a computer.
 
“Can I help you?”

She told her she was here to interview
with Glen Goldman.

“Absolutely.”
 
The blond woman smiled in the most
perfunctory way possible.
 
“Please
take a seat, he’ll be with you momentarily.”

Nicole took a seat in one of the black
leather waiting chairs.
 
It felt
gorgeous and sleek and glossy, like something out of a four-star hotel
room.
 
There was a glass table
nearby, with magazines carefully fanned out across it.
 

They were advertising industry
magazines.
 
Two of them had Red
Jameson on the cover.
 
On one, he
was holding a golden CLIO statue.
 
In another, he was holding a cigar in each hand and grinning.
 
Beneath his picture it said, How One Man
Can Have Too Much of Everything and Still Not Enough.

It was hard for her to tell if Red was
smolderingly sexy because he was good looking and photogenic, or if it was
because Nicole happened to know how smart and innovative and powerful he
was.
 
Maybe it was all of the
above.
 
His looks were
interesting.
 
He was supposedly of
Irish and German descent, but he looked more Italian or Persian.
 
His skin was dark, almost coffee
colored.
 
His eyes were hooded.
 
His hair was slightly curly, black and
wiry.
 
His nose was long and a
little hooked at the end, and he possessed a strong, chiseled jaw, surprisingly
thick neck and broad shoulders.

In his slick gray and black suits he
sometimes looked more like an athlete dressed up as a businessman, rather than
someone who belonged in neckties and wingtips.

“Miss Masters?”

The blonde receptionist’s voice startled
Nicole out of her reverie.
 
She
realized she had just been staring at the magazine with Red’s picture on
it.
     

She stood up too quickly and nearly lost
her balance.

The blonde smiled as if embarrassed for
her.
 
“I’ll bring you to your
interview with Mr. Goldman now.”

***

The interviews turned out to be
surprisingly pleasant, if exhausting.
 

Glen Goldman was older, thin and
balding.
 
He reminded Nicole of her
Uncle Regis, who used to always pretend to find quarters in her ear when she
was little.
 
Glen asked her about
college, he seemed genuinely happy for her that she was so excited about
advertising.

“It’s a young persons game now,” he said,
blinking.
 
“If you don’t mind
working sixty or seventy hours a week minimum, you’ll be fine.”

“I can’t wait to work,” she said,
truthfully.
 
“I’ve always enjoyed
hard work.”

Blinking ferociously, he nodded and
smiled.
 
“I like your attitude.

After Glen, a middle aged severe woman
named Remi Danvers came in.
 
Remi
was an art director at the agency.
 
She had short brown hair, enormous golden earrings and an even more
enormous golden necklace.
 
Her white
button down shirt was unbuttoned far enough to reveal her nonexistent
cleavage.
 
Remi fired off questions
about Nicole’s resume, almost as if trying to catch her in a lie.