Tapping The Billionaire (Bad Boy Billionaires #1) (21 page)

A few seconds later, he floated us to the top, our heads peeking above the waterline, our lungs dragging in much-needed air. The coast was clear, the mystery person no longer in sight. The lights were off, the doors were shut, and Kline was still finger-fucking me, seemingly unfazed by our almost arrest.

“Sweet, dirty,
wild
girl,” he whispered in my ear, picking up the pace. “Even when we’re thirty seconds away from getting arrested, you still let me slip my fingers inside your pussy. You like this, don’t you? You love being bad just for me.” He licked the water from the curve of my breasts.

I moaned, my teeth finding his shoulder and biting down.

“Yes, just like that. Christ, baby, when you catch fire, you motherfucking
burn
.”

Hot damn, Kline Brooks was a certified, class-A, deserves-the-major-award dirty talker. His words served their purpose, pushing me straight over the edge and spurring my brilliant response.

“
Ho-ly fuck.”

M
onday night rugby practice was gearing up, but my mind was still on the weekend—laughter and sexiness and a Benadryl-fueled trip through an allergic reaction. The mixture of all three had me smiling to myself.

Georgia Cummings was quickly becoming one of my favorite people. She made me feel high on life and like the world’s biggest idiot all at once.

Curiosity about Rose’s weekend was the only thing that kept me from thinking about how close I’d come to never experiencing what I had for the last week. Because I wouldn’t have traded the last seven days for anything, even if it were to come to an abrupt end tonight. The memories would have been worth it.

Take note, friends. Don’t close off any one section of your life from possibility. Fate gives us chances, but we’re the ones who have to take them.

A touch of the icon brought the TapNext app to life. Realization swallowed me with an unexpected sense of accomplishment. This thing was my baby. I’d nurtured it, grown with it over the years like a close friend. I’d watched it make mistakes, veer off the path to greatness, but I’d pulled it back and I was proud of what it’d become. A place where people could find almost anything. A place where people who were lucky found something worthwhile like I had.

BAD_Ruck (6:15PM): Hey, Rose. You busy? I’m just curious how the date went. I didn’t get to check in with you over the weekend.

I stared at the message window, waiting to see if she would reply. I was just about to give up waiting when the little bubbles popped up on the screen.

TAPRoseNEXT (6:17PM): If avoiding contracting bubonic plague from the passenger next to me can be considered busy, then sure. I’m just on the train on my way back from work.

BAD_Ruck (6:17PM): And the date?

“Put your phone down, K. Everyone is waiting on us,” Thatch shouted.

I looked up to find the team captains still in the middle of the rugby field, known as a pitch, chatting, but I tossed my phone down anyway. Any amount of dawdling would only be cause for Thatch to publicly bust my balls. As my best friend of more than a decade, he had too much ammunition and a specially made gun for the job.

I broke into a jog for extra measure, joining the group of no-good assholes I called my teammates. Sponsorship wasn’t necessary for obvious reasons, but we played the league on the straight and narrow, using businesses to sponsor the team like everyone else. I’d volunteered Brooks Media, but with a dating site being one of the main focuses of the company, that had resulted in a resounding, “Veto!”

Instead, Wes’s restaurant, BAD—a fucking joke of a name for all the success he had—was our sponsor and earned our team as a whole the moniker “BAD Boys.” But because everyone thought they were fucking cute, that wasn’t enough, and the trio of Thatch, Wes, and I were forever dubbed the
Billionaire Bad Boys
. It was there to stay. Trust me, I’d been trying to shake it for years.

“We’re skins,” John announced to the informal huddle when he came back from the captains’ meeting.

“Fuck,” Thatch breathed, rolling his head in distress for some reason.

“What’s the matter, Thatch?” Wes asked. “Afraid one of the boys is going to pull out your titty ring?”

“Blow me, Torrence.”

“Torrence?” I questioned, feeling a wrinkle form between my eyebrows.

“It’s a
Bring It On
reference,” John remarked casually as he stretched out his hamstring by pulling his heel to his ass, as though it wasn’t weird that he’d know that.

When I turned my curiosity from Thatch to him, he piped up again.

“What? Kirsten Dunst is in the movie, and she’s fucking hot.” He added, “And I have a younger sister,” when the group was slow to buy in.

“How
is
your sister, Johnny?” Thatch asked with a smirk.

John’s eyes flashed brightly before turning to stone. “Eighteen, motherfucker.”

Thatch turned to me, and I could practically
see
what was coming. He didn’t actually want to bone John’s little sister. Not even a little.

“What’s that he said, Kline?”

He might have been a manwhore, but Thatch fucked
women
—not girls just starting to make the transition. What he wanted was to poke at one of John’s pressure points just enough to make him explode.

I trained my face to look serious and held in a laugh. “I think he said she’s legal, Thatch.”

John lunged and my humor finally broke the surface. I grabbed his shirt with both hands and shoved him away playfully while Thatch busted out in hysterics beside me.

“Relax, John,” Wes coaxed. “Thatch doesn’t need your sister to fill his pussy punch card. He’s got all the tramps he’ll ever need right here in Manhattan.”

Thatch tsked. “There’s no card, Wes. My dick is not a Value Club.”

“It sure fucks in bulk,” John threw in, eager to even the score because of some running feud between the two of them. We were all well-off, grown-as-fuck men, but you’d be surprised by how similar we were to a group of teenage girls sometimes.

“And how would you know, Johnny? Got a camera in my bedroom?” Thatch snapped back.

“All right,” I called, babysitting like usual. “Drama club is over, assholes. Let’s go play rugby. Focus all of that energy into your attack, for fuck’s sake.”

“You’re the one who can’t manage to make it past halfway without getting tackled and steamrolled into the ground,” Wes pointed out. He laughed as he said it, though, continuing the teasing vibe by wrapping his arm around my shoulders and walking out onto the field with me.

“At least I manage to touch the ball every once in a while,” I jabbed back, shoving him away and jogging to the other side of the pitch.

At this point in the season, practice consisted mostly of scrimmages, dividing into two teams and trying to outplay each other. I was just glad that when we split up, Thatch was usually on my side. He might have acted like a clown from time to time, but the dude was one big motherfucker and had been known to do some permanent damage when he tackled you. I liked to walk without a limp, and if I was going to be told I couldn’t have kids one day, I sure as fuck didn’t want testicle mutilation to be the reason.

I shook out of my daydream when the ball slammed into my chest, a smirk ghosting Wes’s lips from the success of his unexpected pass.

I took off at a run, dodging a defender and reaching the halfway line. Pain shot through my waist as another defender made hard contact. I tossed the ball underhanded and toward my back, the only direction allowed for a legal pass in rugby, and tucked my arms to my chest to take the impact of the fall without breaking a wrist.

“Jesus,” I groaned, shoving Tommy off of me as quickly as I could in order to rejoin play.

“Lay off the cookies, Tom,” I shouted as I ran toward the ruck my teammates had going.

“Weights!” he yelled back. “I think when you said cookies, you meant weights!”

And fuck, by the way my spleen throbbed, Tommy just might have been right.

I slammed my body into the linked shoulders of Thatch and Wes, pushing them forward over the loose ball and helping the group gain momentum in the fight upstream against the defenders. Thatch fought for control in front of me, and I nearly took an elbow to the face in the process.

Rugby was a rough game, and when my organs felt like they might fall out or a limb ached like it might fall off, I wondered why I did it.

But then the ball was in my arms again, tossed underhand and over his shoulder by Thatch, and I remembered without question—the adrenaline, the thrill, the all-out expulsion of a week’s worth of tension, stress, and aggression.

I was convinced a little extracurricular rugby not only kept me in prime physical shape, but it also kept my mind at peace and on an even keel. I could only hope that as my physical health started to subside with age, my need to vent would dwindle along with it.

The weight of three bodies hit me at once as I was crossing the try line, but Thatch had them off in no time to celebrate the score. I was barely on my feet before the choreography started, Thatch firing off shots from his crotch like a semi-automatic weapon, the men of our team playing into his antics by hitting the ground one by one as he fired off “rounds.” As the scorer of the try, I was the only one who’d earned the privilege to stay on my feet.

I laughed and high-fived my teammates before jogging back across the pitch to do it all over again. Practice had just started, and now that I’d scored, my body was ready for more abuse.

I ran for the train just before it was set to depart, sliding through the doors in just the nick of time. Starving and ready to be home, all I could think about was getting there, showering, and ordering a pizza.

As my tired ass met the surface of the seat, I took a moment to be thankful for the lack of pregnant women and elderly. I was worn the hell out, but I wasn’t a prick. The rest of these fuckers could fend for themselves.

I wiped some of the lingering sweat and mud from my face with my towel and pulled my phone from my bag.

A message sat waiting from earlier.

TAPRoseNEXT (6:18PM): Gah. The date. The date was amazing. And then it was pretty fucking traumatic.

BAD_Ruck (7:52PM): Traumatic??? Am I going to need to hunt this guy down?

TAPRoseNEXT (7:54PM): No, he’s great, I promise. It wasn’t traumatic because of him. He’s…I don’t know, Ruck. I’ve got this gut feeling that he’s some kind of wonderful.

The corners of my lips started to curve, some weird, unconventional but meaningful relationship between us forming and instilling genuine happiness in me. But before the smile cycle could complete, utter disbelief washed over me in a wave of tsunami-like proportions—the conversations we’d had, the things she’d said. Work relationships and awkward yet somehow easy conversation. The way Rose, despite my more than infatuation with Georgie, managed to make me feel.

None of it made sense, not one single piece of it, until all at once,
it did
.

No fucking way.

The doors of the subway opened, and I didn’t even hesitate, shoving my way through the throng of people without apology or remorse. I didn’t even know what fucking stop we were on, but I ran for the stairs with single-minded abandon, taking them two at a time and reaching the top on a leap.