The Billionaire's Alibi: The Proposition (5 page)

Her last remaining twenty-dollar bill disappeared for the cover charge, and only when she made it inside did she realize that she had never texted Vivian back to let her know that she was meeting up after all. She whipped out her phone and quickly typed a message, pressing send. She hoped Vivian was still there, but it
was
Vivian—she was a party girl, and Alexa wouldn’t be surprised if her old college roommate had already moved on to another scene, another set of companions.

But Vivian texted her back almost instantaneously; thirty seconds later, Alexa spotted her pushing her way through the gyrating crowd.

“Hey lady!” Vivian shouted over the hypnotic beat, enveloping her in a hug. “You won’t believe who I’m here with tonight.” She grabbed Alexa’s hand and dragged her toward the bottle service entrance.

“You found someone to pay for our drinks already?” Alexa asked, squeezing her way past the crowd.

“We don’t roll any other way,” Vivian said, winking.

They passed a roped-off entrance where a lone man in a suit waited at a table, cradling a glass in his hand.

“I found her!” Vivian shouted excitedly over the music.

The man pushed back his chair and turned as he stood, flashing a grin that Alexa would recognize anywhere.

“Will, this is my college roommate and one of my best friends,” Vivian introduced.

Alexa stared at him, speechless.

To her surprise, Will held out his hand to her. “William Henry Harper,” he said, winking at her. “But my friends call me Will.”

She shook her head in disbelief, unable to process what was happening.

Then, her body took over. She grabbed his drink from the table and flung the contents into his face.

 

 

WILL

“ARE you kidding me?" the girl asked. “Do you seriously not remember me?” Will blinked. He had no clue who she was, only that she had just thrown a drink in his face and she was more than damned lucky it hadn’t gotten on his clothes. He took a napkin from the table and blotted his face, his eyes roaming over her body.

She was in her early twenties, attractive, but not particularly his type. He wasn’t into brunettes. She had decent clothes, makeup, and hair but was detectably less wealthy than most of the girls who frequented this particular club. Her look screamed Forever 21, not Banana Republic; otherwise, she was hot enough.

“Should I?" he asked, faces racing through his memory as he tried to place her. He remembered all the women he slept with, but this one wasn’t one of them—no, she was a mystery.

She glared at him, and his eyebrows shot up in recognition.

“Alexa Romo,” she said sarcastically. “But my friends call me the girl who is broke and unemployed because some dick got in my car earlier today and forced me to hide him from the paparazzi!”

“You two know each other?” Vivian’s stare shifted from Alexa to Will and back again.

“I offered to help you!” he said furiously. “I said I would pay for everything.”

He glanced at Vivian, who shook her head in admonishment, and immediately shut his mouth. If she was giving him the stink eye, he must have done something wrong.

He had been relieved earlier that evening when Vivian told him she had come back to make amends. They hadn’t mentioned the events leading up to Grace’s death, and he preferred it that way. She was as culpable as he was, though she didn’t seem to wear her guilt the same way he did. Seeing her there, even four years later, reminded him of the careless decision he had made that betrayed everything he and Grace had shared. It was that decision that had ultimately led to her death.

So when Vivian promised that her college roommate would be joining them later, he had tried not to look so relieved. One hour. He would only have to endure one hour of being alone with Vivian, who looked so much like her sister that his heart ached every time he glanced up from his drink.

He couldn’t believe that the friend Vivian had spoken of—the one who was supposed to be a blessed distraction from his guilt and his past—was the nightmare of a girl he’d met earlier at the grocery store. What were the odds that
she
was Vivian’s college roommate?

“Please,
please
tell me you’re not friends with this guy,” Alexa said. “He’s a smug, incendiary, two-faced—”

“He’s Grace’s ex-boyfriend,” Vivian interrupted. “Remember, I told you about Will?”

“Oh,” Alexa said, and in that moment, she really did look contrite. Will watched her sit down and hand him a napkin from the table. She didn’t meet his eyes, but he knew that look to well—the piteous one that seemed permanently fixed on everyone’s faces when they found out about Grace. He despised that look.

He snatched the napkin out of her hand, crumpling it in his fist, and tossed it back onto the table.

Vivian raised her eyebrows. “Obviously, you two need a minute.”

Alexa opened her mouth to protest, but Vivian was already ducking toward the bar.

Will slid into his seat across from Alexa, arms crossed as he leaned back and watched her.

She sighed loudly, her shoulders falling until she was hunched over the table. “I guess I owe you an apology.”

“Why?" He shrugged, pretending that the thought of Grace didn’t make his entire chest hurt. “Because my girlfriend died four years ago?”

“No, of course not.” She finally looked up, meeting his eyes for the first time. Her eyes weren’t anything special, at least, not like Jaycee’s. Last night’s date had the kind of eyes that were magnetic, the kind that exhilarated him—and his body. No, Alexa’s eyes were the same, doe-eyed brown that he had seen a million times before. And yet, he couldn’t draw his gaze away.

“I’m sorry for throwing your drink at you,” she said.

Will leaned forward, his arms resting on the table. “Is there some reason you hate me so much? Because I’ve had people hate me for a lot of reasons—my money, my looks, my business acumen. You seem to hate me for something else, and I can’t quite figure out what that is.”

“Your looks?" she scoffed. “That’s exactly why I don’t like you. You’re full of yourself. It’s unattractive.”

“Unattractive?” Now it was his turn to scoff. He had never had a woman call him unattractive before, and he wasn’t about to let this one do it now. “I can get any woman in this bar to give me her number.”

She laughed, though he wasn’t sure why. It was a fact, a simple truth—he could take his pick from the women in this club and have their number, not to mention their panties, in under twenty minutes.

“You want to make a bet over that?” she asked.

“Pick anyone,” Will said, leaning back in his chair. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. Opening the fold, he tossed the contents onto the table and nodded toward the pile. “Fifteen hundred.”

She stared at him, something between anger and amusement lingering in her expression. “Fine,” she said, taking the cash. “In that case, I want you to get my number.”

She folded his money and tucked it into the cup of her bra.

“That’s a cheap trick.” He watched her smug grin dissipate quickly into guilt. “You play this game with all the men you meet?”

She frowned. “Only the ones who throw their money around to compensate for other deficiencies.”

“You’re a fun time,” he said without amusement. “Take the money. You need it a lot more than me.”

He could tell his insult stung her, and she shook her head and sighed, plucking his money from her bra and throwing it back on the table.

“It was a joke. Relax.” She nudged the money toward him, but he barely shifted in his seat.

“I wasn’t joking.”

She pursed her lips. “I shouldn’t be taking your money, alright? You’re right. But you know what? You’re right about something else—I
do
need this money more than you. That little stunt you pulled earlier cost me my job. I have student loans out my ass, no leads on a steady paycheck, and when I got home, my ex-boyfriend was busy fucking some other girl in our apartment. So yeah, I’ve had a pretty bad day. And the truth is, if I let my pride get in the way of taking this money from you, I’ll have nowhere to live. Because I’m completely broke—no savings, no credit, barely a paycheck from my last employer, and no way to pay rent to an ex-boyfriend whose generosity has dried up.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks, just like earlier after she crashed the SUV. He bit his tongue, trying to decide what to say. He wanted to tell her that her financial problems weren’t his responsibility, but he couldn’t be that heartless, not even to her. And not if he had the means to fix it.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered. She wouldn’t meet his eyes as she desperately tried to wipe away the tears. “I should have been nicer to you today. It’s not your fault that my life is falling apart. I mean, not entirely.”

“Stop,” he said lightly. He couldn’t help but feel guilty—he had used her, and regardless of any poor decisions she had made to get to this point, he did owe her something for the part he played in her current misery. “I guess it’s my fault you lost your job.” He nudged the roll of bills back toward her. “Take the money.”

She shook her head, fresh tears filling her eyes. “I’m trying to blame you, but it’s my fault. I’ve already fucked up twice, and what happened today was just the last straw. Doesn’t matter anyway…” She laughed bitterly, her voice raised and her arms outstretched. “Look at me—I graduated from Northwestern and I haven’t been able to hold a steady job in two years. I always seem to find a way to mess it up and this—this is just the latest in a string of failures.”

Alexa was beginning to make a scene, Will noticed. The groups at nearby tables were staring at them before leaning in to each other for a whisper. He couldn’t have that—especially not if Morgan showed up. Nothing would be worse than a picture of some girl sobbing in front of him with a fake headline of how he’d broken her heart.

“I’m going to make a call for you,” he said, desperate to do anything to get her to stop crying. “I’ll book you a suite at the Regency for the next seven days. You can get yourself together without having to go back to your apartment.”

She looked startled, and he wondered if anyone had ever given her a break in her life. “Thank you,” she said earnestly. “You have no idea how helpful that will be.” And then, she started crying even harder.

Will glanced around him and shifted in his chair, trying not to panic. What was with this girl? The nicer he was to her, the more she babbled on about her problems. He wasn’t used to girls crying in front of him, especially not in a club where everyone was supposed to be having fun. Where
he
was supposed to be having fun.

“Alexa,” Vivian called over the music as she got closer to their table, a man in tow. “Now that you’re single, I wanted to introduce you to—”

Will cringed as Alexa turned around and Vivian stared at her in horror. “Alexa! Did Will make you
cry
?”

Alexa laughed and wiped away the remaining tears with the back of her hand. “I’m going to the restroom to clean up.”

Vivian slid into her empty chair, dragging her friend into the seat next to her. “What did you do?”

“She’s having a bad day,” Will said. “A
really
bad day.”

Vivian raised her eyebrows but didn’t seem too bothered. Maybe she was used to Alexa’s bad days, and her habit of blubbering in front of complete strangers too.

“As I was saying,” she began again, “this is Charlie, one my oldest and dearest friends from high school. Charlie, this is Will. He’s going to inherit Harper Global someday.”

Charlie reached his hand across the table, and Will shook it firmly in his own.

They started talking, but Will couldn’t completely wash Alexa from his mind. He nodded his headed and laughed whenever Vivian did, which seemed to fool them; but he found himself wondering about Alexa’s story, her series of poor choices that had gotten her to where she was.

When she came back to the table, eyes thankfully dry, she was more subdued, only commenting with a quiet laugh when Vivian told another story from their college days. And when Vivian gleefully held up her phone and shouted, “Picture!” she didn’t protest.

Will stood between the two girls, arms draped around their shoulders. He glanced to one side at Alexa, who looked even less comfortable than he felt, standing stiff and as far away from him as the picture would allow.

Vivian, on the other hand, pressed against him, one hand resting on his chest, the other around his waist. He turned to speak, and she was there, her lips narrowly missing his, meeting the corner of his mouth instead.

He clenched his jaw, keeping his composure for the camera before pulling her into an empty hallway at the back of the club. “What was that?”

“A confession,” Vivian said. “From a girl who’s always had a thing for her older sister’s boyfriend.” She leaned toward him again, her head tilted upward until her lips found his. He felt instinct setting in as he kissed her back, then pulled away and stepped back, shaking his head to clear the lust that was overshadowing reason.

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