Banking the Billionaire (Bad Boy Billionaires Book 2)(44)

The bell over the door rang as we stepped in, and Frankie’s eyes came up from the portrait tattoo he was working on in the open station in the back. We had private rooms too, but when Frankie was working by himself, he stayed up front to keep an eye on things.

He gave an interested nod, seeing as bringing a woman here was pretty much the exact opposite of my normal routine, but then went back to it.

Come to think of it, I’d never brought a woman here. Something about everything it meant to me had stopped me.

I’d never even considered not bringing Cass here tonight.

My eyebrows pinched together involuntarily. I wasn’t quite sure why that was.

“Wow, this place is fantastic!” she spouted, her eyes bouncing from one piece of artwork on the walls to the next. Some of them were mine, but I wasn’t quite ready to tell her that yet.

“Yeah?”

She nodded enthusiastically and hiked herself to sitting up on the counter. I smiled at her no-cares attitude. No one else I’d ever met would blatantly jump up on the counter of a business without permission.

Her gaze moved around, but when it came back to me, her face was reminiscent. “I actually thought about opening my own photography studio when I was younger, but Georgia talked me out of it.”

I stepped forward and pulled her legs apart to stand between them. “Why’s that? A studio sounds cool.”

She laughed and shrugged before rolling her eyes. “It probably had something to do with the fact that I wanted to call it Let Me Shoot Your Kids.”

Frankie and I laughed. Cass and I both turned to look at him now that we knew he was listening. His green eyes sparkled, but he feigned concentration on his work.

“What about you? A tattoo parlor and a… Jesus, what do you do?”

I shook my head and smiled. “A financial consultant.”

“That means next to nothing to me. I’m assuming there are numbers and money involved?”

“Am I like the Chandler Bing of the group? No one knows what I do?”

She shrugged shamelessly. “At least you’re taller.”

“Oh yeah, thank God I’m taller,” I joked.

“So how’d your business portfolio become so diversified?” She bounced her brows as if to say, See, I can speak work jargon.

“Well, I went to college with the idea that I needed to do something respectable.”

“An interesting concept for you,” she teased.

I pushed forward as though she hadn’t spoken, but I smiled and squeezed at her bare thighs.

Fuck, her skin was like quicksand. I could get lost in it for hours. I shook my head slightly to bring back my concentration.

“And, well, it turned out I was really good at it. Kind of a savant with numbers.”

“An idiot savant,” she said with a smile.

“Right,” I agreed.

“It’s starting to make more sense now,” she said and smiled, but I didn’t take the bait.

“Once I started to make a lot of money, I got bored.”

She shook her head and swung her legs at my sides. “Oh, man, that sounds familiar.”

“You too?” I asked to which she answered earnestly, “Always.”

“Well, I had the cash to invest in things I was interested in. A lot of property and small businesses trying to get off the ground, that kind of thing.”

“So you opened this.”

“Nope,” I corrected with a smile. “Frankie opened this place. I just stepped in as an investor about four years ago.”

“You’re obviously more than a silent partner, though.”

I shrugged. “I liked it. And Frankie liked having the help.”

“Sure did!” Frankie yelled from the back, again confirming shamelessly that he was listening to every word we said.

Cassie smiled, lips and eyes and the apples of her cheeks all falling victim to her amusement as her hair flipped effortlessly over her shoulder. She pushed me back slightly so she could tuck her foot under her ass and leaned onto her hand, and I couldn’t help but notice that she looked comfortable here.




“Get us some f*cking food, T!” Frankie called from his station.

Cassie joined in enthusiastically. “Seriously! And make it a pizza, pineapple and ham.”

“I don’t get a say in this?”

The two of them glanced briefly to one another before turning back to me and speaking in unison. “No.”

I grumbled, but what I didn’t do was tell them to f*ck off. It was just us, no clients to speak of, and I was liking being with both of them.

Knowing it’d take nearly a year for a pizza to be delivered to this location at this time of night, I considered going out to get it myself. But all it took was one glance at Cassie’s face, relaxed with genuine interest and wonder as she hunched over Frankie showing her the inner workings of his tattoo machine, to know I wasn’t going f*cking anywhere.

Kline and Wes knew nearly everything about me—my wild teenage antics and Margo’s death. But neither of them knew I’d been apprenticing to actually become a tattoo artist.

I wanted to tell Cassie, though. So much so I had to fight the urge to just blurt it out.

Grabbing my phone off the counter, I reached for my wallet from my back pocket, but when my fingers met the seam, I knew immediately something was wrong. I patted at the fabric in shock, but that didn’t change the outcome.