The Billionaire Bargain #1(3)

“Your concern is touching.” In strolled Grant, picking at a loose thread on the cuff of his thousand dollar suit. Not a scratch on him, the bastard. I took a deep breath and tried to slow my speeding heart. I hadn’t been worried, not me, move along, nothing to see here. The * was fine. He was always fine.

And also fine, if you take my meaning. Which made the * thing insult to injury.

“I don’t see the problem,” Grant continued in an unconcerned drawl like slowly spreading honey.“I’ve paid off the damage, and no one was harmed. It was just some fun that got out of hand.”

“The share price is already falling,” Mr. Lee pointed out, voice quavering. Looked like it was his turn on the chopping block. Nobody liked to contradict Grant Devlin, but it had to be done if he wasn’t going to run the company into the ground. So they took turns.“It will fall further. Wall Street is worried about you at the helm, and things like this don’t increase their confidence.”

Grant just shrugged.“I can’t help it if Wall Street can’t separate my professional and personal lives.”

I mentally built an entire lobster death tank just for him. With radioactive mutant lobsters. Poisonous radioactive mutant lobsters. With lasers and chainsaws. Would little lobster handguns be overdoing it?

It’s just—aaaaaargh! Such. An. Asshole. And he was never going to change!

This week it was a crashed speedboat, last month it was blowing a quarter million on a roulette gamble in Monte Carlo. Not two months ago, we just barely managed to keep the papers from reporting on his trip back home to Australia to—I swear I am not making this up—competitively wrestle crocodiles.

I mean, for one thing, it would be a hell of a lot cheaper to just change your name to Steve Irwin if you’re that committed to perpetuating Australian stereotypes. For another thing, leaping onto the back of the largest and deadliest reptile known to man, and rolling around with it in the mud, is shockingly not the greatest way to promote investor confidence!

I had worked around the clock for days calling in favors and making thinly veiled threats to keep that little escapade out of the headlines, and what was my thanks? Certainly not the words“thank you” from those entitled lips, and even more certainly not anything like a pay bonus or a promotion. To give me any of those things, he would have had to be aware of my existence first, and to a high-flyer like Grant Devlin, I might as well have been invisible.

He got under my skin so bad, strolling around squandering the family fortune like money grew on trees—well, for him it must have seemed like he had the deed to an entire money orchard, since he sure as hell never worked a day in his life. No, all his energy went into finding something to shock the jaded palates of the rest of the elite—and quite often, succeeding.

Plus, did he have to be so damn handsome?

You might think I’m exaggerating his attractiveness. I’m not. Picture a handsome man. No, more handsome than that. Square that jawline, brush those brown curls with gold, darken those blue eyes till they’re almost black, deep sapphire pools made for mooning over. Deepen that voice till it’s like dark chocolate, and thread it through with a sexy chameleon accent—one second so crisp and upper class it might almost be British, the second relaxing into long lazy vowels that conjured up visions of him kicking back beers on a sunny Australian beach, surfboard planted in the sand as he contemplated the rolling waves with a practiced eye. Strip away any hint of fat over that lean, muscular sailor’s physique; evenly tan his smooth skin until he’s a bronzed Adonis.

For intrigue, add just a few scars on his powerful arms—sometimes a wide-eyed young intern might ask where he got them, and he’d flex his arms and tell a completely different story than he had the last time, each more improbable than the last. And whether it featured great white sharks, modern-day pirates, or a knife-throwing bet, that wide-eyed intern would swoon right into those arms, disappear at the end of the day into his limo, and moon around the office for a couple of weeks, constantly checking their phones for texts that never came, until they quit or until security had to boot them from the building for trying to ambush him outside of his office with pleading love notes and recriminations.

But I’ve gotten off-topic. Back to your mental picture of a handsome man. Now picture an entire team of crack tailors working night and day to create the perfect suit, cut to hang just right on his body, tight across shoulders you could build a house on and an ass that belonged in an underwear commercial. Imagine the world’s greatest stylists converging upon him with mousse and hairdryers until not a hair was out of place except the ones he intended to be, each chestnut lock artfully tousled for maximum effect.

And then he smirks.

Now freeze that perfect, sexy, infuriating bastard at that exact moment in time so that nothing ever musses him or ruffles his feathers or causes a single blip on the horizon of his life, and you’ve got Grant Devlin.

“I’ve drafted a public statement of apology,” Jacindasaid, breaking me out of my rage/reverie. She pulled it up on her computer, projecting it onto the screen. I scanned it quickly—typical corporate bullshit. You’d need Indiana Jones and Lara Croft working together to uncover any trace of an actual apology underneath all the not-our-fault clauses and straight-from-a-thesaurus vocabulary.

I rolled my eyes. Nobody believed these things at the best of times, and this was definitely not the best of times. Investor confidence was going to crash at least as hard as Grant’s boat.