Billionaires, Bad Boys, and Alpha Males (113 page)

She patted her stomach, feeling a little
better now.

What was it, she wondered?
 
A slight case of food poisoning?
 
She’d never had food poisoning before,
but she’d always assumed it was pretty brutal.
 
She imagined herself clinging to the
bowl, sleeping in the bathroom, every twenty minutes being struck by another
bout of nausea.

This didn’t feel like that at all.

Maybe a touch of a stomach flu?
 
Nicole certainly hoped not.
 
She didn’t feel like spending the next
twenty-four hours in bed.

She went to the sink and quickly washed her
face, patted it down with the nearby hand towel, looked at herself in the
mirror.
 
Her eyes were puffy, but
other than that she looked fine.
 
Not great, just fine.

How could she ever really be great
again?
 
She was lost without him.

Don’t think like that, Nicole told
herself.
 
She’d been doing a lot of
pep talks lately, telling herself to buck up and stay strong and other clichés
that never really helped.

I
miss Red.
 
I miss him so bad that it
literally hurts.
 
Maybe that’s why I
threw up.

She was thinking crazy thoughts.
 
Nicole knew she needed to get it
together.
 
But the plain fact was,
she was tired of keeping it together, tired of pretending everything was okay.
 
Not only did she miss him terribly,
every single moment of the day—but now she also had to deal with Kane
Wright completely on her own.
 

Today was going to be a no shower
day.
 
In the past, before the latest
and greatest breakup with Red, there had never been a “no shower day”—she
took a shower at least once, very often twice a day.
 

But lately she couldn’t even muster the
energy for that.
 
Today she simply
put her hair up, put on deodorant and some clean clothes, a little
makeup—and done.
 
She didn’t
feel sexy or fresh or awake.
 

Nicole didn’t much care though.
 
Perhaps I’m depressed, she thought.
 
She found she didn’t care too much about
that either.

And then it was off to work for the day.

Work had become an altogether different
place since Red was fired.
 
The fun
had left Jameson International altogether.
 
There was an interim CEO, someone she’d never heard of before, who’d
given a twenty minute speech a couple of days ago.
 
He’d talked a bunch about ships
travelling rough seas, teamwork, holding strong through the tough times, and on
and on.
 

Nicole had found herself spacing out a
few minutes into it and just daydreaming about Red.
 
Their work lunches together, the way
he’d looked at her, the hunger in his eyes.

But she knew she wasn’t the only one who
missed him.
 
Even Remi had commented
on it one day.
 
Remi wasn’t the type
to get all soft and nostalgic about anyone or anything, but she turned to
Nicole randomly and said, “I put my resume up online yesterday.
 
I just can’t see myself working here in
six months.
 
All the life has gone
out of this place.”

Nicole had simply nodded, because if
she’d spoken, she might have started to cry, and the last thing she needed was
to be seen sobbing in her cubicle.
 

A mental breakdown at her job?
 
No thanks.

Today, she had a busy day,
thankfully.
 
Edward was using her as
his all-purpose assistant, which meant accompanying him to his meetings, taking
notes, getting his schedule straightened out, and going over the reorganized
files on the network.

Being busy was good.
 
Being busy was the only was Nicole
stayed sane anymore.

Still, in those brief downtimes, the
quiet moments, no matter how short they were in duration—she instantly
wondered where Red was and what he was doing right now.
 
And of course, the most clichéd line of
all: Does he miss me the way I miss him?

Towards the end of work, her cell phone
started to buzz.
 
Her heart started
racing at the mere possibility that it might be him—that Red might
finally be breaking his self-imposed exile.

It was her mother.

“Shit.”
 
Nicole had been avoiding her calls.
 
She’d only called back once, at a time
when she knew her mom wouldn’t be around, and left a brief message acting like
she’d been disappointed to have missed her.

But now she was starting to feel
guilty.
 
So despite her qualms, she
finally picked up.
 
“Hey, Mom.”

“Oh!
 
I was so used to getting voicemail, I’m a little startled to hear my
daughter’s real voice.”

Nicole smiled—actually it was more
of a grimace.
 
“Sorry about that,
Mom.
 
Things have been really busy
around here.”

I’ve
been busy moping, not showering, and occasionally vomiting for no apparent
reason.
 
That’s why I haven’t picked
up lately.

“Busy doing what?” her mother asked, a
hint of suspicion in her voice.
 
Of
course she suspected that Nicole was seeing Red again—nothing else
explained the lack of communication.

“Work’s pretty crazy right now.”

“I read in the newspaper that Red was let
go,” she said.

Nicole sighed.
 
Shit.
 
She forgot that her ex-fiancé’s entire
life was chronicled in the media, so of course her parents knew about the
events at her company.
 
“Yeah, the
board of directors met and decided that a change was necessary in order to
facilitate a new direction.”

Christ, I sound like I’m the interim CEO
right now, she thought.

“How do you feel about that?” her mother
asked.

Nicole hesitated.
 
“A little sad,” she admitted.

“Hmmmm.”
 
Her mom clearly didn’t like to hear
that.
 
“Well, it’s always sad when
someone loses a job.
 
But sometimes
it’s necessary.
 
Sometimes change is
a good thing.”
 
Nicole could
translate her mother’s words better than anyone after all these years.

What she really meant was, I hope you’re
not still upset about splitting with Red Jameson, because he’s obviously a
loser.
 
First he lost you and now
he’s even lost his own company.
 
I
hope you’re not pining away for him.

But with her mother, things were rarely spelled
out like that unless she knew she could get away with it.
 
And after so long without talking, her
mother wouldn’t want to upset Nicole and then not speak again for weeks.

“Yes, change is necessary,” Nicole
replied, after a long pause.
 

“So, what else is new?”

Well,
you’d probably be interested to know that a very wealthy man is trying to bribe
me to spend a few nights with him in the Cayman Islands.
 
I might not even have to fuck
him—we’re still working out the details.
 

She smiled, imagining how her mother
would react to such a description.

Instead, Nicole talked a little about all
the work she was doing for Edward and about how she and Danielle were spending
a lot of time together.
 
She tried
to keep her tone upbeat and light.

But of course, her mother knew.
 
Mothers always know, Nicole thought.

“I’m glad you’re keeping busy, honey.”

Translation:
 
I’m glad you’re finding it possible to
stay away from Red Jameson.

“Thanks Mom.
 
How’s everything there?
 
How’s Dad?”

“Things here are fine.
 
The same.
 
Although your father’s prostate is acting
up again.”
 
She launched into a long
story about how dad had gone to the doctor last year after being uncomfortable
for months on end and then been told he had an enlarged prostate.
 
Not cancer or anything, just an enlarged
prostate.
 
Only, the discomfort had
continued and continued and he’d resisted going to the doctor for so long.
 
Finally, Mom had forced him to go and it
turned out he had an infection.

“But he’s feeling better?” Nicole
said.
 
Now she really felt guilty
for not calling back.
 
Her dad had
been sick and she hadn’t even known.

“Yes, he’s doing much better.
 
That man just hates going to the
doctor.
 
I swear, he drives me crazy
sometimes.”

“Yeah, men can be difficult, can’t they?”

“Some men more than others.”
 

Nicole knew exactly what that meant
too.
 
Sure, her father might be
stubborn and wear his jeans until the knees were ripped and threadbare and mom
had to practically fight him to let her throw them away—but he was still
a good, dependable man.
 
Red Jameson
on the other hand, he was of a different breed.
 
He was undependable, unstable, and
totally unsuitable husband material.

Red Jameson might replace his jeans when
they needed replacing, and he might go to the doctor if he needed to, but it
didn’t make up for everything else that was wrong with him.

 
“I should go,” Nicole said.
 
“I’m still really swamped at work.
 
With all the changes and everything,
it’s incredibly hectic.”

“You’re okay, though?
 
You’d tell me if something was wrong?”

Nicole was surprised her mother had come
out and actually asked.
 
For a
moment, she almost told her everything.
 
It would have been nice to just go outside and spill her guts to her mom
over the phone, tell her how hard things had gotten.
 
But she knew it was impossible.
 
She didn’t want to sit there and listen
to her mother badmouth Red in order to try and make Nicole feel better.
 
That wouldn’t help anything.

So in the end, she just nodded her
head.
 
“I’m fine, Mom.
 
I swear.”

“I’m sure it’s confusing right now with all
the changes at your job,” her mother said delicately.
 
It was the closest she could come to
saying she was sorry about Red.

***

Nicole should have known that Kane Wright
would track her down again.
 
He
wasn’t going to wait for her to come to him.
 

She shouldn’t have been surprised then,
when the dark limousine pulled up next to her and Danielle as they walked down
Fifth Avenue later that night.

It had been Danielle’s idea to get out of
the apartment and go spend some time in Manhattan together.
 
Nicole had complained that she’d just
spent the day in Manhattan.

“That’s not the same—you were
working.
 
Sitting in a tiny cubicle
is not spending the day in Manhattan.
 
You could have been in Hoboken.”

“But I wasn’t.”

“Still.”

Nicole was too weak too fight.
 
So she and Danielle had taken the train
into the city and walked around, and surprisingly it was actually fun.
 
Maybe it was all the walking and the
fresh air, but Nicole found herself smiling and joking around for the first
time in ages.

It couldn’t last though, and it didn’t
last.
 
The limousine pulled up
beside them on the street and they turned and looked at one another.

“Is it…?” Danielle asked, her eyes wide
with fear.

Nicole’s first thought was that it was
Red.
 
Red had come back to rescue
her, to love her again.
 
But that
thought only lasted a moment because she knew it couldn’t be him.

This was the other billionaire, the one
she never wanted to see again.

“No, it’s not Red,” Nicole said, as the
limo door swung open and Kane Wright looked at the two of them from inside.

“Let’s have a chat,” he said.

Nicole glanced uneasily at Danielle.

Kane looked at them.
 
“You and your lovely friend,” he
said.
 
“Please, I promise I won’t
bite.”