Billionaires, Bad Boys, and Alpha Males (195 page)

“A few days.”

“And then we can break up?”

“Yes.”

“So like I said, what’s it worth to you?”

He looked her in the eye, and she didn’t look
away.
 
She wanted him to name a
figure.
 
She would try to get him up
of course, because she wasn’t going to do it for anything less than twenty five
thousand dollars.
 
Even though it
would be in a more legitimate way, she was still going to end up in the
tabloids.
 
Her name was still going
to be out there, linked with his forever, at least as far as google was
concerned.
 
Twenty-five thousand
dollars in a few days would be way more than she’d ever made in her life.
 
It would give her time to find another
job, to relax while she did it, to not have to worry about anything for a
while.

“A hundred thousand dollars,” Chad said, his
tone serious.

Kenley almost blinked.
 
But she forced herself to take a moment,
to act like she was thinking about it.
 
And then, finally, she said,
 
“Deal.”

Chapter
Six

One hundred thousand dollars.
 
The words had been out of his mouth
before he even knew what he was saying.
 
Chad was no stranger to being a little extravagant – bottles of
Cristal, the best hotel rooms, thousand dollar pairs of sunglasses.
 
But those were treats, and at the end of
the day, you at least had something to show for it.

You’ll
have something to show for this, too
, he
told himself as he walked through the airport in New York the next morning,
fresh off his flight from Florida.
 
You’ll have a shiny new endorsement deal,
which could be a springboard into other, shinier endorsement deals.

When he really thought about it, though, the
hundred thousand dollars wasn’t the problem.
 
Yes, it was a lot of money, but if it
got him the deal, it was a small price to pay.
 
The real problem, the problem that had
been nagging at the back of his mind ever since he left his mom’s house and
Kenley yesterday afternoon, was that he had been so quick to offer it.

He hadn’t planned on offering her any
money.
 
Yes, he knew there were
probably going to be expenses – clothes and dinners, that kind of
thing.
 
But those were normal
expenses you had when you were dating someone.
 
He hadn’t planned on actually
paying
her to pretend to be his
girlfriend.

He’d underestimated her, though, because she’s
come right out and asked him what it was worth.
 
And in that moment, he’d wanted her to
say yes so bad that he’d blurted out a hundred thousand dollars.

Why was she having that effect on him?
 
He’d never seen anything like it.
 
Actually, that wasn’t true.
 
He had seen something like it, on his
best friend Jay Havens.
 
It was the
same way he’d acted when he’d met his fiancé, Alyssa.
 
The thought was so disconcerting that
Chad picked his phone up and immediately called Jay.

“Yo,” Jay said when he answered.
 
“Where’ve you been?
 
I’ve been trying to get in touch with
you for days.”

“Question,” Chad said while he waited for his
luggage to come around the carousel.
 
He kept his head down so that no one would recognize him.
 
Luckily the area he was in was
relatively free of foot traffic at this time of day, but in New York, it was
usually only a matter of time before someone spotted him.
 
“When you met Alyssa, how did you know
she was the one?”

“Because I couldn’t stop thinking about her,
and I’d do anything to be with her.”
 
Through the phone, the sound of Alyssa saying
‘aww’
could be heard in the background.
 
The two were always together, ever since
they’d gotten engaged.

Chad loved Alyssa – she was cool and fun
and always called him out on his shit, which he found refreshing.
 
But normally, he would roll his eyes at
the fact that that Alyssa was so close to Jay that she could overhear Jay’s conversation.
 
Today, however, Chad thought it was
sweet.
 
The thought was alarming.

“Why?” Jay asked suspiciously.
 
“Why do you want to know how I knew
Alyssa was the one?”

“No reason.”

“Did you meet someone?”

“No.”
 
His suitcase came around the carousel, and Chad reached down and picked
it up.
 

“Who is she?” Jay asked.

“She’s no one,” Chad said.
 
“I told you, I wasn’t asking because of
that.”
 
On the other side of the
airport, near the wall, a woman wearing a tight sweater and a pair of jeans
that showed every curve of her body smiled at him.
 
Chad smiled back.
 
See?
 
he thought to himself.
 
He didn’t care about Kenley.
 
Here he was, back in New York, flirting
with the first hot woman he saw for God’s sake.
 
He was back to his old ways, back to his
old tricks, getting all worked up over anything in a form-fitting outfit.
 
The problem was, he didn’t feel all that
worked up.

“You weren’t asking because of what?” Jay
asked.

“What?”

“You just called me up and asked me how I knew
Alyssa was the one, and now you’re saying you didn’t call and ask me about that
for any good reason.”
 

“Oh.”
 
Chad shook his head and stepped through the sliding glass doors to the
traffic circle outside.
 
One of the
team cars was waiting for him there, and he held up his hand to stop the driver
from getting out to take care of his luggage, preferring to do it himself.
  
Then he slid into the car and gave
the driver the address of his apartment in Brooklyn.
 

“Hello?” Jay said.

“Yes, I’m here.”
 
Chad pulled his sunglasses off and
looked out the window.
 
The city was
cold and gray, much colder than it had been in Florida.
 
This was one thing that wasn’t fair
about the off-season -- whenever he had time off, the weather was complete
shit.
 
Of course, he could have
spent the winter somewhere warm, but the Brooklyn Heat organization frowned
upon that kind of thing.
 
They
wanted the players to stay in Brooklyn, to become part of the
community.
 
It was a bunch of bullshit.
 

“What’s going on with you?” Jay asked.
 
And he sounded worried.
 

“Nothing,” Chad said, trying to force himself
to believe the words as they came out of his mouth.
 
“Absolutely nothing.
 
I’m just starting to get worried about
myself, you know, because I can’t find a woman to settle down with.”
 
It was a lie, of course.
 
Chad had never worried about this in his
life.
 
But he couldn’t have Jay
knowing what was really going on.

“You want to find a woman to settle down with?”

“No,” Chad said, trying to sound cocky.
 
“That’s the problem.
 
I can’t imagine myself with just one
woman.
 
I’m starting to think there
might be something wrong with me.”
 
As he said this, visions of Kenley at all his games, sitting in the
stands and wearing his jersey, danced through his head.
 
He’d take her home afterwards, make her
dinner, and then they’d have a glass of wine in front of the TV while watching
shows on HGTV.
 
Jesus Christ.
 
What was wrong with him?

“Why?” Jay asked.
 
“What have you gotten yourself into
now?”

Chad hadn’t planned on telling him.
 
But he didn’t want Jay to think he was
turning into some kind of romantic sap, and before he knew it, the whole story
was pouring out.
 
Meeting
Kenley.
 
The pictures.
 
The meeting with Expera.
 
Him paying her to be his fake
girlfriend.
 
Of course, he left out
the part about how much he’d been thinking about her, and spun the whole thing
like it was going to be some huge colossal headache, just another classic Chad
Parnell scrape that he’d gotten himself into.

“How much?” Jay asked.

“How much what?”
 
Chad shifted uncomfortably on his seat.

“How much are you paying her?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
 

“Chad, how --- oh, hold on.”
 
He heard Jay conversing with someone in
the background.
 
“Alyssa wants to
know what this girl looks like.”

“Kenley?”

“Yeah.”

Chad thought about it.
 
Her long blonde hair.
 
Her blue eyes.
 
The way her nose crinkled up when she
didn’t agree with something he was saying.
 
Her soft skin, how nice she felt against him, how he loved pulling her
close, how small she felt even though she was curvy and pretty and sexy all at
once.
 
“She’s pretty,” Chad said.

“And?”
 
Jay asked suspiciously.

“And what?
 
She’s pretty, she has long blonde hair.”

“Oh my God,” Jay said.
 
“You love her!”

“What?”

“You love her!
 
All those questions about how did I know
that Alyssa was the one, and now you won’t even tell me what this girl looks
like!”

“I told you what she looks like!”

“She has blonde hair?”
 
Jay scoffed.
 
“Come on.
 
No hint of her breast size?
 
No discussion of how she looks in a
bikini or what you want to do to her sexually?”

“Jay,” Chad said, as if he was talking to a
child, “I wasn’t going to say those things when your fiancé asked what she
looked like.
 
That’s disrespectful.”

“That’s bullshit,” Jay said.
 
“Alyssa doesn’t care and you know it.”

“I have to go.”

“Tell me what she looks like!”

“I have to go.”
 
He hung up the phone and looked out the
window, watching Manhattan sliding by until it turned into Brooklyn. His phone
buzzed in his lap, and he looked down, expecting a text from Jay, giving him
more shit.
 
He picked it up, ready
to give in, to make sure that he described her this time, giving all the
disgusting details he usually did.
 
But it wasn’t Jay.
 
It was
Kenley.
 

“Flight arrives at 3:15,” the text said
 
“See you then.”

That was all.
 
No ‘looking forward to it’ or ‘can’t
wait to see you’ or ‘what do you want to do tonight.’
 

Who cares? Chad told himself.
 
It’s just business.
 
That conversation with Jay had left him
rattled.
 
It didn’t mean anything
that he wouldn’t describe Kenley, just that she meant nothing to him.
 
This was an arrangement, pure and
simple.
 
He scrolled through his
phone, looking at the numbers of women he’d amassed over the years.
 
Some of the names he didn’t even
recognize.

In a couple of days, when this whole thing was
over, he would call one of them, celebrate his new deal with a bang.
 
No pun intended.
 
Satisfied, he leaned back against the
seat and enjoyed the rest of the ride to Brooklyn.

***

“You’re going to do
what?”
Melissa screeched.
 
She was sitting on Kenley’s bed while Kenley rummaged around in the
closet.

“I’m going to be his fake girlfriend,” Kenley
said.
 
She’d taken a flight this
morning from Florida to Connecticut so that she could check on her apartment
and pack some things for New York.
 
Later this afternoon, she’d fly from New Haven to LaGuardia to meet
Chad.