Stingray Billionaire: The Complete Series (An Alpha Billionaire Romance) (3 page)

I offered to rent out
every room that was
not currently occupied
,
but the line got
silent
about that time.
Eventually, I
relented. Until we get something
more permanent, the
temporary
corporate
headquarters of one of the biggest companies to come out of the last decade is
the
Plimpington
Hotel.

When I finally turn the
corner, I pull out my cell phone and call my driver. He picks me up as I’m
walking and we head back to the hotel. I’m barely out of the car before I have
staff dropping files in my hand and
giving
me
cell phones
, two at a time so
I
can figure out whatever doom has befallen the
world since I left for Carne Celeste.

Even as I’m signing
documents like they’re autographs and giving one-word answers to very complex
questions that don’t get a chance to get fully asked, my mind is on that
sidewalk, looking back and seeing Ellie put my number into her phone.

I don’t want to get too
far ahead of myself here, and I can’t say for certain that I even saw it, but I
could almost swear Ellie had a smile on her face.

Chapter
Three

Naomi and the Dog

Ellie

“You know what
else
would be awesome about you and
Nikolai marrying each other?” Naomi asks. This game stopped being fun before it
started.

“I’m not listening,” I
tell her and try to focus on the dishes she’s supposed to be drying.

“We’d never have to go
bargain shopping again,” Naomi says as she bends down to give Max, my yellow
lab, a scratch behind the ears. “And
you
could
have the best dog food all the time.”

Max wags his tail at the
mention of the word food.

“You know you have to
give him something now, or else he’s just going to follow you around until you
do,” I tell Naomi. “Are you going to
help me
with these or what?” I ask.

“I don’t get you,” she says.
“You’re always talking about how you want to break out of this rut you’ve been
in, and then a freaking CEO comes into your store and asks you on a date.
Honestly
, karmically I mean,” she says, “if you
don’t jump him, you’re slapping the universe in the face.”

“With you as my roommate,
I think I owe it a few,” I tell her. “I think it’ll get over it.”

I took the card. I even
added the number t
o
my phone, but after
three weeks, I still haven’t called. To be honest, I don’t even know if he’s
still in town. If he is, I doubt he’d still be interested.

“You say that now,” Naomi
says, “but this isn’t the kind of thing that just happens to people. Everyone
you ever tell the story to is going to think you’re an idiot if you don’t at
least give him a call and see where it goes.”

“How often do you imagine
I’m going to tell the story?” I ask. “Some guy thought I might be an easy
target, but I didn’t let myself get caught. That sounds like every story a
woman has ever told after going to a club. I’m not joking about Max,” I add.
“You dropped the f-bomb. Treats are on top of the refrigerator, in case you
forgot.”

“Just give me one good
reason why you won’t call him and I’ll leave you alone,” she says.

She’s lying.

“Don’t you have
somewhere
to be?” I ask.

Just because Naomi is the
most frustratingly lucky person I know doesn’t mean she’s any good with money.
She’s not so great about responsibility, either. It’s fifty-fifty she’s
supposed to be at work right now.

“The boss gave me
a day
,” she says.

“What’d you do?” I ask.

The one breed of human
Naomi’s luck doesn’t seem to
affect are
her employers.
They
tend not to
appreciate the constant lateness, overbearing personality, and more than a few
have made the mistake of bringing up Naomi’s nose, lip, and eyebrow rings as a
bad thing. Those conversations never end well.

“I didn’t do
anything
,” she says. “I’m being
rewarded.”

“Oh,” I say, and in a
slightly different tone, I ask again, “What’d you do?”

“Well,” she says, “it’s
not so much what
I
did.”

I’m going to hate this
story; I
know it.

“I was out at lunch with
Kim,
and
she
got into a little fender bender with a mailbox,” she says.

“Uh huh,” I respond,
unimpressed. “So what did you tell your boss happened?”

“That’s not the point,”
she says. “The point is that I have been through a traumatic experience, and I
just need a day to clear my head so I can come back to work with, you know …”

“A clear head?” I ask.
“I’ve looked through your ears. I’d say it’s pretty vacant up there as it is.”

“Kim’s fine, by the way,”
Naomi says, “not that you care or anything.”

“You just said it was a
minor fender bender with a mailbox? How injured could she possibly have been?”
I ask.

Naomi’s about to answer,
but her eyes go
wide,
and she pitches
forward as Max head-butts her directly in the posterior. I
would
catch her, but it’s more rewarding if I don’t.

“I told you,” I say. “If
you mention food around Max, you’ve got to follow through. He doesn’t take
being teased
lightly.”

“You’ve got to teach your
dog about personal space,” Naomi says, rubbing her butt before leaning back
against the counter as Max stares up at her with a beautiful, canine smile.

“Top of the fridge,” I
tell her. “It’s your only way out of this mess you’ve caused.”

“I love how everything’s
my
mess
,” Naomi snarks.

I smile. “Me too,” I tell
her. “It’s always made me feel like the responsible one.”

“You’re a peach,” she
says.

Peach doesn’t mean peach.

“You know, it’s funny,”
she says.

“I bet it’s not,” I
answer.

She scoffs and says, “You
don’t even know what I was going to say.”

“Don’t need to,” I tell
her, shutting off the water. “Dry the dishes or don’t,” I say. “I’m done.”

She says, “It’s funny
that you chastise me for accidentally teasing Max by saying the word—”

“Oh, I really wouldn’t
repeat it,” I tell her as Max’s lips come together in anticipation of the treat
he is rightfully owed.

“You chastise me for
teasing
Max with
… that, but aren’t doing
the same thing to Nikolai?” she asks.

“I’m not even speaking to
him,” I tell her. “How is that teasing?”

“You took the card,” she
says. “If you weren’t going to call, why’d you
take
the card?”

“Someone hands you a
card, you take it,” I answer. “Besides, you’ve been bugging me so much about it
that I tore the card up days ago.”

Naomi says, “That is the
stupidest—whoa!”

Max is trying to show Naomi
how much he likes her by rubbing up against her legs the way he’s seen Sammie,
my cat, do over the years. The difference is that Max is a full-grown golden
retriever.

Maybe it’s not the
sweet
or sisterly thing to do, but as Naomi
loses her balance again, I just step out of the way and laugh.

“Where are the
stupid
treats?” she asks as she recovers
herself.

“Top of the fridge,” I
tell her. “Just give him one, though.
He’s been
a bit gassy.”

“You know, this is why
they say dogs are
man’s
best friend,
right?” she asks. “What guy wouldn’t love a gassy dog? That’s their version of
high-class entertainment.”

As Naomi makes her way to
the fridge, Max sits like a gentleman—or
gentledog
,
as it were.

“Make him work for it,
though,” I tell her.

“What does he know how to
do?” she asks.

I return, “How long have
you lived here?”

She sighs and goes
through Max’s repertoire of known tricks before tossing him the treat. Max, now
with the small chunk of jerky-like treat in his mouth, quickly leaves the room.

“If you don’t call him,
I’m going to,” she says. “Where’s your phone?”

“You’re not calling him,”
I tell her.

“No,” she says, “
you’re
not calling him. That’s the
problem I’m going to solve here in about thirty seconds. Seriously, where’s
your phone?”

“I lost it,” I lie.

“Bedroom?” she asks.

I don’t react.

A few years ago, I got
Naomi a year’s subscription to an online deception training program. It was
about the stupidest thing I ever did, but in my defense, how was I supposed to
know she’d sit down and learn this stuff?

“Bathroom?” she asks.

I don’t react.

“Is it in your purse?”
she asks.

I try not to react.

“Your purse it is, then,”
she says.

“Oh, come on,” I groan.

“You know the way that
corner of your mouth is twitching?” she says. “That’s called contempt. You
really should smile more, you
see
?”

I smile with half my
mouth just to mess with her.

“Charming,” she says.

Lucky for me, I’ve dealt
with Naomi’s amateur lie detecting enough to know how to throw her off course.
Ever since that first night after I came home with his number, I’ve been hiding
my phone between my mattresses.

Naomi dumps out my purse
on the couch and
glances
over its
contents.

“Yeah, you should
probably start asking yourself if lying to your sister is one of those things
you want to have in your life,” she says. For her trouble, she opens my wallet
and takes out a twenty.

“Hey!” I protest and
cross the room.

She already has the cash
in her pocket by the time I’m over there.

“Give it back,” I tell
her. “You of all people know exactly how little money I can afford to throw
around, and I’m the one who pays the rent.”

“You’re
so freaking dramatic,” she says, taking the twenty back out of her pocket and
holding it out to me.
I reach for it, but she pulls it away,
saying, “Talk to him.”

“Why is this so important
to you?” I ask. “You have to know it’s not like me going out with a rich guy is
going to benefit either of us.”

“You don’t know that
until you
call him
,” she says.

I snatch the bill from
her hand and start gathering the mess that is the collected contents of my
purse. A moment later, Naomi is running toward my room.

“Later,
sucka
,” she says as I’m still trying to get
back to my feet. My door is closed and locked before I can reach it.

The cretin planned this.

I knock on the door,
saying, “Open up. What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m doing you a favor!”
she says, and I can hear her inside tearing my room apart.

Running back into the
kitchen, I find and grab a butter knife before returning to my door. I put the
tip of the butter knife into the opening of the old lock and twist. The door
unlatches
easily,
and my normally tidy
room is now a hazmat area.

Naomi glances over at
me
but goes right back to her rummaging.

She hasn’t left me much
of a choice here.

I get past her and thrust
my hand between my mattresses and Naomi’s grabbing at me with one hand and
trying to find the phone with the other.

“Get off of me!” I
demand, but even when we were
kids,
she
didn’t hear that phrase the way regular people do.

“This is for your own
good!” she says while I’m trying to wrench my phone from her grip.

“You’ve never had a bad
thing happen to you in your life,” I retort. “You don’t understand real people
problems.”

Finally, through a
carefully thrown, “accidental” elbow to the gut, I manage to pry the phone out
of her rather impressive grip. I run out of the room, pulling the door closed
behind me as I’m trying to pull up the number.

Naomi opens the door up
again half a second later, but I’ve found the
number,
and I’m hitting delete. By the time she gets over to me, I’m more than happy to
hand her the phone.

“What did you do?” she
asks.

“Go ahead,” I tell her.
“Call him. You know his name. Find the number and call him.”

“You deleted it?” she
asks, though it doesn’t sound a whole lot like a question.

I ask, “Now can I have a
little peace and quiet?”

Naomi sighs and continues
looking through my phone. It doesn’t take too long. She hands the phone back,
saying, “Well, I guess that’s that, then.” She gives me the phone back. “Wanna
get
some ice cream or something?”

*
                   
*
                   
*

“You know what I love?”
Naomi asks.

I sigh. “Is it the cookie
dough?” I ask.

“It’s totally the cookie
dough,” she says, shoveling a mouthful of cookie dough ice cream into her
mouth. “You want to know something else?” she asks.

“What?” I ask.

“I think you should go
out with Nikolai,” she says.

“Why do you even care if
I go out with him?” I ask. “You don’t
really
think I’m going to have some dinner with the guy and he’s going to buy you a
Maserati.”

“I’d settle for a sister
who’s not so anally antisocial she won’t meet a guy for a drink to see if they
hit it off,” she says.

“Wasn’t there a punk band
named Anally Antisocial back in the late seventies?” I ask.