Yes, Mr. Van Der Wells (Not Another Billionaire Romance) (5 page)

I look straight ahead. “Lotty. You can call me Lotty.”

“Lotty?” He repeats my name as if he’s calling out to me. Like I’m one hundred feet off and he’s hailing me down, trying to get me to stop and acknowledge him. So forceful and convicting and somewhat painful that my head instantly whips to him, as if
needing
to stop and acknowledge.

“Yeah?”

He swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing with the action. Distracted, my eyes fall to his throat, as a vision of him in the back of the cab with his head thrown back on the seat, neck arched, throat exposed, the city lights dancing across his tanned, olive skin, flashes across my mind.

“Fake name or real name?”

“Fake name.”

His eyes narrow, but his mouth says nothing. 

The ping of the doors opening slices through the moment, and I don’t wait, I take a deep breath and walk into his foyer as if I’ve been in his home a thousand times before. In the middle of the foyer is a tremendous limestone vase, holding a breathtaking arrangement of flowers. Glistening above is a stunning chandelier that I bet my left tit is made of real crystal.

A landline is ringing, and Sexy Demon rushes past me, requesting I excuse him a minute as he goes to answer it.

I linger, meander, listening as he answers the phone, his deep voice drifting farther and farther into the apartment.

His apartment has character. Open plan. Exposed brick walls, dark-wood flooring, amazingly high ceilings, exposed beams in the kitchen and living area. A smash of vintage, rustic, and industrial elements, with an urban touch of all-around floor-to-ceiling windows affording the most magnificent view.

Impressive.

What isn’t so impressive, however, is the untidiness. The further I wander, the more mess I see. Articles of clothing thrown over furniture and on the floor, empty water bottles and takeout food boxes littering most every flat surface, magazines and newspapers left haphazardly all throughout. I’ve learned one thing about Sexy Demon so far:
he’s a slob
.

At least there’s no funky, moldy, malodorous smell to the air.

I hear him returning, still talking on the phone. He emerges from around the corner of a narrow hall, stopping short when he sees I’ve invaded his living space. He fixes his stare at me, one hand holding a cordless phone to his ear, the other gripping a wallet.

I stare right back, noticing he hasn’t made an effort to don a pair of jeans, still parading around in his Ralph Lauren boxers.

He blinks then, away from me, his expression morphing into one of extreme annoyance as he snaps into the phone, “Sienna, I’ve had a shit night, alright? I’m not in the mood for your melodramatics right now. Good night.”

He listens for a second, then reiterates with emphasis, “
Good. Night
, woman,” before killing the call.

“If you can afford to live
here
, then you can afford a maid,” I comment as he carelessly tosses the phone in an armchair. “This place is a mess.”

He glances around, showing no signs of embarrassment. “My last male help had an affair with my wife, and every other female help I hired after that, I ended up screwing—yes, even the middle-aged Russian ones—causing bigger messes than this apartment. So, I avoid hiring help at all costs. My mom cleans up for me when she comes over on the weekends and she—why am I telling you all this?” He frowns, cocking his head at me.

“Thirty-eight bucks,” I remind him, fighting back a smile.

As he opens the monogrammed wallet and begins scanning through a thick file of one-hundred-dollar bills, it hits me that this man lives in a penthouse and obviously has a lucrative job, so why should
I
take a beating from Andrew for getting his car messed up because
this
manslut couldn’t keep his dick in his pants? “Um, you know what, you might want to add a few hundreds to that thirty-eight.”

His head raises, eyes finding me, eyebrows winging up. “Excuse me?”

Crossing my arms over my chest, I lock determined eyes with him. “You need to compensate for the throw-knives lodged in my car, Abercrombie.”

Swearing under his breath, he slaps a palm to his forehead as though the events that took place less than an hour ago are already a distant memory to him. “How about I make an appointment with my mechanic and tomorrow we can—”

“The car isn’t mine,” I cut him off, because I don’t like where that suggestion was headed. Unless I have a death wish, I have absolutely no intention of ever seeing this passenger again, let alone making mechanic dates with him. “It’s my boyfriend’s. And he’s kind of crazy, so it’s better to just give me the cash to pass on to him to have the dents compounded.” Palms sweating at just the thought of what Andrew’s reaction is going to be when he sees his car, I avert my gaze, uncross my arms and shake them out, shake out the apprehension, reminding myself to breathe.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
It’s going to turn out fine, as long I get the compensation, it’ll be fine.

“Your boyfriend has you working a
taxicab
? At
night
?” He sounds furious. Which has me turning my eyes up at him to find that his expression matches his voice. He
is
furious. What the heck? “You don’t look a day older than eighteen. What kind of—”

“You’re
wrong
,” I bite back in defense. “I’m nineteen.”

“Same goddamn difference,” he grits out, stepping in to me. “You’re not—”

“What the hell do you care about my life?” I return, standing firm, refusing to be intimidated. “You don’t even
know
me.”

He stops advancing and chews on his lip, studying me. And then he nods, returning to his wallet. “You’re right. I don’t know you. Will five hundred do?”

“Six should cover it.”

He plucks out the bills and makes to hand them to me, and then pulls back at last minute. His eyes latch onto mine and don’t let go. They’re the green that the ocean appears to be closer to the shore; not too dark, not too light, but just right. Penetrating, invading, fierce.

“Just answer me this one thing,” he murmurs in that same soul-stripping soft voice he’d used on me in the elevator, the one that makes me feel unsheathed. 

I snip out, “I wasn’t aware this was a negotiation?”

His chest rising on an inhale, he moves in even closer to me. Lifting two long, masculine fingers to my neck, he trails the tips across my skin, from one side to the other. And I stand frozen, not out of shock that he’s touching me so inappropriately, but because his touch lays siege on me.

The rabid feeling that his touch evokes, the rich desire that engulfs me, is unprecedented. Not even when I thought I liked Andrew in the beginning did his touch make me feel like this. This man’s touch makes me want to prostrate at his feet and tell him all my secrets.

“These fingerprints on your neck…” he whispers, ever so gently, “did your
boyfriend
leave them there?” 

At this, I stiffen.

Utterly mortified.

He isn’t touching me intimately. He isn’t caressing me. He’s trailing Andrew’s frickin’ fingerprints left behind from my near-death strangulation earlier. I never even thought about the possibility that there might be residual marks from his assault. Maybe, subconsciously, I figured they wouldn’t be visible in the cab. But now, out under the glowing, expensive, penthouse lights, under the penetrating, discerning stare of a sculpted demon, all that’s wrong with my life is
seen
. 

Maybe it’s my body language, or because I’m taking too long to respond, but his jaw tightens and his fingers still on my neck as he grounds out, “He
did
, didn’t he?”

To hell with this!
I don’t owe this man an answer. I don’t even know him. He doesn’t know me. We’re
complete strangers
. Who does he think he is, anyway? Not because he looks like a Roman god does it mean I have to leave an offering at his feet. 

Closing the minuscule gap between us, so my breasts are brushed up against him, I tip up on my toes, lick my lips, and then hiss in his face, “‘
You know nothing, Jon Snow.’
.”

Snatching the bills from his fingers, I spin and bolt it out of there before he can stop me.

T
WO

I
N THAT HOUR
when the sky begins blushing a coy tangerine from the yawning sun, I park outside Andrew’s condo. I don’t know if the brunette—my “sister wife”—is sleeping over, and I don’t care. Neither do I feel like being strangled again. Therefore, I scribble a note on the back of an old receipt, explaining the minor scratches and dents from the events of the night. In it, I wrap three one-hundred-dollar bills from the six-hundred Sexy Demon gave me to cover the charges for the damages—yes,
of course,
I overcharged him! Wouldn’t you?—and place it, along with the car keys, in his mail box by the front door.

I catch a cab back to my apartment. A tiny one-bedroom on the second floor of a tumbledown apartment building that slants precariously in the air, as though it will collapse at any minute. Cockroach and mice infested, with a crap bathroom and kitchen, along with neighbors who’re noisier than a kindergarten classroom.

Under a cloud of exhaustion, I key open my door and plod in. Mom is up and in the kitchen making tea. At the key-jingle of my entrance, she glances up but says nothing. Ever since we got the news about Dad, she doesn’t talk to me unless she absolutely has to. She never leaves this stinking, suffocating apartment, and all her remaining days are spent out on the rusty, small square of a balcony, chain-smoking and imbibing alcohol like it’s fruit juice.

Tossing my keys to the rickety coffee table, I stand in the middle of the room and study her. My mother used to be utterly beautiful, utterly stunning. A Brazilian native, she had a mass of honey-blonde hair flowing down the middle of her back; wide, blue eyes; and a supple, voluptuous physique. In curves and beauty, she used to be the bomb. Hell, I used to
pray
I’d grow into a body like hers.

Now, though? That honey-blonde hair is chopped up to her neck in a brittle, uneven mess—this she did herself with a dull pair of scissors. Huge dark circles reside under vacant eyes, cheeks hollowed, and she has less skin on her bones than a roasted sparrow. She’s just a shell of the sprite, vivacious woman she used to be. A woman who used to turn heads she was so damn gorgeous.

Life can do that to a person.

She believes it’s her Karma. Her payback from wrecking a happy family.

See, Mom traveled to the US through a cleaning agency that recruited immigrants to work for the affluent. She was snatched up for employment as a live-in maid by the previous Cooley family, which consisted of Dad, his wife, Sarah, and my half-brother, Graham. Somewhere along the line, a clichéd torrid affair developed between Mom and Dad; an affair that went on for two years before Mom got knocked-up with me.

Mom decided she would move back to Brazil and raise me on her own, but by then Dad was gone for her, and not wanting to risk losing her, he divorced his wife and moved Mom in.

Well, at least that’s Mom’s side of the tale. Whenever I tried to corroborate this tale with Dad, he always got this solemn, faraway look right before he shut down.

Dad was a well-to-do investment banker, straddling billionaire status. He worked hard and deprived himself of nothing worth having. We lived in a penthouse in Manhattan, and indulged in a rather lavish life. And I supposedly had an insane trust fund to be unlocked at twenty-one.

Now here’s the sting: Dad never married Mom. And I, for the life of me, can’t understand why she never sought security in marriage. Love or not.

When Dad was arrested, and then charged, convicted, and sentenced to eight years for fraud and embezzlement, all our assets were seized and we were left with nothing. At all.
Nada
. We were castaways.

Bigger sting is, that to begin with, Mom was never accepted by the inner circle. Being labeled as home-wrecker, gold-digger, and social climber, she became a pariah the moment Dad divorced Sarah—a wealthy-by-name, well-respected upper-class woman—for her.

As a result, reaching out to anyone would be futile. Mom had some savings, and we did all right for the first couple of months. Said she would wait for Dad no matter what and was quite fine with being downgraded. A year later, however, Dad went to bed in his cell and didn’t wake up. He was poisoned. Apparently, the embezzlement thing went deeper than it first appeared, and Dad, being the only fish from the tank caught and doing time, was being offered deals: If he gave up the names of all the others in this
decades-
long embezzlement ring, he’d walk free.

Unfortunately, the names involved in the ring were huge, and my father was just an irrelevant sprat. So when word got out that he might be cutting a deal for freedom, he was given a different kind of freedom. And that was the end of Raymond Cooley.

That’s
when things started going downhill for us. Mom stopped caring, her savings started dwindling, and we started downgrading.

Four months ago, Mom was diagnosed with liver cancer and was given a loose estimation of six-to-nine months to live. At the rate she’s going with the daily intake alcohol and cigarettes, I’d be surprised if she lives past next month.

Now, this is where we are. Counting down the days until Mom fades into nothingness, and I’m left a pauper and an orphan.

My desperation to hustle nights working Andrew’s cab is for two reasons: I’m saving to bury a mother who stopped caring about me years ago, and I’m planning to flee to Brazil, to Mom’s side of the family, the moment it’s all over.

Brazil is my only hope for getting out from under Andrew’s thumb. As long as I’m where he can find me, he will. And then beat the breath out of me for attempting to run.

“Morning, Mom,” I mumble, collapsing into the single couch in the room. It’s the color of mustard, with all kinds of wears and tears.