Stingray Billionaire: The Complete Series (An Alpha Billionaire Romance) Read online

  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.

  “Probably,” she says. “Anyway, though, I want to see you happy. Maybe the two of you aren’t going to end up with a house in the hills or anything, but why not just get a drink with him?”

  In many ways, my sister is a lot like my dog. Back at the apartment, that was her equivalent of a head-butt. I think she may have head-butted me when we were fighting over the phone, because my forehead is throbbing.

  She’s trying a softer approach now, but just like Max, she doesn’t quite know when to stop pushing.

  “Oh, he probably doesn’t even remember who I am,” I tell her. “Do you have any idea how many people these guys talk to on a daily basis? I bet he meets more people a day without leaving his house than the two of us would meet in a year working retail.”

  “How do you know?” she asks.

  “Don’t start,” I tell her.

  “What?” she asks. “I was just asking you how you know he’s forgotten you. For all you know, he might be waiting by his phone right now.”

  “Oh, I’m sure,” I scoff.

  “Sis, how long have we known each other?” she asks.

  “Really?” I return. “You’re going for ‘how long have we known each other’ here?”

  “It’s a fair question,” she says.

  “It's not,” I tell her.

  “Look,” she says, “we both know that chances are, the two of you aren’t going to work. I mean, he’s all high-fin
ance, and business or whatever, and you’re more the quiet type who likes to cry into her pillow at night because your life is terminally dull.”

  “Thanks for that,” I say.

  “Just meet the guy for a drink,” she says. “Maybe you’ll hit it off. Maybe you won’t. If not, you won’t be disappointed because you were expecting that anyway. If you do hit it off together, though, maybe I can finally realize my dream of getting you married off and out of the apartment.”

  “You do know it’s my apartment,” I say.

  “Whatever,” she says. “Come on, what’s a drink going to hurt? You don’t like the way things are going, you walk away. It’s that simple.”

  “Even if I did want to, I wouldn’t know how to get in touch with him,” I tell her. “I deleted the number and threw out the card.”

  “Oh, he and some of his people have set up an office at the hotel next door,” Naomi says, taking her last bite of soft serve as a reward for her cunning.

  “So this whole trip to the ice cream shop—” I start.

  “That’s right,” she says. “It was all a dirty, dirty sham. It’s got to be the worst way a woman has ever betrayed the confidence of her sister. Now shut up and go, will you? I want to order some more, and I don’t need you here watching me with those judgmental eyes.”

  Just like Max, she’s not going to drop this until she gets what she wants.

  Truth be told, I’ve pulled up that number dozens of times since Nick gave me the card. I don’t know if he’s a good guy or a bad guy or what, but I can’t imagine we’d have very much in common. The only things I know about the high life are what Troy’s told me to tell customers, and I don’t particularly want to try any of that out on someone who might know better.

  So, if for no other reason than to get Naomi to leave me alone about it, I say, “Fine.” I tell her, “I’ll drop by there and see if he wants to go out for a casual date or whatever. I’ll humiliate myself, I’m sure of it. I’ll probably be back before your next cup of cookie dough is ready.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Naomi says. “Now seriously, get out of here. I don’t want you to see this.” With that, she gets up from the table and walks up to the counter.

  I get up and start for the door. What Naomi doesn’t seem to be capable of getting through her thick, cookie-dough-addled brain is there’s a big part of me that’s been trying to find a way to say yes ever since I stood Nick up at the restaurant.

  What are we going to talk about, though? “Hey, Nick, is it true they don’t make any real yachts anymore or is that just a ploy to get the less-rich to stop buying them from under you?”

  If nothing else, though, maybe this will get Naomi and the more impulsive parts of me to leave me alone.

  I go out and head toward the hotel. Whatever Nick’s got going there, it looks like he brought some friends. The usually empty parking lot of the hotel is full.

  What do I say when I see him—if I see him? Do I try to make an excuse for why I haven’t called him, or do I go the aloof route and act like it’s nothing? Once I get through the doors of the hotel, it looks like I’m going to have plenty of time to figure it out.

  The lobby is packed with half the people in town. Nobody’s talking, though. Everyone’s just standing around silently, waiting for something.

  The sight is more than a little unnerving.

  I nudge Tom from the local grocery store and ask, “What’s going on here?”

  He looks around like he’s going to tell these people something they don’t already know and he whispers in my ear, “We heard they’re hiring for Stingray.”

  I look around at the room. “You mean everyone here is looking for a job?”

  “Have you heard how he treats his employees?” Tom asks. “The guy pays his interns more than most companies pay their managers.”

  “I don’t know that that’s true,” I tell him, but know it’s not going to matter. Maybe this is why so many billionaires and millionaires turn out to be such cynical people. If I had a crowd of people that wanted something from me everywhere I went, I’d probably be pretty abrasive, myself.

  “Either way, they’re doing something here in town. We want in on it,” he says. “After all, it’s only right that they hire from the place they’re going to set up shop, right?”

  “Well, good luck,” I say.

  I’m not going to compete with all these people for Nick’s attention. Turning, I start for the door, but someone grabs my arm.

  Looking back, I find a woman about my age. As soon as I catch sight of her, she just says, “Come on,” and starts tugging.

  I tell her, “I was just leaving,” but she’s surprisingly strong as she drags me through the throng toward the unknown. “Seriously,” I say, “where are we going?”

  “Give me about twenty more feet and I can tell you,” she says.

  I give her about twenty more feet, and I ask again.

  “Mr. Scipio has been expecting you,” the woman says. “He’s just finishing up with someone. He’ll be happy to know you’ve finally deigned to show up,” she adds.

  “Listen,” I say, “I don’t know who you think I am or why you think I’m here, but—”

  “Oh, come off it, honey,” she says. “A lot of people try the unimpressed approach, and they always turn out to be the ones who end up doing something stupid—like fainting when they’re in front of him.”

  “It’s good to know he’s spreading that around,” I say.

  The woman glances back at me. “Spreading what around?” she asks.

  We get to the hotel’s only conference room, and the smallish, dark-haired woman lets go of my arm and heads inside, saying, “Wait here.”

  I wonder if Nick hired her because of her undeniable skill at pulling people through crowds. It’s a silly job description, but I imagine someone like him could use someone like her for something like that.

  This is what I think about while I try to convince myself I’m not overwhelmingly nervous. Of course, the sweating palms, the dry throat, and the vague urge to run are getting harder and harder to ignore. I can’t leave now, though. The door is opening.

  “You can go right in,” the woman says. “Also, I wouldn’t worry too much if you fainted when you first met him. A surprisingly large number of people lose bladder control.”

  And now I have to pee.

  “Thanks,” I say, only she doesn’t know it’s not appreciation.

  “Go,” she says. “Otherwise, that crowd down there staring at you is probably going to lose its patience.”

  “And they’d feel better if I go in?” I ask.

  “Out of sight, out of mind,” she says. “It’s been nice to meet you, but I’ve got a lot of things that aren’t you to deal with.”

  It’s not the best thing anyone’s ever said to me, but she reaches out her hand, and I take it. I’m expecting a shake, but as soon as those vice-like fingers of hers wrap around my hand, she yanks me into the room, saying, “Now talk.”

  The hotel conference room, a thirty-foot by forty-foot space, is now a series of makeshift offices surrounding cubicles. The offices are all tan canvas, military-style tents.

  “Hey!” Nick’s voice comes from the corner to my right. He’s sitting at a desk, in an open-doored tent, leafing through files. “I hope you don’t mind, but I have to make a very quick phone call,” he says. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  In a surrealist way, Nick looks like some commanding officer, though I don’t think too many of those wear Armani suits on duty. It’s not just the tents, either.

  “Yeah,” Nick says into his phone. “Get over to Fifth and tell them this isn’t going to work for us. They’re trying to screw us because they know we’re relocating, but do me a favor and remind them that without me, they don’t have a company. If they give you any hassle, you know what to do.” Without waiting for an answer, Nick hangs up the phone, saying, “Ellie, I must say I’m a bit surprised to see you here.”

 
It occurs to me that with all this time I’ve been waiting, I could have figured out what I wanted to say. “Yeah,” I answer.

  He smiles, but after a period of silence I can’t begin to quantify, the smile fades. “Ellie?” he asks.

  “Yeah?” I return.

  “You’re not saying anything. Are you all right?” he asks.

  I’m looking around at the room, wondering where everyone is. I’m not sure exactly how long it takes me to realize he asked me a question. “Huh?” I ask.

  “So, what brings you here this morning?” he asks. “I was under the impression you’d decided not to pick up the option.”

  “Mr. Scipio,” I start.

  “Please,” he says, “call me Nick.”

  “Nick,” I say, “it occurs to me that I may not have been entirely polite.”

  “How so?” he asks.

  His phone rings before I can respond.

  “Sorry,” he says as he picks up the phone on his desk. “I thought I told you to hold my calls,” he says. An instant later, he’s nodding and jotting something down on one corner of one of the papers in front of him. “I’ve got it,” he says. “Tell them if it makes it all the way to the quarter, we can talk, but the index is still recalibrating and it might not … Yeah, exactly. Thanks,” he says. Just for good measure, he adds, “No calls now.”

  “Mr. Scipio,” I say as he answers the phone.

  “Call me Nick,” he says. “What’s on your mind?”

  I freeze. The truth is I’m curious. I don’t tell him that, though.

  “You know,” I start, “it’s revealing that you went after me so hard that first day, but I haven’t heard anything from you since.”

  Hey, there we go. This whole thing was his idea. I don’t see why I have to be the one to make the effort.

  “I don’t have your phone number,” he says.

  All right, that’s a reasonable explanation.

  “Seriously,” he says, “are you all right? You look a little green.”

  “Yeah,” I answer. “I don’t know, maybe a bit disoriented. Where is everyone?”

  “We’ve got people from corporate flying in this evening,” he says. “Listen, Ellie, it’s great to see you and all, but I do have a lot on my plate right now. Was there something you wanted?”