Baby Love: A Bad Boy Billionaire Romance Read Free Page A

headline read   Reid to Join Boiler Room As Newest Investor .  The story detailed how he was moving the most popular primetime show on television to Chicago. I’d caught a few episodes here and there. Okay, that was a lie. I’d been engulfed in more than one binge-watching marathon of all five seasons over the course of the last year of my unemployment. The show was a humiliating, ridiculous affair. It involved ninety-nine percenters begging for money from one percenters.
    Yet I’d eaten up every second of it in secret while Callie was at her professional, lucrative job as a lawyer, Callie’s dog curled up next to me on the sofa.
    The thought of Zane being on the show was an even more enticing proposition to me; not to be  on  the show, but to watch him for an hour each week in private. I blushed at the thought, looking around me nervously and pulling the paper up around my face. He was rich, handsome, and a living legend. Who didn’t blush looking at him?
    ***
    “It’s just me!” I called down the light-filled hallway of Callie’s house. Fresh flowers were sitting on the polished, burl wood table. I looped my messy keychain onto the hand-carved wooden hook rack by the door. Callie’s was there as well; hers was an engraved, polished silver monogram key fob. Mine was a Stormtrooper LEGO figurine with the printed face long worn off.
    Those two key fobs were a wonderful metaphor for the contrast in our lives.
    “Oh thank God!” Callie cried from the kitchen. I turned the corner to find her standing in the kitchen in her designer dress, a glass of red wine on the countertop. “I was so worried.”
    “Rainstorm,” I explained. “I didn’t want to ruin your shoes so I holed up in the library for an hour until all the water drained off the sidewalks.”
    Callie waved a hand in the air dismissively. “Don’t worry about it, honey, I’ve got plenty more pairs where those came from.”
    The acid taste of bile filled my mouth as I considered the ramifications of that statement. I knew that she hadn’t meant it  that  way, but still it was hard to not take it as an insult. “Is Patrick coming home for dinner?” I asked, tossing my purse onto the counter and sitting on a polished chrome barstool.
    “He’s bringing home Lou Malnati’s,” Callie said, tapping into her smartphone with one thumb.
    “Whoa, really?” I asked. That was my favorite pizza and Callie hated it. Too much sodium and fat, according to her. I gazed down at my increasingly round midsection. The only good thing about my recent weight gain was that my rack was now bigger than Callie’s. I swept my long auburn hair over my shoulder. I needed a cut but couldn’t afford it.
    When Callie ignored me for the contents of her phone, I knew not to interrupt her any further. She was likely sending a decision-making email that would impact the lives of all five hundred people at the law firm where she was partner. I drummed my fingers on the countertop and stared around at the gleaming kitchen. Her husband, Patrick, had recently supervised the redesign during their full-apartment renovation. It was a tasteful blend of country and modern, just like Georgia debutante-turned-city-girl Callie.
    I never had a debutante ball. My mother had given up on me by then.
    When my sister had offered to let me crash here last year, some of my fellow students at the university were empathetic. They thought that “I’m crashing with my friend and her husband” was going to involve me sleeping on moldering futon. I hadn’t disabused them of that notion. My eviction was bad enough and I didn’t mind the undeserved sympathy for my living situation. The truth was that instead of a   moldering futon? I was living in the second master bedroom with an en suite Jacuzzi tub. Callie and Patrick refused to let me pay for rent as well. I doused my guilt by walking their dog, Peaches, every day for two hours through the city.
    It kept me fit, got me out of the