Billion Dollar Bastard: An Alpha Male Step Brother Billionaire Romance Read Free Page A

protested, growling like a cornered beast. But like a cornered beast, I was ready to fight.
     
    “I know that. And she knows that. And hell, the tabloids probably know that. But does the rest of the world know that?”
     
    I sat back in my chair and once again, turned around, taking in my skyline, the skyline and panorama of the city I planned on someday owning. It had darkened over the course of my conversation with Nicholas. Now, storm clouds were moving in from off Long Island Sound. Big, bloody, angry ones, with deep rumbling emanating from their guts that spoke of an oncoming tempest.
     
    I glanced down to the street, seeing the people, like little ants down there, rushing about, trying to take cover and hail cabs as the rain began to fall. Within moments, moments of silence between myself and Nicholas, bullet-sized drops of rain began to pour out of the sky, peppering the ground like shotgun pellets.
     
    I might have been a cornered beast ready to fight, but that didn’t matter one damned bit if I were shot down before I could do anything.
     
    “Is there anything I can do to improve my reputation, then?” I asked, turning back once more to my friend. Nicholas stood, taking his glass with him as he walked over to one of my bookshelves. I used to keep books on management and finance in my office, but found that I never looked at them and, besides, who really cares about reading books like that? So, instead, I switched them all out for the classics—Faulkner, Hemingway, Melville, Shakespeare. Nicholas set down his scotch and plucked The Great Gatsby out of the shelf.
     
    “Gatsby dies in the end, Nick,” I grumbled. “Your choice of reading material is not making me feel anymore confident.”
     
    “You could always start a charity or a foundation,” Nicholas suggested finally, setting down the book. “Something that’ll get people distracted, that’ll make them think of you as a philanthropist, rather than a wife-beating billionaire.”
     
    “I’m not…”
     
    “Damn it, Kyle!” Nicholas roared, turning on me. “I know you’re a fine, decent man but that’s not what you pay me for. I’m telling you what this says you are! That’s what you pay me for!”
     
    He strode up to my desk, pointing at the tabloid.
     
    “And this says you’re a rich playboy who slaps around his ex-wife, a girl barely out of college! It doesn’t say anything about her using drugs or cheating on you or kicking you out of your house! All it says is that you were seen with your hands on her outside of a nightclub!”
     
    Nicholas was one of the only people I’d let talk to me that way, and even then, it was hard not to leap over my desk and throw a left-hook into his jaw.
     
    Hell, if I did that, he wouldn’t even hold it against me. And not just because he’d be too busy holding a package of frozen carrots against his cracked jaw.
     
    But that would’ve been a waste of time.
     
    And besides, he was right. Right about every damned thing.
     
    “Fine. Fine,” I growled. “I’ll look for… Something. Some way to give back.”
     
    “Think of it as a long term plan. Look at Bill Gates—billionaire to philanthropist. Don’t see it as a chore. See it as an opportunity.”
     
    All right. I would try to see it as an opportunity.
     
    At least this seemed like something I could, literally, throw money at. My favorite way to pass the time.

 
    KAREN
     
    All faculty meetings operate in one of two moods: boring as hell, or depressing as hell.
     
    Based on the way it started, it seemed like it would be a combination.
     
    I could feel my eyes start to glaze over as one of the other professors began talking about her truly interminable research into the citational systems of 14 th century Scottish monastery manuscripts. She was going to conference to present next week, so it was well within her right, I suppose, to monopolize our time with her medieval trivia.
     
    But that didn’t stop my eyes from wandering