Billionaire: Billionaire Romance: Billionaire Tiger (A Billionaire New Adult Shifter Contemporary Romance)
Authors: Loretta Devine
© Copyright 2016 by Loretta Devine - All rights reserved.
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BILLIONAIRE TIGER
A Paranormal Romance
By: Loretta Devine
Table of Contents
My Stepbrother is a Vampire 40
Captivated By The Scoundrel 313
BILLIONAIRE:TIGER
An Erotic Paranormal Romance
CHAPTER 1
As it was her habit to do, Lara Everly studied herself in her full-length mirror. She was dressed all in black--a lycra top, Capri pants, her best high-heeled leather shoes. She stood and looked at herself. She ran her hands over the round and full contours of her form and studied the lines of her body. She turned to one side and did the same. She ruffled the long, thick, tumbling locks of brown hair that crowned her head, flowed over her shoulders, and fell halfway down her back. She smiled her best red-carpet smile. It was the same as it had ever been. She told herself that it was only nature showing its sense of humor. A capricious nature had given her a supermodel's face, a dancer's legs--and a pear-shaped body.
There was no question about it. Lara was a pear. A very pretty pear, but a pear all the same, full and round in the middle. If she were really honest, the legs holding up the pear were a little more stout in the thighs than those of a dancer would be. They were not ugly legs by any means; the words "pleasantly plump," which she learned from her parents when she was a little girl, were her mantra for many years, until she learned to think of herself as a pear. She had the shape of a pear, and, she thought, the sweetness of a pear--the pear, after all, being the sweetest fruit. She thought she should eat more of them than she did. The only trouble with pears was that chocolate--which was the color of her thick, rich hair--was so much more satisfying. To hell with diamonds; a girl's best friend was a chocolate truffle.
Still, she thought as she studied herself in the mirror, what was so wrong with pears? The face looking back from the mirror, the features that could grace a thousand commercials for shampoos and cosmetics, had no answer for her. It had nothing to say about what lay below her bust. It was only light bouncing off glass and told her nothing about the roundness and fullness from her stomach to her bottom to her upper thighs, which was where men's eyes always stopped when they looked down from that face. Men's taste for fruit was sadly limited. When she saw men out and about, the ones that appealed to her the most had a tendency not to pick pears.
And see them she did. Living in a big city, Lara saw them everywhere. The city was a veritable nest of beautiful-looking men. She saw them in the park and at the market, in restaurants and cafes. She saw them in the streets and in stores. She saw them in the hallways of the apartment building where she lived, and in the offices of the clients that she served as a freelance fundraiser. She used to frequent the gym. She stopped because she saw so many of them there, in their tank-tops and shorts and swimsuits, and it grew difficult to look at them. And the reason was what she found they liked to look at--and touch, and walk holding hands with. When the beautiful men went foraging for mates, they did not pick pears. The fruit that they picked was tall and slender. When it had curves, they were not curves like those in the middle of Lara's body, full and broad and ample. The curves on the fruit that the beautiful men picked were sleek and subtle and sinuous, things that Lara had stopped trying to be.
Many times Lara had thought,
Why not just work with what I've got?
She smiled at herself in the mirror again. From the bust upward, she was what they considered "a knockout". She was gorgeous, as pretty as any of the lean fruits, prettier than many. She primped her flowing, rippling locks again. Damn, Girl, you've got it going on, she told herself. And she believed it. After all, men liked a pretty face. A pretty face and a bright smile could turn many a male head. She had looks. She had brains. She could get their attention. The problem, she found too often, was that their attention was all that she could get, and even that did not last.
After too many first dates that never turned to seconds, and too many men who were there for a night and skidded off like hit-and-run drivers in the morning, and the sight of too many women who were not at all plump, pleasantly or otherwise, on the arms of too many beautiful-looking men, Lara had weighed her options and found them not to her liking. More than once she had thought to place a personal ad specifically looking for a "chubby chaser". There were problems with that as well. She hated thinking of herself, or identifying herself, as "chubby," even though she was. And personal ads, she had learned early in her dating life--such as it was--came with their own pitfalls. There were the men who lied about their looks and their jobs and their living situations, the men who were older than she wanted, the men who were chubby themselves. She had stopped talking to her girlfriends and the women in her family about her troubles with men. She was tired of hearing that she was "too picky" and of the insinuation that she was being "shallow". To Lara, those were the things people told you when you respected yourself enough to think you should have what your heart really desired, the things people said when they thought you had no business thinking of yourself as anything special--or anything more special than they. People, however well intentioned, trying to talk her out of her heart's desire for what they thought was her own good, did Lara no favors, so she kept her feelings and her heart--and, alas, everything else--to herself.
Sighing, Lara kicked off her shoes and padded in bare feet from her bedroom to the office section of her living room, where she kept a large, comfortable leather chair at the desk. She curled up in the chair and reached over to her iPad which rested next to the computer. She put it in her lap. She then reached over next to where the iPad had rested and took from there the thin, rectangular white box, which she rested on the arm of the chair. She lifted the lid and smiled a little smile at the rows of chocolate truffles nestled in the box. They were nothing but truffles; she always ordered them specifically. The confectioner's shop down the street knew her as "the truffle lady". She may not be able to get or hold onto the kind of man she wanted, but chocolate was another matter entirely.
With a truffle in one hand, Lara used the other to turn on the iPad. Munching on her sweet surrogate for a boyfriend, she opened her PDF reader and went over her notes for the fundraising party she was attending this evening. Her latest project was for wildlife organizations focused on the conservation of tigers. Scrolling through PDF pages copied and downloaded from the Web, Lara again went over the things that she had been reading for the last couple of weeks about tigers, all the facts with which she would need to arm herself to help the conservation groups persuade wealthy guests to donate to their cause, the protection of one of the most beautiful and endangered animals on the planet.
In the documents that had pictures and illustrations in them, Lara saw page after page with images of tigers: in tall grass, in forests, in water and by the sides of streams. She saw them in zoos and in performing acts. As she kept paging through, so many of the things that she saw disturbed her, dismayed and appalled her, made her almost want to cry. There were images of places with tiger skins stretched out, stripped and ripped from the beautiful animals after they were slain. There were pictures of places where tigers' body parts were sold as trophies, as delicacies, and for quack "medicines". She saw pictures of hunters standing proudly with their guns beside the bodies of tigers they had shot.
What the hell do you have to be so proud of?
she thought. As a fundraiser, Lara worked mostly with things about which she had no personal feelings. Most of the time she was only helping people collect money, and the work was only work. But this was different. What men were doing to the tigers, whose numbers had fallen precipitously into mere thousands in isolated pockets of the wild, was nothing less than the destruction of something beautiful. The destruction of beauty, the rendering of beauty into extinction, made Lara want to cry. Or get very, very angry. This time it was not just a job, just a thing to pay the bills. This time it meant something. She bit into a truffle and felt like a tiger biting into a deer.
By the time she finished lunch--which the chocolate did not spoil--and she had to shower and dress for the party, Lara had fixed her mind on the work awaiting her. She could not show the people at the party how she really felt. She had to keep it all on a professional level. She would keep it professional--and she would get results. The theme of the party, which was being held at a penthouse just off the park near the river, was in fact tigers. Everyone invited was required to wear something to evoke the image of the big striped cats. Lara imagined the tableau that would meet her eyes when she walked in, as the party filled up; all the tiger outfits that people would be wearing. Some, she guessed, would even be in costumes. Back at the mirror, she let the corner of her mouth turn up in a wry smile at the thought of being in a penthouse full of stripes, whiskers, ears, and tails. For her part, Lara chose to don the shoes from earlier and her slinkiest black strapless formal, or at least the slinkiest such dress made for a pear. This she accented with a sash across the waist, for which she had searched high and low in the city and which she had finally found on line--a silk sash with a tiger skin print. She was satisfied that it was appropriate for the evening and for the part she would be playing in it; tasteful and not ostentatious. Ruffling her hair one last time and putting on her black tiger-print wrap--another painstaking find--she was ready to go to work.
CHAPTER 2
The party was held in a penthouse taking up the uppermost two floors of a building of condos in the toniest, ritziest part of town, on a street that looked as if one should have a six-figure income just to walk there. The penthouse itself looked as much like a museum or an art gallery as a place where someone lived. It was all huge picture windows, vast and spacious rooms, wide stairways, brass railings, an indoor water fountain with koi fish swimming in the pool, and sumptuous furniture, all done up for the evening with potted palms, exotic ferns, and wild flowers to suggest a rain forest. This was the home of the very monied widow Mrs. Eve Dwight-Harrington, a member of that idle rich benefactor class whose names one saw in the lists of donors to arts and cultural programs on Public Television. Arriving at the party, Lara found her friend Clara Olstead, a friendly looking African-American woman, standing near the door, mingling with various tiger-garbed guests. Lara was an old friend that Lara had met after college; as a freelance publicist and party planner she traveled in many of the same circles as Lara herself.
Clara noticed Lara and excused herself from the people with whom she was chatting. With a broad smile, she went over to Lara and gave her a hug. Lara grinned at Clara's tiger-striped tiara, arm bands, and bracelets accenting her eggshell-colored dress. "Looking good, Girl," she said.
