HIS (A Billionaire Romance Novel)

HIS

A Steamy and Dominating Billionaire Romance Novel

By Kat Jackson

Copyright 2015, Kat Jackson

Renowned bestselling author Kat Jackson is back with a STEAMY and DOMINATING Billionaire Romance!

This is a full novelization of the HIS series.

His… The Novel

Tyler Cross… He was the world’s sexiest, cockiest, and most entitled billionaire. Now he’s hidden away from the world. It’s
my
job to save him and his whole company from the brink. I need to get him to come down from his ivory tower…

I’m his personal assistant. I’m supposed to assist him. I’m supposed to
serve
him… Mr. Cross has a secret I must uncover and a
dark
desire I’m desperate to fulfill.

There’s only one problem… The further he pushes me into his personal darkness…
The deeper I want to go…

Published by the Kat Jackson Publishing Group

Copyright
©
2015 by Kat Jackson

This book is a work of fiction, any names, places, and situations portrayed within are products of the author’s imagination.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
his book is dedicated to Amber.

You know why.

PS: To all my sexy and loyal readers, keep turning pages at the end of this book because I’ve included an extra special surprise bonus just for being so awesome.

-Kat

PROLOGUE

“Undress,” Tyler commanded. That spark in his eyes had burgeoned into a full-on flame. “Slowly, and for my approval.”

I started with my shoes. My feet were aching anyway, and that made them easy to take off. My blouse was next, and that proved a little harder. My fingers trembled as I worked the buttons and Tyler set his hawkish gaze on me, studying my every move. He made me nervous. But he made me curious, too.

And hot. Oh, so hot. Hotter than I wanted to admit to. Hotter than I could bear. And by the time I was slipping the blouse down my arms and revealing my creamy flesh, the channel between my thighs was wet and scorching.

You’re insane,
I told myself.
You know that, don’t you?

But I couldn’t think now. If I had any thoughts at all, I would stop. I would turn away from Tyler and run and never look back. And that wouldn’t do anyone any good, least of all me.

I dragged the zipper on my pencil skirt down, then peeled it off my hips where it crumpled to the floor at my feet. I was in my stockings and panties and bra, and when I hesitated, considering which to take off next, Tyler told me:

“The stockings. Then your panties. And last, your bra.”

I did as he said, my knees quivering so hard I was sure they’d knock together. I trailed the gossamer fabric down my thighs and calves and off my feet, and when that was done, I finally started on my panties. I could hear my own pulse in my ears as I pulled them away from my cunt, and my face flushed sanguine when a long, translucent strand of my nectar clung to the material and my nether lips at the same time, stretching out enough that I knew Tyler could see it before it broke off.

It didn’t matter anyway. My panties had already given me away. They were utterly soaked, and so was I.

He said nothing, though, as I stepped out of them and unclasped my bra. I let out a shaky sigh as my breasts fell free, relieving the pressure on my chest that had made my breathing so much more labored than it had to be. My pink nipples stiffened in the cool air and I resisted the urge to shield myself with my hands as Tyler inspected me from head to toe.

I wondered briefly if he would find me lacking. After all, a man of his status was sure to have slept with some supermodels. I was no Victoria’s Secret Angel. I couldn’t hope to compare.

Yet there was nothing but a smirk of satisfaction on his face as he raked his gaze over my naked form. “There’s a safeword,” he told me. “You’ll say it when it gets to be too much for you. You’ll say, ‘stardust.’ Agreed?”

“Yes,” I said. My voice rasped, the product of my sweltering breath sticking in my throat. How did I end up here? How in the world could I have possibly let this man dominate me so completely? How could have I become…
His…

HIS DEMANDS

Mitchell Darling was talking, but all I could think about was his nose.

I wish I could say that it was the first time something like this had happened, but it wasn’t. In fact, I found myself distracted by his nose quite often. In this office, there was no escaping it. Mitchell was the VP of Cumberland & Cross, and unlike other VPs, the only time he wasn’t here was when he, and his nose, had a meeting to attend to.

Which wasn’t very often. Or at least, not often enough that I ever spent a whole week with his nose out of my sight.

It wasn’t Mitchell’s fault, either. He was a kind man, if a little cold sometimes, and he was never inappropriate with me.
I
was the one being inappropriate with
him.

So now instead of listening closely to what he was saying, I was thinking about how I caught him down at the company gym sniffing the seat of an exercise bike.

It was an unfortunate moment. Up until that little scene played out in front of me, I’d really liked Mitchell… It had been a long time since I’d had a man... Maybe that was why I found myself so drawn to him. He seemed like a good enough guy, and he was handsome, sure. Yet here I was, considering his one glaring flaw enough to completely tune out what he was asking of me, which for all I knew might have involved me jumping off the top of the building into a vat of clam chowder.

“This is serious, Valerie,” Mitchell was saying as I tried to focus on his lips rather than his nasal regions. It did make it easier for me to listen. “He hasn’t shown his face in
months.
I don’t know what’s going on with him, but I need to find out. He won’t talk to me. He won’t talk to any of the other execs, either. We’re ready to employ drastic measures to sniff him out.”

He stared at me as though waiting for a response. I did my best to hold his gaze despite the laughter threatening to bubble out of me. “What can I do to help?”

I had gathered that we were discussing Tyler Cross.
Everyone
was discussing Tyler Cross,
all the time
. He was the face of Cumberland & Cross, its young, blue-blooded CEO, who at the ripe old age of twenty-five had already been named one of the richest and sexiest men on earth. He had it all.

Except, as I understood it, he wouldn’t leave his home.

Nobody knew why, apparently not even an important man like Mitchell Darling who I’d thought knew everything. He was the hawkish sort, a man who listened and watched, whose head was always turning and whose eyes ever wandered over the room. He was hypervigilant, which I’d learned back in my college psych courses was often indicative of paranoid disorders, but I supposed one had to be paranoid when they were in his position.

If everyone was
really
out to get you, then you were hardly paranoid, after all.

“I was hoping you’d ask me that,” Mitchell said with a grin that nearly touched his ears. He shifted in the leather arm chair in front of me, crossing one leg over the other so that his pant cuff dangled freely. Mitchell spoke again.

“Have you ever met Mr. Cross?” he asked.

I nodded. “Once.” Our contact had been strictly limited to my interview, which had been the strangest I’d ever been on. The way Tyler Cross had looked at me, that steady silence he’d employed—it had almost drowned out my answers to his sharp, curt questions.
Can you type? Do you know how to file?

Yes, Mr. Cross. I indeed know my ABCs,
I’d wanted to say. But instead I’d played the part of the eager ingénue in the low-cut shirt, the neckline of which Mr. Cross had always seemed to be studying.

“Well, that’s a start,” Mitchell chuckled. He seemed both amused and relieved. “We need someone to pull Mr. Cross out of hiding. Someone he wouldn’t associate with the company. Someone young, charming, and beautiful.” His dark eyes sparkled. “Someone quite like you, Miss Hartwick.”

I felt a little heat prickle in my chest.
Charming. Beautiful.
Was that how Mitchell perceived me? Ok, maybe he did have some weird fetish… But it had been awhile for me… Too long…

But then my brain switched on and I blinked hard, clearing the rosy haze from my vision.

“Wait,” I said. “You want me to lure Mr. Cross back into the business? How am I supposed to do that?” He hesitated and I squinted hard at him. “You don’t actually expect me to use all my
youthful charm
and
beauty
to get the job done, do you?”

Mitchell waved his hand. “Of course not,” he purred in a way that sounded like a big, fat lie. “How you get him back here is up to you. I trust your judgment. As a woman.”

Whatever hypnotic effect Mitchell Darling might have had on me mere moments ago had faded, and now I was seeing this snake for what he really was. What he expected of me, in short, was that I’d throw myself at Tyler Cross and use my “assets” to draw him back into the limelight. Obviously he’d given up on figuring on why Mr. Cross had gone off the grid in the first place. There was no use throwing money at a billionaire, so why not a woman?

“I’m not that kind of girl,” I insisted, now crossing one of my stocking-clad legs over the other and clenching them tightly. I hoped Mitchell would sense my displeasure. “Just because I’m his secretary doesn’t mean that I’ll—”

“I know that, Miss Hartwick,” Mitchell interrupted. He sighed. “Look, you’re his executive assistant—
assist him.
I know you’re the office flirt, but I’m not asking you to fuck the guy. I just need you to figure out what’s going on and convince him to come back before there isn’t a company left to come back to.”

He took a deep breath then, perhaps realizing that he’d spoken to me in a way I’d never heard him speak to anyone before. For a moment, the unflappable Mitchell Darling had lost his composure. He took a moment before continuing, much more even-toned this time.

“The board is already talking liquidation. All our asses are on the line for this, and I can’t have you sitting here doing nothing about it. Mr. Cross hired you for a reason. He saw something in you. Something special. Use that.
That
is your weapon. You get him in here, or there won’t be a position for you at this company. Do I make myself clear?”

I felt my jaw drop just a little, enough to part my lips. As the features of my face tightened and screwed, he added, “You’ll be compensated, of course. Above and beyond what you’re making now. That ought to go without saying.”

He flashed another of his slimy smiles. Once I’d found them radiant. Now they made him seem cheap despite the suit, the shirt, and his shiny shoes.

I entwined my fingers and rested them on my knee, thinking. All right. So Mitchell wasn’t asking me to fuck anybody. But then how did he expect me to coax Mr. Cross out of hiding? What special attributes did I possess that might accomplish such a task?

What, at our interview, had Mr. Cross seen in me?

“I’m not typically in the habit of saying ‘no’ to my superiors…” I began, clicking my fingernails against each other.

Mitchell cocked his head. “Then why start now?”

“…but,” I continued, “I don’t think I’m a good fit for the position you have in mind, Mr. Darling. It seems to require a certain… skill set that I’m just not well-versed in.”

He leaned forward and spread his hands. “We all have to do a little dirty work now and then, Miss Hartwick. And I can’t imagine what good you’ll be to the company if the person you’re supposed to serve—that is, Mr. Cross—fails to show up for work ever again.”

He was right, of course. And he’d said as much twice already. Pushing my luck a third time might result in that jobless future quickly coming to pass.

Mitchell must have seen the defeat in my eyes, because he smiled. “You’re a bright girl, Valerie. I knew you’d understand.”

I let out a very long breath through my nose and stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows. I was used to the view, but when I’d first started here, I’d thought it was breathtaking. The cityscape was all colors and lights, hustle and bustle, a never-ending stream of movers, shakers, and hungry crowds. Every other street was a portal to here, the heart of it all. My first few weeks, I’d felt like I was on top of the world.

Now I knew better. Cumberland & Cross hadn’t lost any prestige in that time, not by a long shot, but the simplicity of my day-to-day tasks had whisked away that childlike wonder I’d first felt. We weren’t important. It was all about the money.
Always.

I looked back to Mitchell. “How much?” I asked.

“Oh, the number is
obscene
,” he assured me in a way that almost made me smile. Mitchell was clever and quick-witted, and even funny when he wanted to be. There was something sly and foxish about him. When he smiled with just the one corner of his mouth, he could make you feel like you two were the only ones in on some dirty little secret. “I wouldn’t want to offend you by speaking it aloud.”

“We all have to take risks, Mr. Darling,” I said, and he did that thing—he tilted his head, half-smiled, and let his eyes narrow just a tad so that they glittered like jewels.

“A quarter million,” he said at last. “Provided you actually succeed, of course.”

If I’d been drinking my morning coffee, I most certainly would have choked. I felt my heart skip a beat and then go leaping up into my throat so that when I spoke next, my voice came out as a mousey squeak. “T-two hundred and fifty thousand dollars?!”

“See?” Mitchell said, grinning wider now. “I knew you’d be offended.”

Offended
was not the word I would have used. Shocked. Flabbergasted. Gobsmacked, even. But offended? How could the promise of financial freedom—no, more than that, even—have ever come across as offensive?

“No,” I said, finally regaining my composure. “No, I’m just… surprised. Jesus, Mitchell…”

Mitchell stood. He walked over to me so that I was near eye-level with his belt line. I tried to focus on his face. The intoxicating scent of his Givenchy cologne was making me dizzy.

“This is important, Valerie. What you’d be doing for me—for the board—it extends far beyond money. There are other things you want, yes? You don’t plan on being a secretary forever.”

He was right. Even though I hadn’t been doing a lot of office work around here lately, I still ran things. The other assistants looked to me for guidance. They reported issues to me and relied on me to oversee them, in a way. I was the one who ordered the supplies. I was the one who kept track of the idiosyncrasies of our clients. If they had questions, I was the one who could answer them. I was a secretary, a manager, tech support, and a herder of cats all in one.

I wanted more for myself, certainly. And rising through the ranks of Cumberland & Cross would be one hell of a start.

“This is on my terms?” I asked him. I wanted to be absolutely sure I understood what he meant. “I bring him in how I see fit?”

“One hundred percent,” Mitchell assured me. “We don’t care how you do it. As long as our stock prices stop tanking while our CEO is off doing God knows what, we’ll be satisfied.”

I began to stand, but to my surprise, Mitchell didn’t step back. My body was nearly right up against his as he said, “This could mean big things for everyone, Valerie. I mean it.” And he brushed a lock of hair out of my face with his fingertips.

“Any leads?” I asked him quietly, hoping he’d back away.

“Just one,” Mitchell answered. “Orwin Manor. It was his childhood home, and there’s enough security around it to ensure that none of the people we’ve sent out there can get in.”

I furrowed my brow. “And what makes you think I’ll be any different?”

“Because I know you, Valerie. And I know Tyler Cross. I know what he likes. I even have an inkling of what he needs. When you get there, you’ll see what I mean.” He paused. “And Valerie? If you have to put on an act or play a part…”