Pleasing Him: The Complete Series (An Alpha Billionaire Romance) (16 page)

She shook her head, her eyes still closed. “No. Fucking. Way.”

His breathing grew heavy around her. Then came his warm leather glove over her lips and cheeks.

“Suit yourself, bitch.”

Every nerve in her body went numb, as time suddenly seemed to lock in place. Her eyes flickered open and caught the shadow of Brody’s knife slowly rising upwards.

She swallowed hard, unable to move or scream. She braced herself for what was about to come her way as a lifetime filled with pain and regret flashed through her mind.

Then she took what she thought was her last breath as she waited with closed eyes, almost corpse-like.

With her eyes closed, she heard an eerie grunt come her captor, Brody Sharp. The waiting was agonizing. It wasn’t that she wanted to die right now, but if she did have one last request it was to hurry up and get this hell over with.

Another second went by, and along came another strange grunting sound.

Taylor slowly peeled open her eyes.

At first she was sure she might already be dead. What else could explain the splotches of bright red blood on the tips of her light pink New Balance sneakers that Colton had purchased for her?

Before she could garner enough courage to look up, Brody’s body collapsed on the ground in front her.

Holy fucking shit
.

She instantly noticed that his own knife was deeply embedded into his stomach. Brody’s black eyes glared directly at her while blood began to trickle out of his mouth as he took what appeared to be his last gasp of air.

Then she looked up.

There he stood, Colton Marcus, hovering above the dead body. Colton looked stunned, utterly frozen in place. Taylor’s head was spinning; she didn’t even have time to say thank you or even feel relief for the fact that he had just saved her life.

The billionaire author looked up at her and let out a deep breath of air. “Are you okay?”

She looked back down at Brody’s lifeless body. “I… I don’t know,” she stammered.

Her whole body trembled as she glanced up at Colton again. Physically speaking, he looked as though nothing had just happened- not a hair on his head was out of place, his shirt was wrinkle-free… But his eyes told a different story entirely; they pulsated chaotically as he tried to regain an even breathing pattern.

Taylor’s own eyes started to well up with tears. She wanted so badly to tell him so much, but somehow saying a simple thank you seemed to undercut what he had just done for her.

The billionaire held out his arms. “You’re okay, Taylor. Everything’s okay now.”

The tears immediately poured from her eyes. Just as Colton went to cradle her in his arms, the very thing that she craved now more than ever, a thunderous voice came from behind her.

“Hold it right there, asshole! Keep your hands up where we can see them!”

Before their fingers could touch, two Boston policemen pinned the side of Colton’s face against the ground.

Taylor was frantic as she watched them cuff his hands behind his back. “What are you doing? Leave him alone!”

“It’s okay, Tay. I got this,” the billionaire said.

One of the officers checked the cuffs to make sure they were secure. “Do you sir? Because it looks like you have a lot of explaining to do.”

Taylor was desperate to intervene, knowing full well she was totally helpless.

Again.

“You don’t know who he is!” she called out.

One of the cops chuckled as he pressed his shiny black shoe into Colton’s back. “We know what he did,
and that’s
all that really matters right now.”

The second officer removed his two fingers from Brody Sharp’s wrist. “He’s gone, Breen.”

The first officer removed his foot from Colton’s back and shoved his gun back into its holster, and then he pulled the billionaire up on his feet and started to read him his rights. “You have a right to remain silent. Anything you say and do can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney…”

As the cop continued reading Colton his rights, Taylor lost all control and tried to wedge herself between Colton and the cop. “Let him go! He didn’t do anything!”

“Lady, please. If you don’t calm yourself down, you’ll be in cuffs too,” the police officer said.

But she had no interest in calming herself down, not until Colton was free and holding her safely in his arms. She grabbed onto the billionaire’s arms and tried to pull him towards her and away from the cop. “Let. Him. Go.”

“Ma’am, that’s enough!” one of the cops shouted.

“Tay, please. I’ll take care of this,” Colton tried to reassure her.

Unfortunately, she was in her own world now, unable to hear or see anything other than the first person’s she’d cared about in a long time being cuffed with steel rings. She started pounding her fist into the cop’s arm and shouting. “He didn’t do-“

Before she could finish her sentence, the officer quickly and easily restrained her in his unflappable arms.

Now the billionaire himself began to lose control as he tried to kick the side of the cop’s leg. “Keep her out of this or I swear to god I’ll ruin both of you!”

But as much as Colton tried to protect her, he was rendered powerless behind the handcuffs. It didn’t help matters that two more officers rushed onto the scene.

Two more officers rushed onto the scene. Three of them grabbed Colton all at once. “Okay, I think that’s enough. Get that piece of shit out of here!” the largest of the three demanded.

Taylor watched in horror as all three cops dragged Colton from his shoulders and pulled him out of her sight. She hoped and prayed that she could see his eyes but his head had been forced backwards making it physically impossible for him to look back at her.

She tried to protest one last time, but the cop’s impenetrable restraint on her arms felt like nails were being hammered into her shoulders every time she tried to break free.

“Let it go, lady. You’re just making things worse for him,” the cop said as she tried to wiggle free from his obscenely tight grasp.

“He didn’t do anything. He saved my life!” she said back to him.

The cop chuckled. “Your boyfriend just killed someone. That much I know.”

Taylor slumped her head down as the cop’s words echoed inside of her.

Colton Marcus just killed someone.

For me.

Then came wave upon wave of nausea as she began to blame herself for getting the billionaire into this mess to begin with.

You attract what you are
, she told herself.
And I attracted someone like Brody Sharp because of who I’ve become- worthless, empty, weak…

Taylor started to vomit, just barely missing the cop’s shoes. He released her onto the grass as her body started to purge itself.

On her seventeenth birthday, she’d managed to reach depths so low that she was miraculously lucky to survive the plunge. She never thought she’d experience that kind of low again in her life, but she was wrong.

Dead wrong.

She listened as the patrol car whisked Colton off to wherever he was going.

Her life was ruined, that much she knew. What if Colton is somehow found guilty of manslaughter? What if he winds up in the wrong courtroom, with the wrong judge?

Colton would want nothing to do with her after this.

Everything was over- her opportunity to publish with the most successful writer on the planet, her chance to rid herself of her old, dead-end life, and her chance to finally be with a man like him.

Not that she actually believed any of those things would actually come to fruition.

Case in point.

“Ma’am?” the cop continued to call to her as she woke from her self-deprecating trance.

Taylor shook her head as she came to her senses, relatively speaking. “What?”

His voice was pure business as he asked, “Do you need a ride home?”

She looked down at the green grass that padded her feet from the cold, hard earth.

Home?

If Taylor learned one thing in her life, it was that a house didn’t make a home. Sure, she had an apartment she could go back to. But a home?

Not even close.

She slowly lifted her gaze to meet the police officer’s eyes head on. “Yes, I do need a ride home,” she said.

He nodded, and then looked down at the vomit splattered amidst the grass. Taylor glanced to her side as two plain-clothed men wearing white rubber gloves placed Brody Sharp into a black, life-size sack and zipped it shut.

“Do you live alone?” he asked her.

“Yes, why?”

“Because you’ve just been through a major trauma. Is there anyone else you can stay with?”

She ran through her short list of options, only to conclude there was only one even remotely viable.

And that wasn’t going to happen.

“No. But I’m okay, really…” she said.

The cop hesitated, shook his head, and then gestured back to the parking lot of the nursing home. “Suit yourself then. We’ll send a detective to follow up with you later this evening.”

She simply nodded back to him. She was out of words, out of energy, out of anything even slightly vital.

Taylor’s senses went numb throughout the entire police escort back to her apartment.

What the hell am I going to do now?

Forget about the emotional challenges that lied ahead for her. She’d decided to focus on logistics.
First step, figure out a way to get paid doing something
.

The problem was that her last job, the one that she was still technically suspended from, was the only job in the entire Boston area that she was able to land. It wasn’t that she didn’t have skills, or that she didn’t work well with other people… It was something far worse, something that showed up on her background checks every single time she applied for a job that she could at least semi tolerate.

She sighed deeply as the cruiser pulled away and she walked back into her lonely apartment.

There was no way she could let her mind wander to Colton.

Focus on the basics Taylor… Paying for rent. Putting food on the table. And moving on with your life.

She’d have to pretend from this point on that Colton Marcus didn’t even exist, and there was only one way to do that…

* * *

Dressed in a sharp black business skirt and a freshly pressed white blouse, both purchased courtesy of her plastic Jesus, Taylor ducked into the university’s bathroom to double check that she was ready for this.

She was about to do the unthinkable- beg her former boss, Rebecca Stein, to reinstate her position as an office assistant at Baldpate University.

This was the lowest of the low, but the only way she could push the entire Colton escapade out of her mind was to turn her own life into one big miserable distraction. She had a knack for self-punishment; she’d learned early on that it was sometimes easier to make things worse than to strive for something better only to fail and come crashing down.

Colton Marcus was the ultimate example of that. He was gorgeous. He was ultra rich. He offered her a way out of her mundane life. All of those things should have been warning signs to her that things were too good to be true.

She made up her mind from this point on- she would never set herself up for a fall that big for as long as she lived.

She took a deep breath as she waited for the elevator door to open.

The familiar brunette receptionist wearing a tight-fitting pink polo shirt smiled at her with her private school teeth and thickly painted lips, but it was the type of smile that reeked of evil intent.

“So happy to see you, Taylor. Ms. Stein is waiting for you.”

Bullshit.

She felt like throwing up for the second time in three days as she walked into the creative writing department head’s office. All she could see was the back of her boss’s hair from behind as the middle-aged woman sat in her leather swivel office chair. “Sit down, Taylor.”

This is just so damn great
.

Her boss spun around in her chair and shook her head from side to side as if she had never seen such a disgusting sight in her entire life. “You do realize that I’m the only game in town, right?

“Yes, Ms. Stein.”

“Unless you’re into scraping paint off brick buildings for minimum wage,” Stein added.

It wasn’t like this job paid all that much more than minimum wage, but Taylor didn’t think that embarking on a pay scale debate with Rebecca Stein would be a very wise choice. Hence, she nodded her head up and down in agreement.

Her boss rose from her chair and moved towards Taylor.

She didn’t seem to have it in her to make eye contact with this woman; all she could do was keep her head down as she gazed at the forty-something woman’s smooth shins and black high heels.

“Look at me!” her boss demanded. “This isn’t the principal’s office. This is the real world, Taylor. And the last time I checked, a felon like you really doesn’t deserve a second chance. Am I right?”

Taylor swallowed hard as she lifted her gaze to meet Stein’s eyes directly. “Yes,” she mumbled back softly.

“Excuse me?” her boss asked.

“I said yes,” Taylor reluctantly repeated.

Rebecca Stein’s lips curled at both ends. Taylor was convinced that this lady was put on this earth to haunt her until the day she died.

“Good. As long as you understand that you are to make absolutely no wrong moves from this point on. And…”

A loud knock on the department chair’s door interrupted administrator mid-sentence.

Taylor looked over at the door and saw that it was the same snobby receptionist who had
greeted
Taylor, for lack of a better word, only now her smirk was long gone and her face was at least nine shades lighter.

Stein launched a Baldpate University pen onto her dark mahogany desk as she started to reprimand the receptionist. “You’re fucking joking, right? It is hard to decipher that I’m incredibly busy right now?”

It wasn’t that Taylor enjoyed seeing other people suffer, but she wasn’t going to miss out on the advantages that karma had to offer right now.

The receptionist held out her hand, and in her hand was a white piece of paper. “It’s… it’s for you. It’s a note,” the young receptionist bumbled.