Stingray Billionaire: The Complete Series (An Alpha Billionaire Romance) (24 page)

His face darkens a
little. “I’d hoped to,” he says. “I wanted to get everything squared away at
the office and then see how you felt about it first, though.”

“So, I know where I’m
going to live,” I tell him. “If my landlord hadn’t brought back that last money
order for rent, I wouldn’t have been able to get out here. Thanks for doing
that, by the way.”

“No problem,” he says.
“If you decide you need your space, I want you to know you can have it.
However,” he says, “if you’d like to stay with me, the manager of the Plimpington
Hotel talked me into renting out the top half of his place while I wait for the
new house to be built. I’m going to recommend that guy to a few people on my
way out of town. He could make a killing as a hired negotiator.”

“There’s one thing I
don’t understand, though,” she says. “Why would you move the company to
Mulholland? You said you knew it would always be my home, and you’re right, but
why move the whole business?”

“Just the headquarters,”
he says.

“You know very well what
I mean,” I tell him.

He kisses me on the
forehead, saying, “One of the things you talked about on our walks was how much
you wanted to be a teacher. You
said you knew
it since
you
were a little kid, but that
you’d never get the job because of the way things work in that town. I never
understood why you loved it so much.”

“I don’t follow,” I say.

“If you weren’t willing
to leave Mulholland, the only way you’d get to do what you want is if there
were enough jobs in town, the place could start
running
as if
it’s at least trying to exist in this century. Only,
I realized
something just now,” he says.

I say, “What if I don’t
want to be a teacher anymore, or what if I’m okay with leaving Mulholland, or
what if—”

“Yeah,” he interrupts.
“That.” He says, “I need to sit down.” He
does,
and I sit next to him.

“I’ve been avoiding that
store even though I own it,” I tell him. “It was never what I wanted to be
doing. I thought maybe being the boss a little while would change that, but I
want something more engaging than sitting on a stool and hoping someone walks
in that day.”

“What about leaving
Mulholland?” he asks. “The company’s moving, so the headquarters is just going
to sit there until someone decides to buy it or tear it down. After the way the
people there turned on you over nothing, I can’t imagine you’d want to stay
there.”

He lucked out that I’m so
predictable. That’s just part of growing up in a small town, though. You get
used to some things, even though they’re not always the most convenient or the
most pleasant.

Of course, that was before
he actually came into my life. Ever since then, I don’t think I could stand
living in that place anymore. I’m just surprised the townsfolk haven’t decided
to trash my store again. I really should figure out what I want to do with
that.

“How do you feel about
irony?” I ask.

Luckily, he got booted as
CEO, and thus the Mulholland office isn’t tying us down there. All right,
“luckily” probably isn’t the right word there.

We talk for a long time,
eventually moving from the kitchen floor of the penthouse to the living room.
Some big things come up, but mostly we just try to fill in some of the pieces
we’ve missed since we’ve seen each other.

After a while, we’re both
tired, but neither one of us is ready to admit defeat and call it a night.

It’s half past eleven
when Nick’s phone rings. He answers
it,
and I’m half asleep on the other end of the couch. I’m fighting a losing
battle.

For a while, I kind of
drift in and out of hearing Nick’s part of the conversation, but when he says,
“I’ll see you soon,” my eyes open.

“Ellie,” Nick says,
shaking my leg.

“What?” I groan.

“Wake up,” he says.
“Something’s happening.”

Chapter
Twenty-Two

No Hard Feelings

Nick

“Are you sure this is
going to work?” Ellie asks as she looks
over
the place settings on my dining room table.

“No,” I answer, “but it
should.”

I’ve only been gone from
Stingray a week, but just to show there aren’t any hard
feelings I
decided to invite the entire board over to the beach
house on Long Island for a nice dinner. At least that’s what I said when I
called Reeves and had him spread the word.

It took a couple of days
for all eight
to come on board, but they think
I’m still trying to recover the company. When I told them I had no intention of
working for Stingray in any capacity, though, the last of the holdouts caved.

Yako
Inoue is catering dinner tonight,
and the house is
starting to fill with the mouth-watering aromas
of
this evening
’s menu.

“I’m going to finish
getting ready,” Ellie
says,
and I nod.
A lot is riding
on how things go tonight. I
should probably finish getting ready, myself.

In business, most of the
time, it’s not what you want, but how you ask and how much leverage you have
when you do. Ask too softly and nobody will take you seriously. Ask too
forcefully and people will tell you no just to knock you down a peg.

It’s simple psychology.

I’ve never had much
success with the middle of the road, though.
In
my experience, it’s best to make everything black and white. Then paint what
they want to do with every color of nightmare you can put together.

That’s diplomacy.

I get dressed in one of
my softer navy blue suits, something that says I certainly dressed for the
occasion, but I’m not trying to prove anything. If they’re going to stay long
enough to get railroaded, I need to come across nonthreatening. At least until
it’s time to drop the hammer, that is.

Cinching up my tie, I
head
to the bathroom
to check up on
Ellie.

“How are you doing?” I
ask. She’s looking up at the ceiling, dabbing mascara under one eye.

“Almost there,” she says.
She switches to the other eye, and after a few strokes of the brush, she stands
up straight. “How do I look?” she asks.

She’s in a sleek, black
dress that beautifully hugs, but doesn’t stifle her form. Over her
hands,
she’s wearing long, black gloves that go
up past her elbows. They’re the same fabric as the dress.

“What’s the stone in
these earrings?” she asks.

“Red
Beryl
,” I answer.

Ellie looks in the mirror
and takes a deep breath. Blowing it out, she says, “Is everything in place?”

“It should be,” I answer.
“Have you seen Marly?”

“No,” she says, “I just
came in here to finish my makeup and then the gloves and the earrings. By the
way, there’s something I should tell you before dinner starts.”

“Can it wait?” I ask. “I
know we have a few minutes, but I want to look everything over—”

She interrupts me,
saying, “You know how I said I didn’t know you got fired, but I was so cool
about it when you told me?”

“You talked to Nolan,” I
state.

She answers, “I talked to
Nolan.” Patting me on the shoulder, she says, “After the way he cut me off and
forced me to buy a plane ticket instead of make a phone call—which I expect to
be reimbursed for, by the way—I thought I’d have a little chat with him while I
was waiting for you to get back to your office. He acts all tough on the phone,
but you narrow your eyes at the guy and he starts quivering. It was sad,
really.”

“Does this have anything
to do with tonight? If not, I really would like to get out there,” I tell her.

“Just listen,” she says.
“Since you weren’t talking about it with me, I figured you were either trying
to handle it emotionally before talking to me—which is stupid—or you really did
think I knew about it, but still didn’t say anything—which is also stupid.”

“You’re pretty smug for a
trophy girlfriend,” I smirk.

She smacks me on the
chest, saying, “You should be nicer to people who do nice things for you, like
help put together a dinner party where nothing goes wrong.”

“I take your point,” I
tell her. “Please, continue.”

“If I’m honest,” she
says, eyeing me like she’s trying to keep me in place, “I thought you were
doing some sort of inside baseball or whatever they call it and the whole thing
was over my head,” she tells me. “However, I did know you hadn’t been able to
find or get ahold of Jacque, so I thought I’d try my hand at it.”

“What does that mean?” I
ask. “How’d you even find his number?”

“You know how Naomi’s
always snooping through everything, no matter who it belongs to or how
expensive it is?” she returns.

“Yeah,” nod. “So?”

“Well, up until very
recently, I
hadn’t
done that in a
long time,” she says. “Where do you think Naomi picked it up? Anyway, I didn’t
call him. I found his address and went, hoping he still lived there.”

“When did you do all
this?” I ask. “We’ve been together pretty much the whole time I’ve been—”

“You’re a heavy sleeper,”
she tells me. “So, the security guard wasn’t going to let me through or even
get a message to him, but I wasn’t ready to give up, so I climbed the fence.”

I’m not sure I believe
any of this, but it’s an interesting story. I ask, “You climbed the fence?”

“Okay, so I didn’t climb
the fence so much as I grabbed an empty nearby trash can which thankfully had a
sturdy lid, set it around the side of the fence so the security guard wouldn’t
see me climbing over and dropped down to the other side,” she tells me.

Okay, now I believe her.
The fence around Jacque’s is nine feet high and there’s not a lot to grab onto
until the top. Not that I’ve ever tried it personally.

“I think I tripped a
motion sensor or something, because that’s when I heard the sound of a lot of
dogs in the distance. I tried running for a minute, until I realized they were
all Pomeranians. There had to be fifteen or twenty of them and they all just
surrounded me. They weren’t really nipping at me—and anyway I was wearing long
pants, so it wouldn’t have mattered if they were—but the way they were all
crowded around me and jumping up on me, I was afraid to move because I didn’t
want to accidentally kick or step on any of them.”

“Behold the brilliant
mind behind all of Stingray’s best technology solutions,” I tell her. “He drew
up schematics for them before he left the company and I had a few people work
on it after he was gone.”

“What?” she asks. “Those
weren’t real dogs?”

“It’s hilarious he was
using them for security,” I tell her. “No, it was a little, if you’ll excuse
the expression, pet project he thought up one day. We offered to market them to
the public, but he just wanted ‘an even twenty-three of them.’”

“Well,” she says, “it
worked. The security guard heard everything and he didn’t even run on his way
over. Apparently, this had happened before. When he walked up, the dogs all
moved out of the way—which makes a lot more sense now I know they’re not real.
Anyway, Jacque must have overheard all of this, because I could see him looking
out the window in my direction. I don’t know why I thought it would work, but I
shouted out my name to him and my connection to you and what you did for the
company.

“Whoever’s behind the
gossip mill at your office is fantastic, by the way. Nolan had just about
everything you told me. I didn’t want to say anything, but I thought you should
know in case you start hearing stories about me on drugs or trying to beat up
the former co-chair of your lost company or however they’ll spin it if they get
ahold of it. I was really only shouting up to him because nobody had been able
to get through. I’m surprised that lawyer of yours didn’t try something like
that. He didn’t shout back or come down or anything. So, there’s my damage
control out of the way for the evening.”

“When was this?” I ask,
baffled.

“The first night I was
back here,” Ellie says. “I waited until I knew you were asleep, because I knew
you’d tell me not to do it. I would have told you sooner, but it did take you
awhile to finally tell me yourself that you gave up the company, so I think
fair’s fair,” She straightens my tie. “We should probably get out there,
though,” she tells me. “Our guests should be arriving soon.”

Ellie gives herself a
conservative spritz of perfume and we come out of the bathroom.

We’re coming out into the
front room and it looks like the first cars are starting to pull into the
driveway through the open front gate. Ellie and I position ourselves
appropriately off to one side of the entryway to properly greet our guests.

Verne is always the first
to arrive anywhere, because he likes to get started on the booze early. I shake
his hand and smile as he comes in and I introduce him to Ellie. Next is
Geraldine, then it’s Mason, then it’s Iman, then Howard, then Nancy, then
Bertrand and last, as always to show up is Daniel Reeves.

I’m gracious, even kind
to all of them as they arrive and Ellie is nothing but charm as she meets the
people I’ve been complaining about so long.

We chat for a while over
cocktails, but when Yako says dinner is ready, she won’t wait longer than two
minutes to serve before she throws everything out and starts again. The most
skilled people in any profession, I’ve found, are always a little crazy.

When we’re all seated,
Yako whispers in my ear that we’re under two minutes, but if I want her to come
back, I should more properly prepare my guests. I nod and try not to laugh.

The food is in front of
us within ten seconds.

“Well, good evening
everyone,” I say. “Welcome, and I hope we can all have a pleasant evening.”

I feel like a moron
talking to these people this way, but there’s no need for nastiness.

“I’m sure the board joins
me in my appreciation for inviting us to your home,” Reeves says. “I hope there
aren’t any hard feelings.”

“Of course not,” I tell
him. “Well, I’m sure there are plenty on all sides, but we don’t have to make
this dinner all about work.”

“I think that sounds
lovely,” Reeves says.

This is going to be the
worst part of the evening, but one of the most necessary. The people sitting
around this table, Ellie excluded, are the most vengeful, conniving group I’ve
had the misfortune to know up close.

What’s more, they’re not
stupid. Not one of them is sitting comfortably in their chairs, yet everyone’s
smiling. They all know something’s coming. What happens now is Ellie and I try
to divert them with kindness and hope it doesn’t come off like the charade it
is.

“So Verne,” Ellie says,
giving just the right amount of eye contact, “Nick tells me you have a gorgeous
vacation home just outside of Sao Paolo, Brazil. I’ve never been there, but
I’ve always been interested in the culture. How have you experienced Brazil?”

We still need to work on
her posh talk a little, but she is captivating as she speaks.

Verne looks around the
table and then to Ellie, saying, “Give it to you straight, I ain’t experienced
a whole lot about it. Built the thing five years ago went there once to pick
the site and once to see it after it was done. Some of the locals been tryin’
to get the place torn down cause they said I built it in a rainforest, but what
do they think I was tryin’ to do?” he says, wheezing laughter.

I’m still nervous, but
Ellie manages to maintain her smile as she finds out I wasn’t joking about the
solipsism I’ve had to deal with from these people.

“It must be lovely
there,” Ellie says, leaning forward, but just enough to show her interest.

Verne shrugs and says, “I
suppose.”

“And just how is a
handsome man such as yourself still single?” Ellie asks and I can hardly hold
back my amusement.

He waves his hand
dismissively. His face is a little red. With that, Verne is disarmed.

By the time we’re to the
third of five courses, Ellie has everyone eating out of the palm of her hand.
She’s a natural negotiator, and the best part is they should be very wary of
what’s happening right now, but they’re not. All of them are resting back in
their seats, smiles and laughs galore. I’m glad nobody brought a date, or this
would get really awkward. Fortunately, nobody in the room expected a
straightforward evening, and it looks like nobody wanted to have their
significant other around when things invariably turn.

By the time we’re
finishing up the fifth course, I grab my wine glass and tap it with a fork. It
lets off a dull thunk.

“If you’ll excuse me,” I
say and drink the whole glass down. Naturally, seeing me do this, a few of the
board members laughingly take their own drinks. Mine, of course, is grape
juice, but they don’t know that.