I Choose You (The Billionaire Brothers Series) (26 page)

Johnson’s body went still while his cock jerked, his semen spilling over, until it went limp and died with him.

Sarah sat on his lap for a minute, staring at her now dead husband. A silencer being on the gun meant there was no mess. Just a tiny hole at the center of his forehead, a trickle of blood trailing down his face toward his lips. Before the blood could reach his parted lips, she leaned forward and gave him a quick kiss.

Then she sighed.

If only he’d just listened to her and visited the fucking gym at least four times a week, she wouldn’t have fallen in love with another man. Johnson would still be the man she fell in love with and none of this would’ve happened. But he’d grown comfortable, slothful, and ate too damn much.

Too bad.

Sarah got up and got to work. First cleaning up Johnson and tucking his flaccid cock back inside his pants. She strategically placed the gun on the left side of his desk — Johnson was left-handed — and knocked a few things from that side of the desk to the floor, making it look as if there’d been a tussle.

She untied the scarf from Johnson’s face and wrapped it around her right hand to be used to set other things askew. She did not clean her fingerprints from the gun because that would raise suspicions. All the guns in the house were licensed and were her guns, too, so her fingerprints were on all of them. An absence of her fingerprints on the murder weapon was a definite red flag. But everything else she had to be careful with.

With her covered hand, she fetched a penknife, went to the far right end of the basement and began slashing through the stacks of cocaine. Detectives tended to analyze every little detail, and she also knew detectives weren’t stupid; good detectives could tell a staged murder scene the minute they entered the room. That’s if, it wasn’t done properly.

Sarah wasn’t being frantic and stupid, but did it properly by meticulously making sure that no two things would coincide, no heavy furniture was overturned, or no out-of-the-way paraphernalia was inexplicably askew. That would make any attempt at deciphering what went down in the meeting with the Mexicans facile.

The prevalent theory would be there was a disagreement with the Mexicans, Johnson pulled his gun, and, with the Mexicans not having their own weapons to defend themselves, they had to tackle Johnson for his gun to kill him. That was the
obvious
theory. But then, they’d start wondering how and why the cocaine got slashed, etc. That’s how you fuck with know-it-all detectives; they think they have it all figured out, but then, there’s other things that never adds up.

The Mexicans had left in a fit of pique, which should’ve raised worry among the securities. But even if they did suspect anything had happened, none of Johnson’s men were allowed in the den unless he called for them, which was rare.

Sarah wasn’t worried, though. Johnson James was a down-low drug dealer hiding behind his big name insurance company. The minute cops rolled in on the scene and saw that it was Johnson James, it would hit the news and no one would give a shit he’d been murdered. They would focus on the fact Johnson James was an undercover drug dealer … and a host of other facts most likely to be revealed. Because a drug dealer just scratched the surface.

As far as Sarah was concerned, she was a busy, hard-working interior designer who was oblivious to her husband’s dealings, until his sudden death. They owned licensed guns for security reasons, but never would she have imagined her husband involved in such entanglements.

Nice.

Sarah glanced around the room, and, feeling satisfied with her staging, she went the foot of the stairs, retied her scarf around her thigh, opened her mouth, and screamed.

M
arsha and I gathered our shopping bags on our arms and hobbled up the driveway.

“Now how the hell am I gonna reach the keys in my purse,” I giggled, realizing I should’ve taken out the house keys before I bundled up the shopping bags.

Marsha laughed and nodded toward Jahleel’s motorbike parked on the lawn. “Mr. Fantastic Fuck is home, so the door might be open.”

I made a face at her. Those were most definitely not the kind of words I needed to hear, because, as she said them, the images of her getting nailed by Jahleel on his couch came rushing in. “Keep those thoughts of JK to yourself, will you?”

She just rolled her eyes at me and continued walking.

On this day, I turn twenty-six. And the one person who I would’ve loved to spend this special day with has been out of the country for the past week or so, unable to give me a sure date when he’d be back. So I decided to spend it shopping like the ‘holic’ I was with my best friend. Marsha never disappointed.

Dating a busy billionaire, whose presence was being demanded at a dozen places per hour, sucked in a major way.

Jahleel woke me up this morning by jumping up and down on my bed singing the happy birthday song and gave me a stunning pair of gold earrings. The gift wasn’t extraordinary, because he randomly bought me gifts at times for no reason whatsoever, so I figured he’d just decided to go simple this time.

The Kingstons sent me gift cards for various fashion stores, and their ‘gift cards’ were like credit cards with a limit Marsha and I had yet to reach. We went all-out crazy, getting things we didn’t even need. Because, what better way to make Krissan Kingston smile than getting her new stuff?

Like Marsha had guessed, the front door was open when she awkwardly turned the knob with her two free fingers. We both tried getting through the door first to relieve ourselves of the bags and ended up tripping over each other, tumbling head first to the floor. We burst into fits of laughter, until Marsha stopped laughing and started scowling.

I followed her glare which was directed to the right of the front door, where Saskia Day was pinned to the wall by Jahleel’s hips. Her breathing was flowing heavy through parted lips, while Jahleel had one hand pressed against the wall and the other gripping her waist. But he was looking down at me as if he’d been caught stealing an angel’s harp, while Saskia’s desire-filled gaze was trained on his face as though, to her, we weren’t there.

I started giggling harder, even though I felt like stabbing someone. “Oh my God, JK, I’m so sorry! I
really
ought to start using my own entrance.”

The situation didn’t seem amusing to him though, because he didn’t laugh back. Instead, he dropped his hand from Saskia’s waist, shoved his other hand through his hair and closed his eyes for a brief moment. When he reopened them, he looked dead at me and said, “I’m sorry.”

You better be,
I told him with my eyes, but kept on a confused expression for the girls. Because, well, why would he be telling me sorry? I was the intruder. He should’ve been apologizing to Marsha or Saskia.

Jahleel walked off without sparing Saskia a second glance as if he hadn’t had her pinned against the wall in what seemed like a moment of heated passion only seconds ago.

“What an
asshole
,” Marsha muttered, as she tried to scramble up to her feet, but kept tripping back over my legs and the bags in the process.

This had me laughing hysterically. “For the love of God, Marsh!”

Saskia shuffled, and I slid my gaze back to her and stopped cackling, not wanting her to think I was laughing at her. She had a look of dejection, her cheeks reddened with embarrassment, or maybe it was vestigial of being seduced by Mr. Grade-A Asshole.

Before I could be polite and tell her ‘Hi’ — because she’d been extremely nice to me the first time I met her — she asked me in her thick British accent, “May I use
your
loo?”

Judging by the way she stressed ‘your’, I could tell she was suffering immense hurt from Jahleel’s callous treatment.

“Sure,” I answered, aiming for cheeriness. “Upstairs, turn left.”

Don’t fall and break your neck now!

She failed at her attempt to smile, so she just nodded and walked down the hall in skin-tight jeans, a Louis Vuitton purse-belt around her waist, an über cut-up black tee, and black Jordans, her hair a mass of wild curls. At the foot of the staircase, she stopped, turned around and, succeeding at a smile this time, said, “Oh, happy birthday. Hope it’s been good so far for ya’.”

“Thank you.” I smiled back, wondering why the hell Jahleel felt he needed to tell her that. “It has been.”

That was a lie, of course.

Saskia turn and continued up the stairs.

Once she was out of earshot, Marsha whispered with bulging eyes, “Okay, so, I was trying my damnedest not to look starstruck — you know me and that pride shit — but, holy shitballs, isn’t that
Saskia Day
?!”

Laughing at her shock, I started to get up off the floor from among the heap of shopping bags around me. “Yep.”

Marsha shook her head and blew a breath as though she couldn’t believe she’d just been in the presence of one of the most famous pop/rock artists out there right now. Then she picked up a bag and whacked me with it, Marsha style. “And you failed to tell me your whore of a brother is screwing her?”

“I had
no
idea, I swear, Marsh,” I returned, as I began picking up the bags from the floor. “First time I met her was a few weeks ago. She hired JK. And while it was obvious she’d been caught under the spell of his unholy good looks just like every other dumb bimbo who sees him, he wasn’t so warm to her. He was kind of a dick, actually.”

Marsha shrugged as she bundled all her bags and started towards the living room. “Maybe she’d already fucked him.”

“Nope. I asked her and she’d said she hadn’t,” I relayed, strolling behind her. “Because she wanted to know the reason behind his asshole-ism.”

Marsha dropped the shopping bags on the couch — Jahleel had bought a new couch like I suggested, by the way — then swirled to face me. “
She
told you something that personal? This infamous celebrity you met for the first time?”

I deposited my own armful of bags on the couch. “Yep. She was pretty cool. She didn’t have that bitchy rock-star attitude you’d expect. I was actually rooting for them to be together,” I lied through my damn teeth. “But JK acted as if he wasn’t interested in the least. So, believe me, I’m just as shocked as you are to see her here.”

“Yeah, bitch,” she shot in an acerbic tone. “Root for
her
.”

“Sorry, Marsh,” I said on a one-shoulder shrug. “But if you wanna keep opening your legs for JK when you know damn well he doesn’t give a shit about more than sex with you, then that’s your problem.”

“Fuck you!” she spat.

I took it with another one-shoulder shrug.

Sighing, she flopped down on the couch among the shopping bags. “I know you’re right. But the problem is not me or any of the women he sleeps with, Krissy K.” She turned her glassy gaze to me and flat-out told me, “The problem is
you
.”

Unsure of what to make of that, even though I knew what she meant, I questioned, “What’re you talking about?”

Marsha made a frustrated noise. “It’s freakin’ obvious to everyone but you. Can’t you just take one unselfish second to open your goddamn eyes and see that JK’s — ”

“Shh,” I shushed. “You hear that?”

A loud blaring of Rihanna’s
Diamonds
sounded right outside the house. In the same minute, my cellphone vibrated inside my pocket. I pulled it out and saw a text message from
him
:

Outside.

Without so much as blinking, I rushed out of the living room and straight through the front door, skidding to a stop. Trevillo Nelson was standing next to my dream car: an Audi TT RS. In the exact color I always dreamed it would be: cherry red. Bright and shiny and brand new with a huge white ribbon slapped on the hood, right there in
my
driveway. Both of the doors were opened, spilling that diamond song.

Trevillo had his hands stuffed in his front pockets, watching me with uncertainty as if trying to gauge my reaction. Today he was Playboy Trev, in light jeans, sky-blue polo T-shirt, white chucks, and a white ball-cap on his head. Yep, he was looking more appealing than the sleek new car next to him.

“Damnnnn,” I heard Marsha mutter from behind me. “Bitch, you need to tell me your secrets.”

Ignoring Marsha, I continued down the steps and started walking around the sexiness that was Audi TT RS. I convinced myself long ago that when the manufacturers designed this car, they were thinking of me. I’ve never loved a car more. And here it was, delivered to me. Only, I couldn’t accept it.

“How did you know?” I distractedly asked as I trailed a finger around the shape of one of the headlights.

Trevillo half-snorted, half-chuckled. “You serious?”

To give him my full attention, I stopped admiring the car and went up to him. “How?”

“Uh,” he started off in a tone that heralded sarcasm. “Aside from it being the wallpaper for your laptop, both your cellphones, your iPad,
and
your iPod, I kind of just took a wild guess.”

Embarrassed, I slapped both palms over my face and groaned. “Oh, God. I didn’t realize I was
that
obvious.”

“Well, babe, it’s no longer a dream car. Now it’s real.” Grabbing my wrists, he yanked me up to him. “Happy Birthday, Miss Kingston.”

He lowered his head and kissed me, and I allowed him to, before I broke it to him, “I can’t accept it.”

Trevillo jerked his head back to look at me. “It’s your birthday.”

“I know, and I
love
the car. But I thought we agreed — ”

“It’s your birthday,” he repeated, as he let go of me and stepped back, his eyes getting hard and serious.

“Trev, I told you I didn’t want you to — ”

“It’s your fucking
birthday
!” he barked at me, making me jump.

Why was he getting so inflamed?

Then I felt a grip on my right arm, and I was being yanked backwards as Jahleel moved in front of me, glowering at Trevillo. “Listen up, assfuck,
you
don’t get to talk to her that way. She can’t be fuckin’ bought.”