One Last Mistake: A Billionaire Romance (The Ironwood Billionaire Series Book 3) Read online

  Dirty Business

  A Billionaire Romance

  The Ironwood Billionaire Series

  By

  Ellie Danes

  www.EllieDanes.com

  Table of Contents

  Dirty Business

  Copyright

  Book Description

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  For Super Fans

  Free Books & Follow

  More From Ellie Danes

  Copyright

  First Edition, August 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Ellie Danes

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and situations are the product of the author's imagination.

  All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written consent from the author.

  License

  This book is available exclusively on Amazon.com. If you found this book for free or from a site other than an Amazon.com country specific website it means the author was not compensated for this book and you have likely obtained this book through an unapproved distribution channel.

  Book Description

  New Job. New Life.

  It was time to leave it all, and the mistakes I’d made, behind.

  At least that was plan, until I spent the night with him.

  He was supposed to be a one and done.

  Someone I’d forget and never think about again.

  Twenty-four hours later, my life is center stage.

  Standing in front of a thousand strangers

  and right next to the one-night stand I promised to forget.

  The man I had spilled all of my drunken secrets to.

  To make matters worse…he’s my boss’s son and he’s about to spill a secret of his own.

  Chapter 1

  Meredith

  I gripped the phone more tightly in my hand. If I were some kind of mutant superhero, I would have melted the plastic with my rage. “You have got to be kidding me,” I hissed.

  “Nope.” My ex-boyfriend’s voice was calm and carefree. “The deposit’s gone, we didn’t back out in time.”

  “You have to pay for half.”

  “Can’t. I’m in Thailand, and I don’t have access to anything. I’ll be back in a few days, but you’ll have to wait.”

  That was it. I was going out tonight and I’d have a good time and forget about stupid fucking I-lost-our-rental-deposit-Connor.

  Feeling incensed, I hung up on him and quickly turned around. Nobody else at the Marketing Masters event seemed to have noticed my heated conversation, so at least I was spared that embarrassment. They probably hadn’t noticed because it was the end of the event, everything was winding down.

  I called Ella, my best friend. She’d lived in New York for the past two years and she’d been so excited when I moved out here last week.

  “Yes?” she asked in a hushed voice, as if she was trying to rein in her excitement. “Are you in?”

  “I’m in,” I said breathlessly. “I am so in.”

  “Great. Wear something hot. We are gonna dance away our sorrows!”

  * * * * *

  I groaned audibly as I opened my eyes. A dull pain throbbed somewhere in the front of my skull, and my eyes felt puffy and dry. Discomfort stirred in my belly; not quite nausea but close. The hangover wasn't bad, but it wasn't particularly pleasant either.

  I was on the left side of my bed – the one I always slept on. I was tempted to roll over and try to get more sleep, but the sun was already blazing bright through the gaps in my drapes. It had to be eight or even nine o' clock in the morning – at least two hours later than my usual wake-up time. No, as sluggish as I was feeling, I didn't think it would be a great idea to stay in bed. I had already wasted so much of the morning.

  The bathroom door was right in front of me, so, summoning what little willpower I possessed, I stretched and managed to get myself out of bed. My glasses were on the floor next to the bed, so I stooped down and picked them up and then put them on, and the world became a lot clearer. I staggered over to the bathroom with single-minded purpose and stumbled in, closing the door behind me without looking back.

  My phone lay on the bathroom floor, which meant I’d definitely had a good time last night. I was usually quite fastidious about putting it on the bedside table when I went to bed. I made a point of taking care of my things. I got that from my dad, who was a mechanic, and who insisted on fixing things to the point where they couldn't be fixed anymore.

  I sat down on the toilet and started browsing through my MyFriends newsfeed.

  I saw something right away that immediately ramped up the level of nausea I was experiencing. Connor, my ex, had put up some photos of him and his new girlfriend on their vacation in Thailand. I knew that it would be a bad idea to look at them but I did anyway. Morbid curiosity.

  There they were on a beautiful white sand beach, fringed with palms, with bright turquoise water. And then the next one, dancing around a huge bonfire on the beach at night. And then the next, scuba diving in those clear waters with millions of brightly colored fish all around them.

  “Ugh, Meredith, why didn't you unfriend this jerk?” I muttered to myself as I closed his photos and went on browsing through the newsfeed.

  That was a good question actually – why hadn't I unfriended him and deleted him from my MyFriends? Well, it wasn't as if we’d had a crazy bad breakup. There hadn't been any cheating or betrayal or anything like that – well, nothing that I knew about, at least. There was just no spark, and despite the chaos of trying to move here with him, then things fizzling out and scrambling for a job and a place to live, well, I still hadn’t unfriended him.

  I wasn't jealous of the new girlfriend, because I sure as hell didn't want to be dating Connor. It was just that seeing them so happy, having this amazing time in this exotic location, made me feel like Connor's life had gotten way better since he and I had ended our relationship, whereas my own life had kind of, well, stagnated.

  It had been almost a year now since he and I had broken up. In that time, he had gotten a major promotion and had started earning an impressive salary. He had met this girl, and she seemed like an awesome person. This was the third overseas vacation they had been on together in the nine months they had been dating, and every vacation seemed better than the last.

  Me? I had quit my job after having had what had seemed like a very promising offer from New York come my way, only to then have that offer fall through, leaving me unemployed and stuck in New York City. I was very good with money, always had been – another thing I could thank my dad for – so I wasn't worried for the short term, because I had plenty of savings and investments to keep me afloat for a while.

  I liked working, however, and being unemployed was frustrating and unfulfilling. I needed to work, I needed to climb that corporate ladder.

&n
bsp; And that's why I had gone to that convention. Ella, my best friend, had set it up for me. She had a connection in a high-level multinational corporation and found out they were looking for a new marketing director. And me? I happened to be one of the best marketing directors around. I'd always known how to get a buzz going about something. It had started in junior high when a group of my buddies – I had been a bit of a tomboy back then – had started a garage band. They weren't that great, really, but I had gotten so into creating a buzz about them and promoting them that they had quickly become the most popular band in school, even more popular than much better bands who deserved that honor.

  And thus, I had taken my first steps on the path in the field of marketing.

  Things had gone very well last night at the convention, and I had met with Ella's connection, who assured me, after a brief interview, that the job would very likely be mine. He was going to call me back today sometime to confirm.

  Then there’d been the phone argument with Connor about a rental deposit from the place we’d lived together, over a year ago. He still hadn’t paid me the deposit, which I’d funded to begin with. And now it was…lost? He had a big shiny job; he should be able to pay me.

  But I didn’t want to get angry again. I brushed my teeth and tried to recall the good time I’d had at the club with Ella. I decided to give her a call.

  “Hey,” I said as she picked up the phone. “How are you feeling this morning?”

  “Hey, Meredith,” she replied. “Ugh, not so great. Those last two tequila shots we had last night, I don't think they were such a hot idea.”

  I laughed. “Maybe not, but did you see how you were dancing after those shots?”

  She laughed, too. “Things got a little crazy around midnight, didn't they?”

  “They really did. But hey, it was an occasion to celebrate, right? I mean, the guy who interviewed me, he was really impressed, and he basically told me the job is mine. Thank you so much for getting me into the convention.”

  “I'm so glad I was able to help. You're just waiting for the phone call to confirm it, right?”

  “I am, yeah,” I said with a grin.

  “Awesome. But hey, speaking of craziness, what ended up happening with that guy you went home with?”

  I froze as panic suddenly hit me.

  “Wait, wh-what?” I managed to stammer. “I...”

  She laughed. “No way, you forgot about him? Or did you like, invite him up to your place and then kick him out when you got to the door?”

  It all came rushing back to me in a flood of images and memories – blurry images and fuzzy memories but...there was no question about it. I had brought a guy back. And we had...we had slept together. I had been drunk. But yeah, he had been here, and we’d had a pretty wild time if the flashes of hot sex zipping through my memory were any indication.

  “No, uh, he's... we... I...” I stammered to Ella.

  She simply laughed. “You can give me all of the juicy the details later. I need to have a shower and get going, and you need to keep your phone line open in case that guy calls you to tell you that you've got the job. Wait, wait, let me rephrase that – you need to keep your phone line open for when the guy calls you. Because the job is totally yours, right? You've got this!”

  “I, I, yeah, I've got this,” I managed to mumble, still in shock about totally forgetting about the guy I had brought home last night.

  “You sound like you could use a little more sleep,” Ella said. “Go get back into bed, just put your ringer volume up real high in case the guy calls. I'll talk to you later, all right?”

  “Yeah, talk later. Bye.”

  “Goodbye, Meredith, and good luck.”

  I put the phone down and stared at my reflection in the mirror for a while. In a whisper, I asked myself, “Is he still out there?”

  He quite possibly was still out there. I hadn’t looked around when I got up. I mean, in my still-kinda-drunk state, I hadn't really thought about the possibility that there might be someone else in my bed! This was not a regular kind of thing for me. While it wasn't the first one-night stand I'd had, it wasn't like this was something I regularly did.

  We’d had a lot of alcohol last night, Ella and I, and then there were those two tequila shots to really get our motors revving. And when I get a bit of tequila in me, things can get messy. Crazy, even.

  It all started to come back to me now. The flashing, brightly-colored lights of the dance floor. The pounding bass beats of the music, infusing my eager muscles with rhythm. The hot guy with chestnut brown hair and piercing blue eyes, whose hips had moved with a slick, serpentine rhythm, whose casual confidence and subtle power on the dance floor had made me weak at the knees. His stubble-rough face in my hands, his lips on mine, my hands on his hard, muscular body....

  And then, that body in my bed, his sculpted torso slick with sweat as he and I had made passionate, fiery love late into the night.

  Wow. Just...wow.

  And until now, I had forgotten about all of that.

  Well, I sure as hell remembered it now. Those images and memories in my head were becoming ever clearer and fresher. And hotter.

  The sex wasn't the only thing, though. We had talked – we had actually talked a lot. He’d told me he was a CEO, although I couldn't remember what company he was CEO of. And he divulged things about his company, secrets I'm pretty sure he didn't mean to tell anyone. Alcohol had certainly loosened his tongue.

  Damn, I felt like I might have told him some secrets of my own. That wasn't good. What had made me feel I could trust this guy so much I could just blab everything to him? And, of course, on the other side of that coin, what had made me seem so trustworthy to him that he had just opened up to me about all his secrets? I wondered exactly what I had told him, and how much he remembered of what I had said.

  So, now the big question was, of course, where was he? Had this mysterious, dashing stranger slipped silently out during the night, or was he still here, snoring quietly in the bed? And if he was still here, what on earth was I going to do or say? I mean, yeah, he was hot, and the sex had been amazing, but a relationship was the last thing I wanted or needed right now. And even with the feelings of jealousy and, perhaps, loneliness that had arisen when I'd seen those photos of Connor and his girlfriend, it wasn't as if I had wanted to be with anyone again.

  If this guy was still here, things were probably about to get awkward.

  There was only one way to find out.

  I drew in a deep, calming breath and held it in my lungs.

  Come on, Meredith. You can do this. And he'll probably feel just as awkward and weird as you do, and then he'll mumble a hasty goodbye, and he'll quickly get his clothes back on and leave, and then you'll never see him again, and then you can just forget about this whole stupid thing. So that's what you're gonna do, isn't it?

  I looked at my reflection and nodded, my jaw set with determination. And hey, maybe, just maybe, he had already left, and then I was just getting myself all worked up for nothing.

  There was no reason to hesitate any longer. I turned around and opened the door – and almost screamed as I saw a naked man standing right there in front of me.

  Chapter 2

  Kyle

  I was dreaming; I knew that much. But it was one of those dreams that felt so real, so intensely real, that I lost myself in it, and forgot that it was a dream. Jimmy was there, and we were kids again. Dad was watching us run around the yard.

  “That's it, Jimmy!” he yelled, cheering on my older brother. “That's it! You're the fastest kid in the world—you're the fastest kid ever!”

  I was running behind Jimmy, trying my best to catch him but he was just pulling farther and farther ahead. A two-year age gap made for a huge difference in our abilities as children.

  “You won't catch him, Kyle,” yelled my dad. “You can't! He's faster than you, and he always will be!”

  The yard seemed to be getting longer and longer, bigger and bigger,
and the end of it disappeared into a thick wood at the bottom. I knew, suddenly, that something terrible was lying in wait for Jimmy and me in those trees, in the murky shadows between them. Jimmy, though, seemed totally oblivious and carried on sprinting right for them.

  “Wait, Jimmy!” I yelled, skidding to a halt and digging my heels into the soil. “Don't go!”

  But he just carried on running. And my father, also oblivious to the waiting danger, was cheering him on.

  “Jimmy, no! Jimmy, don't, don't go, stop!” I yelled, my voice hoarse with fear. The sky suddenly darkened and a thunderclap boomed from out of the blue. Jimmy plunged into the darkness, and then—

  I sat up with a jolt, sweating and breathing heavily. The fright from the nightmare remained, amplified by the fact that I was in a strange place, in a stranger's bed.

  “What the hell?” I muttered, looking around me, my senses on full alert. “Where am I?”

  I massaged my throbbing skull. My mouth was dry as desert sand, and my stomach was twisted in knots. The taste of whiskey lingered on my tongue...whiskey and something else. Someone else.

  Ah, yes, now I remembered, as I looked around the room. The gorgeous, curvy brunette with the black-framed glasses. I liked girls who wore glasses. And this one, man, she had looked sexy in hers. M... Melissa? Mindy? Mary? Fuck, I couldn't remember her name. This could get a lot more awkward than it already was. It wasn't as if I didn't have a ton of experience in this area, though. This wasn't exactly my first rodeo.

  She wasn't here in the bedroom but I could hear the sound of running water coming from the en-suite bathroom. Now, I had a choice to make. I glanced across at the floor, where our clothes were strewn in a messy trail leading out the door. Well, that brought back some pleasant memories from a few hours ago. Man, we had been making out like a couple of crazy teenagers when we had stumbled through her front door, devouring each other with hungry kisses and pawing madly at each other's bodies. Clothes had been ripped off in the single-minded path to the bedroom, scattered all over, and there they still lay.

  I could quickly climb out of bed, get my clothes on, and sneak out before she got out of the bathroom. There hadn’t been much security at her condo, so it wasn't as if I needed her to let me out or anything. So, I could slip away right now, avoid all the awkwardness of the morning after, and forget about the whole thing. And then that would be that; another conquest, another figurative notch added to the bedpost, and I could get on with my life, and she could get on with hers.