The Bad Billionaire's Seven Kiss Negotiation novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Toast
Roland announces Jo's engagement to Conrad on a microphone, Jo says no in front of two hundred guests, Roland threatens Lila, and the bad billionaire offers a way out for seven kisses.
My stepfather tapped his champagne glass with a fork, and two hundred guests turned to look at me.
It was the thirtieth anniversary dinner of Amesbury Freight, in a hotel ballroom, with a photographer from the business section standing on a chair.
My stepfather had texted me that afternoon: "Wear the green. Nothing to worry about, kiddo."
So I wore the green, a size 20 silk wrap that showed every curve I had, and I had walked in feeling good.
Now he put his arm around my shoulders and smiled at the room.
"Thirty years," Roland Amesbury said. "And the best thing I ever did was raise two daughters who are better than I deserve."
People laughed and clapped.
He squeezed me once.
"I'm told I'm not supposed to steal anyone's thunder, so I'll let my favorite CFO say a word."
Conrad Aldous came up on my other side with his glass already raised.
Conrad had been my mentor at the company the summer I was twenty-three, and he had taught me how to read a balance sheet backward.
Ten minutes earlier, by the bar, he had touched my elbow and said, "Whatever he's about to do, I'm as surprised as you are."
He said it so smoothly that I'd looked for the reason in his face and found nothing.
"I'm not surprised at all," Conrad told the room now. "I've been waiting a long time for Jo to say yes."
Two hundred people gasped at once.
Roland lifted my left hand and held it up where the photographer could get it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my daughter Joanna and my friend Conrad are engaged."
Nobody had asked me.
Nobody had even asked me to dance.
Somebody started clapping, and then the whole ballroom did, and the flash went off three times.
I looked at Conrad.
He was smiling at me with real warmth, the same smile he had when he handed me my first bonus.
At the family table my stepsister Chantal had her phone up, filming, and she was grinning.
I looked at Roland.
He was crying a little, a proud father with wet eyes, and I knew that he had practiced it.
I reached over and took the microphone out of the stand.
"Thank you all for coming," I said. "I'd like to correct the record."
The clapping thinned out.
"I am not engaged. I have never been asked. I just heard about it with the rest of you."
Someone near the front laughed and stopped.
"Conrad, you're a good CFO. I'd rather marry the coat check."
The photographer lowered his camera, and then thought better of it and lifted it again.
Roland's hand closed around my wrist, and he kept smiling.
He leaned in to kiss my cheek.
"Put it down," he said, very softly, "or Lila does it instead."
My little sister was twenty and asleep in her dorm room across town, and she thought Roland hung the moon.
"She's a sophomore," I whispered.
"She's twenty. Conrad is a patient man. And her tuition and her housing and her trust all come through me, Joanna, every dollar. Think about who you're embarrassing."
I turned my head and looked at him from three inches away.
He was still smiling for the camera.
I had known this man since I was twelve.
He had taught me to drive stick in the company parking lot and had walked my mother's coffin out of the church.
I put the microphone back in the stand.
So I pulled my wrist out of his hand and walked out.
Two hundred people watched me do it.
No one stopped me, and no one followed except the sound of Roland saying, "She's overtired, everyone, please, have the salmon."
The coat check line was long, so I stood at the end of it with my hands shaking and my phone in my fist.
I had no idea where I was going.
My apartment was the first place Roland would look.
"Miss MacAteer."
I turned.
A man held out my wool coat, the camel one I hadn't yet handed over.
He must have taken it from the attendant himself.
He was very tall, in a black suit, with gray coming in at his temples and a scar through his left eyebrow.
I knew his face from every gossip site I had ever closed in a hurry.
Ansel Hawke.
The press called him the bad billionaire, because he bought companies the way other men bought watches, and because of a fight he'd started on a gala floor two years ago.
He had also sent flowers to my firm every month for three years, and I had sent every one of them to the hospice down the street.
"You walked out of there fast," he said. "I'd like to give you a ride away from it."
"I don't take rides from men who send me peonies."
"They were ranunculus."
"Mr. Hawke."
"My car is at the curb," he said. "It's raining, and that man will be through those doors any moment."
I looked back at the ballroom doors.
Then I took the coat.
His car was black and warm and smelled of leather.
A worn paper folder was sticking out of the door pocket.
He reached across me, slid it under the seat, and shut my door.
We pulled out into the rain.
My phone buzzed with eleven texts in a row, and I turned it face down on my knee.
"I can stop him," Ansel said, watching the road.
"Stop what?"
"Your stepfather. The engagement, the threat to your sister. All of it. I heard what he said to you."
"You were across the room."
"I was at the next table," he said. "I hear well."
I should have gotten out at the next light.
Instead I sat there, a lawyer who had never in her life signed a deal without reading the whole page.
"What does it cost?" I asked.
He glanced at me for the first time, and it was a long look.
"Seven kisses," said Ansel Hawke.
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