Escorting The Billionaire #2 (The Escort Collection)

C
opyright
© 2015 by Leigh James

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. v. 04252015.

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I
looked
out the window as the sun came up. The roads outside were empty, just like my apartment.

I’d just had the best night of my life, and true to form, I’d managed to ruin everything.

Audrey was gone. She’d gotten up as soon as I’d said those horrible words. She left in her sweatpants and a tank top, leaving the wardrobe that Elena had packed for her behind. I’d followed her out of the bedroom and silently watched as she’d thrown on a pair of aviator sunglasses and grabbed her pocketbook.

“Do you want to take the car?” I asked just as she was almost out the door.

She turned, pushing her sunglasses down on her nose to look at me. “James.” She looked as if my name tasted like poison in her mouth. “Go fuck yourself.”

Then she slammed the door behind her.

I didn’t blame her. And even though I had forced her to leave, I hated that she was gone.

I hated myself even more.

I got dressed for the gym. I was going to punish myself, starting right now.

I
was sitting
in the common room at New Horizons, watching dust motes fly through the early morning light. Tommy was drinking orange juice and reading a graphic novel. He’d been happy to see me, and now we were just sitting together, both comfortably lost in the silence—me in my thoughts, him in his novel.

James had broken my heart. I had given myself to him last night. For the first time in quite possibly forever, I hadn’t held anything back. I was with him because I’d wanted him. And when he took me, every single cell in my body told me it was right. That I belonged to him.

I was his escort. His hired plaything. But there was something else going on between us. Something real that you couldn’t pay for or pretend.

I’d thought he felt it, too.

So. Fucking. Stupid.

Tommy reached over and patted my shoulder. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I lied. He watched me for a second and then went back to his book. I went back to my study of the dust motes. I loved Tommy. He was the one person who loved me and now I was sure, the one person in the world I could trust.

And now I didn't know how I was going to be able to keep him safe.

“
E
lena
, I’m sorry,” I said, fighting back tears. I paced back and forth inside my apartment. “I told you, I don’t know why he did it.”

“He must have had a reason to fire you two days before the wedding,” she wailed. I held the phone back from my ear and winced.

I fucked his brains out, and then he told me I was fired,
I wanted to say. That was the truth.

I was his escort, and he hadn’t wanted to fuck me.

Then he finally did.

Then he fired me.

It. Made. No. Sense.

“I’m sure you can keep the deposit,” I said, trying to be upbeat. James had paid her one hundred thousand dollars, cash, up front. “That’s decent payment for one week’s worth of work.”

“I was pretty interested in the other half, too,” she said.

“Maybe you could offer him one of the other girls,” I said over a large lump forming in my throat. “Someone more to his liking.”

“I
thought
he liked you,” she said.

“I thought he did, too,” I said, and I could feel the tears about to come. I bit the inside of my cheek to stop them.

Elena sighed again. “I’ll call him now.”

“Elena—one more thing,” I said. My stomach flipped nervously; I didn’t want her to be any angrier with me than she already was.

“What?” she asked.

“I left all the clothes and the jewelry over there,” I said, the words tumbling out on top of each other. “I had to leave quickly and I just… did. I left. Without taking them.” It was thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes, shoes, bags, and jewelry. A lot of it was on loan from a luxury goods company. Elena was going to kill me.

I took a deep breath. “And I sort of told him to go fuck himself. So he might be a little angry.”

The silence on the other end of the line was deafening.

“Dre,” she said finally. Her voice was flat.

“What?” I asked, bracing for it.

“You’re fired.”

F
ired twice in one day
, just when I thought things were finally turning around.

I should have known better. In my twenty-two years, things had never turned around for me. I curled myself up into a ball on my futon, watching as the sun came up over the sky.
I hate the sun,
I thought, and I did. I hated the sun, the sky, my futon, and James Preston. Not necessarily in that order.

I had no idea what I was going to do now. Without Elena’s assignments, it would be back to trolling for dates online. Or parking my ass on a street corner, trying to flag down Johns. Or waitressing.

Probably, it was going to be a combination of all of these. But none of it would be enough to keep up with Tommy’s rent. I couldn’t even bear the thought. Before he’d moved in there, he’d lived with my mother. It was a bad situation. My mother was, at best, a drunk. At her worst, she was an irresponsible, abusive user. She’d almost set their apartment on fire three times over the last couple of years by passing out with a lit cigarette in her hand. It wasn’t safe for Tommy there. She never bought him the food he liked or took him to the library. And then there was the string of dirty men she brought home.

I’d tried to move him in with me but I couldn’t do it and work. He needed someone to watch him, to take care of him. Once he’d wandered off and once he’d burned himself trying to make a grilled cheese. New Horizons was the right place for him; it was the happiest he’d ever been.

I needed to help him, and now I couldn’t help him.

I let the tears come then, hot and ugly. And then just as quickly as they’d come, they stopped.
Winners never quit and quitters never win
, I told myself, wiping my eyes roughly. I’d read that quote somewhere, and I often repeated it to myself, even though my definition of “winning” was probably wildly different from most people’s.

I made myself sit up—I wasn’t any good to anyone if I was just sitting here and wallowing. I’d found a way to keep Tommy safe this long, I reasoned. I could still do it.

I could do it because I had to do it.

I got up and washed my face. I had the idea of going to the library; they had computers and Internet access. I could look for a job online. Part of me wondered whether I’d be able to google “escort services” or “exotic dancer positions” at the public library, but it was better than sitting here, cursing James Preston for firing me and sniffling into my T-shirt.

The phone rang as I was getting dressed. It was Elena. I took a deep breath before I answered it, preparing for the worst. Maybe James had taken my clothes and thrown them all out. Maybe he’d told her that I’d stolen from her, and that he was going to press charges.
He wouldn’t do that,
part of me wailed, but that was the same part that had believed he’d cared for me.

The common sense part of me bitch-slapped that part, hard, so she’d be quiet.

“Dre,” she said.

“Yes?” I asked, willing myself not to start crying all over again.

“You’re back in my good graces, young lady. I just got off the phone with James Preston—he says he wants you back. He made it clear that he
only
wants you. He also very generously offered to triple the fee for our trouble. Half is now coming directly to you, per his very specific instructions.”

I couldn’t breathe. I stood there, reeling for a bunch of different reasons. I wasn’t good at math, but this was pretty easy to figure out—three hundred thousand dollars.
Holy fucking shit.

“It appears you have nine lives, Dre. But only seven left.”

“What?” I spluttered, finally finding enough breath to talk. “What did he say, exactly?”

“Just what I told you. Oh—and one more thing,” Elena said.

She waited a beat.

“He said that this time, he wants to fuck you.”

I
n the Stratum's gym
, I made myself run hard. Then I lifted weights. I did squats. Lunges. Pull-ups. An attractive young blonde nearby kept looking at me, smiling. She started following me on the weight circuit, that stupid friendly smile plastered on her face.

Finally, I just turned and glared at her. “I’m not interested,” I said before she even had the chance to say hello. She just raised her eyebrows and, scowling, backed away.

Smart girl.

My phone rang, and for a second, my heart stopped.
Audrey.
But of course, I’d driven her away so cruelly that it wasn’t her. It wasn’t ever going to be her.

Instead, it was Elena.

“
What?
” I snapped.

“Mr. Preston,” she said in an apologetic tone, “I just got off the phone with Dre. I am so sorry.”

“What did she tell you?” I asked.

“That you fired her. She wasn’t forthcoming with a reason, but I can only imagine,” she said. “The wedding is this weekend—please, let me make it up to you. Let me send another girl. You can tell your family that you’ve been dating her on the side, and that at the last moment, you decided to bring her as your guest instead.”

“Elena,” I said, wiping my face roughly with a towel, “that’s a stupid fucking idea.”

I heard her sigh. “What do you want me to say? We have to figure something out. I don’t want to leave you like this.”

“You mean you don’t want to lose my business, and you don’t want me saying bad things about your service.”

“That’s certainly true,” she said, “but I also don’t want to leave you stranded right before these big events. Please tell me what I can do to make this better.”

I watched the blonde I’d scared off eyeing me warily from her spot on the treadmill. I thought of my perfect apartment upstairs, immaculate and barren.

“Please tell Audrey I’d like her to come back. I’ll triple the fee for her troubles. You need to ensure me that half of that money will go directly to her. She’s the one earning it.”

“Of course, Mr. Preston,” she said, and I heard barely concealed glee in her voice.

I watched the blonde begin to run, her tits bouncing up and down. But I only thought of Audrey. How she’d arched beneath me last night, moaning. How she’d slept in my arms.

“And Elena, please tell her that this time, I would like to enjoy the full range of her services.”

I
had
Kai take me to her right after I took a shower. I was worried that if I let more time pass, she would run away and hide.

I called Elena again from the car. “I need her street number, please,” I said.

“Mr. Preston, I don’t usually—”

“I’m in her neighborhood right now. Give it to me,” I snapped.

I repeated it to Kai, and he turned down the street into a sad-looking neighborhood. The yuppies had clearly not gotten to this part of town yet. The row houses were all triplexes, in various stages of sagging. Audrey’s was painted a bright turquoise; the paint was peeling in large, insidious-looking curls.

I went up and rang her buzzer.

“What,” she said flatly.

“It’s me,” I said. “James. I’m here to pick you up.”

There was nothing but dead silence for a moment, and I held my breath. I wasn’t sure what she was going to do. I buzzed again.

“Audrey.”

“What,” she said again.

“Let me up.”

“Yes, sir,” she said and buzzed me in.

I went up the ramshackle, worn stairs to her apartment, located on the second floor. The building smelled foul, of odd spices and indoor cats. I knocked, and she opened the door, a neutral look plastered across her face.

“I could have just come to you, you know,” she said, stepping aside so I could enter. “You don’t need to see this—it’s not exactly the penthouse condo at The Stratum.”

I went past her into the apartment. It was neat and clean but otherwise in very sad shape. The sagging hardwood floors were worn thin. It was a studio, so the so-called kitchen opened onto the main living space. Her oven looked as if it were built for a doll. There was a forlorn purple futon in the middle of the room. Other than a boxy television set and a stunted-looking spider plant, that was pretty much it.

“I thought you made decent money with Elena,” I said, looking around.

“I do,” she said. “But I have other people to take care of.”

“Your brother.”

She nodded, her face impassive. I was pretty sure her brother was the only reason she’d agreed to come back to me.

I stood there, clenching and unclenching my fists. Audrey said nothing. Her face looked puffy and red, as if she’d been crying.

“Are you ready to go?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said formally.

I wasn’t sure how to handle her right now, or what to say. I just wanted her back. The dark mix of emotions behind that want, the pressing need I had to be with her—all of that got shoved to the back of my mind, where I could ignore it at my leisure.

“Audrey…” I grabbed her arm and pulled her to me, but she was as stiff as a board against my embrace. I immediately let her go. I couldn’t stand to feel her like that, indifferent and limp against me. I remembered her face last night. She’d smiled at me at one point, when I was on top of her. And I’d known then what I knew right now.

But I didn’t let myself think about it. Instead, I led my highly compensated prisoner out the door and pondered my next move.