The Billion Heir (Billionaire Book Club #1) Read online

  The Billion Heir

  Billionaire Book Club #1

  Nikky Kaye

  Contents

  1. Luke

  2. Lexi

  3. Luke

  4. Lexi

  5. Luke

  6. Lexi

  7. Luke

  8. Lexi

  9. Luke

  10. Lexi

  11. Luke

  12. Lexi

  13. Luke

  THE NAUGHTY STEP

  COMING ATTRACTIONS

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Nikky Kaye

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Luke

  “So this is the woman who’s supposed to make me into a new man?” I asked my new lawyer. I’d gone for a coffee and came back to find a tall blonde waiting for me in Michael Cohen’s midtown Manhattan office.

  It was probably rude to imagine peeling the clothes off a woman you just met, but I’d never claimed to be a gentleman. At the moment she was covered up by slim black pants and a short black motorcycle jacket, but if she’d ever sat on a bike before I’d eat my left cowboy boot.

  She looked like the kind of girl that I’d avoided in college—the kind that wore dumbass fuzzy boots in the blazing summertime and who spent an hour putting her face on before class. Except her full parted lips didn’t even have a lick of gloss on them at the moment…

  “Kappa Kappa Gamma?”

  A furrow appeared between her eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”

  Maybe she wasn’t a sorority girl after all, or she wouldn’t look so confused. At least she hadn’t been Botoxed to death, like every other woman I’d met in New York so far.

  “Lucas Knox, this is Miss Kincaid.” Cohen waved his hand between us then gestured to the two black leather couches in the corner of his office.

  I tipped my head in acknowledgment. “Miss Kincaid.” It came out of my mouth sounding more like Miz, but I couldn’t help that. You could take the boy outta Texas, but you couldn’t take the Texas outta the boy.

  She flattened her expression like a Barbie doll. Cohen was already sitting on the couch, waiting for us to join him.

  “After you,” I said.

  Her gaze fell to my outstretched hand before wandering up the sleeve tattoo that was hidden by my jacket on the train. As she briefly examined me, my palms itched like I’d waved my hand over the tops of tall, wild grasses.

  I resisted the urge to make a fist until after she whirled around. When she did, I noticed two things—her ass was round and high, and my palms began sweating.

  “Mister Knox here has a bit of an unusual situation,” the lawyer began.

  Miss Kincaid and I sat on opposite couches. Where I sprawled out a bit, she sat up straight and stiff, like she was being threatened by a cattle prod.

  “Get to the point, Cohen.” Damn lawyers talked too much.

  “Owing to a tragic accident, Lucas here has come into a great deal of money.” He made it sound so simple, when it was anything but. Cohen continued, “And as you know, with great power comes great responsibility.”

  I snorted, propping my worn boots up on the glass coffee table. “I’m not Spiderman.”

  “How much money?” she asked. Her eyes were hazel, I decided. It was easier to examine her while all her attention seemed to be focused on my legs. She seemed familiar for some reason, but I knew we hadn’t met before.

  “Two billion and change. Less a couple of bucks for the coffee I got earlier.”

  Her gaze flew to my face, the color draining out of her cheeks. Her lips parted in surprise, her eyes widening to reveal a green tinge in her iris.

  “We’re not nickel and diming you, Lucas,” Cohen said.

  “I don’t understand,” she interjected. “How can I help?”

  “Mr. Knox is having some, er, adjustment issues, and we feel he would benefit greatly from optimizing his image.”

  Fucking lawyers, always talking around shit.

  “Miss Kincaid—” I dropped my feet back to the floor and leaned forward. Cohen sighed in relief. “You have a first name?”

  “Alexis,” she said stiffly.

  “Alexis,” I repeated, equally formal, then paused to connect some dots in my head. “Let me boil down the sugar for you here so we can make some hard candy. I am the bastard son of Charles Knox.”

  “Well really, Lucas, I think that term—”

  Alexis blinked at me. “The Charles Knox that is all over the news right now?”

  I nodded.

  “The one that died in a small plane crash with his family?”

  I jabbed my thumb into my chest. “Well, not his whole family.”

  Her cheeks pinked up again. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” She broke off, looking down at the floor. “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Knox.”

  “Thanks, I guess.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “Truth is, I barely knew the man. He sure as shit didn’t make an effort to know me.”

  I knew what his signature on a check looked like, but I didn’t know his real smile or his favorite color. When I was younger I’d imagined being a real family, making up details about him to friends at school until I got called into the principal’s office for being a liar. After that, I kept my musings to myself, like if he took cream in his coffee or drank it black to make him as bitter as I was.

  My mom had done her best, always, with everything. Tirelessly. She also tried to make it seem like I was immaculately conceived or something, but I’d always known exactly who my father was and exactly how much he’d screwed her over. After the cancer took her and the hospital bills took everything else, I got in touch with him to extort his condolences.

  “I’m sorry,” Miss Kincaid—Alexis—said again, bringing me back to the here and now.

  “Yeah, we weren’t exactly close. But for some goddamn reason he put me in his will and gave me a seat on the board of the grand old family oil company.”

  “And controlling shares,” Cohen added.

  Alexis nodded, as though she understood. How could she? I didn’t have a damn clue how this all happened. When Cohen had called me, I’d thought I was being pranked.

  I’d taken my dear old dad’s under-the-table handouts by direct deposit for the past five years, mostly so that I could pay off my student loans and afford to move around without being forced to get a full-time job. I didn’t see any reason to tell Daddy that I was working for non-profit and environmental groups trying to help people screwed over by companies like his. I’d never gotten so much as a birthday card from the sonofabitch. And now this.

  “And this was a total surprise to you.” Her tone implied that I was lying about something. I would have been offended if I didn’t already suspect that she was hiding something too.

  I leaned forward, my forearms braced on my thighs. Her body moved in tandem with mine as she bent over to listen to what I had to say.

  “Let’s put it this way, Miss Kincaid. I don’t give a shit about money, unless it can buy me a better steak or get me out of jail.”

  Her eyes locked on my arms again briefly before narrowing on my face. “Everyone gives a shit about money, Mr. Knox.”

  “Well, Miss Alexis,” I drawled, “there’s money, and then there’s money. I was getting by okay before without a private jet.”

  “So what’s the problem now? Your diamond shoes are too tight?” She pouted playfully, but there was an edge to her voice that wasn’t there before. Her quiet rancor surprised me. She looked like a typical Class A rich bitch, but the tone in her voice was almost… envious.

  I tilted my head. “Nah, but the platinum boxers are chafing my ba
lls.”

  The corner of her mouth lifted. At least she could take a joke. “So you want my PR expertise to spin this story somehow?” she directed to Cohen.

  “No, I want you to spin him.”

  She covered her gasp with a cough. Maybe her mind had gone straight to the same dirty place mine had. I smirked at her. Yeah, baby, you could spin right on my big, thick, billionaire cock.

  “I’m not sure what you mean, Mr. Cohen.”

  “Please, you can call me Michael now.”

  I looked between the two of them, curious about their connection. Why had he called her? Was he banging her? Alexis Kincaid couldn’t be much more than twenty-five, or at most no older than my own thirty. I found it hard to believe she was an expert in anything. Then it came to me—why I’d thought she looked familiar.

  I’d seen her picture online.

  “Alexis,” Cohen said gently, “Lucas is a no-name yokel.”

  “Lucas is also sitting right the fuck here,” I pointed out, wondering how much my bail bond would be if I punched him in the fucking throat. I could afford it now.

  “He needs help to learn the rules of the game. He’s barely online, other than e-mail.”

  I stifled a chuckle. No single man was “barely online”—that’s where all the porn was.

  Cohen was still lobbying hard. “You’d have a blank slate to work with. You can practically invent him from scratch on social media. You can help him with his image, his clothes, dating—”

  “Whoa! Hey, wait just a minute. I don’t need help with dating.”

  “I’m sure you don’t, Mr. Knox.”

  Damn right. I knew one or two things about pleasing a woman. At the very least, I knew more about pleasing women than I did about pleasing attorneys—such as this middle-aged, WASPy tool. And I suspected that I also knew more about his little friend Miss Kincaid than he did. A sudden flare of heat made me shift in my seat as we assessed each other.

  Her hair was darker blonde now, almost like a candy apple, instead of the straightened, bleached out hairdo she sported before. She sat still with her legs demurely crossed at the ankles, but anxiously worried the wrist of her black leather sleeve with her fingertips. Her lower lip was rosy and plump from biting on it, and as far as I could tell she didn’t have a single smear of makeup on her.

  She was still beautiful, in an ice princess kind of way. It was the faint crease on her forehead and the cheap vinyl—not leather—of her jacket that really intrigued me, however. She—well, she wasn’t what I expected.

  As if she felt the weight of my stare on her physically, her shoulders slumped a little. But as she nodded and listened to Cohen, she lifted an eyebrow at me and met my gaze with as much directness than she did in the subway earlier.

  “In any case, he needs help.” Cohen sighed. “I know you’re up for the challenge, right?”

  The look she gave him was downright glacial. “Yes, Michael, I know all about challenges.”

  Cohen’s confident smile dimmed. “I was hoping you would be interested in this contract, for old time’s sake. And I know you’re still trying to build your, uh, professional reputation. This job would be discreet, and it needs to be, well, transformative. We can’t have the board thinking he’s a phony poser when he shows up in a suit and tie.”

  I bristled, but Alexis just froze. Yeah, there was definitely something, some kind of bad blood between them. And I had a feeling I knew what it was. It was a little ironic that she was now pimping herself out as a social media expert. From what I knew, she was the reason social media existed.

  I cleared my throat. “Mr. Cohen? If I may?”

  They both turned to look at me with expressions of surprise. I shrugged. I could be polite if I had to be. I wasn’t a total Neanderthal, even if I did eat a lot of meat and wouldn’t mind clubbing Alexis over the head and taking her back to my cave.

  “Can I have a minute alone with Miss Kincaid?”

  “Sure, sure.”

  After he closed the office door behind him, I relaxed into the couch again. I stretched my arm over the back, my legs spread out just enough to get her blushing again.

  “Is there a question you have for me, Mr. Knox?”

  “You could say that.”

  She waited patiently while I scrubbed my hand over the buzz cut on my head. The tension in my temples needed the kneading of my fingers, but would have to wait. My headaches usually came on with a change in the weather, but apparently making it rain money also did the trick. That’s all this whole clusterfuck was—a big headache.

  I had a distant cousin Freddie who wanted me gone, a “charity” waiting for me to fuck up so it could get a healthy injection of venture capital, and a passive-aggressive dead daddy who put me in the middle of the whole mess.

  Had it only been a week since I’d heard the news of the plane crash? I felt like I’d aged ten years in that time. If I felt ten years older in a week, I couldn’t imagine what she felt… Eying her carefully, I just went ahead and asked.

  “Does he know about Sexy Lexi Kink-ade and your infamous sex tape?”

  Chapter Two

  Lexi

  I wanted to die. But I held my head high and tried to look bored. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Lucas Knox looked me over like he knew every inch of my body underneath my clothes. It took every muscle in my body to stay still. My heart pounded in my chest like I’d just sprinted up all thirty-five floors to the office.

  “Yes, you do,” he said slowly, his blue eyes laser bright. “But if he doesn’t—” He pointed to the door. “—I won’t say anything.”

  We were both silent, locked in a game of visual chicken. I blinked first, and hated myself for it.

  “I don’t know,” I finally managed. “If he knows. Besides, it’s ancient history.”

  I’d hoped it would be dead and buried, despite the fact that nothing ever really disappears from the Internet. I’d lucked out in that the scandal flared only briefly enough for me to profit from it before the gossipmongers moved on to somebody else. I’d brought it on myself, though.

  Social not-working had been my life until I had to get a real job in 2009. That year was not the best time to go job hunting, especially when you're nineteen years old and your only qualification is knowing how to plan a kickass party.

  Now, at the age of 26, I wished I could erase all my memories of that time, and the superficial, spoiled brat I'd been. Maybe if I'd gotten a reality show out of it, I'd be singing a different auto-tune, but I'd been basically dropped into the fire and told to look for a water bucket.

  Ironically, I’d turned one of the worst times in my life into a career in PR and image consulting. My phone was the primary weapon in my arsenal. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn—they were my lifelines. Theoretically, one of the best things about being your own boss was that you could work anywhere and anytime. The reality was that I was hard to work for, which meant that I worked everywhere and all the time.

  Something told me I would have to work hard and long for Lucas Knox, the smirking ray of sunshine sitting in front of me. The work didn’t scare me; it was the hard and long that I was worried about it.

  It didn’t help that the first thing I noticed about him was the bulge in his worn jeans. Eventually, my gaze wandered up to his face, where I was stuck for a while on the golden stubble on his jaw. His hair was a shade lighter, cut close to his head. The bridge of his nose was brushed by the sun a little more than the rest of his face, and had been broken just enough to mar the near-perfect symmetry.

  Lucas Knox was sex on a stick, with an attitude and a Texas twang, and I was already regretting answering Michael Cohen’s summons.

  When I’d arrived I wasn’t sure what to expect, other than a flood of painful memories. As I got off the elevator earlier, I noticed that the blonde wood reception area had been replaced by steel and glass, and everything seemed much more modern and sterile. I took a deep breath. I’m a grown up, I reminde
d myself. I’d done what I needed to do, and I was okay.

  “Alexis! It’s so good to see you! Thank you for coming right away.”

  “You too, Mr. Cohen.”

  The last time I was here he’d awkwardly held my hand as my world had crashed down around me.

  “I’m sorry, Alexis. This is all we can do.”

  “But isn’t there insurance?” I was still a teenager, for god’s sakes. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even know how to fucking drive. I tried to keep my emotions in check, especially since I wasn’t wearing waterproof mascara.

  “Your father invested your mother’s insurance. And now…”

  Cohen had later sent me a large personal check in a sympathy card, like I was a charity case. At the time I’d wondered if I was supposed to send him a tax receipt.

  Now I was still trying to build my professional reputation, because I had to. I had bills to pay and responsibilities to more than just myself. And as much as I’d like to tell Mr. Lucas Knox, newly minted billionaire, to go fuck himself, I couldn’t afford to.

  “What happens to the money?” I asked Lucas bluntly now. “You wouldn’t need me if this was just a matter of your inheritance.”

  “You’re a smart girl, Alexis.”

  My eyebrow lifted. “Surprised?”

  He shook his head slowly. “Nah, I’m not surprised.” I waited until he sighed. “If I don’t get a full vote of confidence from the board in on July first, the company is liquidated. There’s no provision for an alternate trustee.” He spread his hands out and shrugged, as if to point out how unlikely it was he’d receive such a vote in his current state—at least not in less than three months.

  “So what do you care? If you ‘don’t give a shit about money,’ that is.”

  He straightened out of his lazy posture, his jaw flexing. “Well, my asshole cousin will probably bring a civil suit on my ass, for one. And the money—well, the money will go to a bunch of lobbyists in DC.”