Bartered Proposal: The Billionaire's Wife, Part 1 (A BDSM Erotic Romance) Read online

  Bartered Proposal: The Billionaire's Wife, Part 1

  Ava Lore

  Copyright 2012 Ava Lore

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  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, the please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons either living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Bartered Proposal: The Billionaire's Wife

  by

  Ava Lore

  Part 1

  “I'm coming, I'm coming!” I yelled, wiping the last bit of clay from my hands as I stalked to the door. Someone outside was being awfully OCD with my doorknocker, and if they kept it up Mrs. Andersen from next door was going to leave another passive-agressive note shoved in the doorjamb, bringing the total this month to seven. And it was only the fifteenth.

  Exasperated, I ripped the door open. “What?” I snapped automatically. Then my breath caught.

  Jonathan Dare, founder of the multimillion dollar venture capital firm of Onyx Capital, and my biological and nominal father, stood in the hallway.

  “Felicia,” he said.

  I slammed the door in his face.

  That was my first mistake. What I should have done was beat him to death with the expired fire extinguisher sitting across the hall—an apparently permanent fixture that had been there since I moved in almost a year ago—but hindsight is twenty-twenty. Instead of committing patricide I very calmly began to root around in my tiny apartment for my phone while my father hammered on my doorknocker. I finally found it on top of a pile of library books that had been due during the last presidential administration. They had been serving time as the bedside table next to my futon. As a starving artist, I had to go with whatever worked.

  I switched on my phone and called my therapist.

  My father shifted to using his fist on the door. “Felicia? Felicia, please!”

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” I muttered as I listened to the phone ring. My heart soared at the click on the other end, then plummeted when the canned voice of my therapist informed me that she wasn't in right now, but that blah blah blah she was very sorry, blah blah, strove to serve her blah, leave your blah and blah blah and she would blah blah blah blah, beep.

  “Shit!” I hissed, and only an intense consciousness of exactly what the damn phone was worth kept me from throwing it at the wall.

  “Felicia, I need to talk to you!” In fine New York tradition, my father's voice was barely muffled by the flimsy piece of wood between us.

  “Go away!” I hollered, stomping back to my sculpture. I looked at it helplessly. I suddenly couldn't remember what I was supposed to be making. Desperately I milled about, gathering materials, rearranging them and thinking, manically, that it was about time I reorganized my workspace. Anything, anything to keep my mind off the fact that my shithead of a father stood outside my apartment. I hadn't seen him in almost four years. In fact, I had barely seen him at all when I was growing up. Once when I was seven he mistook me for the head housekeeper's niece. That's how great a father he was.

  “Felicia...”

  My jaw clenched. “Fuck off! I don't want to talk to you!”

  “Felicia, it's your mother!”

  I froze in the act of rearranging some of my self-designed tools.

  Mom.

  Was she okay? I had just talked to her two days ago. She had been fine then.

  I chewed the inside of my cheek.

  A lot can happen in two days, I thought.

  I shouldn't have opened the door. I knew better. My therapist, whose advice I could both ill-afford and ill-afford to disregard, had taught me all about setting boundaries with my family. Preferably, she had said, an official international boundary. But I hadn't listened, had I? And now my father was here. Talking about Mom.

  Taking a deep breath, I opened the door. My father started, pausing in mid-pound.

  “What about Mom?” I demanded.

  Relief flickered over his face. “We need to talk,” he said.

  “We can talk here,” I told him. “And you can make it quick.” It was the sort of decisive, ruthless command that would have made him proud of me, once upon a time.

  Instead, to my utter horror, he burst into tears.

  I stared at him. I had never, ever seen my father cry. In fact, if you had asked me five minutes earlier if he were capable of it, I would have told you that reptiles couldn't produce tears.

  I stood in the doorway, wavering, my heart in turmoil. He was a shitbag, sure, but he was my shitbag father. And he didn't look so hot, now that I had time to study him. His hair, usually so meticulously combed, was in disarray, and his stupidly expensive Italian suit was wrinkled as though he had slept in it. It looked too big on him, too, and I was shocked to realize that he had lost weight. Jonathan Dare had always been a robust man, a college football star gone slightly to seed. Now he looked like a man wearing my father's skin, draped over a bony frame I didn't recognize.

  Glancing back over my shoulder at my unfinished work, I hesitated.

  My father saw my moment of weakness. Another mistake. He pounced.

  “Felicia, please. We have to talk.”

  I was going to regret this. I knew it.

  Nevertheless, I found myself giving in to him, like I always did. Because I wanted him to love me. Because I needed his approval. Apparently knowing this wasn't enough to fight it.

  “Fine,” I said. I grabbed my keys and purse from beside the door, and stepped outside. “Let's get this over with.”

  *

  I took him to the local coffee chain, which I hated, but I didn't dare take him to Rick's or Shade's Cafe. I didn't want his presence to taint the places I actually liked.

  “Okay,” I said as we sat down across from each other at dark wooden tables carefully designed to look intimate and indie. “What's going on?”

  He stared down at the cup in his hands, and I tried not to do the same. I'd noticed the significance of his order the second he'd placed it: smallest size, black coffee. The cheapest thing on the menu besides water.

  My father never ordered the cheapest thing on the menu. He always said that looking poor invited being poor. That little cup of coffee between us on the table sent alarm bells clanging in my head, even more so than his tears. He could have been crying just to manipulate me, but appearing poor?

  Something was definitely very wrong.

  “Felicia, I need your help,” he blurted suddenly. “Everything's gone all wrong, and I can't fix it. I need you, you're the only one who can do it. Please, Felicia.”

  Oh my god. I stood up. “You said this was about mom,” I snapped. “I'm leaving.”

  “She's sick.”

  Perhaps, I thought, sitting down was a better idea.

  I sat. I blinked. “What?” I said, stupidly.

  Tears brimmed in his eyes again, and I could have almost sworn they were real. But why would my father cry over the woman he had married? As far as I could tell, he'd never given a second thought to her after the ink on the marriage certificate was dry.

  “She has cancer,” he said, and the words came out in a sob.

  I fe
lt cold. Looking down at my hands, I flexed my fingers, trying to warm them up. “What do you mean, she has cancer?” It was a stupid question. But I'd just talked to mom two days ago. Why had my father flown all the way out here to tell me she was sick? Why couldn't she have told me in a phone call? Surely she was already in treatment.

  None of this felt right.

  My father shook his head and mopped at his eyes with a napkin. “We found out a week ago,” he was saying, “but we couldn't start chemo.”

  My mouth went dry. “Why not?”

  He brought his hands to his face, and I was shocked to see them covered in liver-spots, wrinkled and papery. They were the hands of an old man.

  “I'm ruined,” he said.

  My mouth dropped open. “What do you mean, ruined?”

  He shook his head, unable to speak, and took a few deep breaths. “There's no money left,” he said finally. “It's... it's gone.”

  I pressed my lips together. “It's gone?” I couldn't believe it. My father was richer than King fucking Midas. How did that kind of money just... disappear? “How the hell did you manage that? You don't have the houses? The cars? All the artwork?”

  “It's all leveraged. Everything. I owe it all.”

  Shock numbed me. “You... is this about the company, or you?”

  “Both.”

  “You crossed the streams?” How was that even possible? The corporation should have had enough equity and assets to fund any venture, no matter how stupid.

  “It was private. I wanted to start up a new company on my own. But it didn't work. And the company... well, financial empire building isn't what it once was. We're broke. I'm broke.”

  I sat there in silence. Across the coffee shop someone burst into laughter and the noise grated against my nerves.

  “Are you on drugs?” I finally said. “What on earth made you do those things?”

  He finally lowered his hands, but he didn't look at me. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe I was.”

  Holy shit, I thought. “How much do you owe?”

  He told me. The number he quoted was so huge that even if I grabbed a plane and sacks full of dollar bills and spent a month dumping money into the Pacific, I wouldn't have come close to making a dent in what he'd wasted.

  I sat and stared at him some more. “Are you for real? Jesus Christ, meth-heads are better at money than you. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  He just shook his head and I realized that was all I was going to get out of him.

  I leaned back, reeling. “Why don't you guys declare bankruptcy?”

  “Because... it's my life, Felicia.” I flinched at my name. “I can still fix it, I just need enough capital. And I could cook some books and get it, but...” He trailed off. “Your mother should have started chemo last week. But I can't afford it. Every bill is past due, my credit is tapped out, and I dropped the insurance a few months ago to free up some money...”

  This couldn't be real. No one could have been this stupid.

  “So it's just pride that's keeping you from saving mom.” I stared at him, cold with fury. If he wanted to ruin his own life, well, he was welcome to it, but to drag mom down with him... I couldn't stand it.

  “No,” he said, and he finally looked up at me. “No, I have a plan. I have a backer. Someone who believes in my vision. I can get it done, but I need his help. And... there's a condition.”

  I had an oddly clear premonition. “This is one of those Indecent Proposal things, isn't it?” I said. My voice was too loud. Heads turned in our direction. “Holy shit. I'm your daughter.”

  “No!” he said, his face flushing, his eyes darting this way and that. “No, it's not like that.”

  “What, I have to sleep with him and he'll give you a million dollars and I'll see diddly? Is that it?”

  “No! It's...” He turned to his omnipresent briefcase, popped it open, and pulled out a contract as thick as a paperback book. He extended it to me, but when I just stared at him, he set it on the table between us.

  “It's a marriage proposal,” he said.

  I started to laugh. “Oh my god. Oh my god. You were always such a humorless dick, I thought you were serious there for a while!” It still wasn't very funny—joking around about cancer was a seriously shit thing to do—but the relief I felt was so welcome that I felt I could forgive it. After all, if all his sins had been as relatively innocent as a joke about cancer he would have practically been a shoo-in for heaven instead of the soulless earth-bound lich he was.

  “It's not a joke,” he said quietly.

  I stopped laughing.

  “Who's this backer?” I said. Visions of his usual colleagues danced through my head. Getting married to one of the corporate aristocracy was probably on my bucket list somewhere between eat bucket of toenails and break own kneecaps with ball-peen hammer.

  He took a deep breath. “Anton Waters.”

  My eyebrows lifted so far they were in danger of wandering into my hair.

  “The Anton Waters?” It was too absurd to be real.

  I looked at the contract in front of me, and sure enough, there was his name. Anton K. Waters. A man I'd only read about in magazines and heard about on tv and in idle gossip in online forums. The ruthless, powerful, and boringly attractive lord of Empire Capital, one of the biggest corporations in existence. He'd risen to prominence from nowhere over the short course of ten years until he was on the top of the heap, leaving the bodies of competitors and colleagues alike in his wake. Anyone who got in his way was disposed of without ceremony or even, it was said, emotion.

  Or so I'd heard. And I'd heard a lot. Lately no one could shut the hell up about him for more than five seconds. He'd been on all the major magazine covers, sometimes twice, and even in my relatively television-free existence every other news report I'd happened to catch seemed to mention him in some way.

  And here was a marriage contract, like something out of the nineteenth century, staring at me. With his name on it.

  What's the catch? I wondered. Because there had to be a catch. There was no way a guy like Anton Waters needed an arranged marriage to get him hitched. He made money and fucked bitches. Probably. That's what young, powerful, rich, handsome men did. My father had been one, once.

  And look where it got him.

  And mom, a little voice whispered. Look where mom is now.

  I licked my lips. “What's in this contract?” I said.

  “You'll want a lawyer to go over it with you,” he said, “but it's like a prenup.”

  A prenup. Right. “And what business does Anton Waters have asking for an arranged marriage?”

  My father looked away. “I don't know. He said his reasons were his own. You don't have to sign it. You can walk away. It's merely a condition for his backing.” Walk away and leave your mother to die. The implication hung in the air between us.

  “He's going to pull your ass out of the fire and all he wants is to get married sight unseen to a woman he's never met before?” I asked him. Saying it out loud somehow made it sound even worse than it was.

  A ghost of a smile flitted across his face. “Well, that, ninety-five percent of the profits, directional control of the venture—”

  I held up a hand. “Stop. I don't care.” I reached out and gave the contract a tentative nudge, wondering if it were rigged to explode. It probably was, in a way. I was going to have to find a good lawyer. And not just a good lawyer, but a lawyer a lawyer unscrupulous enough to take part in essentially selling me off to be married like a piece of property.

  Haha. Good one. I could just run down to the state bar office and throw a rock, probably.

  I took a deep breath. The contract in front of me gave me the impression of a great weight, as though it had it's own gravitational pull, one strong enough to derail my entire life.

  “What does mom think about this?” I asked quietly.

  My father looked down at his hands. He fiddled with his fingers, pulling and kneading.

 
“She doesn't know, does she?” I knew it. And she hadn't told me when I'd talked with her two days ago because she didn't want me to worry.

  Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  “He wants to meet with you first,” my father said. “He said you should drop by any time you like. His door is always open to you. He wants to make sure you will... meet his needs in a wife.”

  Meet his needs? Christ, that sounded ominous. A cold fist closed around my stomach and squeezed.

  “This is completely ridiculous,” I said. “You know that, right?”

  My father didn't answer.

  I picked up the contract and stuffed it into my messenger bag. “I'll go talk to him,” I said. And give him a piece of my mind while I'm at it.

  The look of naked relief on my father's face made me want to punch him. He'd destroyed my mother's life without a thought, and now he wanted me to destroy my own by letting him use me as a pawn.

  Well. I loved my mother, but I wasn't her. I stood up and walked out of the coffee shop, not even saying goodbye to my father. I was the master of my own fate. I wouldn't let some man control me, and if Anton Waters thought he could buy someone's hand in marriage in this day and age, he had another think coming.

  *

  Empire Capital, like most of its sister companies—each fairly interchangeable and all with thrusting, dominating names clearly compensating for something—stood on Wall Street. It looked like a mausoleum on the outside, so I was surprised when I entered the mezzanine to find the insides gutted and remodeled in an ultra-nouveau post-modern style. On the one hand, I could appreciate the fine, smooth lines of a well-designed space, but it made me angry that someone had been paid handsomely to minimize the character of the building while I, struggling alone in my art studio, strove to put character into the world. It was clinical. And also I liked old buildings.

  Anton Waters, I decided then and there, was a jerk.

  I strode up to the front desk, sleek and cleverly fashioned and utterly alone in the center of the dark gray slate floor. The receptionist behind it tapped away on a thin white keyboard and stared at a thin white monitor. She wore the tiniest of bluetooth headsets. Also white. Naturally.