The Billionaire’s Surprise Baby by Lisa Kaatz
Nate
Merger proceedings are well underway by early June. Everything has occurred precisely as I planned, except for the name. I’d wanted to read Madison & Adler. Jax insists on Adler & Madison.
His reasoning is sound. I’ll give him that. My name is basically mud and the name Adler carries a certain level of respect. Adler means established, reliable, and trustworthy.
Madison means…
Well, Madison means a lot of things.
So I let him have it. Whatever. The name isn’t the most important part. The fact that I’ll be a stakeholder in Adler Co is. And as his equal partner, I’ll gain all of Jax Adler’s resources and contacts virtually overnight.
This deal is going to make me an even richer man than I already was.
But I hate the way that, in every meeting with the Adler’s, I look up as the brothers file in and hold my breath, not realizing until that moment that I was waiting for Sydney to walk in.
She never does.
She’s busy, they say, and she doesn’t really care about the details of what goes on with the business.
I wonder if she’s avoiding me.
I know that she voted in favor of the merger, though.
So she must not hate me enough to sabotage a good deal.
Just enough to avoid seeing my face if at all possible.
But for the final signing of the contract, which is today, she’ll have to be there. All of us have to be. Me, the Adler brothers, our gaggle of overpaid lawyers, and…Sydney.
I’m sitting in the boardroom I’ve spent the last seven weeks in, overlooking the foggy city sky. The door behind me opens and I look over my shoulder lazily, hoping that nobody can tell on my face that I’ve been looking forward to this moment for weeks.
Jax takes his seat across from me, his lawyers flanking him on either side like bodyguards. Reid is on the other side of the lawyers and Pierce next to him. As though they’re avoiding sitting beside me. Of course, this leaves only one seat left at the table and it’s the seat directly to my left.
From the corner of my eye, I see Sydney and her bright red hair sit down beside me. She’s got that same smell that she had before. Her shampoo or her body wash or whatever. Whatever it is, it smells like a strawberry smoothie and my cock has a trained response to the scent by now. Like it automatically associates strawberry smoothie Sydney with impending hot sex, apparently missing the memo that we broke up a long time ago and she’s not about to rip her clothes off and straddle me.
I shift in my seat and then lift my chin from the papers in front of me and give Jax a stiff smile.
“Here we are at last,” I say.
He nods.
“It’s been a long road,” he replies. “I have to say, I’m glad it’ll be over soon so I can stop having to review all these contracts. And sit in your uncomfortable chairs, Madison. We’ve got to get your office some better chairs.”
“Shall I ask the lawyers to draft an amendment about chairs before we sign?”
Jax snorts.
“God no,” he says. “I want to get out of here before dinner.”
I smile a little bigger. Somehow in the last few weeks, I’ve won Jax over. Maybe he doesn’t like me, but it seems like he at least respects me. Coming from a man like Jax, that’s a compliment. He was and is my biggest inspiration when it comes to business.
He’s why I got into it in the first place. Maybe I’ll tell him that one day. One day long after the ink is dry on these papers and he can’t back out or second guess the decision.
“Can we please hurry?” Sydney says beside me. Her voice is like dark honey, soft but husky. “I had to leave Thomas with Ayla for the night and I don’t want to be out late.”
“Ayla is happy to watch him, you know,” Jax says.
“Yes but I miss my son,” Ayla replies. “I’m not used to spending so much time away from him.”
“Well today we’re just signing,” he says, turning to his lawyer. “Shouldn’t take long. Right?”
“Right,” he replies. “Although I do believe it would be prudent to do one last review of our final terms aloud.”
Pierce Adler groans. I bite my tongue, resisting the sarcastic, cutting remarks that come to mind any time that Pierce reminds me of his existence.
“Fine by me,” Jax says, looking back at me. “Nate?”
“Fine,” I reply.
Together, our lawyers go over the two-inch thick contract line by line. I should be listening but I don’t. I’m taking slow, deep breaths and savoring every moment I spend beside Sydney. Glancing down, I can see that she’s wearing a black pencil skirt and six inch heels.
Kill me now.
My cock is rock hard. Did she wear that thing on purpose? She knows what that skirt does to me. And now I am dying to know whether she’s wearing that little garter belt with the silk bows underneath. The one she wore to surprise me at the office last year.
I reach a hand between us and brush my knuckles against her thigh.
She stiffens beside me and I wait for her to slap my hand away. I’m fully expecting it. She hates me. I made sure she hated me when I broke things off with her. In fact, that was sort of the point.
So why would she let me lay a hand on her sweet skin now?
But she doesn’t push me away. So I press my luck, pushing my fingertips beneath the hem of her skirt to explore the answer to my question. I find it when I feel the clip on the top of her stocking, connecting to a strap that leads up her thigh.
I look around the room. Everyone is immersed in their personal copies of the contract, reading along as the lawyer recites it in monotone.
I steal a glance at Sydney and she’s doing the same as the others, or at least she’s pretending to. Unlike everyone else, her eyes aren’t moving around the page with the words. And she’s biting her lip.
I push her thighs apart and bring my hand higher up her inner thigh, pushing her skirt up, intent on reaching my target and finding out whether she’s wearing lace today when the lawyer asks me some question.
She glares at me and shoves my hand away, pressing her thighs together.
So much for exploring her undergarments.
“Is this amenable to you, Mr. Madison?”
I glance up. All eyes are on me.
“Yes,” I say automatically.
Jax nods and everyone goes back to the contract, heads down again.
Fuck. What did I just agree to? I’ve let myself become distracted once again by Sydney Adler.
* * *
“This calls for a drink,”I say.
The review is done. My hand is cramping from signing and initialing the contract in several hundred places.
“I’d think so,” Jax says. “I’ve heard you like your scotch, Nate. Let me buy you a round and loosen your tongue now that we’re officially partners. I need to know how you snagged Livingston away from us. It’s been keeping me up at night.”
“No harm in letting you know the secret now, I guess,” I say with a grin.
Sydney rises from the table, folding her jacket over her arm and slinging her purse over her shoulder.
“I need to get home,” she says. “To check on Thomas.”
“Thomas will be fine,” Jax replies softly. “Besides, he’s asleep by now isn’t he? He’s not missing you. And you’ll deny Ayla the privilege of rocking with him in the chair if you come home too early.”
Sydney sighs.
“She’s a mom now,” I comment. “It’s fine. I know how it is. Having kids and all. No more fun nights out, right?”
I guess I say the wrong thing because she straightens up and looks at me, cheeks blushing.
“For your information,” she says. “I still have fun. Becoming a mother didn’t turn me into an old maid overnight or something. And parenthood is fun. Believe it or not. But I don’t expect you to understand something like that.”
It’s like her words suck all the air out of the room. Even Pierce looks like he might feel bad for me. I look at her.
“I never said you don’t have any fun,” I say. “Just that I understand if you need to bounce. It’s hard to stay out all night when you’ve got a little one at home. Kids change things. It’s fine. I don’t need to have children of my own to understand that.”
“Right.”
She turns on her heel and opens the door, looking over her shoulder and calling back to us.
“Roberta’s,” she says, naming a popular bar downtown. “Let’s go.”
She doesn’t wait to see if we follow her out, practically stomping out of the room. I guess this is supposed to send some sort of message to me or put me in my place. But I get a perfect view of her tight ass in that pencil skirt as she retreats, so maybe I’m the winner.
