Irresistible Billionaires by Summer Brooks
Sarah
“I’m a crazy person,” I said to my mirror self as I stared at the outfit that I’d donned for my first job interview in five years. I liked the outfit, but it probably wasn’t the most appropriate thing for an interview.
I’d donned a slim, black leather skirt and a purple blouse that was just slightly see-through, giving the perfect view of my cleavage. I was actually pretty damn proud of my bust, which probably wasn’t a polite thing to say in front of other people, but I thought it anyway. I liked the way my boobs looked. They weren’t too small or too big, and they were still perky thanks to the fact that I had yet to grow a baby inside of me. So, I liked to show them off on first dates, not for the guy, but for me.
And yet, this wasn’t meant to be a first date. No matter how many times I reminded myself of that, though, it just didn’t seem to want to get through my head. This wasn’t a first date.
Rhett hadn’t wanted to date me. Or maybe he did, but he needed an accountant more. Or a financial person, I should say, since I didn’t technically have any degree to speak of.
Either way, I probably shouldn’t have been going on this interview. I had a flight in a week. I was leaving to get a new start in life, some fresh perspective, and to do something different.
And yet, here I was, dressed and ready to go with a printed copy of my resume in hand and this annoying little flutter in my stomach that hadn’t seemed to want to go away since I’d seen Rhett outside of my favorite corner store.
“You can do this,” I told myself, trying to hype myself up for reasons that were still completely unknown to me.
What the hell was I even doing?
I had no answers, but I still found myself picking up my purse and heading down to the parking garage, and then driving over to Rhett’s fancy real estate office in the fancy office building with a very nice valet.
I’d never worked at a place with a valet before. Henrietta didn’t believe in pomp and circumstance, even though she could have afforded it.
I rode the elevator up to the eighth floor. I then stepped into one of the most beautifully decorated offices I’d ever seen.
“Bella,” I breathed, looking around.
Live plants dotted every corner, giving the office workers a breath of fresh air every time they walked by. The cubicles in the center, where the realtors would normally work, were completely gone, replaced by individual desks with laptops on them, so that the agents could see and talk to one another as much as they pleased.
Three glass offices ringed the outside of the space. Two of them were open and bright, showcasing the people inside. One was the finance office, and the other was the marketing office. And the last one, with the curtains around the window for privacy, must have been Rhett’s.
“Can I help you?” A pretty blonde agent looked up at me and smiled, twirling a pen around her red acrylic covered fingernails.
“I’m looking for Rhett Thompson,” I replied.
The look she gave me could not have been more devilish if she’d tried. Her blue eyes widened in anger, and she pursed her Restylane filled lips as she looked me up and down, making a quick assessment based on my outfit, hair, and makeup.
I knew that look. I’d dealt with plenty of women like her, the ones who thought every female needed to look and act a certain way in order to be accepted into society.
“He’s—”
But before she could finish her sentence, the office doors to the curtained off room burst open, and Rhett came swaggering out, that charming smile plastered on his face as usual.
“So, you decided to come after all,” he grinned at me.
“I thought I’d see if it was worth my while,” I shrugged, forcing myself to ignore the somewhat tension-filled flirtation going on between us.
This was a job interview. I needed to be professional.
Which was slightly hard considering the only reason I was even here was because I was pretty sure I had a crush on him.
Rhett came to a stop right in front of me, hands on his hips, and a strangely calm expression on his face.
“Francesca, hi,” he said, but he didn’t even bother to glance to the woman on his right.
Francesca, though, didn’t seem to mind, because she smiled at him like he was the only guy in the entire world.
“Hi, Rhett,” she purred. “This woman claims she’s here for an interview with you.”
Rhett just turned and looked at her for a split second before he shrugged.
“She doesn’t claim anything,” he replied as if that was meant to be some sort of defense of me, and then spun around on his heel and started to walk around the office.
Instinctively, I followed him, trying to figure out just what was going on. This whole thing had knocked me off completely, and I felt like I no longer had any idea what was happening here.
But maybe that was a good thing.
“So, just so you know, there are doors here,” he announced, pointing to the three glass offices and flashing a grin in my direction. “So, don’t run into them or anything.”
“Gee, thanks,” I replied, rolling my eyes even though I felt myself start to smile.
He was a jokester. I could be a jokester, too. I was funny.
Rhett disappeared into his office, and I followed him, fully expecting him to offer me a seat and start to dig into the real questions, the one every employer wanted to ask. Things about my experience and my success in the previous jobs I’d held. At which point, I was sure he’d realize that he actually didn’t want to hire me, and there were others out there who were far better equipped for the job then I was. Then, this whole thing would be nothing more than a drop in the bucket filled with strange life experiences that I’d had. I’d be able to move on and forward, jetting off to a foreign country and following through on my plans.
Hopefully.
I was still getting a little flutter in my heartbeat every time he glanced at me with those warm brown eyes.
“I want you to take this and read it,” he announced suddenly, walking over to his desk and grabbing a massive binder from it, which he then proceeded to shove into my arms.
“You want me to… what?” I asked, glancing down at it.
The front of the binder had a beautifully designed insert with the Thompson Real Estate and Development logo on it. The first letters of each of the words intertwined to form a sort of rope, and there was a picture of a house in the background, one of the big, fancy ones with sleek edges and an infinity pool.
I’d love to live in a house like that someday.
“Read it,” Rhett replied. “It’s all about the company, our history, our mission. I know it’s a little bit much. Obviously, it’s extremely thick, but I started this company hoping that everyone I brought on board would end up feeling like family, so I figured the best way to initiate people was to hand them a novel full of our morals and motivations and how I like things to go.”
Rhett was already moving behind his desk, clicking open his computer as if the fact that he’d handed me an entire college textbook and expected me to read it before I’d even decided to take the job wasn’t completely strange.
But then again, I was starting to get the understanding that Rhett did a lot of things that were strange. It was cute in an awkward way. I supposed I’d never thought that a playboy billionaire with rapper friends and a booming business could ever be quite this awkward.
“Rhett, you know I don’t have the job yet,” I replied, raising an eyebrow. “You haven’t offered, and I definitely haven’t accepted.”
His head snapped up in shock like that thought hadn’t even occurred to him, but then he just nodded.
“Sure,” he replied. “Next thing I want you to do is to take this mockup and decide if you like the design.”
He spun his computer around to face me, and I saw one of the most breathtakingly beautiful structures displayed on it. It was still a beginning stage design, and not the fully built structure yet, of course, but what Rhett was showing me still managed to make my jaw drop down to the floor.
It was a house, situated high up on a hill, with a massive balcony out front that overlooked everything, and beautiful, massive windows all over, affording the occupants a view of the outdoors at all hours of the day.
“That’s gorgeous,” I murmured before I could even think to ask why he wanted to know my opinion. After all, I wasn’t an architect or a designer at all.
“Glad you think so,” he responded with a grin. “It’s going to be one of my development projects this season on “Rhett Thompson takes San Francisco.” It’s really important to me that my assistant has an eye for this sort of thing.”
“I thought I was interviewing to be your newest accountant,” I said suspiciously.
“I need someone who can do it all,” he shrugged, although I caught the slight hint of a blush in his cheeks.
I could not, for the life of me, figure this guy out. But, I had nothing better to do today, so I figured, why the hell not? My entire plan for this new chapter in my life was to be spontaneous and to take things as they came, which, up until this point, had been an awfully difficult thing for me to do.
But a girl’s got to start somewhere.
So, I sat down in one of the soft white chairs in Rhett’s office and opened the binder, ready to get to reading the thousand and one pages of his company’s mission statement.
I only got about three words in, though, before Rhett jumped up.
“Let’s go,” he said, walking swiftly toward the door like he was James Bond on a super-secret mission.
“Go?” I asked. “Go where?”
“To the meeting,” he replied as if that was obvious.
And then he just disappeared out the door.
“Oh, yeah, the meeting,” I mumbled to myself. “Because that was completely obvious.”
This was the strangest job interview I’d ever been on.
I stood up, shoving the binder deep into my purse, and sprang forward to head out of his office door, not realizing that Rhett had closed the thing behind him.
And of course, just as luck would have it, I ran smack into the clear glass window. I swear to God, I saw stars as I stumbled backward, clutching the now bruised spot in the middle of my forehead.
“I told you to be careful with the doors.”
He’d appeared out of nowhere again, pulling the door open and holding it out of my way so I could walk through, hopefully without damaging another piece of valuable property.
“Thanks,” I replied with a grimace. “You should probably know that I’m not all that big on taking orders.”
“That’s alright,” he shrugged. “I’m not all that big on giving them.”
He glanced up at me from under thick black lashes, smiling boyishly, and I felt my heart freeze up in my chest before it started to pound out a rhythm that sounded suspiciously close to a traditional wedding march.
Dear Lord, Rhett Thompson was hot. Even here, a place where he was completely laid back, without all of the fancy lights and the perfect cameras to make him look like he was flawless, the man looked like an angel that had fallen to earth.
I let my eyes drop down his figure in a move that was so obvious I probably should have been embarrassed, taking note of the flash of a vein just past the end of his sleeve, and the way his muscles bulged underneath his shirt with every breath.
“So, does that sound good to you?”
It was only then that I realized Rhett had been talking to me this entire time, and I hadn’t been listening in the slightest.
Probably not the best thing to do in a job interview.
“I’m sorry?” I replied, trying to look as innocent as possible.
“The salary,” he replied. “Does it sound good to you? If you’re not comfortable with $200k, I can up it even further. Three hundred, maybe?”
“Three hundred grand?” I gasped, certain that I must have misunderstood something major. “You want to pay me three hundred grand to be your accountant?”
“Well, slash assistant slash all-around go-to person, yeah,” he replied. “You’d have to potentially be on the show sometimes, or maybe make an appearance or two as well. But I’m always happy to compensate you extra for those things if you need it.”
“I need to sit down,” I gasped.
I didn’t even make it to a chair. I just sank down right there, plopping on the nicely carpeted floor in the middle of his big office space, trying to force myself to actually breathe. For the first time since I’d stepped into this office, my lack of oxygen was caused by something other than Rhett’s presence, thankfully.
Three hundred grand. I knew I lived in San Francisco, and that to plenty of people here that might be a laughable salary, but to me, it was more money than I’d seen in my entire life. It was an obscene amount, really. And Rhett wanted me to accept it for this job.
I didn’t even want to know why. Whatever his motivations were, they could just stay hidden, for all I cared. All I could focus on was the amazement of it all.
Three hundred grand.
“Is she okay? Are you okay?” A young Latino man came running up to us suddenly, breathing heavily and staring at me with terrified eyes, as if he thought I was going to slump over and die at any second.
Honestly, I almost might have. That sum of money was enough to make anyone have a heart attack.
“I’m fine,” I reassured him. “Just in a little bit of shock.”
I glanced over at Rhett to see him smirking slightly at me, clearly amused by the entire situation. I glared at him, but I couldn’t help but be amused, too. Sometimes, I was a little too dramatic for my own good.
“Okay,” the young man said, stepping back, although he looked like he didn’t quite believe me. “If you need anything, my name’s Javier. I’m Rhett’s assistant.”
Before I could ask him to repeat his job position just so I could make sure I hadn’t misheard him, the kid took off back down the hallway, headed only God knew where. He struck me as one of those people that’s constantly running back and forth.
Slowly, I turned to Rhett, raising an eyebrow in a clear indication for him to explain himself.
“So, yeah, that’s my assistant,” he admitted, rubbing the back of his neck and trying to hide the ever-growing redness in his cheeks.
“If that’s your assistant, what the heck am I doing here?” I demanded.
“You are… uh…” he stared up at the ceiling as he attempted to find his words, but then he just shrugged and stood up abruptly. “We’ve got that meeting to get to. So, is the salary good for you?”
“Rhett, I have a plane ticket,” I told him, standing, too. “I’m leaving in a week. It’s non-refundable. This is me being spontaneous.”
In a strange way, I felt like Rhett, and I already knew each other. It was like I was explaining this to an old friend, to someone who got me in a way that no one else did.
Which was made even more strange by the fact that Rhett seemed to have absolutely no idea how to deal with his emotions.
“What if you spontaneously decided to let your new boss pay you back for the nonrefundable ticket and then accepted his offer of a three hundred thousand dollar a year job?” He asked with a sly smile.
The outrageous abruptness of it all caused me to laugh so hard I nearly choked on my own spit. Rhett just stood there staring at me, as if he was a little confused as to why I was laughing so hard.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re a pretty strange guy?”
Rhett thought about it for a long moment before he shrugged. “A couple of times. But so what? Come on, the meeting’s about to start.”
Once again, he just marched off, headed toward the third office down the hall, and I was left wondering just who this strange man was.
This was a whole new side of him that I was seeing. One that didn’t seem to be so carefully cultivated for the cameras. One that was goofy and awkward and had absolutely no idea how normal, day to day social interactions were supposed to work.
For a moment, I had to truly contemplate whether or not I was going to walk down the hall and follow Rhett to this meeting. It felt like walking into this meeting would be like accepting the job, in a way, and I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted to do.
But then again, I realized this was exactly my problem. My reluctance to make a decision on the fly was the reason I’d booked the plane ticket to Thailand in the first place. I wanted to learn how to be spontaneous, but maybe I didn’t need to go halfway across the world to do it. Maybe the Universe was answering my prayers right then and there.
Because I had a sneaking suspicion that Rhett Thompson was going to force me to be spontaneous, one way or the other.
And on top of that, three hundred grand was a lot of money. I could buy a house in a few years with that kind of money, and really start to make a home for myself.
So, I made a split-second decision and accepted the job, marching down the hall next to all of the realtors' desks and slipping into the meeting.
Rhett was the only one to glance up as I walked through the door, and I didn’t miss the sly smile that twitched at the edges of his lips when he saw me.
He’d known this was the decision I was going to make from the moment I stepped into his office that morning.
I said nothing, just grabbing a seat in the circle of people and listening in on the conversation.
There were three other people besides Rhett and me in the room. One was a skinny little guy with glasses that were far too big for his face pushed far too high up on his nose. The other two were women. One had long, slightly frizzy blonde hair and was wearing a pair of overalls over a striped purple and white t-shirt, giving her the look of a modern farm girl. The other was a woman with sleek black hair that curled perfectly around her shoulders, wearing a gray pantsuit. She was speaking at that moment and didn’t even toss me a casual glance as I entered the room.
“What I’m saying is that it’s not just about how these things have played out in the past, Marcus,” the woman said, with a commanding tone that I seriously admired. I loved it whenever a woman was able to take control of the board room.
And also, I secretly loved the fact that a woman could take control of Rhett’s board room. That said an awful lot about his character.
“Well, I don’t know if we should be giving Nicki any more airplay, Cassandra,” the guy with the glasses responded. Marcus pushed his frames up even further on his face and attempted to stare down at Cassandra, but the woman would have none of it.
Instead, in a shocking development, she turned to me.
“Hi, I’m Cassandra,” she said, sticking her hand out abruptly.
I shook it, a little thrown off. “Sarah.”
“I know,” Cassandra nodded. “Rhett told us all about you. Now, I need to ask you something, and I want your honest, unfiltered opinion, got it?”
“Sure,” I replied, still a little hesitant.
“Great,” she smiled at me and then tossed a side-eye toward Marcus before she continued. “So, if you heard that a celebrity favorite of yours had gotten his ex-girlfriend pregnant and then said celebrity came out and told the American public that it was a complete lie, what would you think of him?”
“Is it a lie?” I replied diplomatically. I wasn’t totally sure what this question was in reference to, but something told me that it could very easily turn into a sticky situation.
“That’s not important right now,” she replied. “I just want your gut reaction. What’s your initial take?”
All eyes were on me. I was acutely aware of that, and attempting to staunch the growing uneasiness in my stomach by taking a few deep breaths. Still, I knew there was no getting out of answering this question.
“Well, honestly, I’d think the guy’s a dick,” I replied. “You don’t get a woman pregnant and then just abandon her. And my first instinct is not going to be to wonder whether or not she’s really lying about this situation, because women often don’t lie about that sort of thing. But, on the off chance that it is a falsity she’s spewing to us, I assume the boyfriend must have done something terrible to make her feel like that was her only recourse. So I won’t like him anymore, and I probably won’t follow his career and listen to his music or watch his shows.”
“That’s what I thought,” Cassandra replied smugly, sitting back in her chair.
“Jesus,” Rhett breathed, dropping his head in his hands and massaging his forehead.
That was the moment my stomach really started to sink.
“Why did you ask me that, exactly?” I replied.
Cassandra glanced over to Rhett and then back to me. “I knew you weren’t the type to keep up on celebrity gossip.”
“I told you she wasn’t,” Rhett muttered from between his knees. The poor guy looked like he was trying to keep himself from vomiting.
“What are you talking about?” I pressed.
“Rhett’s ex-girlfriend, Nicki, has decided to tell a sob story to the press,” Marcus explained, looking down his nose at me the same way he’d done to Cassandra. “She’s angry about the breakup and has gone around telling all of the major publications that she’s pregnant with Rhett’s baby. So now everyone hates him, thinking that he’d walk out on his pregnant girlfriend and not even bother to give her child support.”
Now that Marcus was telling me about it, I briefly remembered seeing something about that situation the week before. It hadn’t seemed at all important at the time.
“It’s not true, right?” I asked, aiming my question directly at Rhett.
“No. Of course not,” he replied quickly, shaking his head so vigorously I was surprised it didn’t plop right off. “She’s just angry at me. She wanted us to keep up our facade forever and ever. But I couldn’t do it anymore. I needed something real.”
I had a few more questions I wanted to ask him, but I felt they were far too personal to be appropriate in this situation, so I just quieted down and slumped back in my seat, shocked that someone could be as vengeful as his ex seemed to be.
I didn’t hate her or anything, of course. I felt awful for her. The poor woman must have been heartbroken over losing a guy like Rhett, but that didn’t make her actions okay in any way, shape, or form.
“What do we do?” Rhett asked with a sigh, looking up at Cassandra. Clearly, she ran the public relations show around here.
She pursed her bright pink lips, thinking hard, mulling over every possible scenario, before she finally nodded and looked at all of us.
“We give her what she wants,” Cassandra replied. “Money.”
Rhett frowned, shaking his head. I thought he might say no, and tell her that was terribly immoral, but he just looked at me.
“Sarah, I’m going to write you a check. I’ll need you to give it to Nicki as soon as possible, please.”
“What?” I gasped. “Me? That’s not a part of my job description.”
“You don’t have a job description,” Rhett replied cheekily. “And besides, it is now. You’re the only one I trust to do this.”
“What about your assistant, Javier?” I replied indignantly. “Don’t you trust him?”
“Not with this,” Rhett said.
Before I could get another word in edgewise, he strode out of the office. I heard him walk all the way down the hall and then nearly slam his door shut.
“You’ll have to do it in an unassuming way,” Cassandra said as she, too, stood up. Marcus and the blonde followed her lead, although Marcus looked pretty resentful as he did so. “You need to make her feel heard and understood, but also make it clear that you aren’t budging. She gets this or nothing at all. Understand?”
I was so shocked I couldn’t even formulate words. All I did was nod as they left the office, following Rhett’s footsteps.
How the hell did I just get here? Two hours ago, I was planning to leave for Thailand in a week. Now I had managed to agree to pay off a fraudulent baby mama in order to make sure she didn’t cause even more problems with the public.
This was absolutely insane.