Double Pleasure (The Billionaire's Trust, #3) / The Billionaire's Trust (ePub)

Pavel blew out a final billow of cigarette smoke and looked up once more, with a certain disbelieving disdain, at the huge sign hanging overhead. "'The Van Horten Wing'," he read aloud, "'Supporting the World's Endangered Cultures'." He flicked the spent cigarette into the gutter and cleared his throat. "What absolute bullshit." Plucked from the incredible high of his dangerous liaison with Vicki just two nights earlier, Pavel was now in a deep despair, riddled with doubt and guilt and confusion. He hadn't had a cigarette in three years, but found himself on some kind of long-repressed auto-pilot, buying a pack and a lighter, placing the slender cylinder between his lips and inhaling its acrid pungency with a desperation he had thought long gone. Had it been in any way possible at this nauseatingly public event, he'd have showed up staggering drunk and made a deliberate spectacle of himself. Anything to kill the inner demons who were so viciously twisting his innards.

Disloyalty, he had been taught from a very early age, was to a family what embezzlement is to a company, or what bribery is to a police force. It had absolutely no place, and was furthermore a direct threat to success and stability. He had listened intently as his parents outlined their long-studied plan to usurp Vicki Vydra, her terminally sick father, and her delinquent, drunkard brother, and take control of the board of VydraPharm in a bare-faced coup. He had struggled for six hours with the moral horror of knowing such a thing, knowing it to be wrong for the company, wrong for the world, desperately unfair to Vicki and her family, and probably wrong for himself, even. The temptation to simply board a plane and disappear had been so strong that he had looked up flights to Bangkok, to Cape Town, to anywhere far enough away that his parents might never find him.

WARNING: This is a female billionaire romance short story which contains some very steamy love scenes. It is only appropriate for mature readers age 18+.