Billion Dollar Stranger - Stephanie Brother Page 0,31

I’m down south, which isn’t very often by the way, and look at the kind of welcome I get when I’m here.”

“Don’t try and guilt trip me, Robert! I’m not the nasty little voyeur who overstepped here. Now, I’m going to take a shower, and then I’m going out to try to fix the mess you created.”

I storm toward my bedroom and straight through into the bathroom, turning on the shower and tugging off my boxers furiously. The condom I’d been wearing is still hanging onto my dick, but my cum has leaked all over the place. The whole thing is a fucking mess. I ball it up and throw it in the trash, then step into the steaming water and scrub hard at myself with annoyance.

Nicole walked away without hearing me out, and it bugs the hell out of me. I can understand the embarrassment, I mean, it’s not like I’m particularly happy that my brother was watching my naked ass in full thrust-action. But the look in her eyes told me that she thought I knew. She’d really believed I set it up.

People have said a lot of shit about me over the years. I have a PR team at AHP that searches out and destroys most of it before it ever hits the news sites. I’ve had a lot of casual sex with a lot of women, but never at the expense of their feelings. I always make sure that they know what they’re letting themselves in for, and mostly I only fuck once, maybe twice, before moving on. Three times seems to be when women really start to get attached. I certainly wasn’t intending for things with Nicole to progress much past our simultaneous orgasms, but I didn’t want her to leave with tears in her eyes.

Shampoo thoroughly washed from my hair and body clean, I towel off and grab my sweats from the closet. Dressed and with some wax in my hair, I jog down the stairs and pick up the keys to my most basic car, a Volvo XC90. I love the high driving position and the fact that no one seems to notice me in a relatively ordinary SUV. The heavily tinted windows help, of course. In the parking garage, I walk past my five other cars, looking longingly at my favorite, a black McLaren F1. I love to drive it but it draws way too much attention.

There is traffic on the way to the hotel, and I’m antsy and frustrated at the delay. When I finally pull into the lot, I’m out of the car and through the lobby like a shot. The journey in the elevator is tediously slow, and when it finally arrives on Nicole’s floor, I find myself jogging down the hallway. My heart is beating, not from the exercise but from anticipation. I don’t doubt there is going to be confrontation before resolution, but I’m shocked at how much I care about getting through to that point with Nicole. The look on her face as she left flashes before my eyes — the hurt. In the bar on that first night, and later in her hotel room, I’d seen sadness in her eyes, and I didn’t want to add to whatever pain she was already going through. I promised to make it good for her. I told her there was no risk.

Robert has made a liar of me.

Pausing outside her door to take a deep breath, I run through what I’m going to say to her in my mind and then knock.

I wait.

There’s no answer and no noise coming from inside.

I knock again, louder. The thumping sound rings out in the deserted corridor.

I wait.

Nothing.

I look up and down the hallway, considering what I should do next. I don’t have a phone number for her. I know my security team could get it for me, but not immediately. Maybe by tomorrow, but that isn’t soon enough. Nicole is only in Atlanta for two days, so she may be flying out tonight or tomorrow morning. I can get my hands on a lot of information, but flight manifests are something else entirely, and I have no idea which airline she’d traveled in with. Instead, I decide to go with an idea I rejected earlier in the day when I’d been trying to work out how to seduce her again.

Flowers and an apology.

I call my personal assistant on the way to the elevator and arrange for a bouquet of white roses