The Billionaire's Illicit Twins - Holly Rayner Page 0,2

one night off.”

I grinned. “Too right. If there was ever a day to celebrate, it’s today.”

Chapter 2

Bella

I walked into my favorite bar feeling both on cloud nine and a bit sad at the same time—namely because I walked into the bar by myself. To celebrate this enormous victory… by myself.

It was one of the big problems with being a lawyer. I didn’t have time to keep a lot of friends, and I had even less time for a boyfriend. It meant that I ended up doing a lot of things on my own. I mean, don’t get me wrong. Most of the time I didn’t care that much. I’d spent a whole lot of time on my own when I was younger, too, and I was used to it. Used to the company I kept by myself. Used to the time it gave me to build my plan—and then achieve it.

Most of the time, I was completely happy alone.

But when something big like this happened, I felt like… like there should be someone at my side to share it with, you know? Like I shouldn’t be doing the whole thing with only myself for company.

And that feeling had grown a whole lot stronger in the past year, since my father had passed away. When he was alive, I’d at least had the excuse of needing to take care of him. Who had time for close friends or a boyfriend when you had an aging father living one floor down from you, and needed to make sure he was okay at all hours of the day?

Combine that with the fact that I’d had to work five times as hard as anyone else to get to where I was right now, courtesy of the way I’d been brought up—poor, to put it bluntly, which had affected pretty much everything—and you got a girl who definitely didn’t have time for a social life.

Still.

I straightened my shoulders, took a deep breath, and marched toward the bar, a smile making its way to my face as I remembered exactly why I was there. I’d won the case.

I won the case!

“Well, you look all lit up from the inside,” said Miranda, the bartender and owner of McConnell’s Bar, returning my smile. “What’s got you so excited?”

I slid onto an empty barstool and gave her a wink.

“I,” I said slowly, drawing it out, “won that big case.”

I’d told her about the case, of course, though I hadn’t given her any details. So she would know exactly what I was talking about—which saved time on the whole explaining thing. I wanted to get to the drinking, not the explaining.

She lifted her eyebrows until her eyes looked enormous. “Ooh, do tell. You want your usual?”

Before I could even open my mouth to answer, a mug of hard cider came sliding in my direction, Miranda’s heavily tattooed arms moving easily as she spun around to start filling another mug for someone else.

“Talk, woman!” she demanded, having evidently decided that I wasn’t giving up the details quickly enough.

Well, if she really wanted to know…

“So my client wrote a song, which he put online, and which did really well. And then Harmon-e—”

“Let me guess, they stole it,” she said, spinning back around and sending the mug of beer she’d just pulled gliding down the bar toward another patron. “Typical big-company bull.”

I watched the other patron catch the mug, marveled at the fact that he didn’t care about how much beer had spilled in the process, and then nodded.

“They sure did. And my client caught them. We wanted them to take their song down. And pay my client for having stolen it.”

“And the judge found in her client’s favor, and told Harmon-e to do just that,” another voice broke in.

I turned, frowning at the interruption, and saw, to my absolute shock, that at some point in the past few seconds, Ethan Parker had sat down a couple of seats away from me.

Ethan Parker, as in the thirty-four-year-old music industry phenom, the golden boy of the industry, the guy who had come into the business as a kid at his father’s side and taken to it like a duck, building his dad’s small independent label up into something a whole lot bigger than anyone had ever thought possible.

Ethan Parker, as in the owner and CEO of Harmon-e. The billionaire owner. The insanely hot owner.

“He did, as a matter of fact,” I said, narrowing my eyes and taking in every inch of Ethan in.

He was