Hot Boss - Anne Marsh
PROLOGUE
SOME WOMEN DREAM of marrying Prince Charming. They fantasize about the slow, stately march up the aisle of a medieval cathedral, the big white dress and a rock the size of Gibraltar on their ring finger. Molly, my ex-wife, once admitted under the influence of tequila shooters that she phoned Westminster Abbey—a transatlantic call—at the age of twelve because she wanted to save the date. Ten years in advance. And her parents did not have an international calling plan. It took her years to pay off that adventure.
Princes don’t do it for me. More to the point, when I was twenty-one and naked on a Santa Cruz beach, I was just glad I’d dodged a royal bullet, because if Molly had truly wanted an English peer and a glass-carriage wedding, I would have moved to London and made it happen. That’s what you do when you love someone. You keep that someone safe and deliver her dreams to her, gift-wrapped with a big-ass bow. I’m not sure how I feel about ribbons on my dick, but I was definitely willing to find out back then.
“I don’t suppose you’d marry me?” I whispered against her ear. “So we could stay like this forever?”
“You’re asking me now?” She grinned up at me, heels digging into my ass as her hips moved in a way guaranteed to make me forget both graduation the next day and my big financial plans for our future. “Pretty sure we can’t stay exactly like this forever.”
Counteroffering is an art form. “Mostly forever.”
I let my mouth—and my tongue—underscore my point. She groaned something. My name, a few cute curses—Molly was opposed to swearing—and then that one word. Yes.
I remember that night on the beach, the beginning of forever. What I didn’t know then was that forever would last nine years... 108 months... 3285 days. More than five million minutes. All that time and I didn’t see the end coming. Imagine you’re reading a book and there’s another half inch of paper, or twenty percent left in your e-reader, so you’re settling in, getting comfortable because this is clearly going to be the best ending ever, and then bam. The end. The story’s done and you’re left wondering just how much damage hurling the e-reader at your drywall will cause. That was our story, Molly and me. Boy meets girl in college and falls in love. He proposes on a beach and they get married. Then they’re supposed to spend the next sixty years having hot sex, watching each other’s back and popping out a few Mini-Mes along the way. I wasn’t stupid. I knew it wouldn’t always be easy or fun. Marriage is like a roller coaster. You buy your ticket and then, once you’re on, you’re on. You don’t hop off at the top or in the dips. You ride for as long as it takes and you’re grateful for each exhilarating, wonderful, scary-as-hell second.
We got married in an outdoor chapel surrounded by California redwoods and our friends and families, and then we got on with the business of living. I started a venture capital firm with a college friend and made money; Molly earned a PhD in English. While I was busy settling down, my friends were playing the field. You’ve met them. Devlin King is scary smart, a brilliant programmer with a Machiavellian streak. He’d never hooked up with the same woman more than once until he fell for a fellow start-up entrepreneur and accidentally-on-purpose spent the summer working as her intern.
Dev’s dick was so popular it had its own Instagram...until he met Lola and suddenly he got the appeal of monogamy. It’s not that you can’t bang other women—it’s that you don’t want to because those other women aren’t her. Your one and only. The woman who makes you look up and drool like Pavlov’s dog when she waltzes through the door and for whom you’d do anything—hot sex on the beach, excruciating family dinners, half-assed home repairs, or volunteer to go and kick the ass of anyone and everyone dumb enough to hurt her feelings.
The third in our triumvirate fell hard, too. Like Dev, Max O’Reilly wasn’t in the business of relationships. In fact, he was so averse that he created Billionaire Bachelors, a dating app to connect to the many tech billionaires of Silicon Valley, including himself. He’d also launched Kinkster, mostly so he could order kinky-sex hookups the same way he ordered in Chinese food and pizza. A ballet dancer and influencer