Rebel Billionaire (Lords of Gotham #4) - Deborah Garland
TEASER
Sabine
“Who lives here?” Sabine asked after finishing her Coke, staring at a row of brick houses with crisp white trim and manicured lawns.
Her lips pressed against the bottle had been drawing curious looks from Grayson. Oh, those caramel bubbles tasted sweet sliding down her throat, as he watched her neck.
She saw the size of that cock, and how he stroked it with such need. Grayson needed to get laid. That could be her answer or her undoing.
“A woman I know,” he answered and winked.
“Oh great. One of yer honeys. She’s gonna poison my toothpaste.”
He laughed then set his face into a frown. “Poison your toothpaste? Who thinks of that?”
“My brothers meet some very shady characters. They dig up dirt on people who want to keep their sins buried.”
Grayson’s scowl deepened to the point she could hide spare change in the creases in his forehead. “And you want to run the same kind of company?”
She stared at him and removed her sunglasses. “Ye sound worried about me.”
“I’d be worried about anyone who could die of toothpaste poisoning.”
“I’ve been studying the job possibilities around L.A. long enough to know what kind of work I could do. Mostly stuff for the studios. Oppo research. Ye know, finding out the dirt on a star before the tabloids do. Then there are the rich husbands who want pictures of their cheating wives.”
WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For Brett Young, Brad Paisley, Thomas Rhett, Kane Brown, Ryan Hurd, and Willie Nelson.
I thank you in advance for not suing me for using your name and a tiny smidge sample of some of your amazing song lyrics. Love you!
CHAPTER ONE
Grayson
Where the fuck are you?
Every email from Grayson’s brother, Luke started that way. The shock factor had worn off. Not the guilt, though. He’d gone off the grid a few months ago. He had no choice, but to cut everyone out of his life.
It was selfish, he knew that. But most days the humiliation he suffered ate at him worse than the guilt of making his family worry.
After staring at his email with all the messages from Luke lined up because really no one else had emailed him, Gray tossed the cell in his gym bag. There was no point in reading today’s shakedown from Luke because all the messages sounded the same.
Why haven’t you fucking called me back?
I’ve cut off your fucking credit cards and froze your bank account.
You can’t last without money in Los Fucking Angeles.
Luke said fuck a lot. It was part of his New York charm. Gray refused to accept the f-bombs were a hint of how panicked he’d made everyone back home.
He sighed, as the emptiness caused by missing his brothers back home in New York washed over him. His determination to stay headstrong about waiting to contact them, however, felt stronger.
Pushing New York out of his mind, Gray headed out the door.
“Hey, Brett,” Monica from next door greeted him outside his apartment.
“How many cigarettes is that so far?” Gray asked the woman smoking and leaning on the railing. Last he checked it was seven am.
“Who’s counting? Going to the gym?”
“Every day,” he answered her with that brave smile he grew tired of wearing.
A month earlier he moved into the nice, but low-key Marina Del Rey apartment complex under the name Brett Young. He may have been born, raised, and lived most of his life in New York City, but Gray loved country music. Got hooked on the catchy melodies and clever lyrics while at UT Austin.
His college choice had been the first sign of him being the Hart rebel. Luke and their other brother, Tristan, had gone to Yale.
All of Gray’s secrets and lies were building up.
He wasn’t Brett Young. He was Grayson Hart, the billionaire owner of The Sterling hotel in Manhattan with his brothers. But running a 5-star luxury headache wasn’t his passion.
Acting was.
He was an actor.
An out-of-work actor.
Despite all his money and his ‘insanely’ good looks, as casting agents often described him, Gray ate a daily diet of rejection.