19. The Broken Billionaire Sneak Peak
D escription:
Taking a job as a nanny for a billionaire single dad was supposed to be simple.
Keep my head down. Take care of his daughter. Collect my pay check.
Falling for my boss was definitely not part of the plan.
Jacob is grumpy, controlling, and far too handsome for his own good. One minute he's barking orders, the next he's showing me a side of himself no one else gets to see—a devoted father with a wounded heart still recovering from betrayal.
The more time I spend with him and his sweet daughter, the harder it becomes to remember that I don't belong in their world.
Because I have secrets.
Secrets that could destroy everything we've built.
I've spent years running from my past, determined never to let anyone get close enough to hurt me. But Jacob refuses to let me push him away. He makes me believe that maybe, just maybe, I deserve a future instead of a lifetime of regrets.
Then the past comes looking for me.
Now I have a choice: run like I've always done—or trust the only man who's ever made me want to stay.
A steamy billionaire romance filled with sizzling chemistry, emotional twists, family drama, and a love worth fighting for.
Chapter One
Natalei
Being a Brit raised in London and having lived most of my life within the confines of the UK, I always had this secretive fascination with the unhindered, raw, vast, and Bohemian lifestyle the Americans lived.
Yes, of course, there was Europe just across the Channel Tunnel, and I’d been there twice or thrice during vacations. But Europe didn’t really compare to America.
You could make it from Paris to Brussels in three and a half hours, and then from Brussels, it was just a two-hour-and fifteen-minute drive to Amsterdam. If you were feeling rather enterprising, you could do away with another two hours on the road and reach Dusseldorf.
Within seven hours, you could hop across three countries and still have enough time in the day to, I don’t know, drink some beer, eat some bratwurst, visit the Goethe-Museum, and then bunk at a hostel for the night.
I knew this from experience, having done this on my Euro Trip after my A-Levels. And that had been just one day. In that entire week, I’d driven to Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Switzerland, made a pit stop at Monaco, sold my by-then-battered car in Barcelona, and taken a plane to Ibiza.
America. Well, America was something else, as I’d learned the hard way.
Just a month after I landed in Texas, I got a hankering to be out on the road again.
It didn’t matter that the cars drove on the opposite side of the road.
I just wanted to experience all that Texas wilderness and live to tell the tale.
I drove a rental CR-V from Corpus Christi all the way for ten straight hours, overdosed on Red Bull and donuts, and by the time I’d reached my stop for the night, I was still in Texas!
I had to book a dingy motel room in Amarillo and recuperate for another day’s drive ahead to see Albuquerque, that famed city where Breaking Bad was shot.
Needless to say, without having any idea of the true scope of America’s size and how expensive it would be to survive here, I found myself stranded in California with not a penny to my name.
What made matters worse was the timer on my visa telling me that I had just a few months more to stay in the States.
After a month-long stretch of doing side hustles like Door Dash and nannying kids, I realized that the literal breadcrumbs I was making were not going to cut it.
I needed to up my game. I needed to earn the big bucks, as the Americans said, which brought me here, in front of this sprawling mansion at the crest of Pacific Palisades, overlooking the ocean with a backdrop of the Santa Monica Mountains.
I’d devised a rule of thumb for finding out how rich a person was in LA.
If they had their own road on which theirs was the only house—and the house in question had an ornate wrought iron fence and a Spanish Revival meets American Craftsman style architecture—it was likely that they were a pretty big deal.
Maybe even a member of the three-comma club. Tres comas, as in billionaires.
I gulped raw air, turning my throat hoarse, at the sight of the house.
Back in England, old money Lords and Dukes with royal hookups had houses like this.
And yet, here, at this nondescript-on-paper address that I’d found on NannyNanny.com was this monumental house spread over so much acreage belonging to someone who was neither nobility nor notable. At least not to me.
Maybe he was a big deal. Some people were good with names, others with faces; I was good with places.
I could geolocate any location in Europe after seeing just one picture of it, and yet when Al Pacino had been at the front of the line in Starbucks with his girlfriend last week, I’d only realized it half an hour too late after the TMZ van had already come and gone and the paparazzi had dispersed.
Not wanting to make a complete arse (or ass, as they called it across the pond) of myself, I rang the bell and waited for the intercom to come alive, mentally repeating the phrase: “Natalie Harker here to see Jacob Rhoades.” But the intercom never crackled to life.
Instead, there was a buzz somewhere in my vicinity, and the wrought iron gate swung open.
“This is how most horror stories begin, Natalie,” I whispered to myself, stepping through the gate and seeing the desolation all around me.
The grass on the front lawn had gone yellow from lack of watering.
All the plants potted along the length of it were either wilting or had already wilted, leaving spectral twigs and branches hanging in the air, looking like skeletal fingers.
To the right of the house was a pool that gave off an ungodly stench.
I covered my nose as I shuffled discouragingly around to the other side, catching sight of the black sludge gathered at the deep end of the pool.
There was a garage on the other side with five cars, one of them a Rolls Royce, another a Bugatti.
All of those cars were covered in layers of dust.
By now, I was thoroughly scared and had made my peace with the fact that this was where my story ended, where some deranged maniac came barging through the door, swinging a machete, chopping my head off, and burying me in the backyard.
Gullible foreigner that I was, I’d walked into a trap set by a serial killer or some ancient evil that haunted this house.
Unkempt vines were growing along the front wall of the house, reaching up to the roof, snidely coiling around the facade and windows. Two of the windows on the first floor were cracked. I could see a silhouette staring at me from behind one of them.
My breath felt cold in my throat, my fingertips colder. Before I could register the possibility of turning around and running for my life, the long mahogany doors creaked to life, inching open. From behind, a pale figure wearing pajama shorts and a bathrobe came out.
In another life, he would have been an unburdened man, a happy man.
But in this one, I could see that Jacob Rhoades had suffered every sort of atrocity a man could bear and still live to tell the tale as a hollow figment of who he once was.
Once, he might have been ruggedly handsome.
Now, he was a gaunt man with his cheeks sulking, his eyes red, his face covered with an unkempt beard, his arms thinning, and his abs not a sign of his prowess at the gym but a symptom of starvation.
“Jesus Christ!”
“Close, but no cigar. It’s the beard, isn’t it? Makes me look biblical,” he said, dry chuckling to himself. Then, he took a deep gulp from his glass and sighed.
“That’s not apple juice, is it?”
“It should be, but it’s not. It’s Ballantine’s, that most common of swill they peddle as whiskey. You want some?”
“Mr. Rhoades, are you okay?” I asked worriedly. As surreal as this was—surreal enough to make me think that I was Pip from Great Expectations standing at Miss Havisham’s door—I felt worried for the man. He looked morbid.
“Oh. You’re real, then. I figured it was the day drinking that had me hallucinating,” he said. “You must pardon my state. I was not expecting visitors.”
“It’s just me. Natalie. From the nanny ad?”
“Oh, right, Natalie. Please come inside and make yourself comfortable while I go and put on something other than this vestige of shame. Come, come.”
“Is the person I’m supposed to be nannying with you in the house?” I asked, uncertain about his invitation to come inside.
“Rebecca? She’s my daughter. Yes, she’s inside. I’ll have her come down to meet you in a bit. Again, my apologies for this…this…whole…”
“It’s okay, Mr. Rhoades,” I said. The man looked like he had been pancaked by an emotional bulldozer. As he went back inside the house, swaying and holding his arms out, I decided that I should follow him. Unbelievably drunk that he was, he was harmless. More importantly, he needed help.