One Night for the Billionaire CEO (Seattle Billionaires #2)

Prologue

Kira

After three days inside conference ballrooms, I took my wine out to the terrace. The open air felt like a necessity.

Manhattan in October was all sharp air and warm light. The city stretched out below the rooftop, glittering and indifferent, and I leaned against the railing and let the cold settle against my skin. The noise from inside softened to a murmur.

He was standing at the far end of the railing with a glass of whiskey, suit jacket off, sleeves of his dress shirt rolled to the forearms. He was looking at the skyline without really seeing it.

He was tall, broad-shouldered, with the posture of a man who'd been "on" for three days and had finally let the performance drop.

I'd seen him around the conference and he'd caught my attention for strictly not business reasons. I walked over because I didn't want to stand alone and he looked like he didn't either. "You survived."

He glanced over. His dark eyes were tired, but he offered a half-smile that didn't try very hard. "Barely. You?"

"I'm standing on a rooftop drinking wine by myself, so you tell me."

The conference featured three days of people talking about the future like they already owned it.

I'd sat through panels on market disruption, AI deployment, and sovereign wealth strategy.

I'd listened to a keynote from a woman who'd built a fintech empire and lost her marriage, her friendships, and most of her thirties in the process.

She'd called it "the price of excellence" and the audience had applauded.

I'd sat there thinking, that's me in ten years and I don't want it to be.

The closing dinner had wound down an hour ago.

I'd stayed longer than I needed to because going back to my hotel room meant being alone with my personal reality.

Thirty-four years old with a career I'd built from wreckage.

A reputation that preceded me into every room, and a condo in Seattle where nobody noticed whether I came home.

He turned toward me and his half-smile became real. "What did you think of the keynote?"

"I think she was honest and I wish she hadn't been."

He studied me differently than the way men at these conferences usually studied me. They normally calculated my usefulness and tried to figure out if I was worth a business card or a drink. He was trying to place the answer.

"Because she made it sound inevitable?"

"Because she made it sound like a choice she'd make again."

He was quiet for a beat. Then he lifted his glass. "I'm Ev."

"Elise."

It wasn't a lie. I gave him my middle name, close enough so I felt honest, distant enough that he'd never find me with it. I didn't want this conversation ruined by job titles and LinkedIn searches. I wanted to keep talking to this man with tired eyes who'd listened to my answer like it mattered.

He asked what I did. I told him I structured major financial deals, independent, mostly institutional clients.

He said venture capital, a fund in the Pacific Northwest. I told him I was based there as well and we shared the acknowledgement of what living in Seattle was like.

We traded the professional shorthand that let two people talk without saying anything real.

Then he stopped giving the standard answers.

He looked out at the skyline again. "I spent twenty years building things and I'm very good at it. And I go home to a house where nobody's waiting. That's the trade I made and most days I'd make it again." He paused. "But not tonight."

The honesty hit harder than I expected. It wasn't the confession because successful people said versions of that at every conference bar in the world. It was the pause before it, like the admission had slipped past a gate he usually kept locked. I carried the same one.

"I closed a deal six weeks ago that should've been the highlight of my year," I said. "I celebrated with takeout and a documentary about financial fraud."

He laughed. A real one, startled out of him, and his whole face changed. The tiredness was still there but the warmth underneath it surfaced, and I thought, oh, there you are.

"What kind of fraud?" he asked.

"Ponzi scheme. Very soothing."

"You watched a documentary about a Ponzi scheme to unwind after closing a deal."

"Other people's financial crimes really put your own career in perspective."

He was still laughing. I tapped three fingers against the side of my wine glass, three quick clicks in the cold air. Something I did when I was thinking deep and hard.

"The panel today on work-life balance," I said. "Twelve men and two women and both women up there said boundaries when she meant concessions."

"That's cynical."

"That's accurate. There's a difference."

He conceded the point with a tilt of his glass. "So, what should they have said?"

"That ambition costs more than they're willing to admit in a ballroom full of sponsors."

"Maybe that's why they didn't say it."

"Maybe that's why I'm out here instead of in there," I pointed out.

His hand settled on my forearm when he leaned in to argue the point, and he didn't move it when he was done. "You think ambition is a coping mechanism."

"I think it can be. I think it's easier to want the next deal than to sit still long enough to notice what's missing."

"That's a lot of insight for a rooftop conversation with a stranger."

"You started it." I gave a genuine smile. "The house where nobody's waiting, remember?"

He laughed, quieter this time. My knee brushed his when I shifted my weight and neither of us moved back. I let it stay there, and when I looked up he was already looking at me, the tiredness gone out of his face.

"You don't strike me as someone who sits still," he said.

"You've known me for an hour."

"I'm a fast reader."

"So am I. And you're deflecting."

The space between us had closed to almost nothing. His hand was still on my arm, and I put my hand on top of his. He looked down at our hands, then up at my mouth.

"Let me buy you a drink," he said. "Downstairs, in the lobby bar. Somewhere we can sit."

We got in the elevator. He pressed L for the lobby. The doors closed and the elevator started down the thirty-four floors to the main floor. I reached past him and pressed 11.

He looked at the button, then at me.

"Maybe we should have the drink in my room."

He didn't answer right away. He looked at me the way he'd looked at my answer about the keynote, like he was reading past the words to what was underneath.

The look was warm, and I felt it move down through me and settle low.

The noise of the terrace, the traffic below, the party leaking out through the doors, had gone somewhere far off. All I could hear was him breathing.

I wanted his hands on me and to feel the weight of him above me.

I wanted to taste the whiskey on his lips and feel the attention he'd been paying me for the last hour turned all the way up.

Twenty-three floors of silence, and every one of them was me deciding I wasn't going to talk myself out of this.

We made it three steps past my door.

His mouth was on mine and my back hit the wall while the keycard was still in my hand. He kissed the way he argued, thorough and unhesitant, his hands spanning my waist and pulling me flush against him. I dropped the keycard, heard it hit the carpet, and forgot about it.

His mouth tasted like whiskey, just as I had imagined.

I kissed him harder, my fingers working the buttons of his shirt while he found the zipper at the back of my dress.

We undressed each other with the efficiency of two people who made decisions for a living, fabric hitting the floor in a trail from the door to the bed.

He was built like Adonis, broad, solid, warm. When he pressed me back against the mattress the weight of him was grounding and real. I pulled his mouth down to mine and hooked my leg over his hip.

His mouth moved down my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my breast. My hands were in his hair and the conversation from the terrace was still in the room with us. The conversation hadn't stopped, it had just changed languages. Speaking was rendered obsolete.

He kissed his way down my stomach and slid my underwear off and settled his mouth between my legs. I arched into him with my fingers twisted in the sheets.

He was good at this, attentive, reading my responses the way he'd read my arguments, his tongue working me steady and then exact, staying with what made me shake.

It built fast, everything I'd been carrying for months driving it higher, and I came with my hips lifting off the bed, his hands gripping my thighs, the city still bright through the window I'd forgotten to close.

Then he was over me and I put a hand flat on his chest. "Wait."

I crossed the room. My travel kit was on the bathroom counter, half-unzipped from the morning. I found the condom in the inside pocket where I always kept one because I traveled forty weeks a year and packed for every contingency, then walked back to the bed.

He'd propped himself on one elbow. His expression had shifted. He'd thought I was stopping.

I held up the foil packet. "Contingency planning."

"You're a strategist."

"I'm a very good strategist."

I rolled it on him and the deliberateness was its own heat. I'd chosen this, clear-eyed, and it was fully mine.

He pulled me onto his lap and I sank down onto him, taking every thick inch. We both went still. The fullness was overwhelming, the closeness was dizzying, but his forehead against mine grounded me in the moment. For one breath neither of us moved.

Then I rocked my hips and his hands tightened on my waist. We found a rhythm that built slowly, his mouth on my neck, my nails on his shoulders, the sounds we made unpolished and honest. He shifted the angle and I gasped. He did it again, harder. I said "there" and he stayed.

I slid my hand down between us and worked my clit with two fingers, chasing it, and came a second time with my face against his shoulder while he followed a minute later with his arms locked around me and my name, the wrong one, quiet against my hair. "Elise."

The second time was slower. He climbed on top, my legs wrapped around him, and his hands braced on either side of my head. There was less urgency, more attention. We'd burned through the desperation and what was left was two people being careful with each other's bodies.

Afterward we lay on our backs, breathing. I stared at the ceiling and tried to remember the last time I'd felt this specifically good and this specifically temporary.

"I should go," he said, gently.

"You should."

I went to the bathroom, washed my face, pulled my hair back, and studied myself in the mirror. I was flushed, hair wrecked, present in a way I hadn't let myself be in a long time.

When I came out, he was almost dressed; his shirt was buttoned, his jacket over one arm. He looked like someone reassembling himself for the world. He crossed the room and kissed me. Slow and warm, a goodbye that was honest about being a goodbye.

"This was great," he said. "Exactly what I needed. The talking and the sex."

"It was," I said and kissed him back.

He left. The door clicked shut. The city was still bright outside and the sheets still smelled like sex and whiskey and warmth.

I got into bed and stared at the ceiling. I'd enjoyed it, all of it. It didn't fix anything. I knew that. The career was still the career. The condo in Seattle was still quiet. Tomorrow I'd fly home and the loneliness would be exactly where I'd left it.

But tonight it was quieter. Just for one night, it was enough.

I turned off the lamp, and the name I carried out of that room was Ev and nothing more.