My Boss, the Billionaire (The Billionaire Kings Book 2) Read online

  The refreshment tent is heaving, and the band is playing disco songs to keep everyone entertained while we wait. There are children and animals everywhere—mainly dogs, but also a handful of cats, two pigs, and a goat. Sheep and horses are looking over the fence to see what all the fuss is about, and I’m sure I saw someone leading an alpaca out of the car park earlier.

  It looks like pandemonium, but it’s organized chaos, sort of, as the event is a chance for those new to the Ark to have a look around. Several of us have been giving guided tours for the past hour around the veterinary center, the grooming center, the hotel—where animals are taken to recuperate after operations—and through the offices, to show them the huge machine, and the money, it takes to keep the sanctuary running.

  Hal scolded me for turning the celebration into a fundraising exercise, but he doesn’t have the first clue about money, or how expensive it is to run a business like this. Wealthy people, especially those born into money, often don’t. But that’s okay. I have my hands on the wheel of the Ark’s finances, and I’m not letting go of it anytime soon. I’m well in control.

  Everything’s ready; now all I can do is wait. My stomach is bubbling with nerves. I want this to go well. Several members of the press are here, and I’m hoping the exposure will provoke a flurry of donations. Not that we’re struggling financially—nothing like it. Hal, Albie, Noah, and I could easily run the place on our own finances for several years. But although we’ve all invested, and continue to invest, serious money in the Ark, I want it to become a self-sustaining enterprise within another five years.

  I’ve been on my feet since six this morning, and I sit on the wall surrounding the square for a moment, knowing there won’t be much time to rest once the PM arrives. I’ve had a text to say she’s passed Kawakawa, so we have less than thirty minutes to go.

  I hope she likes it here. We’ve worked hard to make the Ark successful, and we’ve come so far from the small cluster of buildings and half a dozen animals we started with. The team deserves some recognition.

  Izzy appears at my side and sits beside me, passing me a cold can of Coke Zero. “Here you go. You look like you need it.”

  “Yeah, thanks.” I pop the can and drink a third of it in one go.

  “Everything ready?” Izzy asks.

  “Just about. I need to ask the teenage volunteers to take off their hats when the PM arrives. What is it about kids these days? Their baseball caps are permanently glued to their hair.”

  She gives me an amused look. “You’re twenty-nine, Leon, not ninety-nine. Don’t be such an old man.”

  “Being young is no excuse for having no respect.”

  “No,” she says softly, “you’re right.”

  “Where’s Hal?”

  “Giving Miss Daisy a last walk,” she says, naming the Border Collie the two of them rescued back in January. They adopted her, and she now spends the day in Hal’s surgery, staring up at him adoringly.

  Izzy groans, slides off a shoe, and massages her foot. “My feet ache. I don’t know how Hal keeps going. The man has enough energy to power New Zealand.”

  I bump my shoulder against hers. “Wearing you out is he?” Normally I wouldn’t say something so indelicate to a woman I work with, but I’ve known Izzy a long time, and now she’s with Hal she’s safe to tease.

  She just laughs and says, “Kinda.” She doesn’t look unhappy about it, and she gives me a fond glance. “You’ve done amazing work organizing today. Try to relax a little and enjoy it, eh? You’ve been working far too hard. Have a little fun.”

  “I don’t do fun.”

  “Aw, Leon. Are you trying to make me cry?”

  I chuckle and have another swig of the Coke.

  “Anyway,” she says mischievously, “I can testify that you do have fun. I distinctly remember one New Year’s Eve at Charlie King’s house where you drank too much and fell in the pool.”

  “Jesus. That was twelve years ago. I’ve grown a lot older and wiser since then.”

  “Well, older, anyway.”

  “Thank you for that vote of confidence.”

  She grins. Then she tips her head to the side and gives a rueful smile. “You’ve become a very serious man.”

  “Life is serious, Izzy.”

  “It doesn’t have to be all the time.”

  I don’t answer. I decided a long while ago that I was going to put one hundred and fifty percent into my work, and I don’t plan on changing that anytime soon.

  “I was just thinking about what this place looked like five years ago,” I say to her, hoping she’ll change the subject.

  She gives me a shrewd look, then turns her gaze to the Ark. “I know, crazy how big it’s grown, eh? I don’t think any of us envisaged it would end up like this.”

  It started as a collection of buildings to house rescued animals with a smallish veterinary center attached, but within a year we’d started expanding, and now the place is huge. We have over fifty full-time employees here including the members of staff who work in the grounds and nearby paddocks, another fifteen part-timers, and a lot of volunteers who come in to help walk the dogs and play with the other animals who’ve yet to find a forever-home.

  “You don’t regret staying?” I ask Izzy. She and Hal had the opportunity to move to Hawke’s Bay to set up a new Ark, but they turned the position down, choosing instead to stay in the Bay of Islands and continue their roles as vets and Animal Welfare Inspectors.

  “Not one bit,” she says. “I love it here, and so does Hal. We’re both ready to put down roots.”

  Izzy’s lovely. Patient, hardworking, kind but firm, and attractive in a girl-next-door sort of way. Hal’s been crazy about her for years, but he’s only just gotten around to telling her. I’m glad it’s working out for the two of them, even though it makes me uneasy that they work together. They’ve put a deposit on a house over in Opua, and they’re getting married later in the year. It wouldn’t surprise me, either, to hear the patter of tiny King feet in the near future. It’ll do Hal good to have kids; it’ll anchor him, settle him down.

  Not that I know anything about that. I’m hardly Mr. Commitment. I haven’t dated a girl for more than a few weeks in the past two years.

  Izzy swigs from her bottle of water, looking across the square, then laughs. “Look at her. Have you ever seen anything so gorgeous?”

  I follow her gaze and see her looking at my personal assistant, Nicola.

  I’ve spent the entire day doing my best to look in the opposite direction from wherever Nicola is, but for the first time I let my gaze rest on her for more than a few seconds. She’s standing in front of the band with about a dozen girls under the age of eight, and they’re all practicing ballet moves.

  Nicola is a little short and curvy for a ballerina, but she’s moving like someone who has trained as a dancer, and, as I watch, she does a perfect pirouette, laughing as the girls try to copy her, half of them falling over.

  “Those girls adore her,” Izzy says. “I think she’s the only reason they go to the class.” She turns her light-brown eyes to me. “You know she runs a ballet class in Kerikeri every week, right?”

  I shake my head, because I want everyone at the Ark to think I have no interest in her. But the truth is I know everything there is to know about Nicola Dixon.

  I know about her ballet class, and that she studied astrophysics for a while at uni, although she didn’t stay long enough to get her degree. Astrophysics! This girl fascinates me. She’s also interested in history, especially the Vikings, which is the reason why she always wears her hair intricately braided.

  She can’t cook. She was brought up a Christian but no longer practices. She reads literary fiction about people from other cultures, maybe because she hasn’t travelled much. She likes soul music and hates rap. She’s a runner—she goes for a thirty-minute run every morning along the seafront before she comes to work. She swears like a trooper—not often in front of me, but when she’s with her friends, a
nd I have to fight not to laugh. She’s been out with several guys since she’s worked at the Ark, but she’s had no serious relationships. She loves mint chocolate and hates shellfish.

  She’s funny, gorgeous, intelligent, and hardworking. And she’s my PA, so she’s strictly out-of-bounds.

  She’s now illustrating basic ballet positions to the girls, rotating her hips and turning her feet out the way ballet dancers do. Most of the women at the Ark wear T-shirts and jeans, but she told me that because I wear a suit all the time, she likes to dress smart. Today she’s made a special effort because the PM is coming, and she’s wearing a pale-green pantsuit with a white shirt. Her high heels are on the grass beside her, and her feet are bare.

  Oh, dear God.

  “How long has she worked for you?” Izzy asks, clearly amused that I said I didn’t know she did ballet.

  It’s been two years, four months, because she started at the Ark on January 2nd, but I don’t admit that I know. “She’s my PA,” I tell Izzy. “It’s a working relationship, not a personal one.”

  Izzy studies me for a while. “I know you don’t agree with mixing work and love, but it doesn’t always have to end in disaster.”

  “You’re the exception that proves the rule, Izz. I hope you and Hal will be very happy for the rest of eternity, but that doesn’t mean I condone relationships at work.”

  “Are you angry with us for hooking up?”

  I tear my gaze away from Nicola to look at Izzy and see a sudden vulnerability in her eyes. I laugh, put my arm around her, and give her a hug. “Of course not. Hal’s always been crazy about you—I’m surprised it took him this long to get together.” I kiss the top of her head. “I’m going to be his best man, aren’t I?”

  As I lower my arm from her shoulders, my gaze drifts back across the square, and my heart misses a beat as I see that Nicola’s stopped dancing, and her gaze is fixed on us. She saw me hug and kiss Izzy. She looks oddly curious, and I imagine she’s surprised I would be affectionate to a colleague, as I’ve made my feelings clear on that often enough.

  I need to look away, but for a long moment our gazes lock, and I hold my breath. I couldn’t believe it the day I walked into the office two years ago to meet the new PA that Hal had hired and saw her standing by the photocopier, already working, even though I hadn’t yet given her anything to do.

  She was wearing a black skirt, a white shirt, and sexy black high heels. Most of the women at the Ark are on their feet all day and tend to wear Converse or training shoes, but Nicola always wears the highest heels. When she walks, they give her butt an enticing wiggle. I try not to look at it, but it’s impossible when it’s that good.

  Her blonde hair was in several braids which she’d then drawn back into a bun. And to top it all, she was wearing glasses with rectangular frames. Glasses! Holy fuck. She looked every inch the perfect secretary.

  Hoping she’d have no personality and zero sense of humor, I let Hal introduce us. She promptly made a crack about my name and the Ninja Turtles, meeting my eyes with a mischievous smile, and I knew then I was in trouble.

  She’s warm, funny, sexy, and spirited, and she isn’t afraid to stand up to me, which I find a surprising turn-on. She’s also an amazing PA, and within several weeks she had the office running like clockwork. She knows what I want before I want it, and she’s very accommodating.

  The expression ‘headdesk’ was invented for Nicola Dixon.

  She drives me crazy. And I can’t think of a single reason to fire her, no matter how hard I try.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see a white-brown blur, and then someone yells. I turn my head to see Wishbone tearing across the square at a million miles an hour. Someone’s let him out of the office.

  Cursing under my breath, I get to my feet. He whips past me, heading straight for Nicola—my dogs are as crazy about her as I am. He’s running fast, so fast that suddenly I know he’s not going to be able to stop. It’s not the first time he’s done this—he’s knocked me over several times while running back from catching a ball in the field. He’s heading right for the crowd of young ballet dancers, and I swear again and start running toward them.

  Nicola follows my gaze and gasps, and I watch her step hurriedly in front of the kids and hold up her hands in an attempt to slow Wishbone down. It doesn’t work; he barrages straight into her, knocking her off-balance. Even though she’d slipped off her high heels to dance, she stumbles back, and her foot catches on someone’s bag. In slow motion, I watch her tumble backward, and I’m just six feet away when her head meets the brick wall with a resounding crack.

  “Jesus!” I leap forward as she crumples and catch her in my arms. Blood flows from behind her ear, covering her beautiful suit. “Nicola!” I demand, but she doesn’t stir. My heart races, and I’m only partly conscious of the screams of the children around me.

  “Oh God, no!”

  Within seconds my hands, my shirt, my suit, are covered in her blood. She’s out cold, and all I can think is that if she dies before I get to tell her what an amazing person she is, before I get to kiss her, I’ll never forgive myself.

  Chapter Three

  Nix

  Pain is a white-hot poker in the base of my skull, bright light, and a swell of nausea that makes me groan.

  “It’s all right, ma’am,” someone says. “You’ve got a concussion—don’t touch your head. Can you hear me?”

  “Yes…” My tongue feels thick in my mouth and my eyelids are heavy, but I force them open. I’m in a tiny room, and a woman in dark green with her hair in a ponytail is leaning over me. The noise is deafening. Is it in my head or outside? “Where… am I?”

  “You’re in a helicopter. We’re taking you to Whangarei Hospital.” Her eyes are kind. She reaches above me and fiddles with something, then comes back and takes my pulse.

  I blink, and my eyes clear. On her shoulder are two silver Amalfi crosses, and the sleeve of her shirt bears a St. John Ambulance badge. She’s a paramedic.

  “Helicopter?” I try to turn my head to see the pilot, but she’s in the way. The pain is excruciating, and she tuts.

  “Lie still, please, ma’am.”

  I’m happy to comply. I watch her finish taking my pulse and blood pressure, and then she leans over me again with a smile.

  “Do you know your name, ma’am?”

  I clear my throat. “Nicola Dixon.” My voice is little more than a whisper.

  “Do you know what day it is?”

  “It’s… Wednesday.”

  “Good. Can you remember what happened?”

  It hurts to think. “I was waiting for the Prime Minister to arrive. I was… dancing.” I remember looking over at Leon sitting on the wall and watching him hug Izzy and kiss her hair. It was the first time I’d ever seen him touch a woman at the Ark. Although I felt envious, at the time it had also warmed me through to see him being so affectionate with someone. “There was a dog… I fell…”

  “That’s right. You hit your head.”

  “Am I… okay?”

  “You bled a fair bit and lost consciousness for about twenty minutes. We’re taking you to the hospital to be checked over.”

  “I’m in the Rescue Helicopter?”

  “No, ma’am, it was on call elsewhere. You’re in a private helicopter. The Northland traffic is heavy today and Mr. King didn’t want you to have a long journey.”

  I stare at her. “Mr. King?” Please, please let her be talking about Hal’s dad, Brock. I know he’s a pilot.

  “Yes, your boss. He’s flying us to the hospital.”

  My head spins. It’s Leon’s helicopter. “Oh my God.”

  “It’s all right, ma’am.”

  “I feel sick.”

  “Here you go.” She lifts a basin and holds it as I vomit into it several times.

  I lie back afterward, feeling shaky and emotional. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s all right, ma’am, you’re going to be fine.”

  “He�
�s going to kill me.”

  “Mr. King?” She looks puzzled.

  “I was sick in his helicopter.”

  “He’s very concerned about you, love. He won’t be worried about that.”

  You don’t know Leon, I want to say. He’s very particular. He made me take his suit to the dry cleaners because it had the slightest mark on the sleeve. He’s fastidious and OCD.

  “It’s a really important day for him,” I whisper. “He needs to be at the Ark.”

  “They’ll manage.”

  “The Prime Minister’s coming.”

  “Someone else will deal with all that. You just worry about getting better. Now hold on, you’ve bled through the pad. Let me replace it.”

  She moves to the side to rummage around in a bag. I turn my head a little. It’s the first time I’ve been in Leon’s helicopter. There are two seats in the front and three behind, and I’m lying across the group of three. I can see Leon in the pilot’s seat. As I watch, he glances over his shoulder at me. He’s wearing sunglasses and headphones, so I can’t see much of his face. He studies me for a moment, then looks forward again.

  My head’s pounding. I turn it back, tears pricking my eyes at both the pain and the worry that he’s going to be mad at me for ruining his big day.

  “Here you go.” The paramedic returns and slips a pad beneath my head, removing one saturated with blood. She spots my tears and rubs my hand with concern. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “It hurts…”

  “I’m going to give you a little morphine, all right? It’ll make you feel sleepy, so don’t worry if you feel a bit out of it.” She slots a syringe into the tube coming out of my hand. Within seconds, everything goes hazy, and with relief I fall asleep.

  *

  Time passes in a mist of light and shadows, of feeling weightless and then being rolled and pulled about, of dull, throbbing pain that makes me cry.