My Roommate, the Billionaire (The Billionaire Kings Book 3) Read online

“But it has such a glorious view.” I can’t imagine the Ark being anywhere else.

  “That’s true, it does.” He slows the car, driving carefully around the bends in case tree branches have blown across the road.

  I glance over at him, as surreptitiously as I can. When he changed in the office, he pulled on a rugby shirt—it’s not an All Blacks one; it’s light blue with a navy-blue band across the top and the word Ora on the front. I think it’s a Northland Rugby team shirt. His hair is just-got-out-of-bed ruffled, and he still hasn’t shaved, so the scruff has turned into a short beard, which I kind of like. I kind of like the whole package, actually.

  Have I really suggested to him that we sleep together? What happened to my determination not to get involved with anyone before I leave? Especially the gorgeous Albie King?

  When we get married in church the very angels will come out to serenade us. I think I’m going to cry.

  But ohhh… I mustn’t get swept away by his romantic declarations. I might have been living in his house, but I still don’t know this man very well. Perhaps he’s the sort who proposes to every girl on a first date. He’s told me he has trouble deciphering other people—maybe he doesn’t understand that some women might believe everything he says.

  Not me. I’m smarter than that. But still, I have to make sure I’m not dazzled again.

  Pierre dazzled me with money, by taking me to the top restaurants, whisking me away for the weekend on his yacht, paying for private viewings in galleries, buying caviar and Champagne and diamonds. It was a very enjoyable lifestyle, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it. But it was like beautiful, colorful bubbles, fragile and insubstantial, and it had a bitter taste when the bubbles popped.

  Albie dazzles me in a different way; with his humor, his friends and family, his warm personality. He doesn’t take me to stunning restaurants for fillet steak, but he’ll buy the whole Ark pizza on a Saturday if everyone’s working late for some reason, then treat them all to a round of drinks at the local bar. Jules told me that last summer he paid for the entire staff of the Ark to spend the night on a party boat in the bay as a reward for all their hard work. He often comes in with trays of coffee for everyone, or boxes of doughnuts or cakes. I know he’s helped Nix out several times because she told me—before she met Leon, her car broke down and needed a thousand dollars’ work done on it, and she didn’t have the money, and Albie went into the garage and paid for it without blinking an eye, and refused to let her pay him back. I know it’s nuts for him—what’s the saying? Monkey nuts? Cashew nuts? No, peanuts, that’s right—it’s peanuts for him, but that’s not the point; he’s generous with his time, money, and affection, and that’s what matters.

  How is it that Pierre spent thousands on me and yet he made me feel cheap, but the most Albie’s spent on me is five bucks at work for a coffee and muffin combo, and yet he makes me feel like a million dollars?

  He’s lost in thought at the moment, probably worrying about the Ark. He looks serious, which is unusual for him, as he’s usually smiling. It makes me sad that he’s not happy at work. I wonder if there’s anything I can do about that?

  “Penny for them?” he says, glancing at me.

  “Penny for what?”

  “Your thoughts, Remy. It’s a saying. I’m asking what you’re thinking.”

  “Oh. I was thinking about Noah.” It’s a partial truth.

  “Noah?”

  “How sad it is that he lives alone in that house.”

  “He has his dogs.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah.”

  “His wife died, yes?”

  “And his unborn baby.”

  “Oh Mon Dieu. How awful.”

  “His father took his own life, too.”

  I stare at him, startled. “Really?”

  “Mm. He had depression, and things came to a head after the Christchurch earthquake—that’s where they lived, and they were right in the middle of it when it happened.”

  “How… did he do it?”

  “He slit his wrists in the bath.”

  I feel a twist deep inside at the thought of what Noah’s gone through. “Oh, c’est terrible.”

  “Yeah, he’s really been through it. Leon’s told me a lot about it. Matt—their dad—took Noah under his wing and helped him turn things around. Noah got his art degree and was doing really well painting murals around the Northland. He got married, his wife got pregnant. And then it all went wrong, and he’s never recovered.”

  “You have tried to get him out of the house, obviously.”

  “Oh yeah, we’re always asking him to come out with us, but short of picking the guy up and bundling him in the car, you can’t force him.”

  “Is it a fear of open spaces?”

  “No, not really. People think that’s what agoraphobia is, but it’s not. It’s an anxiety disorder where you want to avoid people and situations that make you feel trapped or helpless. He walks a lot, with his dogs, along the beach and the headland. It’s social interaction he has trouble with.” Albie’s lips twist, reminding me that he has a similar affliction.

  “I would think it is easy to become like that after a tragedy,” I say. “You withdraw to protect yourself, and it is easier to stay at home and not have to deal with everyone’s sympathy. And gradually it becomes harder and harder to face the world.”

  “You sound as if you’re speaking from experience.”

  “I did withdraw, a bit, when I broke up with Pierre. My life had become a… fabrication. Is that the right word? A fragile creation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like spun sugar. It looked beautiful, but it had no substance, and it crumbled so easily.”

  Albie looks back at the road, but he reaches out and takes my hand. His fingers close around mine, his skin warm. It occurs to me that, back in France, there wasn’t one man who would have comforted me like this; not one man I would have trusted enough to go on a journey with, like I have with Albie today. How strange is that? When he said we’d be gone several hours, I didn’t question the fact that I’d be alone with him in the car all that time. He’s one of the good guys, Bex told me. You grab him with both hands, Remy, if you have the chance.

  I look down at our hands, our fingers entwined. Albie makes me feel safe. An odd choice of word, but I’m happy with it, for now.

  He signals as we approach the roundabout for the turnoff to the Ark, and I release his hand reluctantly so he can turn the wheel. He hasn’t mentioned my suggestion that we could start with one night. I still don’t know if I was serious about it, and if I don’t know, I guess he’s not sure either.

  He turns onto the drive, the gravel scrunching under the car’s tires. The Ark closes at one p.m. on Saturday, but there are quite a few cars in the car park, and Hal and Izzy are in the square talking to Fitz, the wind sending dry leaves spinning in little typhoons.

  Fitz is Izzy’s brother. Their surname is Fitzgerald, and everyone calls him Fitz; I keep meaning to ask Izzy what his first name is. I don’t know him as well as the King brothers. He’s the Ark’s estate manager, and he’s a bit older than the King cousins, maybe early thirties. When I started here, Izzy told me he was the grumpiest man in the southern hemisphere, which has made me a bit wary of him, although he’s always been nice to me whenever I’ve had to speak to him. I’ve since found out he was in the New Zealand Army for a few years and spent time at Scott Base in Antarctica, but his spine was injured when a plane crash-landed at the base, and so he came out of the army a few years ago. Maybe his injury is why he’s so grumpy—he walks stiffly sometimes, so it must still bother him. He still sported an army buzz cut when I started a few months ago, but he’s let it grow longer since, and he now has a head of untidy dark-brown curls. I quite like his new look.

  Albie parks, and we get out and walk over to the others.

  “Hey,” Hal says. “Lovely weather for the time of year.”

  “Yeah.” Albie glances around at
the buildings. “We thought we’d better call in and see if anything needs doing. It’s going to get a lot worse, judging by the Met report.”

  Fitz nods. “I was just saying to Hal that we should do a walk around and look for any potential issues we need to address before the storm hits.”

  “I’ll come,” Albie says.

  Izzy smiles at me. “Nix is out the back, securing the chairs in the garden. Want to help?”

  “Sure.” I glance at Albie and meet his eyes. He winks at me before walking away with Hal and Fitz, heading off to the petting farm. I sigh and follow Izzy through the break room and out into the garden, where Nix is moving chairs up against the deck, about to secure them with rope.

  “Remy’s here to give us a hand,” Izzy says.

  “Hey.” Nix smiles at me. “Busy morning?”

  I recall that Albie hasn’t told anyone else about his hospital visits. I don’t want to break his confidence. “I made Albie take me shopping to Whangarei.”

  Nix grins and passes me the rope. “I bet that went well.”

  “He was surprisingly well-behaved. He only complained four times.”

  They both laugh, and I thread the rope through the arms of the chairs and loop it around the post that holds up the overhanging roof.

  “You two seem to get on well,” Izzy says, earning herself a wry look from Nix.

  I pass the rope to her. “Very subtle.”

  Izzy laughs. “You do, though. I’ve not seen him so captivated for a long time. Well, maybe ever.”

  I glance at her at that comment. “He must have had some serious relationships.”

  “Not really.” She loops the rope through the legs of the chairs and secures it with a knot. “I’ve known him since high school. He was in the year below me. He was quiet when he was young, a bit geeky. He and his friends ran the computer club. He was always good at rugby, though, and he, Hal, and Leon were in the school team. He and Leon played cricket, too, I think. I don’t remember him having a lot of girlfriends before he went to uni. I was down in Palmerston North so I didn’t get to see him much for a while, but when we did meet up occasionally, I could see he’d changed—become more gregarious, more confident. He never seemed short of female company, but I don’t think any of them were serious.”

  “I don’t know why,” Nix says. “He’s a lovely guy.

  “Just not met the right girl,” Izzy says, and winks at me.

  I poke my tongue out at her, and she laughs. “All right, I get the hint.” She finishes tying the rope and straightens. “Shall we have a walk around the vet center now? There’s quite a lot of old boxes out the back—I think we should stack those up and secure them somehow.”

  The wind is definitely picking up now. It’s hard to stay upright as we walk around the buildings, and at one point a particularly hard gust knocks Nix off-balance and I have to grab her to help her stay on her feet.

  “Jesus,” she mumbles.

  “I’m beginning to think maybe we should stay here tonight and make sure the animals in the hotel are okay,” Izzy comments. “We’re almost full at the moment, and they’re going to be restless with all the noise outside.”

  The hotel serves various functions. One room, attached to the veterinary center, is nicknamed Ward Seven after Matt King’s books, and it’s a kind of hospital, where the animals stay when they’re recuperating from an operation or about to have an operation. There’s a daycare room where dogs wait to be picked up after being groomed and where Hal and Leon and others who work at the Ark who have pets can leave them for the day if they need to. There are also boarding kennels housing the animals waiting to be rehomed, run by Hal’s brother, Ryan. Hal and Izzy recently rescued eight dogs and eleven cats from a house in town—the poor animals, who’d frequently been mistreated, had been left alone while the neglectful owner went off for a week partying down in Auckland, and the neighbors called the police when the dogs wouldn’t stop barking. I doubt Ryan’s managed to rehome them all yet, so it’s no wonder the place is overflowing.

  As we lift boxes from the grassy area behind the veterinary center, my thoughts—as usual—drift to Albie. “It is odd,” I comment, “that Albie does not have any dogs. I would have thought working here with all the rescue animals would mean he would be bound to have at least one.”

  “Oh, he did,” Izzy says. “He had two beautiful Pointers—Merry and Pippin.”

  That makes me laugh. He’s a huge fan of The Lord of the Rings. “Typical.”

  “He got them when he left university. He was living in Auckland at the time.”

  “What happened to them?” Nix asks.

  “He used to leave them in the garden when he went to work. One day they dug under the fence, went into the neighbor’s garden, and somehow got into her garage. She’d had trouble with rats and she’d left poison in there, and the two of them ate it.”

  I stop in the process of carrying a box and stare at her, horrified. “Oh no.”

  “Yeah, I sympathized because it happened to me too, when I was young. I had an Old English Sheepdog that died the same way. With Albie, we were just in the process of setting up the Ark. Me, Hal, and Noah flew down to see him. When we got there, he was three-quarters into a bottle of whisky, completely wrecked in every way. Broke my heart. As well as dealing with the dogs, apparently his neighbor—an old woman—had just cried and cried, so he’d had to console her as well. Albie was so cut up he couldn’t speak. He just lay on the sofa, staring at the ceiling, wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t do anything. We stayed with him, watching over him, until his dad turned up. I can still remember that moment. Charlie walked in and said thank you to us for being there, and said we could go. As we walked out, I stopped to put on my coat, and I heard Charlie say, ‘It’s all right to be upset, son.’ I looked over and Albie had sat up and sunk his hands into his hair, and he was crying, and Charlie was kissing the top of his head. It was such a lovely picture.” She sniffs and laughs. “Still makes me well up even now.”

  “Aw,” Nix says, blinking hard.

  Emotion rushes through me at the thought of the warm-hearted Albie losing his beautiful dogs. I want to run out and find him, and throw my arms around him. I keep discovering things about this man that make me melt a little more every time.

  “Shouldn’t have told her that,” Nix says to Izzy. “Now she’s in trouble.”

  Unfortunately, I think she might be right.

  Chapter Eleven

  Albie

  Hal, Fitz, and I spend some time securing a couple of loose planks on the fence surrounding the petting farm, and we help Poppy, my older sister, move all the animals into the main barn. It’s a solid, stone-built building, hopefully able to withstand the high winds.

  “I’ll stay here today until the storm blows out,” Poppy says. “I’ll sleep here if I have to.”

  “Need someone to tuck you in?” Fitz jokes.

  “No thanks,” she says. “I’ve got a sleeping bag.” She walks off to check the rabbits’ hutches are fastened securely.

  I meet Hal’s eyes. His lips twitch. Together, we raise our eyebrows at Fitz.

  “Shut up,” he says.

  “You’ll need to be a bit more obvious than that,” I tell him. “She doesn’t get subtlety, Fitz. She’s worse than I am.”

  “And that’s saying something,” Hal adds helpfully.

  I don’t argue with him because he’s right. I can shrug off my social faux pas, but Poppy takes everything to heart, and as a result she’s become very withdrawn. She used to be a primary school teacher, and she got on fine with the kids, but the hassles with staff and parents, and the ending of a fairly disastrous relationship with another teacher, meant that when Noah approached her with the suggestion she run the petting farm, she bit his hand off. She still gets to deal with kids, but she spends a lot of time on her own now, looking after the animals. She says she’s happier, but I know the signs—I know she’s hiding from the world.

  I watch her leaning over to secu
re the goats’ pen. She’s tied back her long curly auburn hair into a ponytail, and she’s lost weight, I think, since she started work here. On impulse, I go over and give her a hug, and she returns it with a laugh before ruffling my hair as if I was five, even though she’s only two years older than me.

  I run to catch up with the guys as they head out. “I don’t need dating advice from you two losers,” Fitz is saying.

  “You will if you’re going after Poppy,” I tell him. “You know she’s on the spectrum, right?”

  “I’m not ‘going after’ her,” Fitz says. “I was making conversation.”

  “She won’t believe you’re interested unless you actually say it straight up. She thinks you’re just being polite.”

  “I was being polite.”

  “All right,” I concede. He obviously doesn’t want to talk about it. “But she doesn’t think a guy is ever going to be interested in her, Fitz. When she broke up with Daniel, he told her she was a frigid ice queen who shouldn’t be allowed out into society.”

  Fitz stops walking, stares at me, mutters, “Jesus fucking Christ,” then strides off again angrily toward the office block.

  “Seriously?” Hal asks me as we walk after him, slowly this time.

  “Yeah. I was all for roughing him up, but Poppy said he was probably right and wouldn’t let me.”

  “Roughing him up? You?”

  “I’d have got you or Leon to do it,” I point out. “But the thought was there.”

  He laughs. “How’s Remy, by the way?”

  “Don’t start.” We cross the square, heading for the hotel.

  “Still not got her into bed, Al?” he teases. “Are you losing your touch?”

  I stop walking. “Don’t talk about her like that.”

  He stops as well and turns to face me. My stomach twists at his words. I don’t want everyone thinking I only want her for sex.

  His eyebrows rise, and he studies me for a moment. “Sorry,” he says softly. “I misunderstood.”

  I shove my hands into my pockets and hunch my shoulders. “Why does everyone have such a low opinion of me?”