Curiosity is the billionaire’s curse.
It’s worse than karma, fate, or destiny. It can either kill you or lead you to your next venture.
Or if you’re me, it can leave you stuck somewhere in the in-between. Right there in that gray area where you can’t predict what the hell will happen next. You have to keep going to find out.
That was the inherent choice I made to play a game where you have to make up the rules as you go along.
The automatic lights pop on when I step through the large oak doors of my ten-bedroom manor home in Lloyd Harbor.
I make my way down the marble-floored hallway, where I’m greeted by the still sound of silence—my favorite thing.
Usually, I’d savor it because it indicates that all my live-in staff have gone to bed, and I have the time I like to myself. But tonight, not so much.
Instead of my usual thoughts surrounding Grayson Inc. and my plans for the week, the only things living in my mind right now are Aurora Wright’s mindless moans of pleasure and the way she looked when she came on my fingers.
That look of wild pleasure on her angelic face will forever be engraved in my mind.
I swear, the taste of her is still lingering on my tongue, like a fine meal prepared at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Her arousal tasted sweet like Tupelo honey, and her decadent body is the sort that was made to be corrupted.
Even I, with the usual ironclad control I always keep on my dick, was lost in her.
Business is business. I know that. But fuck me, the moment I first saw her, I wanted her.
As bad as that would be for me, I wasn’t lying when I said that.
Everything about her made it hard to look away, let alone resist. From that long wavy white hair running down her tanned shoulders, leading to her perky, rounded tits, to the wrap-over skirt that showed off her tight little ass.
Her enticing bright blue eyes delivered a punch to my gut, and all it took for me to cave was one look.
And fuck if I don’t want to go back outside to find her so I can fuck her raw.
Fucking her with my hand was too much for tonight, yet not enough.
Like the bear caught with his hand in the honeypot, I wanted more.
I still do.
Even as I held back and walked away, I wanted nothing more than to be balls deep inside her and feel her tight little pussy squeezing my dick as I emptied myself inside her.
Nothing about the woman followed my normal rules right from the get-go.
Against my better judgment, as soon as I saw her, a surge of something primal rushed through my veins, and I needed more than just the mere glimpse I initially planned. Tonight was supposed to be a ‘look but don’t touch’ mission, but curiosity worked its way into my bloodstream, silently and lethal like a deadly poison.
If I’m being honest, curiosity hooked me right from the moment Grandfather showed me that first picture of the goddess, then it took me straight to the doorstep of No. 11 to find her.
In my world, it’s common practice to meet your opponents before you face off on the battlefield. But my meeting with Aurora Wright was anything other and didn’t feel like war.
Maybe that was because she was so much different from what I expected to find in William Wright’s daughter.
Although the man doesn’t hold a candle to my family’s wealth, his status is close enough, so I expected Aurora to be a daddy’s little princess. Or at least like one of the typical high-society women who flock around me every chance they get in an attempt to better their lives and status with a billionaire husband.
But Aurora Wright was… normal.
Normal, with real dreams she wanted to work hard to achieve.
I’ve lived this life for so long that I’ve forgotten what normal feels like.
As she spoke about her aspirations to write for a lifestyle magazine, I wanted to bottle the passion lacing through her voice and store it away as a reminder of what it feels like to have dreams you wish for with your heart.
It’s a contradictory thing for me to want, given the fact we met tonight because of my own career desires. But the difference between us is she’ll do everything by the book to achieve what she wants, whereas I’ll take it, sparing no thought for what I have to do to reach my goals.
And the goddess just happens to own the thing I want.
Miss Aurora Wright became the proud owner of Sunset Cove after her mother died two years ago. The resort, a highly sought-after idyllic getaway destination that has been favored by celebs from as far back as the 1940s, was willed to her.
It’s currently on a lease, which runs out next week. It was supposed to be renewed, but Aurora’s mother decided against it because she wanted to run the place herself. Which is why Aurora is currently managing the resort.
That’s as much as I know. The termination of the lease is what attracted my grandfather to the place, but I don’t know what we’ll do with it once it’s ours.
I’m still in the early stages of my master plan, but I think it’s safe to say that tonight, I stepped over the first hurdle.
Everything else should come together over the next few days.
Or sooner.
As I approach the study, the crackling sound of paper catches my attention.
The sound is faint but there, and I know—at this hour—it can only have come from one person.
I make my way into the study, where I find Jericho sitting in one of the leather chairs. He has a Cohiba cigar slinked to the side of his mouth while he flicks through a copy of The Economist.
He’s got his feet up on the stained-glass coffee table Mom bought me in China when I first bought this house. Right next to his feet is a bottle of thirty-year-old scotch, which is nearly finished. That, too, was a present. Grandfather gave it to me months ago for my birthday. I was saving it for a special occasion, like when I originally planned to leave Grayson Inc., but it’s just like Jericho to dive in headfirst.
The fact that he’s here isn’t the thing that’s piqued my interest. We often spend most of our days floating back and forth between each other’s homes. But I know he wouldn’t have come by in the breadth between night and day if he didn’t have something important to give me. Or tell me. Or both.
Jericho lifts his head when I stop by the wall of bookshelves and gives me a Cheshire cat smile. “About damn time, brother. I’ve been waiting here for hours.” He emphasizes every syllable of those last words and taps his wristwatch like the impatient father waiting for his daughter to come home from a party.
“Hours?” Now I believe even more that he’s here for all the reasons I want. “Don’t tell me all the women of New York got the memo that you’re an asshole.”
People call me one of the most sought-after in New York, but it’s a well-known fact that when my brother isn’t working, he spends his spare time switching women faster than people breathe air.
Jericho chuckles off key then sneers at me. “Very funny. So, tell me, did you wine and bed the princess? Because that would be very unbecoming of you, Knight Grayson. More than what you’ve already done.”
He’s talking about my decision to go to No. 11.
I won’t argue with him. We both know it was an unnecessary task, and that I was only there because I was thinking with my dick. The picture I got of Aurora would have sufficed. I didn’t actually have to meet her.
“Not yet,” I say that as if I plan to bed the goddess, but I don’t.
As badly as I would love to plunge my cock into that decadent body of hers, I know I shouldn’t.
Shouldn’t—there’s that asshole word again, but it’s the best word choice to explain my situation.
I shouldn’t and can’t go there with Aurora for many reasons. The first is that even a devil like me knows she deserves better. After meeting her tonight and realizing she’s just a regular girl with dreams, I know she’s not the kind of girl you fuck and leave after as if nothing happened.
That leads to the other reason: I can’t be the guy who would stay.
The goddess might have managed to throw me off balance, but in all my years, there has only ever been one real exception, and that’s not a path I’ll be traveling again. Ever.
Aurora Wright is a means to a very profitable end, so I’m just going to have to exert better control of my dick.
Jericho’s sinister chuckle interrupts my thoughts. “And it looks as if she was as pretty as her pictures.”
Those pictures were good, but they were nothing in comparison to the real-life Aurora Wright. The woman holds the kind of rare beauty that inspires art and forbidden fantasies.
“Or better,” he adds in a melodical voice upon seeing my reaction and added silence. A cunning smile spreads across his face. “This is going to be very interesting.”
“Jericho, stop pussyfooting around shit and playing with me. What did you find?”
That smile of his grows wider. “Everything you need.”
I straighten, this key piece of news sending euphoria surging through me. “Everything?”
He nods, displaying the proud smile of the exceptional MIT graduate he is. “You were right. Everyone, even William Wright, has their secrets. And I found them. All of them.”
Jericho never fails me, and I always have his back. That’s what makes us a good team.
I go in for the kill when we want something, and he digs deep for all the tools I need to get that something. He’s the best financial analyst on this side of the planet and a world-class hacker who can get whatever intel you need. From what a person ate for dinner to who they’ve fucked.
Name it, Jericho can do it.
It was he who told me Aurora would be at No.11 earlier, and he helped me sow the seeds for my plan. Now, I can take it to the next level.
He leans over the arm of the chair and picks up a manila envelope from the floor. I walk over to take it when he holds it out to me.
It’s heavy. Heavy is always good.
“Thank you. What kind of secrets am I up against?”
“Serious shit. Believe me when I say you have this in the bag all six ways to Sunday.”
Jesus.
Which means all I have to do now is name the price.
I gaze at Jericho, grateful for his help, but since Grandfather unleashed this new path for us, I’ve been curious about what Jericho wants too.
I filled him in on my task within minutes of my private meeting with Grandfather, and all he said was, “What do you need me to do?”
That was days ago. Every time I try to talk to him about it, he changes the subject. I know he spoke briefly with Grandfather today, but he hasn’t told me anything yet.
“You helped me,” I point out.
“Don’t I always?” He raises a brow, but the smile he gives me suggests he knows what I mean.
“Don’t you want the chance to lead the company?”
His smile widens. “Do you want the short or the long answer?”
“Obviously, the long version because it includes the short.”
He swivels his legs off the table and sits straighter, staring at me head-on. “I’d love a company of my own. I’d love to take the lead, but on this occasion, I do believe this position is for you. You want it. I know you want it, and I’m not going up against you. We planned to leave and start our own company anyway. You were going to take the lead on that, too.”
“I saw us as partners.”
He smirks and shakes his head. “You can call it that if you want.”
“What do you want, Jericho?”
“My legacy. So, there’s no fucking way I’m going to allow Bastian to take the CFO position, and I can’t see you working with him either.”
“No. But Grandfather already knew that. You haven’t told me what he said to you.”
“Because he didn’t say shit.” He chuckles, but there’s no humor behind his laughter. “He called me into his office, and looked at me for a full minute before he said he couldn’t figure out what to do with me yet. But he’d let me know. Soon.”
And the plot thickens. “That’s all he said?”
“Yeah, so who knows what the old man could be planning?”
“Whatever it is, I know he wants us to run the company.”
“Sure, but rest assured our father and Bastian will be doing everything to work against that.”
“I know. If I know nothing else, I know that. Our dear father was shitting himself when Grandfather asked me to stay back after Monday’s meeting. I’ve seen him hedging around the office, watching me closer than usual, and asking about my whereabouts.”
“Expect more of that. Neither of them wants us in their lives, let alone to have any part of the Grayson legacy.”
Behold the story of our lives. One that framed our past and will shape our future. It always makes me sick, and I think of how our mother would have suffered.
She had the misfortune of meeting our asshole father when she was eighteen. She came to the US to further her studies and get work experience. She was hoping to make it here as an artist.
She met my father when he was working on a building he was going to purchase. It was opposite the college she attended.
He got involved with her even though he was already engaged to his bitch wife, Sloane. When Mom got pregnant with me, he made her think they were going to be the happy family. That’s why she got pregnant with Jericho just after she had me. But it was at that time that he was scheduled to marry Sloane.
As Sloane was set to inherit her father’s diamond mining company after their marriage, our father chose her. But he was always going to do that.
He disowned my mother and never looked back, even after she lost her job and had to live on the streets, pregnant and with a baby. My grandfather only happened to find out about us by chance. Mom wanted to go back to France, so he helped her get back there. After that, we never wanted for anything.
Grandfather just had one request—that we return for high school and prepare to be part of Graysons when the time came. That’s how we came to be and where we’re at now.
“We can’t let them win, Jericho.” I stare back at him with renewed determination.
“No, I don’t plan to. I’m ready to fight fire with fire.”
“Then let’s do this.”
He nods, and I mull over what I need to do next.
I probably shouldn’t have told Aurora that when we meet next, we might not know if we’ll be friends or foes.
I already know the answer, and it’s not friends.
Then again, we never were.
Friends shouldn’t know what the other tastes like.
And they shouldn’t want a chance for another taste.
