Bound by the Billionaire Read online

  Across the room, a woman, with the same spectacular blonde hair as the woman in the painting. She was dressed casually, as if clothes were nothing to her, that her real substance was herself— who she was— not the accoutrements that money could buy. So unlike the other women that filled up the room. It was such a new and refreshing manner, Robert could not look away from her. She wore a white blouse with a bold silver necklace and little makeup except for a slash of bright red lipstick on her perfect, natural lips. She looked directly at him. She noticed he was staring at her, but she did not look away. Nor did she move toward him, as most of the women in the room would have done, the hunt begun. She stayed where she was.

  The gallery was packed with people. Robert pushed through them to get nearer to this extraordinary woman. He was finally next to her, though she was facing away from him. The crowd pushed him into her, his body against her back, and he bent his face slightly toward her golden hair and thought how it smelled of sunshine and summer and fields of green grass. His body, against his will, was filling with adrenaline, the excitement moving through him just being near her. He could not remember ever being so affected by a woman. He felt lost in her somehow.

  She turned to him, and she was more beautiful up close than she was from across the room.

  “Hello,” she said. “I thought I saw you looking at me from over there in the corner. Did you want something?”

  “No,” he said. “Only to meet you, I guess.” He held out his hand. “Hi, I’m Robert.”

  She smiled at him and her face lit up, and his breath caught in his throat. Had he ever met such a beautiful woman before? So beautiful and yet she seemed completely unconcerned about it and the effect she was having on him.

  “Hi, Robert. I’m Kim. Kim Davidson.”

  Chapter 3

  Despite the last-minute repairs Sonya had made to her, Kim still felt out of place at the gallery party. These were not her people. These were the rich and famous, and not just the rich and famous from Chicago—she thought she just saw Johnny Depp in the corner. She didn’t belong here. She wished the party would finish, and she could get to work. That was where she belonged, cleaning up after these people.

  Sonya came up to her. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. You go off and have fun. I’m fine just watching from the corner.”

  Sonya went back to her friends. A person wouldn’t think Kim and Sonya were the same age. Kim felt so old—older watching her friend across the room. Perhaps it was being a mother and all of the responsibilities that went with that. But she knew too that she’d made some bad choices.

  She and Bruce met in high school. Like some sort of cliché, she was the cheerleader, him the star football player. Of course they would get married; that was how these stories went. He got the job managing the ranch in Montana, a dream job for him. But for Kim it meant leaving her bereaved mother—her father had died the same year—and her friends in Chicago. Montana was so far.

  When she got there, she understood just how far. They were in an isolated area away from other people. Bruce was drinking too much. In a short time, Kim was pregnant. At first Bruce was happy about it, but soon he began to see it all as a prison— the marriage, the pregnancy, and the pending fatherhood— and he took out his frustrations on Kim. She withstood his mental and physical abuse for months, but after Derek was born, she realized she couldn’t raise her son in that place, with the monster Bruce had become. One day when he was out in the far pastures moving cattle, Kim packed up their few possessions, the amount that could fit in a backpack, and she and Derek escaped. She took a bus back to Chicago. She was broke, had nothing more than a failed marriage, a three-month-old baby, and fifteen dollars in her purse, but she was back home with her mother, and she knew things would work out.

  That was five years ago, and she’d been struggling ever since working minimum-wage jobs trying to raise money to improve their lives. Slowly, slowly she was making progress.

  Looking at Sonya across the room, throwing her head back laughing, whispering into the ear of the handsome man next to her, living as if she hadn’t a single care in the world, made Kim envious. Immediately she felt guilty. If she had Sonya’s life, it would mean Derek would not be a part of it, and she could never live like that. She’d made her choices, and now she needed to live with them.

  She blinked back the tears her thoughts had generated. When she looked up, she saw a man watching her from across the room. She was surprised to feel excitement— sexual excitement —when she looked at him. She wondered where that was coming from. He was very handsome, it was true, but when last had she felt anything like that? She couldn’t even remember—years perhaps.

  He had dark wavy hair and crystal-blue eyes, piercing even from this distance. He wore a tuxedo, but you could see he was a man who took care of his body. His strong arms, wide shoulders, and ripped thighs couldn’t be hidden by his eveningwear. Kim couldn’t stop looking at him, so she turned her body away and found that she’d been holding her breath. What was happening to her? This was not meant to be happening.

  The room was crowded, and people jostled into each other trying to move around to view the paintings. People were bumping into her, but Kim ignored them. But then she felt something else. Someone stood against her. She could feel a hard flat stomach, the edge of a shoulder, something hard at her waist and getting harder. She turned around and there he was, the man from across the room. He smelled amazing and looked more handsome up close than a person should, like a dream.

  “Hello,” she said. “I thought I saw you looking at me from over there in the corner. Did you want something?”

  “No,” he said. “Only to meet you I guess.” He held out his hand. “Hi, I’m Robert.”

  She shook his hand. “Hi, Robert. I’m Kim. Kim Davidson.”

  He stepped to the side, ushering her with his hand in the small of her back, and created a small area open between them, a small intimate circle.

  “Do you like the show?” he asked.

  “I love it. I’ve not been to anything like this for a very long time. The paintings are wonderful. I hope the artist sells all of them. The colors and the bold confident strokes, the subjects, so intimate and loving… I can’t stop looking at them,” Kim said, surprised to hear herself speaking so honestly from her heart to this stranger.

  “Really? Which one is your favorite?” Robert asked.

  “You know, the big ones are lovely, almost too much in a way. My favorite one—I’m not even sure if you noticed it, most people probably haven’t—is that small one in the far corner. The woman on the bed with the crumpled red blanket. I don’t know… I don’t know anything about art, this is not really… I mean, I’m not actually meant to be here, but… I don’t know. I just love that one. It seems so honest somehow. She’s so vulnerable but not scared in any way, like confidently vulnerable. Is there anything like that?” She laughed slightly at herself. Robert smiled at her.

  Kim wasn’t sure why this man was mixing her up so, making her speak from her heart when she didn’t know him at all. There was something—maybe it was the awakened sexual feeling in her that pushed her off balance slightly. It had been a long time since she felt such an attraction to a man. It was unsettling, and she was acting uncharacteristically because of it.

  “You’re right. It’s exactly like that—a vulnerable confidence. And about the honesty—you’re right about that too.” He smiled at her. “That’s my favorite also. The woman seems so unpretentious and un-self-aware. She doesn’t care or maybe she doesn’t know that she’s the most beautiful woman in the room. Like you I think.”

  Kim knew she was blushing. How did a man say such a thing? Her? The most beautiful woman in the room, when the room was full of every kind of beauty? Kim assumed he must be playing with her. He was obviously very wealthy and apparently slick as well. He knew how to work a woman, and he seemed to be trying his charms on her. He would not succeed, despite what her body was trying to convince h
er of.

  A middle-aged woman, who might have been pretty had she not pulled her graying hair back into a severe bun, came up to them. “Please excuse me for interrupting,” she said to Kim and then turned to Robert. “Sir, there’s someone who needs to speak to you. Mr. Karradin, he says it is urgent.”

  Robert turned to Kim. “This is Debra, my PA. If you could excuse me for a moment?”

  “Yes, of course,” Kim said.

  Kim watched the two walk away. She stayed put not knowing yet that he would not return and she would not see him for the rest of the party.

  “Do you know who you were talking to?” Sonya said, bouncing up to her, already drunk from the free-flowing champagne.

  “He said his name was Robert.”

  “Yes, Robert Miller. Don’t you know him? He’s a billionaire, inherited loads of things from his parents when they died in a plane crash a few years ago. A hotel chain, a diamond mine in Africa, property all over the country. He’s the most eligible bachelor in the country. What were you talking about?”

  “Nothing. The paintings. He asked me which one I liked and I told him.”

  “Yes, he has a big art collection. He bought one of the paintings.” She pointed toward the far corner. “Do you see that small painting? The one with the red, I think it’s a blanket or something?”

  Kim smiled. She couldn’t believe it. “Yes, I see it.”

  “That’s the one he bought.” She rubbed Kim’s arm. “Lucky you, catching the eye of Robert Miller.”

  Kim watched Sonya go back to her friends and thought, yes, lucky me. And then reminded herself that nothing would come of it—just a man trying his luck. She wasn’t interested. She had more important things to take care of than stroking some rich man’s ego.

  Chapter 4

  Robert got delayed with the telephone conversation with Mr. Karridin, the CEO of the hotel chain, one of his many businesses. There was a problem with the construction permit for the new hotel in Egypt. When he got back to the party, most of the people had gone, including that extraordinary woman, Kim. He felt sad about that. He wondered how he would find her again. He thought he saw her speaking to the manager of the gallery, Sonya Lando—that might be the place to start. That gave him a bit of hope.

  For the moment though, he had other things to think about. Now that he looked carefully, he realized Rive Gauche had really no security at all. There was the guard at the reception desk who monitored the door and kept an eye on the bank of screens that told him what was happening around the building where the various security cameras were located. There was one other roaming security guard who took predictable routes through the three bottom floors of the building, the first floor of the gallery, and the two floors of offices. The fourth floor to the top floor was accommodation, luxury apartments only accessible with keys held by the tenants. Any visitors had to check in with the reception desk guard, who would call up to the apartment the visitor wanted.

  Robert’s plan was to hide somewhere until gallery one was empty and locked up for the night. Then when he was sure the roaming guard was elsewhere, he would sneak out, dodging the easily avoided security cameras, slip the painting off the wall, and take his private elevator up to the penthouse. He admitted that it was not the most difficult of thefts, but it was his first. He’d try a tougher one next time, he told himself.

  Only a handful of guests remained in the gallery—mostly the manager, Sonya, and her friends, one a drunk young man, who when he thought no one was looking grabbed the manager’s breast. She responded by cupping him between the legs, and then they both laughed as if it was the funniest joke ever. Robert smiled at their games.

  He slipped by the entrance without being seen and into the janitor’s closet at the end of the hallway. He’d wait there until the coast was clear and he could get into the gallery to grab the painting. In the meantime, he moved to the back of the janitor’s closet. It was dark inside. He sat down to wait behind a shelf with various cleaning products on it. The room smelled like a mixture of pine and bleach, not altogether an unpleasant smell, Robert thought. It reminded him of his grandmother’s house, which was always one of his favorite places when he was a child. He made himself comfortable for his wait.

  As he heard the cleaning crew vacuuming the hallway outside the closet, his mind drifted to the woman he’d just met, Kim. She was so different from the women who were usually in his life. Those women were so forward and were rarely able to hide that they wanted him and, though they tried to pretend otherwise, that they wanted his money too. Most everything that came out of their mouths was words well thought through to further their agenda. Nothing about them was honest and natural, or spontaneous.

  Kim was the direct opposite. He thought about how she had described the painting he’d bought. He could hear that she was speaking directly from her heart, and it had touched him. Her honesty about everything that she was seemed a very rare thing in this jaded world. It seemed impossible for her to put on a mask, to act in a duplicitous way. How refreshing was that! And she was so beautiful and sexy. Robert couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt such a powerful sexual urge come over him for a woman. He wanted her with a powerful aching, and that felt wonderful. It made him feel so alive—alive like he had not felt for a very long time.

  As he sat in that dark closet, just thinking about her, he felt himself harden. He tried to ignore how excited he was getting. But then he heard something. Someone was opening the door.

  Chapter 5

  Kim was happy the party was finally over and she could get to work. Her job was to clean the first floor, which was the gallery, and the two upper floors, which were mostly offices. She was to empty trash cans and vacuum the floors, clean the toilets. It would take her about four hours, she thought. A nice easy job. She enjoyed working alone at her own pace, and she also enjoyed the silence and the time to think. Her two waitressing jobs never allowed that. Luckily Sonya told her to leave gallery one since a special outside cleaning crew was always brought in to clean after such parties. That would mean though she started late, Kim would likely finish early.

  She was surprised when she noticed herself whistling as she vacuumed the hallway. What was making her so happy? She was relieved to have this job, that was true. It wasn’t too bad and it would help with her tight finances. But that wasn’t it, at least not the bulk of it. She searched her mind. Though she didn’t want it to be the case, she knew the cause of her happiness. Of course she knew it. It was that man at the party, Robert. She knew she didn’t want a man in her life—she had no time or interest in that—but it was nice to know that somewhere under all of her fatigue and responsibilities, she was still a sexual woman and that a man like Robert could still turn her on like that. It had been sudden and intense, and she’d liked it quite a bit, though it had surprised her. When she left Bruce, she had thought love and romance were now a thing of the past for her. She had more important things to think about. She needed to raise her son. She was sure that when leaving Montana something inside of her had switched off, but it was clear from how her body had reacted to Robert, it had not been switched off permanently.

  She finished the vacuuming and needed the cleaning supplies for the bathrooms. She had only the bathrooms left and she’d be finished for the night. She could go home and get a good night’s sleep for once. She didn’t work tomorrow until the lunch shift at Joe’s Pub, so she might even sleep in late the next morning.

  She opened the janitor’s closet and turned on the light. She looked around for what she needed and collected the cleaning cart. She found the window cleaner she’d use for the mirrors and reached for it on the upper shelf before adding it to her cart.

  She turned to take the cart out, and a hand came from behind her and covered her mouth. A strong arm circled around her neck. She froze with fear. What was happening? Was she going to die in this closet?

  But then she felt a warm breath at her ear, and a voice whispered, “I’m not going to hurt you. P
ut your hands behind your back.”

  She did as she was told. The man, for she could hear that it was a man though she had not seen him yet, tied her hands behind her back.

  “I promise. I’m not going to harm you. Don’t be afraid,” he whispered again near to her ear. The warmth of it, she found with a shock, was exciting her. What kind of person was she to be excited by a man who was tying her up? A surge of excitement rose inside of her from a place she didn’t know existed. It made no sense how she could be getting excited now when a strange man tied her up in a closet. He could do anything to her and she would be helpless. The thought of it was what was exciting her—he could do anything to her. The excitement she was feeling was sexual, something she hadn’t felt for so long. Did she like being powerless before this man? She was surprised at the answer her body was giving her.

  “I’m here to steal a painting only. I will not hurt you.”

  Kim suddenly realized there was a familiarity about this man. Did she know him? She felt that she did. She couldn’t put her finger on it. Was it the feel of his hands on her? Was it his voice? His scent? No, she knew what it is. It was his hard body against her. She had felt that body before; she had felt it earlier that night. She knew who this man was.

  The man turned her around, and her guess was confirmed: it was Robert.

  Before she could speak, he leaned into her and kissed her neck, and she was surprised to hear herself groan in response. Who was this woman? He bit at her and licked the inside of her ear, which sent electric sparks out. The pleasure was nearly painful, but she could do nothing to stop him.

  “I want you,” he whispered in her ear.

  He roughly pushed her against the back wall, his strong, tough body reinforcing the fact that she was his. She would need to take all that he wanted to give, all that he wanted to take—she had no option, bound as she was. His hard cock pushed against her, and she moaned into his strong wide shoulders. She couldn’t believe how quickly she ached for him to take her, but he was not going to rush. He would do things as he wanted. He would punish her with a slow drawn-out torture of pleasure, she could see that.