The Millionaire Affair

Book 3: Love in the Balance

by Jessica Lemmon

Genres: Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance; Erotic & Steamy Romance

Synopsis

LOVE IS A DEAL BREAKER . . .

Millionaire ad executive Landon Downey has a policy: no romantic relationships allowed. So when he's saddled with his six-year-old nephew for a week, he doesn't think twice about asking Kimber Reynolds to act as live-in nanny. What he doesn't expect is the undeniable attraction to the woman he hasn't seen since they were kids. And not only does she like him back-she suggests they work their way down a list of extracurricular activities in the bedroom. How can he resist?

Kimber wants to prove once and for all that she can love 'em and leave 'em with the best of them. All she has to do is keep her sixteen-year crush on Landon out of the equation. No problem . . . until she realizes she may not be the only one whose heart has gotten completely tangled up in their no-strings agreement!

Release date: June 24, 2014

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 336

Sample

16 years later.

Another shout sounded from beyond the bathroom door and Landon reached out and silently flicked the lock. He didn’t know how long he could remain in here undetected, but it was worth a shot.

“Hang on,” he said into the phone.

His sister, Angel, chuckled. “Where are you, anyway? You sound all echoey.”

He pressed his cell phone to his cheek and lowered his voice. “Echoey is not a word. I’m hiding in the bathroom.”

She barked a laugh. “From our nephew? Landon, really.”

“I think I bit off more than I can chew,” he mumbled, pacing the tiled floor. On his second pass between shower and sink, he noticed the ruckus that had driven him in here had stopped. Suspicious. He shushed Angel and held his breath, pressed his ear to the door to listen. Nothing. He unlocked it and poked his head out.

“Hello?” she whispered.

“He’s gone into stealth mode,” he said quietly. She erupted into another fit of laughter. “Send reinforcements.”

Tiptoeing in his socks through his bedroom, he sidled along the wall and around the dresser. Back pressed against the bedroom door, he peeked into the hallway.

“Rawr!”

A blur that may well have been his life flashing before his eyes nearly took Landon’s head off. He stilled the object with one palm—a plastic light saber—and Lyon grinned up at him, a gap where one of his front teeth should be. Thankfully, the tooth had been missing when he got here.

“You’re dead!” Lyon shouted.

“Not in the hall.” His voice held a comical tremor. “You’re going to break something.” Like my nose.

“Okay!” With that, Lyon turned on a heel and went tearing down the hallway, swinging the light saber with renewed vigor.

“Do you want Auntie Angel to talk to him?”

Landon stepped into the hallway and, with one more cautious look over his shoulder, made a break for the kitchen. “I can’t get anything done with him here,” he said as he neared the end of the hall. “How did you keep him for two weeks?”

The way he’d said it made two weeks sound like two years. May as well be. Lyon had thwarted both attempts at getting on his company’s conference call and several other attempts to check his e-mail from his phone. “Seriously, did you drug him or something?” he asked, only half kidding.

“Maybe I’m more maternal than you think,” she quipped. He thought of Angel’s struggle to get pregnant and felt the pang of loss for his only sister. She would make an excellent mother, and they all knew it. Never one to welcome pity, she shifted subjects before he could respond. “First of all, I took off work the first week he was here. After that, he had a routine and I was able to work some in between.”

“And you had Richie.” Her husband. Landon had himself, and the team of designers he’d assigned to the account, who were having a conference call without him with their client and the owner of Windy City potato chips, Otto Williams, this very minute. “I can’t take off this week.”

“Yeah, well our billionaire cousin used to say the same thing. Funny how after Shane found Crickitt, he found time for a vacation.”

At the mention of his cousin, he thought back to Shane and Crickitt’s summer wedding last year. Shane was a lucky bastard. He’d managed to meet Crickitt, who was not only considerate and kind, but also understood him. Landon had yet to find a woman who possessed one of those qualities, let alone all three.

That thought brought forth one involving his ex-girlfriend—technically ex-fiancée—Lissa, and his eyebrows scrunched together. They were better off apart, especially since their relationship had been an empty husk for years—way before she’d locked lips with actor Carson Robbins on the temporarily-famous YouTube video that had gone viral. Carson Robbins, Landon thought with a chuff, his pride stinging despite his efforts to keep from it. Why she had left him for that no-talent ass clown, he had no idea. The mind boggled.

A remote-controlled monster truck sped down the hall, narrowly missing Landon’s toes before crashing into the baseboard. The recently installed, special-order, Macassar Ebony baseboards. He pulled in a deep breath. The slapping sound of tennis shoes on the wooden floor followed the path of the car as Lyon blew past. “Careful, buddy!” he called to his nephew. Then to Angel he repeated, a little desperately, “I can’t take off this week.”

The truck slammed into his ankle and he bit back a curse. “Lyon!” His nephew’s eyes grew wide and Landon promptly slapped a patient smile on his face despite the pain in his foot. “Not in the house, okay, buddy?”

“Okay, Uncle Landon,” he said, lifting the car and stamping in the other direction again.

Landon limped into the sanctuary of the carpeted living room. “Help me, Angel, you’re my only hope.”

She laughed, at his expense, but he was beyond caring. The mighty Lyon Downey had defeated him. “Well, you can’t ask Evan to leave his immersion workshop.”

“Give me a little credit.” He knew what this workshop meant to his youngest brother. Evan hadn’t done much for himself since his wife died and he’d become a single dad. His MO up until six months ago had been caring for Lyon and making as much money as possible at his tattoo shop. Then he’d started painting on the side, for fun, or so he’d told everyone. But it wasn’t Evan’s dark, broody cartoon-style works that had captured Landon’s attention. It was the light back in his brother’s eyes. Evan had finally started living again instead of just surviving.

Next thing he knew, Evan was calling to let him know a friend of Angel’s had a friend in the children’s book publishing industry.

“He needs to create five more paintings this week for his agent,” Angel said, still arguing her point.

“I know that.”

“He could be a real illustrator, Landon. You have to find another way. Ever since Rae died, he’s been marginalizing the things he wants. It’s about time—”

“Angel.” She stopped speaking. “I’m not going to ask Evan to bail me out.”

“Okay. I’m sorry. I just… I want him to succeed.”

He smiled. Although a few years younger than him, Angel had always acted the part of mother hen to her brothers—Landon included. She’d gotten worse since Mom died. But Angel wasn’t the only one who wanted the best for Ev. Landon wanted him to succeed, too. His brother’s tattoo shop was profitable, successful, and, until the artwork of his heart had gotten attention in the literary world, all he’d wanted to do. Now his paintings were all he could talk about. Landon wouldn’t deny him this opportunity. No way.

“Can you delegate a portion of your work and lessen the load?” she asked, back on task. “You’ll still be able to get things done… just maybe not as much as you’re used to.”

This account was too important to take his hands off it. But he wouldn’t miss an opportunity to tease her. What were big brothers for? “Sure. You want to set a project aside and take the lead on Windy City? Maybe today while you’re in town?” She was scheduled to fly in this morning to handle a pitch for Holstein Electronics. A pitch he needed her, as the head of his art department, to nail. A pitch he’d never in a million years ask her to skip.

Predictably, she took him at his word. “You can’t be serious!” Her voice went an octave higher. “You asked me to bump up the Holstein account so we can get the billboard design done by next Tuesday! I’ll barely have time to breathe between flights from Tennessee to Chicago and back.”

“Exactly. And like you, the rest of my staff is buried. The delegation thing? Not going to happen.”

Angel heaved a sigh, then blew out the word “okay” before falling silent while she thought. A moment later, he heard her snap her fingers, a sign she’d landed on an idea. “What about the day care in your building?”

“What? No.” He wouldn’t abandon his nephew in a strange place, not even the day care at work, which he knew was staffed with well-trained professionals. Last night, Lyon had a nightmare because of the change of scenery. Evan had warned Landon it might happen, but nothing had prepared him for the helplessness of holding his nephew and being unable to comfort him. He remembered Lyon’s eyes, wide with terror and filled with tears, his little heart racing against Landon’s chest.

“No,” he repeated firmly.

“Okay… Well, what about a nanny?”

A plump, proper woman with a British accent popped into his mind and he made a face. “You can’t be serious.”

Angel’s voice dipped conspiratorially. “What if she was someone you knew? Someone we all knew?”

He crossed an arm over his chest and narrowed his eyes at the lake view outside. She was up to something. Plotting and scheming as per her usual. “Spit it out, Angel.”

“You remember my friend, Kimber Reynolds? She came down to visit me last month and I mentioned she owns a vintage clothing store in Chicago.”

“The girl who stayed at Mom and Dad’s house one summer when we were kids.” The same summer his college girlfriend had given him the worst news of his life.

“Yes!” Angel said with game-show-host enthusiasm. She sounded proud he recalled who Kimber was. “While she was here she’d mentioned she could use some extra money. And since she lives not all that far from you…”

Kimber. He remembered bits and pieces about the girl who’d lingered in his peripheral for an entire summer. He remembered she had red hair, liked to read, and drank Mountain Dew. She’d offered to help him with his creative writing paper, the makeup assignment to save him from failing his college class after Rachel’s pregnancy time bomb. He recalled balking at first—what help could a sophomore be to a college senior?—but Kimber had insisted, and then surprised him. She was smart. Turned out she’d had some helpful advice.

“… sure she would be willing to help you out,” Angel was saying.

He blinked out of his daze and tuned his sister back in.

“Want me to use my three and a half minutes between stops to pay her a visit while I’m in town?”

He started to ask about Kimber’s credentials, then something Angel said earlier crawled out of his subconscious. “Wait, did you say ‘live-in’?”

“Of course.” He pictured her shrugging. “You’ll need someone to bathe Lyon and feed him dinner at night in case you need to work late at the office. And in the morning, you won’t want to wait for her to arrive. What if she catches a late train? Then your progress will be impeded.”

She was being a smartass, but she had a point. If Kimber were here with Lyon taking care of the day-to-day, Landon could focus on work and be home in time to play with Lyon or tuck him in. But a woman living in his penthouse? Not that his place was small. At six thousand square feet, it’d easily hold the three of them. Before Lissa had moved out following the video debacle, she and Landon could go hours without so much as running into one another. But living with a stranger?

“I don’t know, Ang. Has Kimber… done this sort of thing before?” Cared for the nephew of a bachelor workaholic millionaire whose fiancée dumped him for a D-list actor?

“Of course!”

He recalled Kimber’s unruly hair, braces, her affinity for Stephen King. Surely living with her wouldn’t be the same as living with Lissa. Kimber wasn’t his girlfriend, wasn’t his lover, wasn’t his anything. He’d pay her to do a job, she’d show up to do it, and then they could part ways and live their separate lives. Without exposing him to humiliating YouTube videos popping up online and on his employees’ smartphones.

“Admit it. I’m brilliant,” Angel said.

He smiled. “Never.”

“Admit it and I’ll ask her,” she sang.

“I could always give it one more day.” He was kidding, but he wouldn’t give in right away. Where was the fun in that?

A sound, suspiciously resembling a toy monster truck crashing through the new sixty-inch LED television, came from the direction of the bedroom. Followed by a penetrating silence and a quiet, Oops.

He trekked down the hall, mentally preparing himself for the electronic carnage he would likely encounter. Lyon poked his head out of the bedroom, shoulders down, eyes wide, a sickly expression on his face.

Landon managed a small, if not pained, smile for his rambunctious nephew, who looked everywhere but at him.

“Fine,” Landon told Angel as he put a supportive hand on Lyon’s little shoulder. “You’re brilliant.”

“Really?” she cooed.

“Really,” he admitted. He held his breath, peeked in the room, and confirmed that, yes, the LED had indeed met its demise. God rest its electronic soul.

On a heavy exhale, Landon said, “Ask her.”

Me? Babysit?” Kimber couldn’t say the word without laughing. But seriously. Her with a child? It was ridiculous.

Angel lifted a turquoise silk shirt and held it up to her chest. “Does this bring out my eyes?” She’d come into town for a meeting at Landon’s behest, and somewhere between the plane ride and a cab, managed to convince herself that Kimber—who had no experience with children whatsoever—should be in charge of her nephew.

Kimber took the top out of Angel’s hands and hung it back up. “You know it does.”

Angel rolled her eyes. “Anyway, it’s not babysitting. It’s a nanny position.”

“Oh, that’s so different.” She turned to walk away.

“It is!” Angel followed. “Nannies are sophisticated.”

And now her friend was reaching. Kimber plopped down onto the goldenrod, button-top ottoman at the rear of the store. Angel stood over her, hands on her narrow hips, the Downey look of determination lighting her blue eyes.

Kimber would have to give her a reason. Angel was terrier-with-a-chew-toy tenacious. And a little rabid when challenged. “I can’t leave Hobo Chic for an entire week.” Which was so not the issue. The issue was her… with a kid. A kid she didn’t know. That’s not the issue, either. It wasn’t. Not by a long shot.

Her friend elevated her arms and did a neat little turn. “You’re telling me none of your employees can handle this place while you’re gone? What do they do when you have a day off? What did they do when you came to visit me in Tennessee last month?”

“That was different.”

“How?”

Kimber shook her head rather than fib again. Neil or Ginny, even Mick, could handle this ghost town in her stead. Right now, across the street, Jilly’s bakery and the restaurant next door teemed with customers. While she sat here in an empty shop and tried to use her powers of telekinesis to move customers from the food shops to her store. Maybe she should start offering a free pastry with every purchase.

“He’ll pay you whatever you want.” Angel knelt in front of Kimber, her eyes doughy.

“I don’t need the money.” Angel had mentioned a dollar amount right after she suggested the position. An amount that had caused Kimber’s knees to buckle. True, Kimber may not need the money, but she sure could use it. To fund Operation “Get My Ex-Boyfriend and Co-owner of My Store Out of My Life For Good.”

Removing Mick’s name from the lease was a huge, huge motivator. But she also had her pride. “I’m an only child,” she said. “I have had zero experience with siblings or babies or children of my own. Do you want to entrust your only nephew with someone who has never changed a diaper?”

Angel laughed the next two words. “He’s six. And well out of diapers.”

“See?” She stood and paced to the other side of the store where she straightened a rack that didn’t need straightening. “I should have known that.” She slid a hanger into another with a shink sound. “More proof I’m unqualified.”

“You knew that!” Angel stopped the next hanger with her palm, her eyes boring into Kimber’s skull. A human lie detector, her friend.

“I know.” Kimber crossed her arms. “I just… feel uncomfortable.”

She waved her off. “My nephew is a doll face. Like me.” Angel batted her eyelashes.

“You know I know you’re not really an angel, right?”

A loud, awkward cough sounded from the other side of the store. Angel’s eyes flicked over her shoulder where her husband Richie stood, arms braced around his body, looking decidedly uncomfortable. At his side was Mick, who was texting and doing his level best to completely ignore him. Mick. What a jackass.

“They seem to be hitting it off,” Angel said dryly. “Need I remind you why you’d like to speed up the process of getting Mick out of here?”

She didn’t. Every day got harder than the last. But that didn’t change the other potentially bigger issue Kimber was worried about. “I’m not opposed to being Lyon’s babysit—” At Angel’s stern glare, she corrected herself, “Nanny.”

Kimber could get through her discomfort, figure out how to handle a six-year-old. The main problem with this whole scenario was that Angel had said this was a “live-in” situation. And Kimber couldn’t fathom a world where she might live under the same roof as Landon “Sexy Pants” Downey. Unless it was a fantasy world of her making.

Granted, she was a far cry from the teenager who had a mouth full of metal and a nervous hyena laugh, but Landon was awfully… GQ. She picked a piece of lint off her secondhand capris and avoided Angel’s scrutinizing gaze. Kimber wouldn’t even know how to behave around him.

Angel lowered her voice, though there was no need. Mick was paying no one any attention, not even Richie who was supposed to be running interference for this elusive talk. “I know you had a crush on Evan way back then,” she started.

It was a wrong assumption Kimber had never corrected when she was a teenager. Or since.

Angel smiled supportively before continuing. “But Evan won’t be there, so you don’t have to be nervous about seeing him.” A twinkle lit her light eyes. “Unless you’d like to see him. He is single, and if you and Lyon get along—”

“No.” She halted her friend’s speech, snuffing the hope that had begun blooming in Angel’s eyes. “I don’t want to date Evan. The crush I had on him”—Landon—“was over a decade and a half ago.”

Angel blew out a defeated breath. “Fine. Sorry. Well, if you’re worried about Landon, don’t.”

She nearly swallowed her tongue at the mention of his name. If Angel had any idea about the debilitating crush Kimber had harbored for him way back when…

“Would it make you feel more comfortable if I told you that Landon isn’t suffering any weird rebound or depression from Lissa leaving him for Carson Whatshisname?”

Would it? A little. She liked to think he was over Lissa instead of pining for that awful woman.

“Landon and Lissa’s relationship wasn’t”—Angel scrunched up her face like she’d tasted spoiled milk—“normal.”

Whatever that meant. Kimber wondered if he’d had some strange sex fetish she didn’t know about. Some weird room rigged up with chains and—

Ew. No.

“And his penthouse is about three times the size of my house, so it’s not like you won’t have any privacy. Plus, it overlooks Lake Michigan.” She smiled.

Right. Because the view would seal the deal.

Angel lifted her purse off the counter and slipped it over her arm. Richie picked up on her cue and started for the door. Mick may be able to charm the ladies, but his bromance skills needed work. She lifted a finger to let her long-suffering husband know she’d be another second. “Landon is going to provide your meals and incidentals for the week.”

“I can feed myself, Angel. He doesn’t have to—”

“So don’t argue with him when he calls.”

Kimber felt her heart sink to her stomach. Or maybe her kneecaps. “What did you just say?” Because it sounded like Angel said he’d be calling.

“It’s a formality. He just wants to square away the details. He likes details.”

“When?” she asked numbly.

“After lunch.”

It may have been a long time since Kimber had seen Landon in person, but she’d seen a picture of him six months ago in the Arts & Entertainment section of the Chicago Tribune. In the photo, he and Lissa were leaving the charity dinner after the infamous YouTube video of Lissa making out with another man had gone viral.

The millionaire advertising guru and CEO of Downey Design had worn an immaculate black tuxedo and a frown that brought out the angle of his sexy, squared jaw and enviable cheekbones. Lissa had worn a practiced look of remorse, her hand hung limply over his arm, her body candy-coated in a clingy red Gucci dress, her gazelle-like legs long and graceful. Unfortunately for the supermodel, she had zero percent self-respect to go along with her zero percent body fat. Who cheated on someone as hot as Landon Downey, anyway?

He’d been perfect all those years ago before Kimber had lost her virginity, and having tested the waters a few times, she could see he was even more perfect now. She let out a sigh, and Angel leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. “Richie and I have to catch our flight home. Thank you for doing this. It means the world to Landon. And Evan,” she added with a lift of her manicured eyebrows.

“You knew I’d say yes, didn’t you?” Kimber asked, defeated.

Angel grinned, the expression lighting her whole face. “I knew if I stopped by in person you’d fold like a cheap suit.” She stole a glance over at Mick, who was pecking something into his phone. “Have fun breaking it to Romeo.”

But breaking it to Mick wasn’t what had her stomach in knots. It was that Landon was going to call her. Her. And she had no idea what she’d say when he did.

*     *     *

She spent the remain. . .