Page 8 of The Billionaire's Special Relationship

When he turned and saw her, and saw how his people were looking at him with disgust on their faces, as if they were sayingyou chose her over Tabby,he took it out on her. “Get your ass back upstairs!” he yelled at his bedmate.

But she just stood there, her pink, meaty arms folded, as if she wasdefying him too.

It was not his night.

He lifted his arms in the air again, dropped them to his side again, and then made his own way back upstairs. Then, and only then, did his bedmate go back upstairs too.

But as Tabby drove away from that apartment building, she kept wiping away tears. And she still wasn’t thinking about that woman. She was thinking about how foolish she had been to even fall for a guy like him. Darius wasn’t even her type. He was arrogant and self-serving and was always around town claiming he was doing so much for her when he wasn’t doing shit for her. When she never took a dime from him. Then he’d declare he never said it and all those people were just jealous of their relationship and lying on him. But now she knew who was the real liar. She couldn’t believe she fell for a dude like that.

And it wasn’t like she was some high school idiot still. She was twenty-seven years old. She’d be thirty in just three years. She was tired of short-term relationships or guys who left her when she refused to give it up to them on the first date as if that was all they were after anyway. She was tired of being all by herself in this world.

Darius, she thought, was at least a hardworking brother who wouldn’t be a burden on her. He might even be a decent father to the children she wanted to have, even though she knew he didn’t have the temperament for fatherhood. But she was willing to overlook all of that because she wanted to have somebody so badly.She wanted to have children so badly. It was a terrible combination.

But because the pickings in Larkin were thin, she figured she had to settle and she thought she was settling for Darius. She thought she could do way better than him. Only to find out he was settling for her. He thought he could do way better than her!

She squeezed her steering wheel as tight as she could and screamed out in the privacy of her own car. She could stop the stress from making her sick when she screamed out that way.

It could stop the stress, but it couldn’t stop the tears. And it couldn’t stop the reality that she had reached another dead end in a relationship that had wasted another year of her life. And she would have to turn around, go all the way back to the beginning, and start over.

But the thought of starting over yet again made her physically ill. She shook her head as she drove. She was destined to be alone in this life. That was all there was to it. No children for her. No husband for her. No life outside of hard work and more hard work: a life of struggle for her. That was just the way it was and she’d better start getting used to it. Because she would take that reality any day of the week than to go back to the beginning again with another joker that would break her heart in the end anyway. That wasn’t going to happen.

She was done.

She was not going back.

CHAPTER SIX

The door of the limousine was opening even as it was still rolling to a stop in front of the Dellstone office building in midtown Manhattan.

Stuart, the founder of the iconic watersports brand and chairman of its’ board, hopped out hastily and hurried across the sidewalk before his bodyguard, who was tasked with opening the door for the boss, could unbuckle his seatbelt. By the time the bodyguard hopped out of the front passenger seat, Stuart was already at the building’s entrance.

When Stuart entered the lobby of his massive office complex, three of his top executives, including his Chief Executive Officer Mel Weiss, were waiting for him.

“Is it final?” Stuart asked urgently without breaking his stride.

“Not yet,” Mel replied, as he and the other executives kept pace with their boss. “He still one vote shy to take him over the top.”

When Stuart heard that there was still hope, he began running toward his private elevator with a speed that none in his entourage could match, but they tried to keep pace anyway. The few employees stillin the downstairs lobby at that time of night were amazed to see their top leaders running so dramatically. Especially Mr. Jacobs himself! What was going on? They were pulling out their phones to call their contacts in upper management. What was happening?!

But when the executives hopped onto the elevator and the doors slammed shut, Stuart wanted to know the exact same thing. He looked at his CEO and longtime friend and was unable to shield his shock. “How on earth could this have happened, Mel?”

“They started making offers months ago, Boss, but Alan stayed in the background. He wanted the stakeholders to believe it was just rogue board members behind it. That way, it wouldn’t get back to you. But today, Alan got involved. His mother turned over her twenty-four percent to him, and she was able to bring along another nine percent. And then Alan gave the holdouts offers they couldn’t refuse. But conditional on every one of them accepting before he ended the phone call. They had to sell their stakes to him right away. But he didn’t make those phone calls until after we both had left the building earlier today. By the time I made it home, just before midnight, it was already in progress. And I mean they were already going down to the wire. He was only four votes short by then, and two were committing as soon as I got the word that a takeover was taking place. I didn’t even immediately know who the last two holdouts were. We had to scramble to find out who the last two were so thatwe could get to them with a counteroffer. But we were working behind the eight-ball. We had to phone nearly every stakeholder just to find out who the remaining two were, and we’re still in the process of doing so. Alan timed this to the second, Stuart. He knew what he was doing.”

“But how did it happen?” Stuart was still in that land of disbelief. “I had every possible safeguard in place. I had every single scenario imaginable fleshed out.”

“And Alan, as your CFO, knew every single scenario. He’s a punk, but he’s a brilliant punk. And he made sure to knock every one of those safeguards down before he proceeded. He planned this shit to the last man!”

But Stuart was shaking his head. “A hostile takeover right under my nose, by my very own son, and nobody saw it coming?Nobody? I’ll be damned if I’ll accept that!” He pounded his fist into the elevator wall. “I’ll be damned if that will ever be acceptable to me!”

The three executives looked at each other. They knew their asses were cooked right along with Stuart’s control of the company. They were loyal to Stuart and would remain loyal to Stuart and Alan knew it. This was a dark day for them too.

But Stuart wasn’t thinking about himself, let alone any of them, as the elevator doors opened on the top floor. He took off running again.

By the time he made into his boardroom at the southeastern end of the top floor, Alan Jacobs, the new majority stakeholder of the DellstoneWatersports Corporation, was uncorking a bottle of champagne. Cheers and congratulatory laughter were heard in the room. Until Stuart walked in. Then everything went silent.

He stood there staring at his son as everybody in that room, including his son, were staring at him. He was not his usual dapper self. It was obvious that he had thrown on a dress shirt, untucked, and a pair of pants that were available to grab. He also had on an overcoat that opened and hung off of him so loosely that it seemed as if he had lost a ton of weight since he got that call from Mel less than half an hour ago. It was the first time in memory that anyone in that room had ever seen the boss in anything other than one of his patented designer suits. The full gravity of what they’d all just participated in, this sneaky, underhanded, disloyal takeover, hit them like a ton of bricks when they saw him.

Because in all the hoopla of their taking over one of the largest corporations in America, they had failed to remember just who they were dealing with. This man came from a rough background. He wasn’t born with any silver spoon in his mouth. Before he became rich and powerful, he was a man of the streets. He wasn’t a violent man by nature, but they all had been around him long enough to know that he could become a bruiser if you crossed him.