The Billionaire Game by Lila Monroe Read Free Book Online Page A

starving pitbull with a bone fresh
off the butcher’s block. She sipped her appletini angrily,
shaking her head with her brow creased. “It’s
discrimination. Total double standard. Marvin in accounting was
looking at porn constantly—real porn, you don’t even want
to know some of the search terms he was using—and they had to
go through this whole process with verbal and written warnings for
months, and they still didn’t fire him! They probably never
would have if he hadn’t accidentally clicked the wrong button
during a meeting with a client!”
    “Ha, I remember that!” I
said. It was all people had been able to talk about at Devlin Media
Corp. for weeks. Someone had even redownloaded the video and made an
autotune parody. I hadn’t been able to eat yogurt for a month
after watching that.
    “But you come along, looking at
just a few dozen barely suggestive pictures, for perfectly legitimate
reasons even if it is on company time—”
    “Yeah, but isn’t Marvin’s
dad, like, some big hotshot on Wall Street?” I interrupted,
trying to bring the good starship Lacey back down to Earth before she
began roaming the universe in search of new life and new
civilizations. “That probably had a lot to do with that.”
    “Well, I’m technically just
a wedding away from owning half the company,” Lacey shot back.
Her face cleared. “That’s it! I’ll just get you
rehired! With an even better contract.”
    “You don’t have to do
that,” I said. “I don’t want to take hand-outs or
special treatment.”
    “Or even promoted!” Lacey
said, not hearing me through the haze of blissful charitable
planning. “There’s that position in—”
    “Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold your
horses. Hold those horses still! Do not let those horses leave the
stable.” I set down my drink and made Lacey look me in the eye.
“Don’t be all going mad with power now. I do not want to
have to interrupt my job search to depose you from a benevolent
dictatorship, and let’s be real, I am the superhero the people
would call on in their time of need.”
    Lacey pouted. “Okay, maybe I was
jumping the gun a little with the promotion. But not much! You’ve
been there for years! You have tons of experience, and if you just
had some challenges to be passionate about—”
    “But am I ever really going to be
passionate about receptionist-ing?” I argued, and quickly went
on before Lacey could point out that ‘receptionist-ing’
wasn’t a word: “I mean, is anyone? Does anyone wake up in
the morning and go, ‘oh boy, another day of answering phones
and scheduling appointments and being yelled at! Maybe there will be
a really difficult appointment to schedule and I can challenge my
mental abilities to the fullest! I can’t wait to see what gross
old man uses the fact that I’m trapped behind a desk to tell me
that I ‘sure do got a good breeding figure’ and offer to
take me back to his place!’”
    Lacey waved her hands in surrender,
trying not to snort her appletini out her nose.
    “You know, maybe this was a
blessing in disguise,” I reflected.
    “How do you figure that?”
Lacey asked, getting the appletini situation back under control.
    “Well…” I took a
breath. “Maybe this my chance to really focus on something I
can be passionate about. Maybe this is the chance to really launch my
business.”
    My stomach lurched as I spoke the
words, the sounds of them solidifying into terrifying reality. Once
they were out there, there would be no going on—I would have to
go forward and try to live up to them. Could I do it?
    “Maybe Asher was right,” I
said. “Not about being a horny asshole, obviously; but maybe he
was right about how I should expand my business. I’ve been
asking other people to treat it like more than just my hobby, but
have I really been treating it like more? Maybe this is my chance to
just go balls to the wall and really go for it.”
    Lacey set her drink down. “Really?”
    I held my breath and