Dearest Billionaire Jett: A Billionaire Romance (Carrington Billionaires Book 1) Read online

  Dearest Billionaire Jett

  By A. Long

  Copyright © 2019 by A. Long

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Chapter One – Olivia

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  I sat there, staring at the slip in my hand, feeling like this all had to be some sort of bad dream. Because there was no way that this was for real, right? No way at all...

  I had never been fired before. Not in my whole life. Okay, outside of that job at the hospital. I hadn’t actually worked at too many places, but I had a good reputation everywhere I had gone, and I had never imagined in a million years that someone would look at me and decide that I was so dispensable.

  The hospital was downsizing. That’s what they had told me. They’d said that anyone who wasn’t vital to keeping the place running was out on their ass. I could hardly believe that this was really happening to me – I knew that they had been struggling lately, but never in a million years did I think that I would be the one getting the chop. The pink slip in my hand said otherwise, and I knew that I was going to have to find some way to survive this.

  I didn't have anything in the way of savings, not even close. Working as a nurse at the same time as paying off all my medical school debt hadn’t left me much in the way of spare income, and I barely had enough to make another month’s rent on this place before I was kicked out. I had been so proud when I moved here, it was a place that I could call all my own, but now it was starting to look like maybe… maybe I had spoken too soon. Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten so attached to this place. Because I was going to be out on my ass soon enough, probably living on the streets in a cardboard box trying to keep the rain off...

  Before my naturally pessimistic mind could go much further down that route, there was a knock at the door – I sprang to my feet, something in the back of my mind telling me that it would be someone from the hospital coming back to tell me that they had made a huge mistake and that they wanted me back and that I should just burn that pink slip and forgot about the whole ordeal. But instead, when I opened the door, I found myself faced with my mom, clutching a pint of ice-cream to her chest and with a heavily furrowed brow.

  "You sounded serious on the phone," she told me, as she thrust the pint towards me without waiting for an answer. "What’s going on? Is everything okay?"

  I was still holding the pink slip, now crumpled, in my hand, and I pushed it towards her so she could see what had gotten me feeling so down and out. As soon as she laid eyes on it, she froze, like she had been expecting anything but that. She shook her head, took it from me, her hands so cold from the ice-cream that they made me shiver.

  "There has to be some kind of mistake," she murmured, and she looked back up at me. "Doesn’t there? They didn’t mean – did you do something?”

  "I didn’t do anything," I replied, slumping back down into the couch behind us. It felt like if I tried to stay on my feet for a moment longer, they would give out underneath me in sheer protest. I had never felt this way in my life before, like my whole world had just been tossed up in the air, and everything was in flux. I needed to sit down. I needed to sleep. No, not sleep, I needed to wake up, for all of this to have been nothing more than a dream that my neurotic brain had cooked up to torture me with. But I could see from the look on my mother’s face that this was real. There was no way I would ever have been able to come up with that convincing a facsimile of her expression in that moment.

  "They’re just downsizing," I explained, my voice tiny, sounding like it was trying to crawl back inside me and get away from this conversation completely. "And they said that they couldn’t keep anyone around who wasn’t totally necessary for procedure."

  "That’s crazy," she replied at once. "You help keep that place running. They can’t seriously think that they’re going to be able to work half as well as they did before without you, do they?”

  "Well, it looks like they’re pretty confident," I replied, and she sighed and got to her feet, heading to the kitchen so that she could grab the two of us a couple of bowls for the ice-cream. Even though I was totally depressed and didn’t have anything in the way of an appetite, I figured that I should eat something. I didn’t know how long it was going to be before I got enough money together to do a big grocery shop, after all. I was going to have to survive on the pity-desserts that people brought around to my house, hoping that they would be calorie-dense enough to keep me from expiring on the spot...

  "Hey, stop that," Mom ordered me. "You don’t want to get up in your head right now, it’s not going to help with anything."

  "How could you tell that’s what I was doing?” I demanded, and she shook her head at me.

  "Because I know you," She reminded me. "And you get totally lost in bad thoughts the minute something doesn’t go your way. So let’s not allow that to happen right now, OK? Let’s think about what we can do to make things a little better."

  "I don’t know what’s going to make this better," I muttered, as she planted a bowl of ice-cream in my lap – it was vanilla, swirled through with dark chocolate and studded with cherries. My favorite. Any other day of the week I would have been wolfing this down before I went back to the tub to get myself another serving, but in that moment, I couldn’t muster anything close to an appetite.

  "I have an idea," she replied, and she fell silent for a moment before she went ahead and hit me with it. I looked up at her, to see she had joined me on my couch. It was a second-hand couch, one that I had managed to crib from a yard sale for cheap when one of mom’s neighbors had been clearing out her house after a divorce. Mom didn’t usually bother with holding back from speaking her mind, unless there was something in there that she was sure was going to get a rough landing.

  "What is it?" I prompted her. At that moment, I would have taken nearly anything that she threw my way, no matter how crazy it might have been. I just needed something, a sliver of hope to stop myself from going totally crazy.

  "Okay, but you’ve got to listen to everything I have to say first," she warned me. I cocked an eyebrow. Alright, now I was actually a little intrigued to find out what harebrained idea she was going to toss in my direction.

  "I’m listening," I assured her and, after a long pause, she finally told me what was on her mind.

  "So, Jett Carrington is back in town."

  As soon as she said that name, I had to fight the urge to pull a face that would let her know that I never wanted to think about that jackass again as long as I lived, thank you very much. He was an asshole of the highest order, and I had seen him at his worst, when he had owned the high school that we both went to and had made me one of his victims. I knew that he might have changed, but frankly, I didn’t much care to find out. Guys like him didn’t deserve second chances. They had already decided what kind of people they were going to be, and I wasn’t going to bend over backwards to try and let him prove that he was different now.

  "Mom," I warned her, but she lifted her hand before I could go any further.

  "You said you would hear me out," She reminded me, and I sat back in my seat and grabbed my spoon. Maybe if I ate the ice-cream I could keep the protests from streaming out of my mouth too quickly.

  "He came into the diner, a
nd I was listening in on what he was talking about," she explained. "He’s looking for an assistant right now, and think of how much he could pay you – him and all the brothers, now that they’re grandfather has moved on, God save his soul, they got their inheritances and they have more money than they know what to do with."

  "I don’t think it’s worth it," I replied bluntly.

  "Why not?" She asked, furrowing her brow. "It doesn’t have to be for long, just until you get back on your feet..."

  "Because I don’t think I could look myself in the mirror if I started working for someone like that," I replied, not leaving any room for argument. "You know what he’s like. You know how he treated me. If I started working for someone like him, I’d just be opening myself up to all of that all over again."

  "I’m sure that he’s changed now," she told me. "I heard him talking to his friend at the diner, and it seemed like he was a lot more mature than he was when he had been...uh..."

  "When he was making my life miserable in high school?" I finished up for her. "Yeah, I would hope that he was. But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to be tripping over myself to start working for him. I need a job, but I don’t need a job that badly. I don’t want to give up everything that I’ve worked so hard for just to go back and make myself less than him again."

  "Well, it was just a suggestion," she replied, and I could hear that she was a little hurt. Maybe I had been too harsh. She had just been trying to help, after all, and I knew that she was probably as shocked by all of this as I was.

  "I know, Mom," I replied, and I tried to bite back the sigh that wanted to come up. She was just trying to help. And maybe she had forgotten the bullying that Jett fucking Carrington had delivered to my doorstep through high school – maybe she really thought that I had put it behind me, and that he had changed enough that there was no bad blood between us anymore.

  But I got the feeling that if I turned up at his door, I would have been laughed right the hell out of there. That he would still treat me the same as he had when we were in high school.

  But from the look on my mother’s face – I knew that I couldn’t put any more pressure on her than I already had over the years. If she wanted me to go for this job, then I had to give it a try. Even just to say that I had listened to her. That was all that mattered.

  "Thanks for the tip, Mom," I told her, and I reached over and patted her hand. "Maybe I’ll shoot him an email, yeah?”

  She perked up at once, and nodded.

  "Maybe," she agreed, and she got to her feet again. "Come on, let’s get you a coffee. We’re going to need all the energy we can get if we’re going to apply for jobs for you for the rest of the day."

  "Right," I agreed, and I bit back a groan. Back to the job market. Just what I needed right now.

  Chapter Two – Jett

  "Alright, so here’s a map of the town..." Micah announced to me, as he laid out a giant scroll in front of me, pushing aside the remnants of the breakfast that we had put away a few minutes before so that he could fit it all in.

  "Okay, is this one-to-one size, or what?" I laughed. He grinned at me.

  "Big dreams, big maps," he replied. "I have a few ideas of where we should start. Let’s work from main street down, right?”

  "Right," I agreed, and I reached for the black coffee that I had been working on since our breakfast had been delivered. Normally, the diner didn’t take their food off-premises, but when I had called to put in the order, they had offered to bring it over at once.

  That was the shift that had happened, I supposed, since that money had come into my bank account for good. It was crazy – I knew that my grandfather was rich, but there was some part of me that had never been able to connect with just how rich he was. Not until the billions were sitting in my account, and I was staring at more zeroes in my wallet than I had ever imagined I’d be able to claim as my own before.

  Some of my cousins, they had decided to just take the money and live off it for the rest of their lives. Never work again, never have to worry about working again, just enjoy the money and everything that came with being richer than they could ever have imagined they would be. I didn’t blame them, not really – I knew for a lot of people that would have been a life-dream come true. But for me? No, I couldn’t sit around on my ass sipping mimosas at various beachside resorts while I watched my cash tick down and pour into me, me, me.

  I had gone to business school for a reason, and I had always planned for this once the money was in my account – it was enough to take the edge off the shock of losing a family member like this, to be able to throw myself into the world that I knew so well. That’s where I had met Micah, actually, and the two of us had been idly planning for this day for a long time. We wanted to do something to change the world, or at least the small community where I had grown up. We wanted to make a difference. And that’s just what we were going to do now that we were back here at last.

  Though coming back here didn’t come with a bunch of good memories for me. And I had known that when I had decided to come back, that there was going to be some...well, some tension left over from what I had been through when I had lived here before. There was a reason I had gotten out of this place the first chance that I got, just as soon as I graduated high school – it had felt like so much of this town had been poisoned by the memories of what had happened, of what I had tried to leave behind for such a long time.

  In fact, I had been okay until I stopped by the diner the day before – it was then that I had seen Tracy, the woman who had worked in that place as long as I could remember, and the shock of seeing a remnant of my past where I recalled her being was enough to stir up the sediment of the memories once more. She was sweet to me, which was more than I deserved after the way that I had treated her daughter, but I had been pretty short with her, unable to handle being in there for a moment longer than I had to be. It was strange, in some ways, I had been sure that I would be able to move on from this, to prove to myself that there was nothing to fear in this town for me any longer, but my body still reacted like there was something to run from. Like there was something to terrorize me the way there had been before...

  "So, I was thinking that we start with some renovations at the bookstore," Micah announced, and I blinked and remembered that I was meant to be in the middle of a conversation with him about what we were going to do with my money. I had never spoken to Micah outright about what had happened when I had lived here as a teenager, he didn’t need to know that, but I could tell that he had noticed something off about the way I had been acting since we’d arrived. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was right around the corner, ready to spring out at me at any moment, when I least expected it...

  "Yeah, I like that idea," I replied, nodding and leaning over the map to keep myself distracted. "It’s been around for a long time, right?”

  "Yeah, pretty much the oldest building that’s still open in town," He replied. "I think that’s where we should start. It would make sense, given that we’re going to have a little pushback at first, to show them that we’re serious about making sure that this place stays as true to what it’s always been as possible."

  "Yeah, I like that idea," I agreed, and I ran a hand through my hair. "Where do we start with that? Should we reach out to the owner and let them know that we want to work with them on it?"

  "I think we can talk about buying it out, but keeping the staff and management that they already have," he suggested. "They clearly know what they’re doing, but with your backing, they would never have to worry about making rent or enough cash to live on ever again."

  "You make a good point," I muttered in agreement. I liked the bookstore – I had never exactly been a big reader, but that place, with its musty shelves stacked high with a million old books, had been something of a safe haven for me when I had been in high school. Shit, anything that got me away from him had been a safe haven, as far as I was concerned, and there was no way in hell that h
e would ever have bothered with something as intellectual as reading to pass the time.

  "See, you don’t need an assistant," Micah teased. "You’ve got me, I can handle everything for you."

  "Yeah, I’m sure that’s how you’d like to see it," I laughed. "I think it’d be good to have someone else around here. Someone who can handle the details."

  "Because I’m just no good at it?" He shot back playfully, clasping a hand to his chest as though he could hardly believe what he was hearing. I rolled my eyes at him and laughed.

  "You know that’s not what I’m saying," I replied. "I just want someone around who knows this town well and can make sure that we’re not going to step on any toes, right?"

  "Yeah, you’ve got a point," Micah conceded, and he leaned back into the stool at the breakfast bar and eyed the map for a moment. I couldn’t help but notice, all of a sudden, how empty this whole place looked – I knew that I had only moved in a few days ago, but it seemed as quiet as a crypt. I needed to get some life in here, so that I didn’t sit in this place all alone and feel like I was on the brink of losing my mind. It didn’t suit me, being in a home with so little life. Maybe, at the back of my mind, I was still thinking about leaving – still thinking that I needed a quick bolthole to get away from should some shit go down like it did before.

  At least Micah was here. The two of us had met in our first class on our first day at business school, and we had become fast friends ever since. He was smart and sharp and he wasn’t afraid to call me on my bullshit when I needed someone to do just that. He had come from a family that didn’t have a hell of a lot to their name, and I always welcomed his perspective on the stuff that I knew I just couldn’t understand like he did.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I went to check what it was - I had been a little jumpy since I had gotten back here, that was for sure, and every time my phone got a notification, I'd practically snatched it up to see who was on the other end of the line.