Rogue
Billionaires in Disguise: Maxence
My life has become a sad country music song, but instead of heading south, I went to Paris.
I had nothing left to lose, literally. My boyfriend had stolen it all.
Everything.
Everything except a non-refundable plane ticket to Paris, which was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime where that deadbeat was going to propose at the top of the Eiffel Tower.
So I got on the plane without him.
After all that, it was understandable that when I started drinking at the Buddha Bar, things got a little out of hand.
Luckily, a man intervened. He was so ripped that I could see every thick muscle of his abs, obliques, chest, and arms through the tight tee shirt he was wearing. He towered over the guys who were bothering me, and they backed off.
I took him back to my hotel because I was full of drunken, bad decisions that night.
The last thing I needed was a man who wanted to save me when I was trying to do all the wrong things.
Maxence’s brother was trying to kidnap or kill him, and an organized crime thug wanted to cut off his head and feed it to the sharks for entirely different reasons.
So when a cute little blonde stood up on a barstool in the middle of the Buddha Bar in Paris and drew the attention of the wrong sort of guys, Maxence swooped in for the rescue. Everything about her appealed to him: her sweetness, her giggliness, and especially the fact that she was in trouble.
That last part made her sugar and catnip to Max.
Luckily, he only had five days before he left Paris and Europe for wherever his global charity job was going to send him this time.
Why not spend it with the funny blonde who insisted he lie to her?
Indeed, if she thought everything he said was a lie, he could confess his sins, unburden his soul, and reveal what he thought he never could.
Five days with her sounded like Heaven, if he could just convince her to stop throwing him out of her hotel room.
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Published by Malachite Publishing LLC
Copyright 2020 by Malachite Publishing LLC
Lord, give me sobriety and chastity, but not yet.
St. Augustine
Chapter One
Bad Decision
Dree
Dree raised her shot glass high above her head to toast the gilded Buddha towering over the nightclub. She shoved all the air from her lungs through her throat and screamed with her whole body at the people yammering over the techno music and each other, “I’m gonna fuck every man in this bar tonight!”
The crowd roared its approval amid laughter and raised cocktail glasses that glinted in the dark nightclub’s spinning lights. Their faces and gaping, open mouths swam through the air as Dree bobbled where she was standing on top of the chair.
Dree tossed the remaining tequila into her mouth to seal the deal, and the liquor sent acrid fumes up her nose to mix with the aromas of roasting meat, sizzling ginger, beer, wine, cocktails, and people becoming sweaty from dancing in an overheated nightclub. She swallowed the tequila hard because her stomach was already raw from three earlier shots of tequila plus even more cocktails.
Dree raised both her arms and screamed, “Woo!” Thus, becoming a “woo-girl” for the first time since college.
Dozens of men and women woo’d back at her, so she waved her arms and woo’d some more.
It felt great.
Yeah, she was a frickin’ woo-girl tonight. Goddammit, she totally was.
She had, literally, nothing left to lose.
Two waitstaff came over and scolded her in French too rapid for Dree to comprehend, both because she was drunk and because college French had been a few years before. They were definitely wagging their fingers at her and pointing at the floor, though.
The seat of the bar chair she was standing on slid sideways under her feet, tilting her. She caught the back of the seat right before she fell off.
One of the servers grabbed Dree’s hand as she stumbled, and she allowed herself to be helped down from her perch. The seat jittered and swiveled as she held onto the back and found the floor with her toes, trying not to drop the shot glass she held in her left hand. The last thing she needed was to add broken glass to the mix.
As she held onto the barstool and eased herself down to standing on the wobbling floor, she thanked the waiters, who sighed visibly at her but walked away, letting her stay in the club.
Good. The point of the evening was not to get thrown out of the Buddha Bar in Paris. The point of the evening was—
—Well, she’d just proclaimed it to the room.
Dree plunked her butt back on the bar chair and glanced around. Lights spinning in time with the techno dance music dazzled her eyes. The crowd had already forgotten about Dree’s statement of purpose and gone back to yammering and yelling over the music and each other as they tried to talk their way into each other’s pants.
The petite woman who had helped Dree stand up on the barstool seconds before rolled her eyes. “Déchirée.”
When your nickname is Dree and you take college French, you learn real quick that déchirée means plastered drunk.
Yeah, she was wasted and had just announced her sordid intentions to the bar.
And why not?
Quite literally, Dree had nothing in the world left to lose.
Dree shook the last few drops of tequila from the shot glass into her mouth and set it on a cocktail napkin that was covered with black, feminine handwriting, only some of it her own.
Right away, she realized her mistake and moved the shot glass back onto the wooden presentation tray, and she shook out the napkin and blew on it, drying the one dot of liquid blurring a line that formed the bottom of the P in Nepal.
Ruining that napkin would be a disaster. Dree folded it carefully and tucked it into her tiny clutch purse because it was her bucket list, her guiding light for the rest of her life that she had screwed up so badly because she’d trusted the wrong guy.
The so-wrong guy.
The wrongiest of all the wronginator guys.
She was so screwed.
But tonight, she was having one last drink in the Buddha Bar in Paris, and then she was going to fuck all the guys in the nightclub.
Or at least a fair number of them.
It said right there on that napkin that was now safely in her purse that she needed to have a one-night stand with a beautiful man whom she’d never see again, or to have a threesome, or to have a foursome with three guys, or a gang bang.
All those debaucheries were listed right there on the napkin, so she pretty much had to do them, right?
Yes.
Yes, she did.
Maybe she should write a book about that someday, The Guidance of the Napkin. It could be about how people could change their lives by meeting random people in bars and following their drunken advice written on a napkin instead of following what they were “supposed to do.”