The Billionaire's Fake Marriage: A Single Dad Next Door Romance Read online

  I started to pick up the pace and jog as the disaster of my interaction kept running through my head over and over again. Soon I was in a full on sprint as I ran farther than I had intended to run and turned around and kept running all the way back home. This had been my chance to wow my hot neighbor guy, Devin. But instead of a wow, I’d given a flaming fizzle of a performance.

  My chest heaved as I made it to my lawn and collapsed in exhaustion. There was no cool down, just an all-out sprint and collapse when I made it home. The day had warmed up to nearly 80 degrees which was perfect as I lay there and let myself catch my breath before heading inside. I pulled one leg toward me to stretch and then the other, while I looked up at the sky and tried to think of any possible way I could win back the balance of my liaison with my hot neighbor Devin.

  When I felt the strength return to my legs, I gingerly made it into my house and climbed up the stairs to my room. I stripped off my sweaty clothes and looked for my work outfit so I could take a shower. My curtains were still open and I walked over to close them before Devin got too much of a show. But there he was, standing right in the middle of his bedroom with a towel wrapped around after finishing his shower.

  I quickly grabbed the corner of my curtain and pulled it in front of me. The quick movement of the curtains got the attention of Devin and he turned toward the window and walked my way. My breath quickened as I thought of what to do next. If I just hid behind the curtain after he clearly had seen me, then I was continuing to play the little girl role. I was twenty-one years old. Devin needed to know that I wasn’t a little girl. Plus, I was much better at flirting when words weren’t involved.

  We were in the midst of a little cat and mouse game as I quickly turned away from the window and took a step deeper into my room, but I held onto the curtain and he stayed at his window watching. I smiled at the thought of him standing there looking for me to turn back around, but I didn’t want to turn around and just stood there like some weirdo.

  I reached over and grabbed my bright red lipstick from my makeup table. Then, I turned back toward Devin’s house and used the lipstick to write on the window. Slowly, I thought about how to write my name so that he could read it. With my left hand I held the curtain in front of me and looked up at Devin as his eyes kept an intense stare in my direction.

  I didn’t look up to see if he was still there; instead, I concentrated on writing the letters large and clear so he could see them. When I was finished with the last ‘I’ I looked up and saw Devin standing there still in his towel and waiting for me to finish. He cocked his head to the side slightly and squinted his eyes as he read my writing from his window.

  He mouthed the words, “Hi, Lilli,” and I giggled.

  “Hi,” I mouthed back to him and waved a short single wave.

  His gaze stayed focused on mine with a sexual power I’d never known before. I felt the dirty thoughts running through his mind as my whole body warmed. His eyes narrowed and the intensity of his stare made my center warm.

  Now we were stuck with nothing else to say. With a burst of adrenaline running through me, I let the curtain drop from my hand and blew Devin a kiss. I stood there for only ten seconds but it was a confident ten seconds and then I turned and walked into my bathroom. For the one gleaming moment I was filled with confidence as I let him get a peek at my body and then just as quickly disappeared away from the window.

  When I pushed the bathroom door I started jumping up and down with excitement at what had just happened. This was a whole new level of flirting between the two of us. No longer were we strangers who just got a peek at our naked neighbor, and we now knew each other’s names and I had just flashed him in the middle of the day. I couldn’t even say that it was the alcohol that made me do it; clearly, I was utterly sober in that moment.

  My heart continued to pound with excitement as I showered and got dressed for work. I planned a quick getaway so I wouldn’t have to run into Devin now that I’d given him the ultimate flirting. I simply walked out of my bedroom, down the stairs, to my car and drove away. I didn’t look up to see if he was looking through his window nor did I look at his front door to see if he was there. I didn’t want to know if he was there because I couldn’t be distracted by him at that moment.

  My willpower did me good as I made it to the end of my block and turned toward the interstate. I wasn’t sure how any further run-ins were going to go with Devin, but I had made it out of my house and off to work successfully, so that was enough for the time being. I’d have all night at work to think about my next strategic interaction with the hot guy from the next door.

  Chapter 2

  Devin

  This girl was going to be the death of me. I’d been distracted by her for weeks and now she was heating up the teasing to a whole new level. I certainly hadn’t expected her to flash me like she did. Lilli, that was a nice name, it suited her perfectly and now I had a name to plug into all my deliciously dirty fantasies.

  My body still throbbed as I pictured her standing in her window and letting the blue fabric of the curtains drop away to expose her body. Her long red hair draped down over her shoulders and her milky white skin looked flawless in the glow of the afternoon sun.

  Lilli was young though, much younger than I’d thought she was. All her late nights partying, I’d estimated she was in her mid to late twenties, but when I saw her up close and personal she looked barely twenty-one. I had no business flirting with her; nothing good could come of it. Well, maybe a night full of good old fun, but nothing more than that. Lilli looked like trouble. Since she had returned home to her family she’d been out partying nearly every night. Although I was over dating the party girl types, I couldn’t help imagining what a night with Lilli would be like.

  My cock was already throbbing every time I saw her. Just the thought of having her naked in my bed was enough to make my body head up. Her womanly curves pressed against my hands were a vision I often went to sleep with over the last few weeks. Certainly, I didn’t have any problems finding women to bring home, but since I’d curbed my own partying lifestyle, it was harder and harder to find time for women in my life.

  As the doorbell rang I snapped out of my lustful daydream and hurried to let Jacob inside. We were set to be at the office in under an hour, but I needed him to give his opinion on a new company I wanted to introduce everyone in our office to. Not all my investments went through the office and I was considering backing this company all on my own, but it was much riskier that way.

  “It’s nice to know you’re excited to see me,” Jacob said as he joked about my raging hard on that was pressing out of my pants.

  “It’s that damn girl next door. You wouldn’t believe how she teases me.”

  “Probably all in your imagination. I use to think my neighbor was teasing me, and then I went over there and hit on her and she punched me in the nose.”

  “Ouch, that’s some serious mixed signals. But let’s be honest, you probably deserved it,” I joked.

  “Apparently it’s fun to flirt from afar, but when I wanted to do something about it I was suddenly the creepy old guy next door.”

  “You are kind of creepy,” I laughed.

  “Shut it! She was flirting with me, I know it. I just can’t figure out what happened between her flirting and me making my move. But anyways, just be careful. If she’s living with her parents, she’s young and that’s not the kind of drama you want in your life.”

  “I hear ya man. I’m over the drama. I had enough of that with Ashley to last me a lifetime.”

  “How are Ashley and Izzy? Have you seen Izzy lately at all?”

  “No, Ashley insists that my visits just upset Izzy and confuse her. That’s the last thing I want to do. I send letters and she doesn’t answer. It’s probably better that I wait until she’s a bit older. I was a pretty crappy father the first few years of her life.”

  “That’s bullshit. You’re her father and even if you were gone a lot at first, you’re h
ere now. You should get to see her as much as you want to. With the amount of money you’re sending Ashley each month, she should be bowing down to let the two of you spend time together.”

  “I’m trying to understand her point of view. I was partying pretty hard for a lot of years, and I don’t think she truly believes I’ve settled down and have changed my ways. To Ashley, just because I’m busy with work I must be busy with every woman in a skirt that’s in Chicago.”

  My ex-girlfriend hated all the traveling and partying I’d done after our daughter Izzy was born. There was no excuse for it and I had to live with the father I’d been over those years. But I wasn’t about to push myself on my daughter now that I was ready. Izzy was ten years old now and to just barge in on her life would be selfish of me. As much as I wanted to start building a relationship with her, I was a changed man and willing to put her needs ahead of mine. Ashley said it wasn’t the right time so I trusted her parenting and stayed away except for Izzy’s birthday and Christmas.

  “If you spent more time with her then she’d learn to adjust. I think Ashley is just using your love for your daughter to push you away. She literally moved as far away from here as possible to try and keep you from your daughter.”

  “No, come on now. She moved to be near her family. I was working eighty hours a week then and traveling more than I was home. It was the right move for her. She needed help with Izzy when she was young and her family was there for her.”

  “Her family talked her right out of being with you.”

  “Maybe that was a good thing. We weren’t good together. Before Izzy we were drugging and partying every day. Ashley stopped when she got pregnant and I didn’t until a few years ago. At least things broke off before they got too nasty between us,” I said as I grabbed the drone I wanted to show Jacob. “Now take a look at this.”

  I turned the drone on and used my phone to guide it into the hovering position. While at the beach in Florida a few weeks before, I saw a group of guys flying this drone over them while they were surfing. I couldn’t wait to get it back home and see what the guys thought about it.

  “What the heck is it? Some sort of camera drone? There are hundreds of those on the market right now.”

  “No, this one will follow you without having someone control it. See, you put it into the air and have it fix onto a person. Then I can walk around and the drone will stay behind me taking video. I saw some guys surfing and the drone was following them. Talk about some insane footage, it was epic.”

  “So it doesn’t need someone to control it?”

  “No. It uses facial recognition and will follow you. This is the future, don’t you think?”

  Jacob grabbed the drone out of the air and looked at it for a minute. He was the tech guy of our group and I valued his opinion on all our technology investments. I found companies based on my gut, but Jacob could find the holes in their processes and equipment that prevented us from wasting our money.

  “I’d need to talk to their engineers, but it looks good. Where are they manufacturing?”

  “Let’s talk about it at the office with the other guys. I don’t want to explain everything twice, but I really wanted you to see it first.”

  “Alright, I’ll see you at the office then. Go take care of that thing,” he said as he pointed at my shorts. “No one wants to see that.”

  “I beg to differ. Cindy might want to see it,” I winked.

  “Devin, Cindy is a lesbian. She definitely doesn’t want to see that,” Jacob laughed as he headed back out to his car.

  Cindy might be a lesbian, but I was pretty sure she swung both ways. She’d been flirting with me about as long as I’d known her. She had been my human resources manager at my tech startup nearly ten years ago and we both happened to be looking for something to do with ourselves about a year ago. After the sale of my company I floundered around trying to decide what to do with my newfound money and time, partying took a front seat for a while, but that got old.

  Capital S Investing was started because I had nearly a half billion dollars from the sale of my company and nothing new to do with myself. I started looking into small up and coming companies and helping them out with their funding needs. Soon I’d gather a half dozen other friends that wanted to help these start-ups and we were now running our own small firm.

  We didn’t meet often – only about one week of the month. The rest of the month we were off researching new companies or just hanging out and enjoying ourselves. During our week in the office, we analyzed the numbers of companies we’d invested in, decided on new investments, and sometimes heard pitches from companies. It felt like a little bit of normal for me and I liked that. It was the same reason I bought a house in a normal neighborhood, as I didn’t want to be seen as that rich guy who women used for his money.

  Certainly, my house was plenty large enough for me. The neighborhood was an upper class for Chicago with nearly zero crime. I was comfortable leaving my house for weeks at a time and never worried about intruders or crime, although I did keep an alarm system hooked up just in case. Life in Chicago was as close to a normal life as I could hope for.

  When I arrived at the office, everyone was sitting around the conference room laughing and eating lunch. It was nearly noon but that was our normal starting time. Working all week didn’t mean that any of us liked to wake up early in the morning and come to work. Our typical day went from noon to eight o’clock and sometimes much later, depending on what projects we were working on.

  “I thought you were in Bali this week?” Cindy said as I walked in.

  “Bali?”

  “Yeah, didn’t you say there was a new surf company out there that you were going to visit?”

  “Shit!” I said as I scrolled through my phone. “Yeah, I’m supposed to look at this board company. Wow, I’m glad you know my schedule so well,” I joked.

  “I’m sure you would have remembered two hours before your flight when your phone alerted you. And you’d probably still make it to your plane.”

  “Yeah, probably,” I laughed at the memory of the two of us running to a plane when we were flying to New York one weekend. We had literally arrived at the airport thirty minutes before the flight and still managed to get through security and onto the plane. It probably didn’t hurt that we had first class tickets, but it still felt like quite the accomplishment.

  “Show them the drone,” Jacob exclaimed. “This thing is going to make us rich.”

  We all laughed at his joke. Every single person in that room was already rich. Most of us had a nine figures net worth. All seven of us were there purely because we needed something productive to do with ourselves and wanted to help new companies. But of course, we were business men and women, so making money on the deal was always an important part of the process.

  From the outside, our office didn’t look like the home of seven millionaires, but we technically did most of our work out of the office anyways. The drab walls and boring furniture weren’t at all like the startup companies we worked with, but then again we didn’t care anymore. Our bank accounts were full and none of us had the need to impress others with fancy office accommodations. We had one employee, Stewart, our accountant. He kept the books looking nice and did most of his work from home. We didn’t have a big social media presence and certainly didn’t advertise. Our purpose was solely to help other companies and our investments in those companies were now our business. Sooner or later we would need to hire staff, but at the moment we relished the small size of what we were doing and the relative quiet that we had been allowed to work in.

  My old brown office chair squeaked as I got up and lifted the drone into the air to show the group how it worked. At least everything was so old that I didn’t have to worry if I accidently broke a light fixture during my little demonstration.

  “It has facial recognition and will follow me without the need to control its every move,” I said as I walked around the room. “I saw the founders on the beach
and they had the drone following them while they were surfing. It was friggin amazing.”

  “What’s their production like?” Jacob asked.

  “I’m really not sure of any details. We will need to visit them and start from scratch. They seemed very green and I think they’ve just been financing with family and friends money. We could put some capital behind them with some advertising and it would blow up rather quickly.”

  “Where are they located?” Chris asked.

  Chris was the youngest of our group and had just left his job at Google. His coding skills were amazing and he was itching to start his own company soon. I’d convinced him to hang out with us while he got his own thing up and running. His long beard and scruffy hair made him look more like a homeless man than one who had acquired a multimillion dollar portfolio.

  “Florida, do you want to go check them out?” I asked.

  “Sure, I don’t have much going on this month. I’d like to take a look under their hood and see what type of code they are using.”

  “You know most guys your age are looking under skirts, not coding hoods,” Sergei laughed.

  “Skirts ain’t going to make me rich.”

  “Very true, but they have their own benefits.”

  Sergei was happily married, but loved to give the rest of us a hard time when it came to women. He and his wife had known each other since they were children and their family had arranged their marriage while they were in college. It didn’t seem like a good way to start a life together, to me, but Sergei was happy so who was I to say anything?