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  THE BILLIONAIRE’S BOYFRIEND

  Geoffrey Knight

  The Billionaire’s Boyfriend © 2017 Geoffrey Knight

  Self-published in the USA Geoffrey Knight 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, situations and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is licensed to the purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of International Copyright Law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines and/or imprisonment. No part of this book can be shared or reproduced without the express permission of the publisher.

  Published by Geoffrey Knight

  Edited by Scarlet Tie Elite

  https://scarlettieelite.com

  With undying gratitude to Val and Zathyn,

  the team at Scarlet Tie Elite,

  for helping me nip and tuck my very first

  full-length rom-com into shape.

  Thanks for all the words of wisdom

  and heartfelt support over the years!

  Also by Geoffrey Knight

  The Cross of Sins

  The Riddle of the Sands

  The Curse of the Dragon God

  The Tomb of Heaven

  The Dame of Notre Dame

  The Billionaire’s Boyfriend

  Buck Baxter, Love Detective

  Buck Baxter and the Disappearing Divas

  To Catch a Fox

  The Pearl

  The Boy from Brighton

  Hotel Pens

  Be My Valentine, Bobby Bryson

  Boys of Perfection

  Nude Surfing

  Scott Sapphire and the Emerald Orchid

  Vampire’s Lair

  Vampire’s Pact

  Drive Shaft

  Drive Shaft 2: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

  The Darcy Boys and the Case of the Secret Skulls

  The Darcy Boys and the Case of the He-Bot Hunks

  Zombie Boyz: Guess Who’s Coming at Dinner

  On the Overgrown Path

  Into the Jaws of Wolves

  To the End of the Line

  Harm’s Way

  THE BILLIONAIRE’S BOYFRIEND

  Geoffrey Knight

  Chapter One

  It all began with a dozen roses. Red roses, naturally.

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t the one who purchased them. I didn’t even have a special someone in my life I could give roses to… at least not yet. I was just the flower delivery guy, risking life and limb in the name of love, pumping the pedals on my bicycle as hard as I could to get from Hell’s Kitchen to Bleecker Street in record time, weaving between cars and waving apologetically to the sound of each horn that tried to blast me off the road.

  “Sorry… comin’ through… whoa that was close.”

  A box of long-stemmed roses quivered in the basket on the front of my bike, as though my swift and reckless trek down 9th Avenue had turned the flowers into a nervous wreck.

  “Sorry little roses,” I muttered to the box. “You’ll be safe and sound in the adoring arms of your new mommy any minute now… if we can just run these lights without getting wiped out by—”

  The blaring horn of an airport shuttle bus crossing 9th at West 14th Street forced me to stand up and power pedal through the intersection as fast as I could, before sailing safely into Hudson, wiping the sweat off my brow and sighing with relief.

  I checked my watch.

  Mrs. Mulroney, the owner of Mrs. Mulroney’s Little Flower Shop, had given me strict instructions to deliver the roses to Penny’s French Patisserie by noon, which was the time that Penny closed on Mondays. Any later, and the delivery wouldn’t get to her on time and her boyfriend—who planned on proposing to Penny at dinner that night—would not be a happy customer.

  There are few reasons why a guy like me would risk an unsightly and early doom whizzing through the New York traffic like a berserk bug with a hungry bird in hot pursuit. But the belief that true love still existed in this crazy and chaotic world was as good a reason as any if you asked me.

  Of course, being a frustrated romance writer with a history of throw-away boyfriends and a love life that had flatlined long ago, I had a choice—I could either resent love in all its forms, or I could cheer it on from the sidelines, happy that at least someone had found the key to that elusive happily-ever-after dream.

  Me, I chose the latter and saved my moments of stress and annoyance for the little things in life, like trying to figure out how to work the remote on my TV or get my music collection down from that stupid cloud.

  I guess you could say I was an old-fashioned kind of guy for someone in their early thirties.

  And yes, I even wore a wristwatch.

  “Shit, twelve minutes till midday,” I told the box of roses. “Gotta get a move on.”

  I poured on the speed, but within the next block the course of my journey—and the course of my life—took a completely unexpected turn.

  A short distance ahead, a burst fire hydrant was shooting water up into the air, turning Hudson into a rising river. Police officers tried to redirect the quickly congesting traffic while fire fighters worked to stop the gushing geyser.

  I quickly sized up my surroundings and recalibrated the quickest route in my head.

  There was a side street on the left that I knew would take me straight through Greenwich, onto 7th, then directly down Bleecker to Penny’s French Patisserie.

  I glanced at my watch again.

  I had eight minutes left.

  I turned the handlebars and my bike pitched from side to side as I pedaled faster than ever, heading down the side street then veering into an alley just as a garbage truck swung blindly around the corner, almost taking me out completely.

  I swerved and managed to stay upright, skidding my bike to a halt.

  At the same time, the truck veered and braked, the wheels screeching as the driver hung one arm out the window and began to shout a tirade of abuse at me.

  “Jesus, what the hell are you doin’? Get off the road, you stupid moron, or next time you might not be so lucky! Ya hear me?”

  He put his foot down on the accelerator and continued his barrage of threats, still hanging out the window and looking back at me instead of looking where he was going.

  I quickly shot a glance in the direction the truck was moving.

  A short distance up ahead, a man in a suit was reading a text on his cell phone as he stepped unwittingly onto the street—

  directly into the path of the oncoming truck.

  “Hey! Look out!” I shouted as loud as I could, yelling to both the man with the phone and the abusive driver.

  Neither of them responded.

  Neither of them could hear me over the shouting of the truck driver and the revving of the truck’s engine.

  Before I knew what I was doing I stood on the pedals and began pumping my legs, speeding as fast as I could toward the guy who was about to be steamrolled by the garbage truck.

  I raced past the moving truck.

  I crossed right in front of its path.

  The guy with the phone looked up just in time to see me crash straight into him.

  The truck driver finally realized what was about to happen and stepped on the brakes.

  I threw myself at the guy with the phone and knocked him out of th
e path of the screeching truck.

  He and I both hit the ground with a thud and rolled.

  The box of flowers opened and long-stemmed roses fell all around us.

  The braking truck missed us by an inch.

  My bicycle, on the other hand, was not so lucky.

  With a loud crunch, the frame of my bike buckled and the front wheel twisted under the garbage truck.

  “What the fuck!” screamed the driver. He quickly reversed the truck up and kept going, spitting the bike out from under the wheels and backing all the way down the alley, fleeing the scene while still shouting abuse from the driver’s window. “You really are crazy! You coulda got me killed! You cyclists are a hazard, ya hear me! A goddamn hazard…!”

  I realized then that I was on top of the man in the business suit, with roses scattered everywhere.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  He looked up at me, blinking back the shock. His eyes were brown. His bearded face was handsome and kind. And then he smiled, and in that fleeting moment the thought crossed my mind that I had just saved the life of the most beautiful man I had ever laid eyes on.

  All he said was, “Your life is about to change forever.”

  I looked at him, confused. “What did you say?”

  Suddenly, a small group of business people seemed to materialize from nowhere.

  “Oh my God! Mr. Croft, are you okay? Mr. Croft, are you hurt?”

  A panicked woman in high heels and a sleek, tight-fitting skirt and jacket tried to bend as graciously as possible, dropping her iPad and cell phone to try and scoop up the man I’d just rescued.

  Several other businessmen in suits reached to help, all of them stepping over me as they jerked Mr. Croft to his feet and whisked him off the street and into a black limousine that was parked a short distance away.

  Before they shoved him into the back of the limo like a President in the midst of an assassination attempt, the man glanced back at me and mouthed the words ‘Thank you’.

  Then he was gone.

  The entourage piled into the limo after him.

  Doors closed and before I knew it the limousine raced away, maneuvering a corner and disappearing from sight.

  “What the hell just happened?” I muttered, my head still spinning as I pulled myself to me feet and dusted myself off. I looked down and saw the roses on the ground.

  Oh shit! The delivery!

  I scooped the roses up and crammed them back into the crumpled box.

  I picked up my twisted bike and hoisted it over one shoulder.

  With box and bike, I started to run.

  When I reached Penny’s French Patisserie, I was wet with sweat and panting profusely, not to mention fifteen minutes late. But to my surprise, the chic little cake shop was still open.

  “Are you Penny?” I asked the young woman behind the counter, still trying to catch my breath.

  “Yes? Can I help you?”

  I left my busted bike outside the door and entered the store carrying the worse-for-wear box. “These are for you.”

  Penny looked delighted if not confused by the battered appearance of the box.

  “My apologies. I had a little accident on the way here,” I told her. “I thought you closed at midday.”

  “That’s on Tuesdays.”

  Dammit, I’d nearly got myself killed for nothing.

  It didn’t matter. Seeing Penny’s face light up when she opened the box was worth it. She didn’t seem to mind that the roses were a little disheveled. In fact, she beamed with utter joy that someone loved her enough to send her flowers.

  “There’s no card,” she said, looking through the box.

  “Oh, there should be. There was. I’m sorry. It must have fallen out.”

  “Who are they from?” she asked, although from her tone she already knew the answer.

  “Your fiancé.”

  Penny looked at me suspiciously. “You mean my boyfriend.”

  “Yes! Your boyfriend! Sorry, that’s totally what I meant.”

  Suspicion turned to excitement. “Oh my God, He’s going to propose! He’s going to propose to me tonight, isn’t he!”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know. Oh God, I really should go now. Hope you enjoy the flowers.”

  I scurried for the exit.

  Before I could make it out the door, Penny came running up to me, grabbed me by the shirt and planted a big kiss on my cheek.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you! I know you didn’t mean to let the cat out of the bag, but I seriously hate surprises. Gosh, what will I wear to dinner!”

  “I’m sure whatever it is, you’ll look beautiful.” I continued my escape, but as I reached for my bike just outside the door, I couldn’t help but ask, “Out of curiosity, will you say yes?”

  Penny grinned from ear to ear. “Absolutely, yes! Yes, yes, yes! I love him.”

  The romantic in me let out a sigh of happiness and I smiled back. “Good for you.”

  With my heart full of hope for the world and my broken bike under my arm, I caught the subway back to Mrs. Mulroney’s Little Flower Shop.

  * * *

  My name is Matt Darcy. At the time of the garbage truck incident I was a thirty-two-year-old writer who paid the bills by delivering flowers for my neighbor and local florist shop owner Mrs. Mulroney. We lived in the same building together, a narrow apartment block in Hell’s Kitchen, with Mrs. Mulroney’s Little Flower Shop on the ground floor and four cozy old apartments above it, all connected by the same rattling pipes and inconsistent water pressure.

  Mrs. Mulroney and I lived in the apartments on the second floor.

  Directly above me lived twelve-year-old Tilly and her constantly working single mom, while directly above Mrs. Mulroney lived the elderly yet spirited Mr. Banks.

  Together, me, Tilly, Mrs. Mulroney and Mr. Banks made up something of an odd family, four rather offbeat souls thrust together by a universe who seemingly thought it was either a clever idea or a thigh-slapping joke to put such disparate individuals under the one leaky roof.

  Tilly had the brains and personality of a pragmatic and precocious college student… trapped in the body of a twelve-year-old girl with braces on her teeth and butterfly bobby pins in her hair. She believed in unicorns, the quantum mechanics of time travel and peace in Syria, not necessarily in that order. She read Time Magazine, quoted Nietzsche, and listed her heroes as Joan of Arc, Charles Darwin and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau because he was, in her words, ‘a total dreamboat’. I happened to agree. The fact that her mom worked three jobs just to make ends meet meant that Tilly spent most of her free time clambering down the fire escape that connected her apartment to mine just to share her views on politics, pop culture or the plight of the pandas in Pittsburgh Zoo.

  “They’re not really pandas, you see. Red pandas aren’t really bears at all, but they’re not really raccoons either. They’re undergoing a real crisis of identity… kinda like you.”

  “Me? Crisis of identity? What do you mean?”

  “Well, you think you’re gay, but you haven’t had a boyfriend for as long as I’ve known you. Unless you’re out there busy kissing boys or finding a husband, how do you know you’re really gay at all?”

  “I don’t have to have a boyfriend or a husband to know I’m gay.”

  “But you’d like one, right?”

  “Yes. Maybe. Sure, I guess.”

  “But you don’t really know.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t even know if I’m husband material.”

  “Like I said, a crisis of identity.”

  I gave her a stink eye. “I think I hear your mother calling you.”

  “She’s at work.”

  “She has a very loud voice.”

  Tilly was always good at taking a hint.

  At least Tilly’s musings made some sort of sense.

  Mr. Banks, on the other hand, made no sense at all. You never knew what he was going to say next… or where he might show up. Yes, Mr. Ban
ks—an elderly British expat with a rather overactive imagination—was very good at finding his way into other people’s apartments and appearing in the most bizarre nooks and corners. Once I found him in my laundry looking for Dead Sea Scrolls, having hidden them there from the Nazis. Another time I discovered him in my closet with my underwear on his head; he told me my bicycle helmet didn’t seem quite up to current safety standards. Then there was the time I found him under my dining table with a Bible and a pregnancy test kit, insisting he was ‘this close’ to cracking the Da Vinci Code. He was a sweet and harmless old man who never argued or raised his voice when he was gently guided back to his own apartment. But nobody really knew how Mr. Banks managed to break into other people’s places with such apparent ease. Tilly was certain he had once been a British spy who could jimmy any lock open. Unfortunately, there was no point asking Mr. Banks if this was true. Every time we asked him what he had done for a living, the response was always different—bee keeper, criminal lawyer, used car salesman, brain surgeon, deep sea diver, pastry chef, mortician, janitor, astronaut. No two answers were ever the same.

  Then there was Mrs. Mulroney, a headstrong Irishwoman with a love of flower arranging and whisky drinking. By her own admission, Mrs. Mulroney was somewhere on the slippery downward slope of her sixties and did her best work while ‘topped up on the turps’ as she liked to put it. She had once been married to a man in Dublin who had treated her poorly, until the day he fell down a flight of stairs and never got up again. Whether or not Mrs. Mulroney pushed him was anyone’s guess, but being the good Catholic that she was, the strong-willed Irishwoman had always claimed that Jesus was simply looking after her.

  “The Lord moves in mysterious ways,” she had once said after one too many nips from her hipflask. “Sometimes he nudges you gently down the path of righteousness… other times he’ll give you a good hard shove down the stairs.”