Page 49 of Conning the Billionaire
As soon as she’d gone to sleep, Micah must have leaped up and grabbed his shaving crap from the sink and his suits out of the closet, stuffed them in his suitcase, and left the room as silently as a cat burglar.
The hotel security staff wasn’t going to catch Kylie this time. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Kylie vaulted out of bed, scrambling for the lamp on her side.
Light blazed through the room. She squinted in the glare and snagged the few things she’d left out, dragged a pair of shorts under her long jammies shirt and tucked the shirt’s hem into the waistband on one side, jammed her bare feet into her tennis shoes, and bolted for the door of the bedroom.
That jerk had left his suitcase again. It must be another dummy suitcase. So he had a definite modus operandi like a career criminal.
In business, her swarthy Italian ass. Micah Shine was a consummate con man, and she was not getting trapped again.
She flipped open the bedroom door and barreled through, striding for the exit to the hallway.
In the living room, Micah Shine was sitting on the couch with his back to her, a laptop open on the coffee table, and nodding as someone on the computer said something in a foreign language that did not resemble Kylie’s high school Spanish. A cup of coffee sat on the glass tabletop.
Kylie stopped walking.
Outside the windows, Atlantic City still glittered in the night around the base of the building, and the ocean beyond was inky darkness.
As she stood there, Micah’s head inclined in Kylie’s direction as if he were listening to something, but he didn’t turn around. He asked the person on the computer, his tone bold and decisive, “Will the ROI on that shipment be enough to justify the outlay of capital?”
What the hell? It wasn’t even quite five o’clock in the morning. He couldn’t be on a business call before dawn. Kylie dropped her suitcase.
Micah said, obviously still talking to the person on the computer, “But what would be the percentage return on our investment? Manufacturing in Britain is difficult enough after Brexit. We have to recalculate all our ROIs and include inflation costs of our materials to ensure we return a respectable profit.”
Britain? The UK was five hours ahead of the US East Coast in time zones, so it must be something like ten o’clock in the morning there.
Now that Kylie really looked at the back of Micah’s shoulders and his blond head, the collar of a white dress shirt was just visible above a navy blue suit jacket he wore, which was not the soft black tee shirt and the black pajama pants he’d worn to bed just three hours before.
Weird.
Kylie walked around the couch, nearly tripping over her untied shoelaces and giving him a wide berth to make sure she wasn’t visible to whomever he was video-chatting with.
As she crept toward the end of the sofa, the person’s voice on the other end of the teleconference became clearer. The person wasn’t speaking a foreign language. The woman just had a robust British-like accent.
It wasn’t precisely British, though. Kylie had heard many British people from different parts of London and other parts of England while being a cocktail waitress and growing up in Atlantic City. She wouldn’t place the woman’s accent as British, but it wasn’t Scottish, and it certainly wasn’t Irish or Australian or anything like that.
As Kylie came around the end of the couch, she saw what Micah was wearing and slapped both hands over her mouth so the people in a business meeting wouldn’t hear her cracking up.
Yes, Micah was wearing a white dress shirt, open at the neck, and the jacket from a navy blue suit, but from the waist down, he wore only a pair of light blue boxer briefs and navy blue socks.
His long legs were propped up on the coffee table beside the computer and crossed, muscular and thick from his hips to his ankles. Coarse dark blond hair was scattered over his thighs and calves, softening the deep crevices and ridges of muscle.
Micah had gone Zoom-casual.
His laptop computer sat upon a stack of books, so he must only be visible from the chest up.
And stiff and proper Micah Shine in a videoconference without pants was just freakin’ hysterical. Kylie fumbled for her phone in her pocket to take a picture.
As she clicked, he blocked his face with his arm like he was fending off a punch.
Kylie lowered her phone, trying to put Oh, come on, dude into her facial expression and the click of her tongue.
Micah narrowed his eyes at her as he lowered his arms, saying to the computer, “The reflection of the sun from the next casino over flashed a glare in my eyes.”
The woman’s voice on the computer said, “Really? I would’ve thought sunrise would be later in the morning this late in autumn.”
Unknown computer-woman was right. The sky was dark as midnight outside. The sun wouldn’t rise until after seven at this time of year. Kylie had hated walking to school in the dark, her sneakers crunching over a crust of dirty snow.
