Page 1 of The Billionaire in Her Bed

Chapter One

A homeless guy taking refuge from the cold at the far end of the bar with a shot of Fireball whiskey, two twenty-somethings who looked like they’d accidentally wandered into a war zone, and Wayne, Flotsam and Jetsam’s answer to Norm fromCheers.

Yep. Another hopping Tuesday night in Sunset Park West, Brooklyn.

Not.

“That’s it for you.” Brooke Worthington snatched away Wayne’s empty beer bottle before he could ask for another. “Time to go home. Is your wife on the way, or should I get you an Uber?”

“Uber,” he croaked, his breath smelling like stale cigarettes and his preferred brand of cheap beer.

Her shift couldn’t end soon enough.

She grabbed a towel and a spray bottle of disinfectant from beneath the bar and started to scrub the scarred oak surface. “Go to the bathroom and freshen up. I’ll take care of the car.”

He let out a loud burp and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Gross. “Thanks, Brooke. You’re too good to me.”

“Don’t I know it.” She waved him away. “Go. Before I change my mind and call your wife.”

“You wouldn’t.” He teetered on his stool, grabbing the bar rail to keep from falling.

She arched a brow at him. “Wouldn’t I?”

He eased himself off the stool with all the grace of a spastic walrus and tottered toward the bathroom. Brooke went back to the task at hand, holding her breath against the strong smell of the disinfectant.

Probably a holdover from all the time she’d spent sitting in hospital rooms, waiting for Mallory to finish chemo or radiation. To this day, she associated the smell of ammonia with sickness. Ammonia and anxiety, with a side order of dried blood and unwashed feet, saturating the air like an old sponge. It gave her the willies.

“Excuse me.”

A deep, husky voice conjured images of naked bodies, sweaty and entwined, stopping her rag mid-swipe. Had it been so long since she’d had sex that some random guy’s Barry White impression was all it took to shift her brain into bad porno mode? She mentally tallied up the days, which quickly multiplied into months. And months. And months.

Yep. It had.

She raised her head, ready to feast her eyes on the holder of the voice that had her girly parts doing the Macarena, and her breath caught in her throat. If she hadn’t been holding on to the bar for dear life, she would have crumpled onto the beer-stained floor like Wayne almost taking a header off his barstool, except she would have been more of a puddle of lust than a drunken heap.

Tall. Christ, he was tall. Probably six-one or six-two, and every inch of him long, lean, and lip-smacking. She let her gaze linger on his magnificently manly chest and impossibly broad shoulders before traveling up to his chiseled jaw, dotted with the perfect amount of sexy stubble. Dark hair fell in waves over his brow, and piercing Paul Newman-blue eyes stared out at her from under sinfully long lashes.

Figures. The first guy worth a second, third, and fourth look to walk into Flotsam and Jetsam, and she was up to her elbows in cleaning solution.

“Do you have a phone I could use?” He shoved his hands in the pockets of his cashmere coat, which he wore over a crisp, white button-down shirt that looked right at home with his pleated charcoal dress pants. “I left mine back at the office.”

“Uh, sure.” Phone. Shit. She’d forgotten Wayne’s Uber. She threw the towel in the sink, squirted some hand sanitizer onto her palms, and reached for her cell on the shelf behind the bar. “Just let me take care of something first.”

“No problem.” Tall, dark, and scruffy sat his oh-so-fine butt onto the stool a few feet down from the one Wayne had vacated. Sexy and smart. Another plus in Mr. Almost Perfect’s column.Almostbecause in Brooke’s world, no one was the total package. Everyone had warts. Some more than others.

“Can I get you a drink while you wait?” She tapped the Uber app on her phone and entered the required information. Type of vehicle, pickup location, destination—which she unfortunately knew all too well, having requested rides for Wayne more times than she could count. “On the house.”

“Are you sure this place can afford to give booze away?” His eyes darted around the virtually empty bar. “Your boss might not approve.”

She lifted a shoulder. “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

“Then I’ll take a Macallan. Neat.”

“You’re kidding, right?” She closed the app and slid her cell across the bar to him. “I’ve got Dewar’s and Johnnie Walker Black.”

“Make it a Johnnie Walker.” He ran a hand through his thick, disheveled locks, pushing them off his face for a nanosecond before they flopped back over his forehead. “Is it always this dead in here?”

“On Tuesdays in January, yeah.” She snagged a fresh towel, sprayed some disinfectant on it, and gave the bar top another wipe down. “Hopefully business will pick up once the new Fairway opens down the street.”