Page 17 of Mr. Wicked

CHAPTER ONE

Grayson

There was nothing like the deep blue waters of Saint-Tropez. That was why I’d chosen to come here when I started planning my celebration for the international launch of Hooked. A launch that had consumed our team of coders for months, all led by Drake from the moment we’d hired her as our director of app development and engineering. The rollout that had just taken place a month ago. The result was an explosion in memberships, an overwhelming amount of press, and an income that had fucking skyrocketed.

Things weren’t even close to settled at the office. Shit, there were still flames that needed to be tended to on a minute-by-minute basis. But after four weeks of living at my desk, working twenty-hour days, I had declared it time to party.

Holden had taken his daughter, Belle, to Disney. Easton and Drake were tucked into their love nest.

I wanted to be on the water.

So I rented a hundred-and-fifty-foot yacht and invited nine guests to join me for a weeklong cruise.

Of course, six of those guests were women.

We were only two days into the trip, and I was already having the time of my life.

And what made my smile grow even wider was that whenever I took a break from the fun and logged into Hooked’s database to check how many new members had come in, the number had doubled from the last time I’d looked.

But according to the number I was staring at now, it had tripled.

Fuck yes.

“How about a refill?”

I glanced up from the screen of my phone. The butler was at my side with a freshly poured scotch on his tray.

I shot back the remaining sip in my tumbler and handed him the empty. “I’d love one. Thank you.”

We exchanged glasses and I gazed out onto the Mediterranean, my phone now in my pocket, but the two million users who had come in over the last twelve hours were stamped on my mind.

This was power.

This was a level of success I hadn’t anticipated when my friends and I had sat around the living room of our tiny apartment near Harvard, dreaming of the future of our app.

But now that we were already the largest dating app in the country and about to take over that worldwide spot, there was no going back. The top position was what I wanted and the only goal we hadn’t yet reached. As chief marketing officer, I was going to make sure it happened.

That nothing stopped us.

That nothing got in our way.

Like a woman trying to slide into my life and slow me down, or another company attempting to steal our market share.

There wasn’t anyone more single than me.

And as for the competition, we were currently in litigation with an ex-employee and Faceframe, the social media giant he had left us to work for. We were suing them for stealing our proprietary software and launching a similar type of app. But The Dalton Group, the set of lawyers representing us, assured us that we had the case in the bag.

Just two more reasons to celebrate.

And the yacht was an excellent place to do it.

The only thing that could make this vacation better was if my best friends had joined me.

But my other buddies who had come along were doing a fine job at making sure our time on this boat was well spent. They were in the hot tub now, waiting for me to join them, but I was just going to sit here off the port side, relishing in this view for a little while longer.

Not the sea, although it was certainly serene.

I was looking at them.

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