Page 8 of The Billionaire's Bad News Baby

“English is fine,” Elio snapped. He didn’t have the patience today to listen to someone stumble their way through Italian. The woman didn’t take note of his tone though, and just smiled in relief.

“Oh, phew. My boss gets real mad when I use English, but then he also gets mad when I say I can’t work a shift because I’ve got Italian lessons that afternoon. Like come on, man, pick a side.”

“Can I help you with something or are you just trespassing for fun?”

“Oh, yeah.” She tapped the cardboard box. “I’ve got a delivery for Elio Morelli. Is that you?”

She held out the box. It was just plain cardboard with no address written on it anywhere, a single strip of brown masking tape securing it shut. Immediately, the hairs on the back of his neck rose, suspicion crawling through him like a swarm of spiders under his skin. Okay, so maybe Marc wasn’t being over dramatic after all.

“My personal mail doesn’t get delivered to the island,” he said, which it didn’t. There was a PO box on the mainland, and Gianna would bring the contents over whenever she had a shift.

The woman blinked at him, her mismatched eyes wide and innocent.

“Oh, I just got told to bring it here...”

“What is it?” he asked.

“I dunno,” she said with a shrug, those bizarre eyes of hers still wide and innocent. Oh my God, this woman was going to give him a coronary.

“Who’s it from?”

She peered at the box as if a label might magically appear. “The mainland?” she asked with clearly no idea. Elio just sighed sharply through his nose and raised an eyebrow, which seemed to send her into a panic spiral.

“Oh, please don’t make a complaint to my boss. If he finds out I lost the sticky note that was on it, he’ll for sure fire me, and it’s really not easy to get a job here when you’re Italian isn’t that good. I can read it great, and all the addresses are fine, but speaking it… Anyways, I remembered the address that it was supposed to be delivered to. I just don’t remember who it was from…”

“So leave it at the door and get off of my property,” Elio interrupted, feeling like he was just going in circles.

“There’s a storm coming,” she said, pointing to the rapidly darkening sky. “If I just leave it on your doorstep, it’ll blow off, and then I’ll get into trouble because apparently my boss thinks it's my fault if the weather’s bad as well.”

She rolled her eyes at this employer of hers and shifted impatiently from foot to foot, as if he were the difficult one.

Elio’s phone started buzzing from inside the study, and on top of everything else, the sound of it felt like a jackhammer being drilled straight into his ear. He had to close his eyes for a second and take a breath because this whole fiasco was the last thing he needed right now.

“You work from home, huh?” the woman asked, peering around him and looking into the study like she owned the place. “That must be great, getting to be on your own all day. I work with this guy Nico, what a sleazebag. I’d wear my headphones at the warehouse and ignore him, but my boss doesn’t let us listen to music on the job…”

It was all too much after a week of feeling like a fugitive for no reason. The phone was still ringing with its cycle of shrill beeps. On top of that, the crash of waves around the island and claps of thunder above were getting louder every second, and the wind was picking up preparing for a storm. He could barely hear himself think. Unable to take the woman’s nonsensical ramblings on top of everything else, Elio snatched the box from her, just wanting everything to stop, for her to go away, to be left alone. She did indeed stop, her mouth frozen in a perfect “o” of surprise.

The tape was easy enough to get rid of, tearing off in one clean strip. Elio opened the box where he stood, not even bothering to go inside. He had been on the edge of exploding, pieces of him just disappearing into the ether out of frustration and overstimulation. Now he froze, staring at the stack of papers that were the only thing in the box.

“Mr. Morelli,” said the woman, the ditzy tone gone and replaced with a much sterner voice. “I am sorry, but these are a notification of legal proceedings from Mr. Noel Preston and his legal team. You’ll find all the necessary information for proceedings in the paperwork. I’ll leave you to it.”

With that, the woman turned to leave via the garden path as if this was all just fine, like she didn’t sneak in here and trick him into being served court papers like some sort of cartoon villain. And now she was just leaving?

As she was walking away, Elio finally found his voice.

“Hey!” he snapped, and she turned back with a raised eyebrow.

“You tricked me into taking these. That’s not fair!”

She offered him a sympathetic smile, which only made his blood boil more.

“Yes,” she said. “But you did take them, and I have visual confirmation that you have taken them and that you heard me explain what they are.”

“It shouldn’t count if it’s a trick.”

“It had to be a trick,” she said bluntly and waved a hand around at the island around them. “You didn’t exactly play fair to start with, sir.”

“Play fair? It should be invalid. You trespassed under false pretenses.”

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