Page 3 of The Billionaire's Bad News Baby

Marc raised an eyebrow at him and said nothing.

“You really think he’s going to come after me?” Elio asked, already knowing the answer.

“Noel Preston is one of the richest people in the country. He is your direct competitor, and he is also known as one of the most litigious people in existence. Couple that with the fact that it was your party he choked at? Yeah, I think he would love nothing more than to use it as a reason to come after you.”

Elio sank down in his chair and prayed to whatever God might be listening that he could disappear into a puff of smoke. That would solve a lot of his problems. Unfortunately, his prayers seemed to go unanswered and he remained in his chair, firmly in reality. He sighed and resigned himself to the legal and social hellscape that Marc seemed so sure was on the horizon.

“So what do I do?” he asked.

Marc, of course, seemed to already have a plan in place.

“Let’s stick with flying under the radar and keeping quiet. That would be my advice, and I would advise you to follow my advice to the letter. You’re no good at public statements, so we need to play to your strengths.”

“So, what? I just hang out here all day? Work from home?”

Marc gave him something like a sympathetic smirk. “You’re wonderfully innocent sometimes,” he said.

Elio rolled his eyes. “That’s not an answer, Marc.”

“By lay low, I mean leave the country, Elio,” he said, and Elio felt a chill run down his back when he realized Marc was being perfectly serious.

“God…” Elio muttered, lifting the glass of juice back to his temple.

“When I said Preston loved a lawsuit…”

“Right, so, by quiet, you mean silent.”

“As the dead. You have that lovely island of yours. I’d recommend taking a vacation.”

“For how long?”

“For as long as it takes for all of this to settle down.”

Elio waited a few moments, waited for the punchline to this awful joke, but Marc never gave one. He sighed, put down the glass and set about organizing a jet for a trip to Italy. But he could still look at this in a positive light, the glass half full and all that… At least if he went into hiding, he wouldn’t have to go to any parties any time soon.

CHAPTER 2

KAYLA

The only thing stopping Kayla from repeatedly banging her head against the kitchen table was knowing that it would definitely leave a mark and she could get called into work at any time this week. Which was part of the reason that she wanted to smack her head against a hard surface. Maybe she could give herself amnesia and forget about her stupid job altogether. Unwilling to give herself brain damage, however, and taking the responsible route, Kayla sighed and opened her eyes, looking back at the job search page she’d been scrolling through for the last hour.

Nothing had really caught her interest or grabbed her attention enough for her to start thinking about a new life with the particular job advertised. It would still be some version of paperwork and offices, coffee runs and emails, emails, and more emails. Despite her lack of enthusiasm, she’d still favorited a dozen listings, tallying a list to send resumes to because surely they had to be better than where she was now.

Hopefully. Maybe. Well, it couldn’t be much worse, could it?

Her current job was to serve legal papers to people who were getting sued or otherwise taken to court for whatever reason, and there seemed to be as many reasons as there were people. Someone slipped on private property and broke their hip. Someone said something defamatory, damaged property, got left out of the will, wanted a divorce, broke a contract… The list was endless. And it was her job to inform people that they were about to have legal action taken against them.

She’d had every curse word under the sun thrown at her and more than a few vases, too. Plenty of doors had been slammed in her face, hard enough to leave her ears ringing, and she’d had to bear witness to a lot of crying as well. Serving papers wasn’t exactly a happy experience for anyone involved.

Kayla had a fair few legal firms and courts on her books, contacting her to get the papers delivered. Some things just had to be done the old-fashioned way. No emails, no texts, nothing that could be excused away as getting lost in the humdrum of life. It was better to show up at someone’s door and say to their face, “Hey mister so and so. You’re being taken to court. Here’s the information you need. Godspeed. Please don’t throw a vase at me.”

Law firms liked Kayla because she was unassuming. Which was a really nice way of saying that she was sneaky. Sometimes people knew a court case was on the cards and would hide away, opening doors for no one and traveling wherever they could to avoid the physical handover that would kick off the official proceedings. They expected a bony, middle-aged man in a dark suit to be knocking on their door. If it was a more paranoid individual, they might be expecting something closer to a nightclub bouncer or a SWAT team.

What they weren’t expecting was a thirty-two-year-old woman in a pencil skirt with wild blond curls that fell past her waist. Kayla’s eyes, bizarrely, had been one of her best secret weapons despite the fact that she had been made fun of because of them for her entire schooling career. Her left eye was a bright sparkling green and her right a deep brown that reflected gold in the right light. A genetic anomaly that had strangers asking her all sorts of questions. But when she rapped on front doors to even the most evasive of people, they would stop and take stock of her for a second, figuring out which eye to make eye contact with, and with Kayla’s usual spiel of “yeah, heterochromia, wild huh?”, they would take the papers without even realizing what they were doing till it was too late.

Job done. Success. On to the next one.

But if they didn’t throw something at her, slam a door in her face or start screaming and crying, Kayla’s mishmash of unique physical features got people asking unnecessary questions.

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