Page 1 of How To Tempt The Off-Limits Billionaire

CHAPTER ONE

Hey, gorgeous, if you’re looking for that pretty pink thong, you left it at my place last night. I’m sitting at my desk, it’s in my pocket, and I keep remembering how I slid it down your hips...

ROISINFROWNED,TRYINGto make sense of the words when another message popped up on her screen.

You there? Huh, you must be busy. Anyway, just wanted you to know that I had the best time!

Her fingers hit the keyboard with more force than necessary.I’m so glad you had fun, she typed.

FYI, I’m halfway across the world, you cheating scumbag!

Now, sitting on one of the backless, effortlessly sexy couches in the lobby of The Vane hotel, the luxurious hotel owned by her biological brothers, Roisin O’Keefe scrolled through the text messages she’d exchanged with Kelvin since he’d, inadvertently, let the cat out of the bag.

It was an accident. I didn’t mean for it to happen.

Yeah, sure. The “accident” defense was old and tired and didn’t work because people weren’t prone to randomly falling—naked—into other people’s arms, and beds.

We’ve been together since college. You can’t just throw us away, Ro!

No,he’dthrownthemaway when he decided to play Remove-Her-Panties with the owner of the pretty pink thong.

Kelvin’s infidelity hurt—of course it did, she wasn’t a robot—but Ro knew that her heart wasn’t completely broken. Maybe just a little battered, slightly bruised?

And, under the occasional prickles of pain, there was relief. A lot of it.

And that was partly because she no longer felt obligated to tell her boyfriend that she’d inherited almost a billion dollars from her biological parents a few months before.

She’d dreaded breaking the life-changing news to Kelvin. As a financial advisor, he would’ve insisted on taking control of the situation, demanding that she let him act as her business representative. He would’ve freaked at her insistence on giving most of her windfall away and urged her to buy property, shares, upgrade her house, and her car. Andhishouse andhiscar. After six years together, and much prodding, he’d finally proposed and she’d spent the next two years nagging him to set a wedding date. Ro had no doubt that, given her change of fortune, he’d want them marrying right away.

Having access to a billion dollars was a hell of an incentive to marry...

She’d initially felt guilty at her cynical thoughts but now, many weeks after her leaving Los Angeles, she knew her instincts about her long-term partner were right. Kelvin was fundamentally, and sadly, untrustworthy.

Pink thong girl was welcome to him.

Another reason to thank the gods she’d kept her life-changing news to herself—she had yet to tell anyone, not even her adoptive parents, about her inheritance—was she knew that, had she told Kelvin and then broken up with him, he wouldn’t have hesitated to sell her story to the highest bidder.

And it was a hell of a story. After birthing three sons and plundering one of Africa’s oldest and wealthiest family-owned business, the uber-moneyed and infamous South African powerhouse couple, Gil and Zia Tempest-Vane, found themselves pregnant with baby number four. Uninterested in raising another child—not that they’d given their other three children much attention—they gave her, their only daughter, up for adoption in the USA and immediately returned to their licentious lives jet-setting around the world.

For the best part of the next three decades, they frequently hit the headlines and there wasn’t a vice they weren’t intimately acquainted with: drugs, orgies, infidelities and bad behavior were routinely covered by the international press. Sadly, not even the death of their son tamped down their pleasure-seeking instincts.

Jack was the oldest of Ro’s biological brothers and, from what she’d learned, had been an exceptional young man. Whip-smart, athletic and, according to Radd and Digby, responsible, caring and soul-deep honorable. His death from a brain aneurysm shortly after his twenty-first birthday devastated his brothers. Jack was their guiding light, hero and role model. Their rock throughout their tumultuous childhoods.

Jack’s death, and Gil and Zia’s lack of grief, were the catalysts for Radd and Digby to emotionally, and permanently, divorce themselves from their parents.

Ro couldn’t blame them for that. Gil and Zia’s domination of the social pages and gossip columns continued unabated. Their deaths in a horrific car accident in California two years ago left a hole in the news cycle and that hole was partly filled by the incessant speculation of who would inherit their enormous estate.

As far as the world knew, Gil and Zia only brought three boys into the world—Jack, Radd and Digby. Nobody knew about their fourth child as Ro’s birth and adoption were well-kept secrets. But when they died, Ro, who’d always known she was adopted, learned that she wastheirchild—their sole beneficiary, in fact—and that she had two biological brothers.

Right now, nobody could link Ro O’Keefe, American kindergarten teacher, with Gil and Zia Tempest-Vane. And if the press discovered her connection to them, the internet would explode. She would be front-page news worldwide and hounded wherever she went.

That didn’t sound like fun.

Ro flipped her phone from hand to hand, thinking that, at some point, she’d have to tell her adoptive parents about her inheritance, but they had their issues they were currently working through. Issues she was also trying to make sense of...

After a thirty-five-year relationship, one adopted child, and a supposedly rock-solid and indestructible marriage, her parents were talking divorce, telling her that they’d drifted apart and now wanted different things and, maybe—bleurgh—different people.

As a result, Ro couldn’t help questioning her beliefs about love, commitment and marriage. She’d genuinely believed her parents were perfectly matched, the best of friends who enjoyed a happy, passionate marriage.

---