Page 1 of Taken By the Dark Billionaires

Chapter One

Sutton Baxter took a deep breath, raised her hand again to the door knocker, then dropped it to her side. An uneasy shiver slid down her spine, as if knocking on the door would open the gates of hell for her.

Forged from the finest resources, the mahogany frame, with its deep reddish-brown hue glowing with streaks of gold, was exactly how she had envisioned the door of a billionaire’s house to look. Although ‘house’ was the wrong word, it was overwhelmingly palatial in its magnitude.

Her gaze slid over the series of intricately engraved patterns on the door, but it was the three-headed creature, something like a dragon with a snake’s body—a basilisk—in the center, that increased her foreboding.

Curiously, a tiny flower, something like a lily or something similar, was also carved into the middle of the three intertwined dragon heads.

In the light of dusk, casting ominous shadows around the creatures embossed in the wood, Sutton wondered if she should just turn around and leave. Looking into the eye of a basilisk meant death after all, according to mythology.

Okay, she was just being silly. It wasn’t like her to amplify an already stressful situation with extra imaginary morbidity. From a young age, she’d had to learn to take things at face value.

It is what it is.

Although, if she could stop trembling for a minute, everything would be okay. But she couldn't, and it might not be okay.

She clutched the container of cupcakes she had made in one arm and immediately realized how inane she was being on top of everything else. Did she really think that bringing them homemade cupcakes as an apology to go with her plea not to fire her best friend from her job because it had been Sutton who had messed up was going to make it all better?

She was so stupid. Her entire thought process just showed how immensely sheltered and unworldly she was. Here she was, homemade cupcakes in hand, wearing a white floral, decade-old, hand-me-down dress from her sister, standing in front of a house so staggeringly enormous that her brain couldn’t wrap itself around it, all to apologize profusely to its owners in the hope Tammy was still able to keep her job.

Who did things like this?

She clenched her fist at her side, feeling truly wretched all over again that she had messed up so badly that her best friend thought she was going to get fired from her dream job. She even mentioned that they were going to kill her, but surely, she was exaggerating, or it was the meds talking.

They were billionaires, not killers.

Still, Sutton had only one simple task. Well, she had a list of sixteen tasks after she had offered to do them for Tammy, who was down with horrible flu, and since Tammy had only started her new job as their junior PA two days ago, she didn’t want to make a bad impression.

Sutton had executed everything on the list, from picking up dry cleaning to stocking the mini-bars in their office—to be done when they weren’t around, obviously as was strictly instructed. She also canceled a reservation at a swanky restaurant and then had to call the woman they were meant to meet and make an excuse for why they were unable to attend the dinner.

She dropped off two checks at two different charities and also had to gift wrap a multitude of presents for their thirteen-year-old niece. Luckily, Tammy had already picked out the gifts herself because that would have paralyzed Sutton completely.

But, also on that list was delivering a fairly thick orange envelope to a guy on 5th Avenue. Tammy had drilled into her the importance of the fact that it had to happen at that exact time, but Sutton had been late getting there. An accident had held her up, and by the time she got there, no one was there to receive the package. She waited over an hour in the same spot, but it was getting dark, and... well, was that even a valid enough excuse?

Apologizing to Tammy over and over again was not enough to put her friend at ease, not when she was crying over the phone that they were going to fire her while gasping for air through her blocked nose.

Sutton had to fix it.

And this was the only way she knew how. As if she didn’t have enough things to worry about. Was her life just always going to be an upward struggle?

Was she never going to be at peace, have nice things, like a cool apartment on the Upper East Side of New York, a nice car, financial security, and safety?

Was her life always just going to be one vicious cycle of violence and misfortune of worry and grief? She quickly shoved down her feelings of dispiritedness. She had a mission to accomplish, and she wasn’t going to let her friend down.

She and Tamara Woodsmith had always been close. Tammy had lived in the upper-class part of their hometown, Newhearts Ville, and Sutton had lived on the poorer side of the same town.

They didn’t even go to the same schools, obviously, but the one thing they had in common was reading. They met at the local library and formed their own two-person book club, reading their favorite authors and then spending days talking about the book over bags of chocolate and sodas.

Tammy went to college to study journalism but ended up working for a billion-dollar company at a low level. She quickly moved up and was now an assistant to the chief PA, who worked directly with the three billionaire owners.

Sutton had stayed behind in Newhearts Ville, fifty-five minutes outside of the city, and the only thing she had learned was how to make sure her sister’s ex-husband didn’t kill them and his six children in their sleep.

She amazed herself that she was still able to get up in the morning, every morning, considering her life was such a bleak, dark hole. But she did it for her two nieces, four nephews, and her sister, Laura.

With Laura’s ex-husband in prison, they were able to breathe a little better, but in order to care for them all, Sutton had been forced to take a tiny studio apartment in a not-so-nice part of New York so she could work, earn money, and take care of her sister and her children.

The instant a temp position had opened up at Basilisk Industries, where Tammy worked, she had helped Sutton get the data entry job. It was only for six months, but the pay was so good that Sutton could hardly believe it. She could get her nieces and nephews new clothes, pay for schooling for the three older ones, fix the farmhouse in which they lived back in Newhearts Ville, and even pay for her sister to do some online courses to keep her occupied.

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