Page 1 of Her Billionaire Bargain (Kensington Square)

ONE

I had never smokeda day in my life, but I had a feeling today might be the day I started.

Why had I canceled the cleaning crew I’d hired? Oh, yeah, because I’d told them I could handle the party I’d foolishly held to celebrate six months of running Shaw, LLC solely on my own. I wasn’t used to having staff in my home. As a very single guy, I didn’t usually make that much of a mess.

Then again, I normally didn’t host parties. I went to parties.

But tonight was different. The champagne fountain had been flowing all night. The fondue fountain had been bubbling. My side table had at least three slips of paper with phone numbers from interested women, and the headache that had been brewing all evening had been beaten back by Advil and a shot of Jack.

I was officially winning at life.

If you didn’t look around my living room at the sheer destruction that surrounded me, that is. By all appearances, a band of unruly children, aka fellow lawyers and friends and their spouses, had charged through and left chaos in their wake.

Part of the chaos was Bob, my pug, who’d slumped next to a half-eaten slab of cake that had landed on my Aubusson rug. And he’d just burped.

Or I had. It was hard to tell at this point.

My house was trashed.

On top of that, I didn’t even like how it looked when it was all put together. This place was styled to suit my father. Stuffy Isaac Shaw. Not wild, freewheeling Dexter Shaw. I should not have priceless antiques in my house. Especially ones I’d had some mindless decorator place in appropriate corners so I seemed rich enough to draw in the fanciest clients—so I could keep on affording this monstrosity of a house.

I was thoroughly sick of this endless cycle, and just skirting close enough to the line of drunkenness to be ready to do something about it.

Grabbing the bottle of Jack like Linus from the Peanuts cartoon with his blue blankie, I headed down the hall to my office, moving to the huge oak desk that my older brother, Preston, would probably drool over. Me, I just kept banging my knee on the heavy file drawers every damn time I sat down.

I jerked my mouse, and my computer woke from the intergalactic screensaver that made my eyeballs pound. Maybe those space lasers weren’t ideal right now. I shut my eyes for a moment, and then tapped in my password before I logged into Shaw, LLC’s server. It took a couple minutes, but I found the digital address book of names and numbers my all-too-capable assistant, Isis Jenkins, kept for me.

Better yet, she filled in the blanks when I jotted down a phone number and labeled the name in a way I could remember…like “Hottie in Pink Pantsuit.”

Yes, that had been a real entry. Ever since my diagnosis of Adult Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, I’d given in to the temptation of leaving myself visual cues to trigger my memory.

Sometimes it was a beautiful woman in a pink pantsuit who stuck.

But Isis helped me out by filling in the blanks with the correct information, like actual names, so I was confident that I’d be able to find the details for the interior decorator my friend Bishop had hired back in the fall. She’d help him set up his new office with my brother Preston, aka Benedict Arnold Shaw.

Or PMS, his girlfriend’s nickname for him worked too.

In the scheme of things, I was fairly certain the decorator had probably endured worst jobs than the one I was about to dump in her lap. I wasn’t fussy. I was just tired of wearing an itchy suit that didn’t fit, and lately that wasn’t only my job, but my house too.

In retrospect, I probably should’ve kept my bachelor pad at the Clarendon Apartments, even though my father didn’t think it offered the appropriate image for an esteemed attorney.

I swear, end up on the news just one time for noise complaints and public nudity and it was impossible to live it down. And the nudity hadn’t even been mine.

Unfortunately.

I’d never given two shits about image. There was a reason I wore graphic T-shirts under my suit jackets most days at work, assuming I wasn’t due into court. I might stretch the boundaries a bit, but I wasn’t a masochist. Judges didn’t take kindly to what they viewed as not respecting their authority. And I liked to win.

Fifteen minutes later, I gave up searching for Pink Pantsuit Hottie’s number and called Isis, my best friend-slash-assistant-slash ruler of my universe. She did everything but sleep with me, though I’d technically never tried because she would rip off my stones.

Part of why she was my best friend.

“What?”

“Well, hello to you too.”

She sighed heavily. “Dexterous, I went home to go to bed. It’s late. I’m officially off the clock.”

“Best friends are 24-7. It’s in the handbook. I checked.”

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