Breaking the Billionaire’s Rules Read online

  BREAKING THE BILLIONAIRE’S RULES

  ANNIKA MARTIN

  CONTENTS

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  Foreword

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Most Eligible Billionaire sneak peek!

  Also by Annika Martin (aka Carolyn Crane)

  Acknowledgments

  All the Annika deets!

  Copyright © 2019 by Annika Martin

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or business establishments, organizations or locales is completely coincidental.

  Cover art: Catalano Creative

  v000002152019

  ISBN: 978-1-944736-08-8

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  * * *

  Breaking the Billionaire’s Rules

  * * *

  Max Hilton is my high school nemesis turned billionaire. And tomorrow I deliver his lunch order.

  * * *

  In a cat costume.

  * * *

  You know he’s going to love it. He’ll smile that smirky smile, sitting there all superior in his gleaming tower, the wealthiest and most notorious playboy in all of New York, the king of everything.

  * * *

  Turns out it wasn’t curiosity that killed the cat—it was mortification.

  * * *

  I’m almost ready to quit my lunch delivery job, but then my roommate tosses me a copy of The Max Hilton Playbook: Ten Golden Rules for Picking up the Hottest Girl in the Room.

  It’s the book that catapulted him to stardom. And it’s my new bible.

  * * *

  I’m going to use his own techniques against him. I’ll wrap him around my little finger, bring him to his knees, and crush his steely heart. Call it payback for all the single girls who had to endure legions of losers wielding his legendary tactics.

  * * *

  But seeing Max every day, I’m discovering a side of him I didn’t even know existed--he’s not the jerky guy I thought he was. He has this smile he shows only to me, and it melts my heart. His touch sends shivers down my spine. And those forbidden kisses are driving me wild.

  * * *

  Falling for him was not in my plan.

  * * *

  Am I breaking his rules or will his rules break me first?

  1

  Never ask a woman what she wants. Tell her what she wants.

  ~THE MAX HILTON PLAYBOOK: TEN GOLDEN RULES FOR LANDING THE HOTTEST GIRL IN THE ROOM

  * * *

  MIA

  My roommate Kelsey swings open the door to our apartment before I can finish unlocking it. “Oh my god, I nearly dropped my phone when you texted,” she says. “I can’t even imagine!”

  “Right?” I throw my hat and scarf onto the couch. “Don’t bother to hide your horror, because it’ll be ten times worse than you think.”

  “Uh!” She pulls me into a quick hug.

  “I feel sick every time I imagine how it’ll be.”

  Kelsey lets me go. “Who even does that?” Her fists are balled, her lips pursed into an angry little rosebud. She’s a dancer with awesome powers of emoting. “He just wants to crush you! He wants to demolish your dignity like a house of cards!”

  “Okay, you can hide your horror a little.”

  “No, I can’t hide it. I hate him so much on your behalf, I want to burst!”

  “Thank you.”

  “Of course,” she says.

  “You guys, do I need to call the overacting drama police?” My friend and former roomie, Lizzie, comes in from the other room.

  “Oh my god, Lizzie!” I give her a big squeeze.

  “I called in the cavalry,” Kelsey says.

  “Maybe it won’t be so bad,” Lizzie tries.

  I raise a brow. “This is a man who woke up one day and thought, ‘I’m rich and famous and I can have anything I want, and what I most want is for my old high school nemesis to be forced to deliver sandwiches to me in my office. In a friggin’ cat suit.’”

  “You can’t be sure he requested you personally,” Lizzie says.

  “The office said as much when I tried to switch. It was a specific request for me to be the one to handle that building. It’s that or I lose the job. And not just one time—no, no, no. Ongoing deliveries. You know it’s him.” I unbutton my coat. “It’ll be the worst ten-year high school reunion ever.”

  Confession: I’ve spent a truly unhealthy amount of time imagining running-into-Max scenarios. They always involve me wearing an amazing gown; possibly a tiara. And our high school hostilities are so insignificant to me, I’m having trouble remembering them. I’m all, Max who? But in such a gracious way. My career is going so gangbusters that everything from high school is a dim footnote.

  Unfortunately, ten years out from our graduation from The Soho High School for the Performing Arts (aka SHSPA, aka the Shiz) I don’t have much to show for my career.

  “Well, pizza’s coming, so there’s that,” Lizzie says.

  “Heart eyes.” I peel off my winter coat, stripping down to the Meow Squad cat suit I’m forced to wear on my lunch delivery route.

  I look up and catch them staring at it, and I can tell they’re imagining it—what it will feel like. What is there to say to that?

  Then Kelsey says the one thing you can say to that. “You’re not alone.”

  I take a deep breath. My knotted shoulders relax a smidge. These girls are everything to me. Two best friends who are in it with me. “Thank you.”

  I go to my room to change into my favorite sloth T-shirt and bright pink yoga pants, and then I go back out and curl up on the couch.

  Kelsey gives me a beer. Her purple fingernails match perfectly with the purple streaks in her jet-black hair. “CLC,” she says. Carb-loving comfort.

  Lizzie snuggles in next to me on the other side. “Were you just mortified?”

  I retell the moment of discovery. One second I’m standing out at the Meow Squad truck, waiting for tomorrow’s delivery assignment, feeling pretty happy about my life. Sure, I have a job where I have to dress as a cat and deliver food-truck orders to office workers, but it’s a part-t
ime job with insurance, the holy grail for up-and-coming actresses.

  And then the next moment, I see Maximillion Plaza on the roster.

  And the sun goes behind the clouds.

  And shadows move across the land at terrifying speeds.

  Giant birds with dinosaur faces screech across the sky.

  “And I’m like, no friggin’ way! You know he found out. I swear to you, the day I first tried on the outfit, the biggest thing on my mind was not how stupid I looked, or how grateful I got hired and all of that. My first thought was, what are the chances I’ll ever have to deliver to Max Hilton? A million-something people in Manhattan, what are the chances Max orders from Meow Squad, and I end up with the delivery? Maximillion Plaza wasn’t even in the Meow Squad delivery area when I first started. I thought I’d be safe. I should’ve known.”

  Lizzie winces. “Maybe he wants to apologize?”

  “No way. Trust me—no apologies will be forthcoming. He’s rubbing his hands in sweet anticipation.”

  “Was it that bad?” Kelsey asks.

  “He once baked dirt into a brownie she had to eat on stage,” Lizzie says. She’s heard all of the stories. “She took a bite and she had to keep chewing—”

  “—and it was dry and weird and gritty, and I so wanted to spit it out,” I say. “Though to be fair, I did put a remote-control squeaking mouse cat toy in his piano right before his freshman recital. And I made it scrabble around while he played Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat. A sweet, quiet piece.” I snicker, remembering. “Of course he didn’t react. Nothing fazes Max. He has a protective titanium exoskeleton.”

  Lizzie gets the pizza alert text and runs down to the lobby. Our apartment’s official pizza is brie, potato, and caramelized onion. Crazy toppings are firmly against my pizza religion, but once you’re out of Jersey, all is lost in the realm of pizza.

  “You’ll get through it.” Kelsey doles out napkins.

  “You don’t know. Max is my kryptonite. Beyond kryptonite. Kryptonite doesn’t live to destroy you. Kryptonite doesn’t stare at you with an amused light in its eyes as you die inside.”

  “Well, you’ll be able to quit when we land our parts. We’ll have jobs for a year. At least.”

  “Dude, Phantom of the Opera has been running since eighty-eight.”

  “Jobs for twenty years. Fifty! We’ll be old ladies, singing and dancing up there.”

  “Pinky slap!” I hold out my pinky. She slaps it with her pinky.

  We’re both going out for the massive Anything Goes revival. Kelsey’s trying for one of Reno’s Angels, a really demanding singing and dancing part, and I’m trying for the lead, Reno Sweeney. I’m shooting crazy high, but I feel like the part has my name on it. Deep down I feel it.

  “We deserve it,” I say.

  “So deserve it!”

  Kelsey especially does. Over winter, she found out her live-in boyfriend was cheating on her with four different women. Hence her presence as my new roomie.

  Lizzie arrives with the pizza and sets it out. I grab a piece of steaming, carb-laden yumminess and sink my teeth in, and for one blissful moment, Max is out of my mind.

  “You should’ve switched over to my room when I moved out,” Lizzie says. “You shouldn’t have to look at his stupid tower.”

  “Agreed,” Kelsey says. “You know I’ll trade rooms with you any day of the week. Just say the word.”

  I mumble and eat some more pizza. It’s true; I can see part of Max’s tower through the configuration of buildings out my window. I had a lot of feelings when I realized that was his tower. Feelings like dark, hard diamonds in my heart.

  “I wonder how he found out,” Lizzie says. “Maybe Facebook or something?”

  “The day I’d post an image of me in that thing on Facebook,” I say. “He had to find out some other way. God, I can only imagine his glee. He would’ve been like, how the mighty have fallen. But a more clever and witty version of it.”

  Kelsey groans and grabs another piece.

  “He is going to rub it in so hard,” I say. “He’ll be laughing the whole time while I set out his sandwich. And then I’ll have to say Meow at the end. Like a trained monkey.”

  “Or a trained kitten,” Lizzie says.

  “Is that supposed to be a helpful comment?”

  “Yes?” she squeaks. “No?”

  Playfully I punch her arm. “Get with the pity program!”

  Even back in high school Max was cool and superior, though if you watched him long enough—like really watched him—you could see that silence was one of his big strategies. And that underneath that aloof silence was the slightest edge of teen awkwardness.

  Now he’s remote and beautiful in his Manhattan lair, the head of the billion-dollar men’s style empire that grew out of his infamous pickup guidebook, the international bestseller that helped catapult him to a level of notoriety to rival the Kardashians.

  “Millennial Dean Martin,” Slate magazine once called him.

  I read somewhere that he laughs about that. I don’t doubt it for a minute; of course Max would think he’s too cool even for suave Rat-Pack playboy Dean Martin.

  “Will it help if I carry a black magic marker around town and black out one of his teeth whenever I see his face on a bus stop ad?” Kelsey asks.

  “Yes,” I whisper. “That would be extremely helpful.”

  “I’ll give him a Frankenstein scar,” Lizzie offers.

  “That might make him look hotter.”

  “A penis coming out of his nose?” she tries.

  “Here’s the only thing I’m wondering—is he planning on guffawing and being all boo-yah as I set out his sandwich? Or will he go for superior silence with a smirk? Never mind,” I decide. “It’ll be the smirk.”

  I sit back and stare at the nearly empty pizza box. I was a lot more excited about the pizza when it was still in the box.

  Lizzie grabs her giant purse. “I have treats. First, dessert!”

  “Did you frost special anti-Max cookies?” I ask hopefully.

  “Something better.” She pulls out a three-pack of Peanut Butter Kandy Kakes and tosses it to me.

  “Oh my god! Where in the city did you find these?”

  “Internet.”

  I rip open the plastic, press the package to my nose, and suck in the smell of my childhood. It was always a good day when you found Kandy Kakes in your lunch bag. It was about the treat, but it was emotional, too. Finding one of these meant our family was on a good streak. “You guys want one?”

  “Not so much.” Kelsey wrinkles her nose. “You have to be from Jersey to like those. I think it’s a rule.”

  “Lizzie?”

  “All for you,” Lizzie says.

  Nobody I know appreciates Kandy Kakes, which is fine by me. I sink my teeth into the sponge cake-y, peanut-buttery goodness, which is of course wrapped in a thick layer of milk chocolate.

  When I re-emerge from my dessert bliss, I notice Lizzie’s tearing at something, trying to tear the molded plastic wrap off something rectangular. “What is that?”

  “Something else I think might help.”

  “What?”

  “Hold on.” She claws at the package with her fingernails. “Uhh!”

  “Is it a one-woman performance art show depicting wrap rage?” I ask.

  She throws the package at me.

  I catch it and turn it over. It’s a dart set. “Um, thanks?”

  Kelsey has scissors. “Gimme that.” She cuts open the dart set.

  “It goes with this.” Lizzie pulls a beat-up paperback from a bag and slaps it onto our coffee table.

  Not just any paperback. I grab it. “Excuse me? What is this?”

  A rhetorical question. I know what it is. The Max Hilton Playbook: Ten Golden Rules for Landing the Hottest Girl in the Room. Most people call it The Hilton Playbook. It’s Max’s “how to get girls by being an arrogant jerk” guide. It sold millions of copies back when it came out, just a year or two after we graduat
ed from high school.

  Max launched his men’s style empire after that. Shoes. Watches. Body spray. Instagram stardom. They’re saying he has a deal for a Netflix show.

  I flip the book over.

  The entire back cover is Max’s face. It’s one of the more iconic pictures of him; he looks devastatingly handsome, but that’s not what’s special about it—it’s the way the shot captures his gaze, his ability to make you feel like he’s looking right into you and you alone, all sparkling, knowing humor. Like he knows all of your secrets because you trusted him for a little while, and he stomped all over your heart, and he’s just a little too proud of himself.

  “Don’t worry, I didn’t buy it new,” Lizzie says, grabbing it from me. “No jerky billionaires were made richer in the acquisition of this book.”