BOSS: A Stepbrother Billionaire Romance
Victoria Villeneuve
Chapter One
Declined. Insufficient funds.
I tried to hide my embarrassment from the cashier as I mumbled an excuse about how my direct deposit should have gone into my account. She just gave me a bored look and asked if I was still going to buy the items. I dug out $2 from my purse and handed them over, my face red. I grabbed my no-name pasta and jar of red goop labelled as tomato sauce and left the grocery store.
I knew I was running short on cash until my next unemployment check came in, but I didn’t think I was that low on funds.
Slowly making the ten minute walk back to my apartment, I put my groceries in the single kitchen cupboard and looked around. Calling my apartment shoebox-size was being way too kind to shoeboxes. I could walk ten steps from the front door to the back wall; the ratty, stained old couch that doubled as my bed took up most of the room. My laptop – the only luxury I owned – was on the tiny coffee table, and the bathroom to my right was such a tight fit that if I ever wanted to close the door to pee I had to go into the shower stall to make the room to close it.
It’s not exactly what one expects a girl who went to one of Boston’s most exclusive private schools to live in, but hey, it was my home. And it was way better than the alternative.
Unfortunately, there were parts of it that weren’t so great. It turned out living in New York City on your own, without being in contact with any friends or family, wasn’t the easiest thing in the world.
I left home went I was seventeen. I had just graduated from high school, with great grades from the Moreton Academy in Boston. One of those fancy schmancy private schools, you know, with Ivy crawling up the walls and teachers with British accents. Field trips to Yale, the latest-and-greatest equipment, that sort of thing.
The rest of my life wasn’t quite so posh.
For two years I’d been living hand-to-mouth in Seattle. Working minimum wage jobs, living in this tiny apartment, barely having enough money for food. My mom tried calling me for the first few months after I left, but eventually gave up. I didn’t want to talk to her, not after how she’d treated me.
A year ago I’d started working at a local grocery store. It was good work. It was easy. All I had to do was ring customers through and occasionally stock shelves. I made a tiny bit more than minimum wage, my boss was actually not a horrible person, and I didn’t want to die every time I knew I had to work like the hellish restaurant job I’d gotten before the grocery store.
Unfortunately, three weeks earlier I was laid off, since apparently business was not doing well. My boss told me he was sorry, and I understood, but I hadn’t had any luck finding anything new since, and the $200 a week I was getting in unemployment was not getting me very far.
I put some water on the stove to boil and collapsed onto the couch, closing my eyes. Trying not to think about the fact that my rent was due in a week, and there was absolutely no way I was going to make it. Trying not to think about the sixteen resumes I’d dropped off in the last two days and had yet to get a single call back. Trying not to think about the fact that I might never get out of this poverty hole, trying not to think about what my future was going to be like. At this point I just had to think about the cheap no-name noodles and tomato sauce I was going to eat, and then the next episode of Person of Interest that I was going to watch online.
I swore I was going to buy a Netflix subscription when I could finally afford it.
The water began to boil and I immediately dumped some pasta in, not wanting to use up more power than I had to. I wondered how long I could get away with not paying the bill before the company disconnected me.
Nuking some pasta sauce in a bowl, I listened as the microwave whirred away. A few minutes later my sauce was hot, the rotini cooked, and I even scrounged up a bit of cheese to grate on top from the back of the fridge. I sat down at the computer and loaded up the video streaming site I’d found, ready to watch a bit of TV and forget about all my problems for just a little while.
Of course, first an ad played.
“You all know him as America’s billionaire badboy. But does Kiegan Hunt really have bigger balls than us mere mortals?”
I almost choked on my pasta as the camera cut to a shot of a man in his mid-twenties, with blonde hair that had that sexy just-got-out-of-bed look, an upper body whose huge muscles were covered in tattoos and a smile that, despite everything, made me want to melt.
“Tune in every Tuesday at ten on NBC to watch Kiegan Hunt and one random person take on the same challenge, and see who comes out on top.”