The Billionaire's Lockdown Baby - Holly Rayner Page 0,2

of her made me grin with amusement—and not only because it was so obvious that she didn’t belong in this sort of restaurant.

I’d pulled out all the stops and gotten last-minute reservations at the swankiest place in town. Not that it had been hard; owning and running Pacific Broadcasting Company, which was the only provider on the island when it came to media, meant that I had cornered the market on all things broadcasting—and that I was, against all odds, one of the richest people in Hawaii.

No, not the richest. I might own a large company and get reservations at the drop of a hat, but I was a long way away from being the biggest wig in town. And I was man enough to admit that. I didn’t even feel bad about it.

There were way too many Hollywood stars in residence for me to think I was the richest. Too many trust-fund babies who had found their way to the islands, saying that they wanted to decompress or hide from the real world. That one made me laugh, because it was a whole lot more likely that they just wanted the publicity that came with ‘retiring’ to Hawaii—where they would continue to put themselves in the spotlight through social media, as often as the possibly could.

Which was great for me. Because I owned the rights to all of the lovely cable lines and wireless networks they used to do just that. And that meant that the more they were out there exposing themselves, the more money my company made.

Maybe one day, I’d be closer to being the richest. But not yet.

Still, I was a big enough deal that I could easily get last-minute reservations at the fanciest place in town—which was exactly what I’d wanted for tonight. It was exactly what I’d wanted the moment Aubrey reminded me—this morning—that it was her five-year anniversary with the company.

Looking at her now, though, I wondered if it had been the right call. Because the girl didn’t fit into this sort of lifestyle. She wasn’t the dress-up-like-a-Malibu-Barbie sort of girl. Not even close.

She was the sort of girl who was completely brilliant at all things marketing, and kept my life whirring along like a top with her organizational skills, but had also been born into the Island Girl lifestyle, and hadn’t ever tried to shake it. The sort of girl who had been excited to go to dinner in this restaurant… but also looked like she’d probably spent the entire afternoon surfing and hadn’t bothered to wash the salt out of her hair before she got dressed for dinner.

Really, if her late-three-times-a-week schedule held true, I was betting that she’d surfed longer than she’d meant to and had come straight from the beach. She was probably still wearing her bathing suit.

The thought made me smile even harder, and I looked more closely, trying to see whether I could tell if she was in fact sporting a bathing suit under the clothes she had on tonight. I saw a slight burn covering her fair, freckled nose, and noticed that her blond tresses were done up in a sort of messy updo that still somehow managed to complement the strapless top she was wearing.

A strapless top that left her shoulders bare and her cleavage peeking out.

I yanked my eyes up and away from that general area, horrified at myself and the thoughts that had just flashed through my brain, and found that she’d seen me come in and was actually watching me, now—and smiling.

I grinned back and made my way toward her, my mind shifting quickly from how beautiful she looked to what I was going to order—the surf and turf? Territory that had nothing to do with the creamy skin of her chest, or the swelling of her cleavage over her blouse.

Those were not thoughts one was supposed to have about one’s employees.

“You seriously go surfing every single day,” I said. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe her—I’d seen her coming into the office with her hair still soaking wet often enough to know that she was telling the truth. I just couldn’t imagine having enough time to be able to do that.

“Yes,” she responded. “Seriously. Every day.”

She widened her eyes to make them even bigger than they usually were, and exaggerated her movements—the way people only did if they were one: drunk, or two: seriously questioning whether you had a brain in your head at all.

In this case, it was definitely the