The Tycoon Read online

  Praise for Molly O’Keefe

  “Molly O’Keefe is a unique, not-to-be-missed voice in romantic fiction.”—New York Times bestselling author Susan Andersen

  “Real, immediate, and wrenching. This is a love story not to be missed.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) for Indecent Proposal

  "Breathtaking and incredibly sexy, BABY, COME BACK is an emotional tour de force."

  Skye Warren, NYT Bestseller

  The Tycoon

  King Family Book One

  Molly O’Keefe

  For Stephanie and Julie. And to YOU! The readers - thanks for taking this crazy journey with us! Your notes and reviews and instagram photos mean THE WORLD!

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  The next 2 books in the King Family Saga are available now!

  The Bodyguard

  The Bastard

  The Cowboy - coming soon

  Contents

  Prologue

  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

  Prologue for The Body Guard

  About the Author

  Prologue

  VERONICA

  No one had ever told me about orgasms.

  Like, I had a sense, from movies or whatever. But no one ever gave me the complete picture. How they were tricky. How you had to be patient and vulnerable. Naked in a lot of ways—more than just, you know, actually naked. No one told me that they were a little frightening, that feeling of chugging up the incline of a roller coaster. Of something powerful and scary being just over the edge of a cliff.

  Really, what no one told me was how freaking consuming they were.

  After having some (eight, to be exact), it was literally all I could think about. Even in this stupid dress with the suffocating shapewear and the itchy netting. The boning in the bodice that dug into my armpits and didn’t let me breathe. The way my boobs—always a problem, except in the orgasm department—were squished and flattened.

  All of this should be awful. But it wasn’t. Not really.

  Because it was my engagement party.

  And all I could think about was sex.

  And Clayton.

  “You didn’t lose the ten pounds you were supposed to, did you?” my stepmother, Jennifer, asked. She had her disapproving sniff going at full speed.

  “Nope,” I answered.

  “Veronica,” she said and then sighed, the most disappointed sigh. “You were going to try.”

  “Was I?”

  Clearly, while I’d been thinking about sex, my stepmother had been thinking about the ten pounds she wanted me to lose. The urge to tell her to just calm down, was hard to resist, but I managed -- because orgasms. I used to obsess over those ten pounds, too, and all it got me was another five.

  But this was what she’d done to my half-sister, Sabrina. She’d tried to bully and shame her into a size zero. The woman just couldn’t stand to see a girl eat bread. Or be happy.

  I would never understand how my father could go from my beautiful, loving mother to Jennifer. They were diametrically opposed.

  “Tonight…” Jennifer said, straightening herself up so she looked like the stick that had been stuck up her ass. She wore a blue dress that hugged her body so closely I could practically see her hip bones through the material. “…is important.”

  I was twenty-two, not twelve. And it was my freaking night and no one needed to tell me what was important. I turned to face her instead of dodging her gaze in the mirror and I looked right at her. Something I never would have had the courage to do before the last few weeks with Clayton.

  But I’ve had eight mind-bending orgasms—and they’d brought me some kind of new confidence I’d never had before.

  “Jennifer,” I said, right in her frowny face. “It’s my engagement. It’s my party. It’s my body. And none of it concerns you.”

  Jennifer sniffed so hard she nearly turned herself inside out.

  Behind me, Trudy swallowed a laugh. She’d been brought into the upstairs dressing room of The King’s Land Ranch to literally sew me into my dress—no zippers for the girl who didn’t lose the ten pounds.

  “We’re nearly done,” Trudy said around the mouth full of pins between her lips. A few more tugs and twitches on my dress and she stood back and smiled at me. “Eres bonita.”

  I believed my old friend when she said I was pretty, because for one of the few times in my life—I felt pretty. I felt it down in my bones. Tonight was going to be amazing.

  “Gracias.”

  Trudy helped me down from the dais where I’d been standing surrounded by mirrors. A thousand reflections of myself stared back at me. It wasn’t pleasant.

  “Do you know where my sister is?”

  “Where do you think your sister is?” Trudy asked with a laugh, sticking the pins she’d had in her mouth into the pincushion she wore on her wrist.

  I sighed. The stables. Probably in her dress, too.

  “What have I said about speaking in Spanish, Veronica?” Jennifer asked.

  “More than half the people who live on this ranch speak Spanish,” I said, shaking out the skirt of my sparkly tea-length gown. “You could try learning it. But if you don’t want to hear it, you should move.”

  Jennifer stepped up to me so fast she was like a snake coming out of the bushes. And her face…uh-oh…I’d pissed her off.

  I tried not to smile.

  “I have spent the last sixteen years thinking this day would never come. That you would never find a man to get you out of this house. But it’s here and I’m so glad you are leaving.” She spat her venom all over the place. And once upon a time her words would have hurt, more than hurt, maybe. But Clayton and the orgasms were like armor. “You and your alcoholic sister need to just get out of my house.”

  “Bea’s not an alcoholic,” I said, but Jennifer was already leaving. “She’s just fun!” I shouted at her back.

  And then it was just me and Trudy in this stupid hall of mirrors.

  Trudy touched my back, trying to be comforting, but if I had armor around myself, my weak spot was Beatrice. I would have left this house a long time ago if it hadn’t meant leaving Beatrice here. Sabrina, too, for that matter.

  Someone had to take care of them.

  “Don’t let her get to you. Tonight is too special,” Trudy said.

  Right. I was twenty-two. Sabrina a year out of high school. I could have this life. The orgasms and Clayton.

  The whole fairy tale.

  “You deserve to be happy.” Trudy eyed me sideways, a smile on her face. She was married to Oscar, who ran my father’s stables, and while not employed officially by the King family, she’d stepped in when my mom died and has always been really good to me and Bea. A motherly buffer between us and our stepmother.

  We hugged and Trudy left to change her clothes. Her hair was already done, with the white mock-orange flowers from the shrubs behind the house tucked into her curls. I had the same in mine. Well, sort of. They were already slipping out. I turned in the mirror so I could try and tuck them back in, but it wasn’t much help. My brown hair was so straight it was impossible to get things to stay. I was
doing my best with the bobby pins, but I didn’t have my glasses and my fingers looked like pink blurs in a bigger brown blur.

  “Hello, Veronica.”

  Oh, God. A tide of heat rolled over my body and the bobby pin dropped from my suddenly numb fingers.

  It was Clayton. And, just like that, I was breathless. Hot.

  He stood in the doorway, a black blur that became clear as he walked toward me. My God, that man in a tux. It shouldn’t be legal. He was handsome enough without the bespoke black coat and crisp white shirt, but with them he was nearly unbearable. His dark hair was swept back from his face. And I didn’t know if you could call a face dangerous, but if you could, his was. His nose was maybe too big, his cheekbones too sharp. His resting face was utterly unreadable with perhaps a hint of disdain. His eyes were a penetrating dark brown. Nearly the color of his hair. But his lips. His lips were the rudest thing I’d ever seen. Thick and full. Slow, painfully slow, to smile.

  And they tasted so good.

  He looked like one of those intense Irish actors. Broody and dark. And the way he watched me; it was like he couldn’t wait to take me apart with his teeth and put me back together with poetry.

  He was the brightest thing I’d ever seen and I had to look away. Look away or go blind. Or go crazy. Or strip this damn dress off and ask him to do what he did to me in his office last week.

  “Let me help you.”

  “With what?”

  “The flower?” He crossed the dressing room and crouched at my feet. I stared up at the ceiling and prayed for strength. For calm.

  Just…be cool, Ronnie.

  He stood holding the mock-orange blossom in his fingers. The smell, thanks to my crushing of the delicate thing, filled the small space between us. It was heady. Like champagne on an empty stomach.

  “Where does it go?” he asked.

  “My hair…but I can’t—”

  “You’re not wearing your glasses.”

  I used to think he never smiled. When I met him four years ago, he was humorless. Stern. None of the Irish poet, only the businessman Dad had hired to manage the amalgamation of some of his companies.

  But in the last six months, as we started dating he smiled more.

  And I knew that was because of me.

  He brought me orgasms. I brought him smiles.

  Not sure if it was fair, but it was real.

  “Why aren’t you wearing your glasses, Veronica?”

  “They don’t go with the dress.”

  He put his hands to my waist and I swallowed a moan low in my throat.

  Kiss me, I thought. Please, just kiss me. Let’s not go downstairs. Let’s not do this whole party. Let’s shut the door and take off these clothes…

  He turned me until I faced the mirror and it was everything I could do not to close my eyes. I hadn’t looked in the mirror while Trudy was sewing me into my dress, or earlier, when Sabrina was helping me with my makeup.

  I didn’t know myself in this moment, so instead I looked at Clayton.

  I couldn’t say I knew him any better, but he was so damn fun to look at.

  “You’re nervous?” he asked. His fingers found my bobby pin and tucked the flower back into the elaborate twist that was my hair.

  “A little.”

  “Me, too.”

  I laughed. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Why?” he asked. Our eyes met in the mirror and it was a strange, diffused connection. Painfully intimate.

  “You don’t seem nervous about anything. Ever.”

  Clayton projected a kind of detachment. An unruffled coolness. He was the picture of control. Except… I thought of that time in his office. And again in his condo. That last date when he’d cooked for me.

  He hadn’t been cool then. His hands had shaken when his fingers combed through my hair, when he held my skull in his palms. His voice had broken when he moaned, “So good, Veronica. You suck me so good.”

  Between my legs I suddenly throbbed.

  “You’re beautiful.”

  It was weird. Well, maybe not weird, but he always said I was beautiful. He never said I looked beautiful. Every compliment I’d ever gotten on my looks had been about the dress I was wearing or how I’d done my hair. The implication being that without adornment I was not beautiful.

  But Clayton was not commenting on the fancy Oscar de le Renta gown. Or my hair. Or the smoky eyes Sabrina had given me.

  He was talking about me. Myself. My body. The skin I lived in.

  It wasn’t something you noticed until someone said it to you repeatedly. Especially a man like him. Not just that he was handsome or that he was sexy.

  It was that he was never wrong.

  “This dress,” he whispered, and his fingertips brushed over the strapless bodice. Not quite touching my breasts but close enough that I knew he was doing it on purpose. “Is perfect for you.”

  He hummed low in his throat. And his hand ran from my breast down my waist to my hip. The dress was seven thousand layers of pink tulle with gold sparkles and crystals sewn into every layer. The bodice was fitted but the skirt flared out at my waist. Not poufy, just…forgiving.

  It was a beautiful dress and I felt beautiful in it. Except that it was too tight.

  “I have something for you,” he said.

  “Clayton,” I sighed. “You don’t have to give me anything.”

  The ring on my finger, the orgasms. The happiness I felt. All of it was enough. Except…well, he could tell me he loved me. That would be something. A gift.

  Two months ago, after we’d had sex for the first time (after the first two of my orgasms), we were lying in the big king-size bed in his home, sweating into his sheets, and I’d blurted that I loved him. He’d kissed me, given me the third orgasm. And the next day he proposed.

  Maybe he didn’t love me. Maybe he just liked me a lot. Maybe he was pretty sure that he would love me at some point, and just wasn’t there yet.

  Or maybe…just maybe…he did love me, and he just didn’t know how to crack through that armor he had around him.

  I voted that option. Because there was no reason for him to do the things he did unless he felt something real for me. And because I didn’t want it to be awkward, I hadn’t told him I loved him again. Except a few times when he’d fallen asleep before me, the dark splash of his hair falling down on his forehead. Those rude-boy lips parted as he breathed.

  At that moment I couldn’t resist and the words slipped out in a whisper against the skin of his shoulder. Secrets I kept in the night.

  Clayton pulled an oblong box out of the inside pocket of his tuxedo jacket and my stomach fluttered. He was so good at picking out jewelry for me. My engagement ring was an antique Tiffany-set sapphire. Elegant, with a bit of filigree around the impressive stone to make it unique. It was my favorite thing in the world.

  He handed me the box with the half curl of his lips that made him seem so boyish. I wanted to hug him. Tousle his hair. Whisper I love you against the pulse in his neck.

  “Open it,” he said.

  “You don’t have to—”

  “I know.”

  I opened the box and in it was a beautiful necklace. Antique. Victorian, maybe. A long gold chain with a diamond and pearl pendant. A giant diamond.

  “I saw it and thought of you.” He took it out of the box to put it around my neck where the chain and jewels glittered and gleamed in the lights and mirror. The touch of his fingers against my nape made my breath hitch.

  “I have something for you, too,” I said, and stepped away from his touch over to where I had put my clothes. My jeans and Converse. My purse. I pulled out the box for him.

  This might be a mistake. So dumb. I mean, the man had no need for something as old-fashioned as this. But…I saw it and thought of him. I held the box out.

  He seemed weirdly flabbergasted. Like he didn’t know what to do with the package I was offering him. Or maybe like he didn’t want it. He looked at the box and then at me,
his armor totally in place.

  How, I wondered in the back of my brain, have I managed to get engaged to a man I can’t read? Like, what kind of lunacy was that?

  “You can open it later.” Embarrassed, I started to put the box back in my purse, humiliation a copper taste in the back of my mouth.

  “No,” he said. “No, please, I’d like to open it now.”

  I handed it back to him and wiped my sweating hands on my gown. Which was shit for that kind of thing, actually. The netting stuck to my fingers.

  Clayton pulled one end of the red ribbon that made the elaborate bow on top of the small box and it was like he was pulling my stomach with it. I reached into my purse and grabbed my glasses.

  My own armor, maybe.

  Or maybe I just wanted to see his face clearly when he opened my present.

  He pulled off the thin lid and lifted the antique gold pocket watch out of the box.

  “Veronica,” he breathed.

  “I saw it in a shop on Lucas Street. I mean, it’s a little silly, I guess. But it does keep time. The guy at the store said it was owned by a cattle rancher in the area in the 1800’s.”

  He turned the watch over and hit the small knob that popped open the front.

  “That inscription was there,” I said, wanting some distance from it if it was too much. Though the inscription was part of the reason I bought it. Because the woman who gave her husband this watch over a hundred years ago had had more courage than I did.

  “For you, forever,” he read.

  “It’s—”

  He said nothing, just stepped toward me, stalked toward me, really, so fast and with such power I took a step back and my head hit one of the mirrors. And then he was kissing me. His hands cupped my face, like he was holding me still. Like I might possibly run?