Billionaires Dollar Series

“That’s not alphabetical order.”

“No, but it’s the order they agreed on.”

“Hmm. I think it sounds better when Carter is first.”

“I’m sure my brother agrees with you,” Liam says, taking a sip of his wine. “So you read about the numbers, huh?”

“Yes.” The crook of his eyebrow makes me wonder if I’m heading in the wrong direction, but it’s Liam. It’s my Liam, who once had a poster of the Terminator on his bedroom wall. “Honestly, Liam… how do you do it?”

His eyebrows shoot high. “How do I do what?”

“Manage all that money? Isn’t it the most stressful thing ever?”

“Stressful,” he says, like he’s tasting the word. “Yeah, it can be that.”

“I mean, one wrong investment and you lose money, right? For the company?”

He nods. “Yes. But one good investment, and I make money for the company.”

“But in this case, it’s not just any company-it’s three people. And they’ve entrusted you with their fortunes.”

His lips curve into a smile. “Fractions of their fortunes, Maddie. Practically nothing but shavings on top of an iceberg.”

My mind can’t really comprehend that staggering fact, so I breeze past it. “Doesn’t it get… too much sometimes? The responsibility?”

Liam shrugs. “Rarely.”

“Come on, I know you. I know you’re obsessive at heart, and competitive. I refuse to believe that it doesn’t affect you.”

“Of course this is the fact you’d hone in on.” He waggles his eyebrows at me. “Are you impressed?”

He’s trying to get a rise out of me, and a part of me wants to respond no, just to tease. But the truth slips out instead.

“Yes,” I say. “I know I’m not always comfortable with the responsibility of cooking a guest’s food, and that’s only one person I can disappoint-and it’s only a meal.”

Liam drains the last of his wine, putting the glass back on his bedside table. “It gets pretty fucking hairy sometimes,” he admits.

“It’s… like walking a tightrope. It’s a high-stakes game, and at any moment, you might tumble and fall. Doesn’t matter how many safety nets I put in either, because they could all fail too.”

His hands begin to move. They’re broad over the backs, fingers long. “You know I love numbers. And it’s all calculations. Percentages. Eventualities. Odds.”

I nod, thinking back to when he’d helped with my math homework. He himself had only ever had trouble with one thing-not showing his work.

“This is the same thing, but it’s all real-world. Real companies. It’s the best game I’ve ever played.”

I wet my lips. “But it’s not a game.”

“Oh, everything in life is a game, Maddie. And everything can be won.”

Grabbing his comforter, I drape it across myself, shivering despite the heat. He tracks the movement and drapes an arm around my shoulder. “But what you do? That would make me legitimately nervous.”

“What I do?”

“Yes. Having a guest complain because I accidentally undercooked something.” He gives a violent mock shiver. “Terrifying.”

“It can be,” I admit. “Even worse if the chef on duty is an asshole about it, too.”

His hand tightens on my shoulder. “Can they be?”

“Oh, yes.” I finish the last of my wine and he takes the glass from me, joining his on the bedside table. “A kitchen is a bit like a ship.”

Liam raises his eyebrow. “You have me intrigued now. Are there pirates? Treasure to plunder?”

“Oh, there are pirates a plenty. And if you have a bad captain, or poor crewmates, the ship isn’t going to go very fast. Worse still if you hit a storm.”

“All right,” Liam says. “Hit me with your war stories.”

“Are you sure you’re ready? It involves carnage.”

“Well, I’m even more intrigued now. This sounds like an HBO show in the making.”

“I was nineteen and working my first kitchen. Part-time, I might add, as I had culinary school at the same time. Our chef had just been put on eight weeks of bedrest for a routine surgery… and the replacement was this batshit crazy sous chef they’d sourced from out of state. This guy thought he was Gordon Ramsey-but only they yelling and swearing part, not the actually-good-at-his-job part.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. I’d come to work and ask what my task was, and he’d yell at me that it was prepping, it was always prepping, and was I stupid?”

Liam’s eyes narrow. “Fuck. Can he do that?”

“Oh, this was just a normal Tuesday! I’ve been called far worse in a kitchen.” I shake my head. “The next day I don’t ask, and then he yells at me for prepping and not asking him first.”

“The guy’s impossible to please.”

“Impossible,” I agree. “Anyway, so we had a particularly bad Friday night service. I’m cooking sides, and I’m already nervous as all hell, because I’m not that experienced yet.”

“Of course,” Liam agrees. “And you have this asshole breathing down your neck.”

“Exactly. Now, our dishwasher accidentally drops a few plates, and he cusses her out so bad that she runs out crying. Quits on the spot.”

“Holy shit,” Liam says. “He made her walk the plank.”

“So we’re down one person now. And if you’ve ever tried working a kitchen without having a dishwasher… well, it’s a catastrophe waiting to happen. Then the guy working the pizza oven calls in sick-now we’re down two.”

“Rats abandoning the ship,” Liam says.

I snort. “We’re really getting a lot of mileage out of this metaphor, aren’t we?”

“We’re thrifty like that. So what happened next?”