The Baby The Billionaire Demands. Jennie Lucas

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       CHAPTER ONE

      MONEY MEANT EVERYTHING to Lola Price.

      Money was the difference between happiness and grief. Between joy and tragedy. She’d learned it at five years old, and every day since.

      Growing up in a trailer on the edge of the California desert, in a dusty town where jobs were scarce, she’d seen her mother’s daily struggles to pay the bills after Lola’s father died. Her mother eventually remarried, but it only made things worse.

      By the time she was eighteen, Lola had learned that there was only one way to protect the people you loved. One way to keep them safe and close—and alive.

      You had to be rich.

      So she’d dropped out of high school and moved to Los Angeles. Desperate to save what was left of her family—and without any talent or even a high school diploma—she’d hoped to instantly become a movie star, but her acting career never got off the ground. Without money, she’d lost everything.

      Now she had a four-month-old son. And nearly a million dollars. Lola took a deep breath. No one would ever take her family from her again.

      Sergei Morozov’s booming voice brought her back to the charity ball, where he’d been swaying with her on the dance floor. “Can I kiss you, Lolitchka?”

      “What?” Startled, Lola looked up at him. “Kiss me?”

      “Yes. When?”

      “Um...never?”

      The Russian tycoon winced. Burly and in his mid-fifties, with gray hair on his temples and a strong accent, he was CEO of a large Wall Street firm. He’d also been, until four months ago, her employer. “When you agreed to be my date tonight, I thought...”

      “I’m sorry. I don’t feel that way about you.” Around them, couples danced in the gilded hotel ballroom to the orchestra’s elegant music. The children’s charity ball was the social occasion of November in New York. She was just surprised her two best friends, Hallie and Tess, both newly married to billionaires, weren’t here. They loved fancy events like this.

      But Lola didn’t see them. As she danced with her former boss—keeping an old-fashioned, almost Victorian distance between them—she saw dark-haired men everywhere in sleek, sophisticated tuxedos who reminded her of another previous boss, Rodrigo Cabrera. The Spanish media tycoon who’d coldly given her a million-dollar check, then tossed her out of his beach house, secretly pregnant and brokenhearted.

      Sergei cleared his throat. “If you just need a little more time...”

      “That’s not it.” She looked down at the marble ballroom floor. She never should have agreed to a date, she thought. She’d been swayed by her neighbor, a widow who occasionally babysat her son, who’d told Lola she ‘needed to get out and live.’ That, plus the weddings of Lola’s two best friends in rapid succession, had made her feel her own loneliness. When Sergei Morozov had invited her out, she’d convinced herself it might be a healthy step forward, after a hard, lonely year.

      Now she wished she’d just stayed at home.

      “Some man broke your heart,” he growled. “He abandoned you and your son.”

      Lola looked up in astonishment. She’d never spoken about Rodrigo to anyone, not even her best friends. “I never said he abandoned me—”

      “You had pregnancy alone. Had birth alone. No man.” His big hands tightened against her back. “Forget the idea of a date. Maybe I just marry you, eh?”

      She sucked in her breath. “Marry?”

      The burly man looked down at her. “I have wanted you for a long time, Lola,” he said softly. “If marriage is your price, I am willing to pay.”

      Lola stared up at him in shock.

       Marry him?

      Her stomach looped like a roller-coaster.

      Sergei Morozov wasn’t a bad man. She’d worked СКАЧАТЬ