Trusting Him: A Billionaire Beach Island Romance (Billionaires of Driftwood Island Book 5) Read online

  Trusting Him

  Billionaires of Driftwood Island, Book 5

  By Sloane Meyers

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Similarities to actual people or events are entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Sloane Meyers. All rights reserved.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  More Books by Sloane Meyers

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  * IAN *

  “Mr. Hughes? Mr. Hughes, are you alright?”

  I glanced up at the sound of my name, and forced a smile onto my face.

  “I’m fine. But I don’t think we’re getting anywhere with this meeting anymore. Let’s break for the day and we can reconvene tomorrow when we’re all fresh.”

  There was a pause as my words sunk in. I never ended meetings early, and the expressions on the faces in my boardroom ranged from shocked to relieved to annoyed.

  But despite what anyone’s face said about their thoughts, the only thing anyone said out loud was, “Yes, sir. Of course, Mr. Hughes.” No one dared to contradict me. That was one of the perks of being the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company. You pretty much always got what you wanted.

  The only problem right now was that I didn’t really know what I wanted. Ten minutes later I was sitting alone in my plush office chair in my expansive corner office. My view of New York City from up here was spectacular, and I had always loved looking out at the city’s skyscrapers. Today, however, those skyscrapers felt like they were closing in on me.

  I looked instead at the only framed picture on my desk. It was a picture of my own feet, buried in sand. That sand had been from an island beach where I’d enjoyed one of the best vacations of my life. If I closed my eyes now, I could almost feel the warmth of that sand between my toes. I could almost hear the waves crashing against the shore, and smell the salty air.

  I could almost see her.

  I opened my top desk drawer and pulled out another picture—one I didn’t dare to keep on my desk. The picture was of a woman in a bright yellow bikini, running away from me across the same beach, but looking back over her shoulder at me and laughing. Her crazy, golden-brown curls flew behind her in the wind, and her blue eyes sparkled brightly in the sunshine.

  I had looked at this picture almost every day for the last five years. It was the only picture I had printed of her—the girl with whom I’d had a wild summer fling that I still couldn’t forget. I’d been tempted to contact her so many times over those five years. I didn’t have her phone number or email address, but I had her name. Ruby Jennings. It would have been easy enough to find her. But I’d held back.

  Summer flings weren’t meant to last beyond the day the calendar flipped to August. Trying to force a vacation romance to continue on was only asking for trouble. Ruby’s laidback world back on Driftwood Island was so different from my overly scheduled, fast-lane life in New York City. Combining our lives would never work. All I would do if I attempted to bring her here was ruin my happy memories of my time with her.

  Besides, Ruby clearly didn’t want anything permanent with me. She knew my name, and I wasn’t exactly hard to find. As one of the top businessmen in the country, and the head of a huge New York corporation that I’d built from the ground up, my name brought up hundreds if not thousands of Google results. Anyone looking for me could find me and figure out how to contact me if they put in about five minutes of effort. Ruby hadn’t made the effort, which meant she was smarter than me and knew better than to try to resurrect a romance that had had a clear expiration date.

  Still, I couldn’t help but compare every girl I ever dated to her. No one had measured up. No one had her beauty, or her same spark for life. No one made my heart pound in my chest the way she had. I closed my eyes and remembered the feel of lying in the sand with her, our bodies pressed against each other as we kissed like there was no one else in the world but the two of us.

  On days like today—or weeks like this week—I couldn’t help but dream of leaving New York and escaping back to those island beaches for good. I used to love my work here in such a big city, but lately all the meetings felt tedious. I didn’t care about the business anymore, and I couldn’t stir up the same excitement over stock prices as I used to. The endless schedule of business obligations was wearing me down, and a small part of me dreamed of selling it all and starting over somewhere new. I had more than enough money to do that. With a net worth well over a billion dollars, the world was mine for the taking. I just had to make up my mind which part of the world I wanted to take.

  I chewed my lower lip thoughtfully as I continued to stare down at the picture in my hand, and a crazy idea started to take root in my head. What if I went to Driftwood Island for another vacation? I couldn’t stay all summer this time, like I had last time. But maybe two weeks back on the beach would be just what I needed to clear my head and shake off the sense of hopelessness and boredom I felt. It had been years since I’d taken any kind of real vacation, and damn it, I deserved one.

  I shrugged out of my suit jacket and set the picture of my beautiful island girl down on my desk. I knew I shouldn’t think of her as mine. After all, it had been five years. She was very possibly married to someone else by now. But until I knew that for sure, I couldn’t keep myself from imagining her in my arms again.

  My fingers trembled with excitement as I fired up my computer and did a quick Google search for hotels on Driftwood Island. It looked like there was still only one large resort there. Thankfully, their presidential suite was available for the next two weeks. I booked it without hesitation, then went to book flights. These were tasks I usually would have passed off to my secretary, but I was too excited to wait right now.

  Screw all these meetings and business decisions that needed to be made. People were just going to have to figure out how to survive without me for two weeks. Billionaires needed a vacation now and then, too.

  And this billionaire was going to use his vacation to rekindle an old flame. At least, that was the plan. Hopefully I didn’t end up getting completely burned by that flame.

  Chapter Two

  * RUBY *

  One of my favorite tasks as a maid at Driftwood Island’s Resort and Spa was cleaning out the suites. It was a task only given to senior staff like myself, who had been working here for several years. Turnover amongst the housekeeping staff was high, since most of the resort staff had permanent homes back on the mainland. Staff would work for anywhere from a few months to a year, then get bored of island life and decide to head home.

  But not me. I was a proud Driftwood Island local, and I wasn’t going anywhere. Besides, I needed the generous salary my job at the resort gave me. I had a four-year-old daughter to take care of, and she needed a roof over her head and dinner every night. This job made it possible for me to provide for my little Chloe without asking for help from anyone, and I took a lot of pride in that fact, even though most of the job was drudgery.

  Most. Not all. Cleaning the suites never felt like drudgery. For one thing, the suites themselves we
re so ridiculously beautiful and over the top that I still hadn’t gotten tired of looking at them, even though I’d seen them hundreds of times over the last few years. The décor was positively opulent. It was all the sort of thing I could never dream of affording, but when I stepped into those suites to clean, I sometimes liked to pretend that the giant rooms were my home. I would lounge in the plush chairs for a few moments, or run my hands lovingly over the marble countertops in the bathroom.

  But it wasn’t just the suites themselves that amazed me. It was the people who stayed in them. I suppose that now that a few of my good friends had married wealthy billionaires, I shouldn’t be so impressed by money. But I was. I loved to see the sparkling evening gowns that were sometimes hung in the suites’ massive closets. I gawked at the glittering jewelry the resort guests often carelessly left spread out on the dressers. I shook my head at the sheer number of shoes some of them brought—shoes that probably each cost more than a month’s worth of rent for me. I never touched any of their things, unless it was absolutely necessary to do so in order to clean properly. But I did admire it all shamelessly.

  Perhaps a small part of me was truly jealous of how the ridiculously wealthy lived. I’d had my own chance at landing a wealthy partner, and I’d let it slip by. I’d never told anyone the details of my summer fling five years ago. Everyone knew I’d had a fling. That was impossible to deny when I ended up pregnant, and had a baby nine months after the summer’s last rays had faded away. But no one knew who the father was. I always acted like I didn’t know either, even though it was a bit embarrassing to pretend that I’d had a baby with a man whose name I didn’t know.

  The truth was, I knew his name. I knew exactly who he was, and I’d followed his life over the last five years without telling anyone. He was CEO of a huge company in New York, and as far as I could tell he’d gone from a multimillionaire to an all out billionaire over the last few years. I didn’t claim to be an expert on business, but it didn’t take a genius to see that his company was wildly successful.

  He had no idea that he had a four-year-old daughter on Driftwood Island, and I had no plans to tell him. In the beginning, I’d agonized over whether to contact him. But I’d figured since he’d never contacted me, he wasn’t that interested in a long term relationship with me. And I also figured it was better if we stayed out of each other’s lives. If I was honest, I was terrified that if Chloe’s father knew about her, he’d swoop in with a team of lawyers and try to take her away from me. I envisioned the horror of her being hauled away to New York, where I would never be able to see her again.

  And if that didn’t happen? Her father would probably think I was just contacting him to get money. I’d overheard countless stories from wealthy resort guests about how they had baby mamas out there trying to milk them for every penny they could.

  I wasn’t like that. I had pride. And I wasn’t going to use my daughter as some tool to get money. I would raise her myself, working hard to provide for us on my own. That’s how I ended up as a maid at the resort. Even though most locals shunned the resort completely and refused to work here, I needed the money. The job paid well, and the occasional chance to see how rich people lived was a nice perk.

  Today, I’d been tasked with freshening up the presidential suite. The suite hadn’t been rented out much this summer, but my boss said someone had just booked it for two weeks. He wanted me to make sure the suite was in top shape for our guest, and then be responsible for cleaning up the room every day. I couldn’t keep a giddy, excited smile off my face when he told me this. My boss could be horribly rude and mean to me, but he knew that I was the best maid on staff, so he always gave me jobs that involved our richest, most demanding clients.

  The next two weeks would be fun. I’d get to see the resort’s largest suite every day, and I’d probably also get to gawk at some rich family’s stuff. It had been a while since I’d had excitement like that, and as I entered the presidential suite, I couldn’t stop myself from starting to hum my favorite pop song. I hadn’t been in a mood this good since I’d been in charge of cleaning the suite for a famous actress who stayed at the resort last summer.

  The suite didn’t need much work, and I probably could have finished up in ten minutes. But I took my time anyway. I wanted to double check everything and make sure everything was perfect. The last thing I needed was for one of our richest resort guests to complain to management about something in the room not being up to their standards.

  I continued to sing at the top of my lungs as I worked. One of the awesome things about this resort was that the rooms were all extremely insulated against noise. This not only kept resort guests happy when their neighbors were noisy, but it meant I could sing while I worked and no one would know.

  It was one of my favorite things about the job. Singing had always made me happy, and I thought I had a pretty good voice. But I didn’t sing much at home these days, since by the time I got home I was exhausted and needed to take care of Chloe. Here at work, though, I could sing my heart out, which had the added bonus of helping the hours at work pass more quickly.

  I switched to a new song as I dusted off a coffee table one more time. At least today was Friday. That meant tomorrow was Saturday, which was my day to get off early. I could take Chloe to the library in the afternoon. I smiled at the thought. I loved how my daughter loved the library more than any other place in the world. She was turning into quite the little bookworm, and had somehow taught herself to read over the last few months. I tried to buy her new books whenever I could, but since I was always so tight on money, the library saved me. She could get dozens of new books every week, and it didn’t cost me a penny.

  “Ruby! Ruby, are you done up in the P-suite?” my boss’s voice, crackling frantically over my radio, brought an abrupt ending to my singing. I hadn’t heard him sound this agitated since one of the maids had accidentally spilled bleach on a client’s Louboutin shoes.

  “I’m done,” I said as I picked up the radio and put it up to my mouth. “Just finished, actually. Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Our guest arrived early, and one of the idiots down at reception checked him in and gave him his room key before checking that the room was actually ready. Thank god you’re on top of things today, at least.”

  I almost laughed. I could totally picture my boss’s face right now, purple with rage. He had a bad angry streak, and nothing made him angrier than when he thought someone had screwed up a room for a guest. I was glad I hadn’t been at fault for anything, and that I had the room ready. I took one last look around to be sure everything was in order, and then I stepped out into the hallway.

  The long hallway was deserted and quiet. The suites here were so large that there were only a few doors to the hallway, and none of the other suites’ occupants were around right now. I should have made a quick exit to the service elevator before the new occupant of the presidential suite arrived, but my curiosity got the best of me.

  I pushed my housekeeping cart over to the service elevator, but I didn’t push the button yet. I would wait here until the new resort guest appeared so I could see who he or she was. The presidential suite was so expensive that anyone who rented it was almost always rich enough to be very well-known. We’d had quite a few celebrities come through, as well as some foreign royals. I bit my lower lip as I heard the guest elevator dinging, and hoped it would be someone I knew. I had to be careful not to act like a total fan girl when celebrities showed up, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t jump up and down squealing on the inside.

  I pushed the button for the service elevator and put a bored look on my face as I stared in the direction of the guest elevator. I was trying to act nonchalant, like I wasn’t actually trying to see who was coming.

  But when the elevator door opened and a tall man with neatly cropped blonde hair stepped out, all thoughts of acting nonchalant disappeared immediately. I gasped, and clapped a hand over my mouth. Then I panicked and turned away, desperately pushing
the button on the service elevator over and over as though that would help it come faster.

  Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit! I willed the elevator to arrive, and I forced myself not to turn around again. I would have known those green eyes anywhere. Ian Hughes, my long-lost summer lover and the father of my child, was back on Driftwood Island. I told myself to be calm. It had been a long time. He might not even remember me. He might not recognize me. I just had to stay calm and not act like a monkey who was high on caffeine.

  “Ruby?” his voice was deep and strong, just like it had been five years ago. Despite the panic I was feeling, I couldn’t keep my heart from melting just a little bit at the sound.

  No! Do not turn around! Do not respond. Pretend you didn’t hear him. Pretend Ruby isn’t your name.

  But I wasn’t fooling him at all. I heard him drop his leather messenger bag to the floor, and then I heard his footsteps moving in my direction. The hallway carpet did a lot to muffle the sounds, but my senses were all hyperaware right now. Every step sounded like a huge boom in my ears.

  “Ruby, is that you?”

  Mercifully, the service elevator finally opened at that moment. I kept my back to him as I quickly pushed my housekeeping cart into the elevator and began to push the “close door” button like a maniac. I was careful to keep my face out of Ian’s direct view, but if he caught the door before it fully closed then my little game was up. I could hear his footsteps speeding down the hall, and my heart jumped nervously in my chest. This was it. He was going to catch me, and I was going to have to confess everything to him.

  But then, just as I saw a flash of his hand appearing near the doorway, the elevator shut completely and began to move. I had just made it. I leaned against the cold, hard steel of the elevator wall and whimpered out in relief. This was bad, bad news. I was going to have to figure out some way to convince my boss to take me off of presidential suite duty for the next two weeks. My boss was going to be angry with me, but I had no choice. I had to stay away from Ian Hughes.