Page 6 of Auctioned to the Billionaire Stalker

I could tell he was upset. I gave him a half-smile. “It’s no big deal. It’ll be fine, really.”

Those tips didn’t do a ton for me, but every little bit helped. Especially now that I’d had to drop sixteen hundred dollars on my classes. I pushed my way out the side entrance to avoid the lunch rush currently spilling through the front. I started to grab my bike but glanced down the street. The Lancaster building was only a couple of blocks away. I didn’t really need to ride to get over there as long as I made it up to the top floor by eleven thirty. That’s when video game mogul Jack Lancaster insisted on having his lunch delivered every day.

He always got the same lunch. I thought it was a little weird, but who was I to judge?

“Girl. What are you doing? Why aren’t youwaiting tables?”

I turned sharply to see my best friend, Nia, tying on her half apron. We’d worked together at Dinardo’s since our freshman year of college. I was still working to get my undergrad, but Nia’s parents had paid for college for her. She was working on her graduate degree now. It felt nice, though, that we were both still in school.

She applied another coat of bright red lipstick as best she could using her reflection in the glass on the side of the building. She could apparently see Ivan better than herself because the two of them started making funny faces at each other.

I snorted. She always put me in a better mood. “Walk me over there?”

“Over where?” Her pretty bluish-green eyes, so striking against her smooth brown skin, looked in the distance and landed on the Lancaster building. “Shit.” She got a huge grin on her face. “Hell, yeah, I’ll walk you over. I’ve got to give you a damn pep talk.”

I sighed. “I can’t, Nia.”

“Like hell!” She grabbed my upper arm and turned me towards her. “This is the perfect opportunity. You’ve been dragging your feet on getting an internship. You know this is your dream job, too.”

It was. I might not look like the typical gamer on the outside, but I loved video games. AndCaveSpherewas my favorite by far. I’d idolized Jack Lancaster before I’d worked at Dinardo’s. That was back when all I knew about him was that he’d started working on his game early in life. Now I knew he was thirty, the designer of one of the most popular games of all time, and incredibly good looking.

And, sadly, since working at Dinardo’s, I knew a little more. He was reputed to be kind of an asshole, he obsessed over his order being theexactsame every day, and he was pissed if it was even one minute late. I no longer worshipped the ground he walked on. I couldn’t stand people in power being mean to the powerless for no reason.

But I still would love to be part of the advertising andmarketing team forCaveSphere 4, the much anticipated fourth installment of the game. It would be a dream job, but there was no way I could ask for an internship. Even a free one, and I really needed one that paid. I was too scared of the ogre who was probably going to freak out on me because he didn’t have croutons for his soup.

Nia was still holding onto me, trying to make me see how great this opportunity was. I pulled loose from her surprisingly strong grip. Nia was both thinner and taller than I was. I rubbed my arm. “You’re stronger than you look.”

“I can hold my own,” she shrugged. She looked over her shoulder. “Old Man Dinardo better not get mad if I’m a few minutes late. I’ll just walk you to the lobby and then hurry back.”

“Thanks,” I said, giving her a quick smile.

We walked along companionably for a couple of blocks to the Lancaster building. I carefully filtered what I told her. Nia knew some of my problems, but she didn’t know the full extent. She knew about Myers, the ex who’d cheated on me. She knew I had money problems. Anyone who worked at Sugar, the high-end strip club that was part of a group of connected gentleman’s clubs that Nico and Carmen Salazar owned, had money problems.

But she didn’t know how bad they were.

And I hadn’t told her about my stalker. At first, I hadn’t wanted to worry her. But that had changed into wanting to protect her. I was glad Nia and I only had one job together, we weren’t roommates anymore, and I rarely saw her at night since I was usually working. She was safe from him—or I hoped she was.

“You’re quiet. What’s going on?”

I clutched Jack Lancaster’s weird lunch order—piping hot tomato soup in summer—to my chest and squinted my eyes up at the sun. “Nothing, really. Just… same old stuff, you know?”

“Yeah,” she kicked at a pebble on the sidewalk with her Chuck’s. “Sometimes when you look at all thesepeople, do you feel invisible?”

I knew exactly what she was talking about. The people around us were wearing high end suits and designer work clothes, headed to their office buildings after a working lunch. And there were tourists from the beach and bay area shopping at the high-end stores in West Bay’s thriving downtown. “Absolutely.” We were just two girls working our way through college, wearing cut-off jean shorts and Dinardo’s Deli T-shirts.

The only people we weren’t invisible to were the men who took double and triple takes as they saw the two of us walking together. Our shorts were short and our shirts were tight. That’s the way Old Man Dinardo liked us to look, and, honestly, we got better tips that way. I couldn’t help but wonder how many of them recognized me from my night job.

Being a hostess at Sugar paid well, but it had its drawbacks. I didn’t make the big money because I didn’t strip and I didn’t ‘entertain’ men in the VIP rooms, but I did serve them plenty of drinks. And while I did it, I wore very revealing uniforms, flirted, and ignored it when the men got a little handsy. I figured they knew me from that, as I made unintentional eye contact with a handsome forty-something man in a bespoke suit. The hunger in his eyes was unmistakable. I smiled at him, not wanting to piss off a potential high tipper if he knew me from Sugar.

Or he might just think I was hot.

I looked at Nia, quirking my eyebrow as I saw a couple of men basically salivating over her, too. “Well, maybe notabsolutelyinvisible,” I said. Nia might not work at Sugar, but she was truly one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. Men tended to notice that.

She laughed ruefully. “Wonder how many of them are married or have girlfriends.”

“Too many.” I hadn’t been so jaded before Myers had cheated on me and I’d started working for the Salazars. I knew a lot of the men who frequented their high-end gentleman’s clubs werenotsingle. Yet they hung out at Sugar, or Cayenne, theinfamous sex club, on a nightly basis. I wondered what they told their wives, or if they said anything at all.

Hell. Maybe their wives didn’t care. Rich people lived differently, and it seemed like affairs were just a normal thing for them. I’d never be able to stomach that, though. Myers cheating on me had been awful. I’d loved him. Or thought I had at one time.