The Billionaire From Chicago: A BWWM Billionaire Romance (United States Of Billionaires Book 6) Read online

  “I wonder if you could call up to Elizabeth in room 612 and tell her Luke is here to see her?” The man behind the desk, whose name tag read David, nodded.

  “She’s expecting you?” Luke nodded back to him.

  “I think I might be running a minute or two late,” he suggested. “But I wanted to let her know I’ve arrived.” David nodded again and picked up the phone, and Luke stepped to the side to let the man complete the call. He turned towards the elevators and tried not to be too conspicuous in waiting for Elizabeth to arrive.

  He hadn’t formed any kind of real image in his mind of what the prospective mother of his child would look like, but something about the name had tickled Luke’s interest right away; there had been a girl he’d had a thing with in high school with the same first name more than ten years before, and while it was far from the most logical reason to reach out to that profile, Luke had thought it would be a kind of mental, private way of remembering the girl he’d come closest to having real feelings for--juvenile as those feelings had been.

  He knew that Elizabeth was such a common name that it was next to impossible for it to be the same one or even one who might have ever met the girl who’d moved away to the Pacific Northwest for college, leaving him behind.

  Luke wondered whatever had happened to the girl he’d known; after parting ways for college, they hadn’t really stayed in touch. The last time they’d spoken to each other was, he thought, during winter break of their first semester. And that had seemed to put a conclusive end to things between them, consumed with awkwardness as they’d both been.

  Luke had only just pushed any thought of his high school semi-sweetheart out of his mind when he saw something that made him think that his imagination was running away with him. A woman stepped out of the elevator, and for a few heartbeats, Luke thought he had to have imagined her. She had long, dark brown hair that fell to her shoulders and bright blue eyes framed by finely arched eyebrows.

  Her lips were slightly on the thin side but well-shaped, and she looked almost exactly like the girl that Luke had parted from so many years ago--but more refined, more mature, dressed in a simple black dress with a v-neck that barely showed her cleavage and a hem that fell to maybe two inches above the knee, her legs covered in mock-lace tights and amber glinting at her ears and wrist. If she was wearing makeup, Luke couldn’t precisely tell.

  “Lizzie?” The word left his lips before he could censor it, and the woman stopped short as she approached the front desk, looking around until her gaze fell on him. Her eyes widened as she took him in for a moment, and he saw the color rise up in her cheeks and then fall just as abruptly.

  “Luke?” She started towards him and then hesitated, shook her head, and continued forward. “There is no way in hell…”

  “Apparently there is,” he said, pretending to be less shaken than he was. He extended a hand towards her, and instead of shaking, she threw her arms around his shoulders, giving him a quick hug.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” she said, pulling back to take him in again. “I can’t believe it.”

  “I’m pretty shocked too,” he agreed, shaking his head. He would never in a million years have thought that the random Elizabeth he’d found on a surrogacy site would be the girl he’d had a brief--if passionate--fling in high school. What were the odds? Ask your bookie to run the numbers later, he thought irrelevantly.

  “Wow. I don’t really know where we go from here,” Elizabeth said, stepping away from him about an arm’s length. Luke licked his lips and looked around; a few people, including David, the front desk agent, were watching them curiously.

  “Let’s just pretend this is normal and go to dinner,” he suggested with a little smile. It was, after all, the only thing he could do at that point.

  “That sounds about right,” Elizabeth agreed. She took a quick breath, and Luke couldn’t help noticing that the movement made her breasts press against the V-neck of her dress--drawing attention to the full, slightly heavy look of them. Up close, she looked even more gloriously herself and gloriously mature than she had coming out of the elevator. Luke shook off the thought f and gestured for Elizabeth to precede him towards the door to the hotel.

  “I have a driver waiting for us up the street a bit,” he explained. “I’ve got us reservations at a steakhouse. You haven’t gone vegan or anything since the last time we spoke, have you?”

  Elizabeth laughed. “No. I had a brief vegetarian phase in college, but I’m long since over it,” she said. “And what’s the point of being in Chicago if I don’t go to a steakhouse?” Luke smiled and felt something inside of him relax. Maybe it had been good luck, instead of bad, that the random person he’d chosen to make a proposition with about having his child turned out to be someone who shared a old history. Maybe it would work out.

  Chapter3

  “So, if it isn’t too rude for me to ask, how did the guy who nearly blew up the Chem lab in high school end up becoming a multi-billionaire?” Elizabeth had, to some degree, gotten her composure back in the car on the way to the steakhouse where Luke had had made reservations. Remington’s was everything that a steakhouse should be: classic, stylish vintage decor, reminiscent of bygone gilded ages, tabletops that looked like lacquered, rough-hewn wood, the smell of searing meat and homey cooking.

  The menu, as Elizabeth looked over it, wasn’t possessed with the kind of hipster-like need to recreate the wheel; while there were some more modern preparations, it was still clearly a very straightforward place: cuts of beef, sides a la carte, raw bar and starters that would coordinate with the beef-heavy main course, and alcohol.

  “It’s kind of an interesting story--or at least as interesting as modern billionaire stories can be,” Luke said. “You remember I was into computers and programming back in the day?” Elizabeth nodded.

  “I do--you were going to design some great big social network or something, or maybe it was a game you were going to do?” She smiled at him playfully. Luke laughed.

  “Well, neither of those things materialized--obviously--but I did manage to find a good niche in cryptocurrency,” he explained. Elizabeth considered that. She knew vaguely about the existence of cryptocurrencies; bitcoin was one she’d heard of, along with a few other names. But if someone had told her that a person could become a billionaire via such ephemeral, vague internet-based stuff, she would have told them they were full of it.

  “I would never have thought that it would be profitable at this point,” she said, trying to be polite.

  “It’s difficult, but with a little risk and a little luck and some smarts you can get good at trading it and make a lot of money--obviously,” Luke explained. He shrugged it off and glanced at the menu for a moment. “Buying and selling at the right time and then investing my profits while I kept a basic bankroll for speculating in the currencies…” he looked up and smiled sheepishly. “This is probably incredibly boring for you.”

  “No, it’s mostly just out of my realm of understanding,” Elizabeth admitted. They both chuckled. “But I mean, you’re verified, so I won’t question that it’s true.”

  “What about you? I mean, obviously, I assume you’re not a billionaire yourself, but I mean what did you end up doing after college?”

  “Complicated question,” Elizabeth told him. “I started out working at a design agency and ran into a little bit of financial trouble at one point--namely, my car just up and died on me.”

  “It wasn’t the Hipstermobile, was it?” Elizabeth laughed.

  “Yes, in fact, it was,” she said. She’d gotten the car, sardonically nicknamed “the hipstermobile” when she was seventeen after over a year of saving money from her part-time job. Her parents had offered to pay half the down-payment on a full-priced car, but Elizabeth had insisted that her first car would come completely out of her pocket and that she wasn’t going to start financing anything before she was even eighteen years old.

  So, she’d ended up buying a two-thousand-dollar
, nineties model Volvo. Boxy and with its paint worn down to almost the primer, it looked--to Liz and her friends--exactly like the kind of car a “hipster” would drive, and it had therefore earned the nickname.

  “I can’t believe it lasted that long,” Luke said. Elizabeth shrugged.

  “I had a good mechanic in Portland--I think he might have had a bit of a crush on me,” she explained. “So, he was able to keep it maintained for me and give me a good price on it. But eventually, it hit that point where the price to fix it would be as much as the price of another car.”

  She made a face. “I wasn’t making enough at the agency to buy a car outright, so I had to take a loan from my parents to be able to get a car to get around.” Elizabeth glanced down at the menu again, knowing that at any moment the waiter would arrive to take their orders. “So, in order to be able to pay my parents back as quickly as possible, I started taking some freelance work...and then, over time, got more and more contacts, made more money at it, and figured out that I was making more per-hour working for myself than I was at the agency. So, I went freelance full time.”

  The waiter arrived then, and while Luke ordered his selections, Elizabeth scrambled to decide what she wanted. They decided to share the ceviche, and Luke ordered a Moscow Mule to drink while Elizabeth ordered a French 75. Luke got the Ribeye steak and Elizabeth the filet, and they settled on grilled asparagus and creamed spinach on the side.

  “Now, where were we again?” After the waiter left them, Elizabeth had lost the thread of their conversation; apparently, so had Luke.

  “I think I’d just finished telling you the story about how I became a freelancer,” she said after a moment’s thought.

  “Oh yes! Okay, so you are successful in your own right, obviously,” Luke said, inclining his head towards her slightly. For what had to have been the tenth or twelfth time, Elizabeth took in just the sight of him in something slightly akin to wonder.

  He looked somehow just like the cute guy he’d been in high school--he still kept his hair on the longer side, though now it was, thankfully, much neater, confined to a short ponytail at the base of his skull. His warm, brown eyes had the same slightly puppyish look to them--but he’d grown into the awkwardness he’d had as a teenager, born out of a nose that had been a little too large for his face, a jaw that had been, then, in the process of transitioning from youthful softness to adult firmness.

  He looked fit and toned, broad-shouldered and stylish in his fitted jeans, plain black tee shirt and blazer. How had she managed to not even hear about him? Didn’t the news talk about billionaires? Especially ones who’d gotten their fortunes in unusual ways? It seemed so strange that she hadn’t heard a single thing about him; but then, it wasn’t as if she’d been looking for information about her former flame.

  “We should probably at least pretend to talk about what it is you’re looking for in a surrogate,” Elizabeth pointed out. Luke looked almost surprised for a moment but then recovered.

  “Oh yeah, we should probably get down to that,” he agreed. The waiter came with their ceviche and their drinks, and for a few moments, the main point of the dinner was once more lost as they both sipped and tasted.

  “So, let’s talk about this surrogacy thing,” Elizabeth said once they were once more settled and alone. Her cocktail--champagne mixed with citrus and some kind of liqueur that she’d forgotten the name of--had taken some of the edge off of her feelings of awkwardness and tension, even after just a couple of sips.

  “Well, in this case obviously, since I don’t have a wife or girlfriend to donate eggs, I would be asking you to basically be the donor as well as the carrier,” Luke said. Surprisingly, he seemed almost embarrassed by that fact.

  “That stands to reason,” Elizabeth said. “I mean--unless you wanted to get donor eggs from a repository or something. But it would be easier if you just...I guess...inseminated someone and had them carry to term. A lot lower risk and cheaper too.” She felt her cheeks warm up as she said ‘inseminate’ but plunged forward nonetheless.

  “Exactly,” Luke agreed. “Of course, the easiest possible way would be through sex--but I understand if that would be too personal for you.” Elizabeth raised an eyebrow at that. She hadn’t even considered the possibility of having sex with the man who’d contacted her on the surrogacy site; of course, it was different with a man she’d almost ended up having sex with in high school, but she wasn’t sure if that made her feel more comfortable or less comfortable with the idea.

  “I mean--artificial insemination isn’t that complicated, you know,” Elizabeth said, hedging.

  “Oh of course not,” Luke conceded. “It’s just that...ultimately, we should look at all the options, right? And artificial insemination does require some more effort--sometimes shots and things.” Elizabeth had to admit that it seemed like Luke had done his research; she suddenly felt slightly out of her depth.

  “Definitely,” she said. “I just...I don’t want it to feel too much like you’re paying me to have sex with you, you know?” Luke’s eyes widened, and he shook his head, hard.

  “No, not at all,” he said. “That is the furthest thing from my mind. I mean, if I just wanted to hire someone to have sex with, then that would be a very different thing.” Elizabeth couldn’t quite help the slight chuckle that rose up out of her in the face of his quick denial.

  Their main courses arrived then, and Elizabeth settled into the meal, enjoying her filet with its truffle sauce, the baked potato, and vegetables along with her drink--which Luke insisted on getting her a refill on--along with sips of some water. They talked about other things, more generally, smoothing the way a little more, and by the time she was halfway into her second cocktail and a little more than halfway done with her meal, Elizabeth had to admit--privately, deep down in the back of her mind--that she was a little bit curious about what it would be like to sleep with Luke.

  “To get back around to the original point of this dinner, what would it take for you to carry a child for me?” Elizabeth nearly choked on a mouthful of creamed spinach at the sudden turn in the conversation, even though she’d been anticipating for a while that they would get around to it again.

  “Well, I think your opening offer was pretty strong,” Elizabeth said after taking a moment to compose herself. “There are a couple of things I’d want to make sure of upfront, though.”

  “Of course,” Luke said, nodding.

  “If I were to move here to Chicago, I’d have to break my lease at the apartment I’m living in right now,” Elizabeth explained. “That’s a pretty hefty fee.”

  “I’d of course be willing to pay that,” Luke said without a moment’s hesitation.

  “I’d also want there to be a contract up front, discussing how payment will happen and what the terms are going to be,” Elizabeth added. “I mean--obviously there are some things we’d have to work out between us, but stuff like how the apartment I’d be living in will be paid for, what kind of access you’d have...things like that.” Luke nodded again.

  “Yeah--I actually have a prototype contract already,” he said. “It just makes sense for us both to have a clear idea of how this is going to play out before we even get down to it.”

  “That’s good then, I’d like to see it,” Elizabeth told him. She didn’t really have much more in mind than that; and if he didn’t have the contract with him right at that moment--and she didn’t think he did--then there wasn’t a lot more to discuss.

  “Do you think you’ll want to do this?”

  She considered that question for a moment as she ate another bite of her perfectly medium-rare steak.

  “I mean, it shouldn’t be any stranger with someone I know than with someone I don’t, should it?” she met his gaze over the table, and Luke smiled.

  “It is a little weird to realize that it’s someone you know and not a stranger. I get it,” he said.

  “It shouldn’t be, though; it should be easier,” Elizabeth insisted.

  �
��Probably it’s because…” Luke set his fork and knife aside and sipped his drink. “We kind of had a near-miss with this kind of thing, you know?” Elizabeth looked down at her plate and considered that. They’d never ended up having sex--in fact, she hadn’t lost her virginity until she was nearly nineteen--but they had been working towards that, certainly, before they’d parted ways.

  There had always been a part of her that wondered what it would have been like to have her first time be with Luke, rather than with the boy she’d eventually had sex with, but she’d put the question entirely out of her mind. Of course, there was no “first time” to be had anymore, but the fact that Luke was potentially interested in having sex with her for the sake of conception did re-open the question of what sex with him would be like.

  “I guess I do kind of wonder how things would have been different if we’d ended up going to the same school--or at least, a school in the same state. Close enough to see each other on weekends or whatever,” Elizabeth said. She pressed her lips together and looked up to meet Luke’s gaze. “Do you?”

  “Oh, I’ve thought about it a ton of times,” Luke admitted, nodding. “It’s always a question--and I guess with things being like they are…” He sat back slightly in his seat. “I don’t want you to feel pressured into having sex with me.” Elizabeth giggled.

  “Oh my god, you--how many times did you say that before we broke up?” she shook her head, laughing a little harder, unable to help herself in spite of the conviction that she was drawing attention to their table. She took a deep breath and tried to force herself to calm down. “No, I don’t feel pressured into anything,” she said finally.

  “If you’d rather go the artificial insemination route right away, we can do that,” Luke told her. Elizabeth licked her lips, wondering how her mouth had gone so dry, and sipped the water she’d asked for, glancing almost distrustfully at the remainder of her cocktail. It was--without a doubt--a little bit dangerous to keep sipping a champagne cocktail that would only dull her inhibitions. Even if she was fairly certain that her little tingle of attraction to Luke would be there whether or not there was alcohol in her system, she didn’t want to let herself get actually drunk.