Personal Disaster (Billionaire Secrets Book 3)

  PERSONAL DISASTER

  AINSLEY BOOTH

  SHE’S LOOKING FOR A STORY ABOUT A BILLIONAIRE. HE’S THE PARK RANGER STANDING IN HER WAY.

  Ten years ago, Marcus Dane left the tech world in his dust and joined the National Park Service. For the last decade, the world has ignored the park ranger-who-could-have-been-a-billionaire, but now an intrepid reporter has tracked him down. Worse, Poppy Lisowski has a theory about him which could blow his quiet life to smithereens. He needs to send her packing. But he’s already tumbled head-over-heels in insta-lust with her flippy ponytail and smart mouth…

  For Emma

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by Ainsley Booth

  CHAPTER ONE

  MARCUS

  July

  Rifle, Colorado

  I HAVE GREAT FRIENDS. But they’re also jerks, and I tell them as much when they call me as a group from the Hamptons.

  Two of them have big news, it turns out.

  “Had you told me that you were getting engaged, I’d have maybe flown out for the weekend,” I tell Jake Aston. And you…” I point at Toby Hunt, who’s sporting a giant shit-eating grin. “Married?”

  Ben Russo shakes his head on my phone’s screen. “I know. They both kept good secrets. Too good. Sorry you aren’t here, man.”

  “Yeah, well…” I flip the camera around on my own phone and show them the mountain top I’m currently looking at across a gorge just outside my office. “That’s my view, you assholes, so I’m not too sad.”

  They howl with laughter, then Jake makes me promise to come back out east for the wedding.

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Now I have to get back to work. Leave me alone,” I growl. But I’m grinning, and that smile doesn’t drop off my face until I arrive back at the National Park Service-owned cabin where I work.

  Whoever she is, the stacked brunette with the perky ponytail and open-toed sandals peering in the windows of my office isn’t from around here. Which is a shame, because I like perky ponytails.

  The sandals are an interesting choice in the Rocky Mountains, but to each their own.

  I don’t like industrious outsiders who drive halfway up a mountain to find me, though.

  And I don’t need to make it easy for her now.

  “Can I help you?” I ask in that probably not, but say your piece anyway voice that usually sends people running.

  She straightens and turns around, a polite smile on her face. “Perhaps you can. I’m looking for Marcus Dane. Do you know him?”

  Like I’m your stereotypical bearded mountain man who knows everyone in the national park, but couldn’t possible be the guy she’s looking for. She’s right on the former point, and too bad for her, very wrong on the latter.

  “Not sure anyone really knows Marcus Dane.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard.”

  Well that’s not good. “Are you here on official business or…” I leer at her, because it’s both effective and fun. When was the last time I got a good leer in? College, probably. “Something more personal?”

  Sadly, the leer I’m so proud of doesn’t send her shrieking for the hills. She gives me a bland look and hands over a business card. “Business, Mr. Dane. Nice beard, by the way. Killer disguise.”

  I sigh as I read the card. Her name is Poppy Lisowski and she’s a journalist. Her card lists a few different places she’s been published. I recognize The Washington Record, and I think Poindexter is a blog I’ve heard about on the morning news.

  So she’s not here about anything good, then.

  “It’s not a disguise,” I say slowly, taking my time so I can figure out something, anything more about her. “It’s just my face. Which you looked at and appeared not to recognize, and since I was just about to take a coffee break, Ms. Lisowski, I thought I’d better find out if your reason for being here was more important than caffeine.”

  “Do you use Twitter, Mr. Dane?”

  Ah. That kind of question. I take a deep breath and cross my arms over my chest. “That’s none of your God damned business.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  POPPY

  THE BEARD definitely helps him look pissed off. It’s close-cropped, so I can see the hard cut of his jaw as he grits his teeth. He’s clearly uncomfortable with being hunted down, and part of me feels bad—just for a second—about poking this particular bear.

  It’s not like I don’t have sympathy for the ideals he claims to protect. It’s just that the truth is more important than political ideology.

  I take a deep breath and try again. “Do you know Toby Hunt?”

  “We went to college together.”

  “And you have visited him in San Francisco recently.” Not a question. I’ve done my research.

  “Technically he lives in Palo Alto, not San Francisco.”

  “Thank you for confirming your close relationship—”

  “Go away, Ms. Lisowski. Nothing good will come of your nosing around here.” He drops his hands to his sides, and the muscles in his shoulders bunch and roll, big and strong.

  How big and strong he is doesn’t matter in the least. I shouldn’t notice that he’s super tall, either. I’m not short, and he dwarfs me. So it’s not the smartest idea to march forward and get right into his space, but that’s what I do. I pull out my recorder, and ignoring the obvious shake in my hand, I turn it on. “Would you repeat that on the record?”

  He leans in, his brown eyes sparkling for a split second before he shutters his gaze and directs his voice to the mic. “Go. Away. Ms. Lisowski.”

  “And the threat?”

  “I didn’t threaten you.”

  “You said nothing good will come of me nosing around here.”

  “Mighty big stretch to call that a threat.” He shrugs. “But sure, I said that. On the record and everything.”

  “What do you mean, nothing good?”

  He straightens up and props his hands on his hips now. He’s constantly in motion, this park ranger. This rebel. This likely resistance leader. “What do you think you’re going to find here, little one?”

  I roll my eyes. First he tried to perv on me—which totally didn’t work—and now he’s being condescending? “You need to work on your scare tactics.”

  He grins unexpectedly. “But you are little.”

  “Not to most people.”

  “Ah.” He winks. “Well, Poppy. I think you’re going to discover I am not most people. Now, I’ve decided this conversation isn’t more important than caffeine, so if you’ll excuse me, it’s my coffee break.”

  He brushes past me and heads into his office.

  That’s his prerogative, but I wouldn’t be a half-decent reporter if I left it at that. Also, there’s no way I’d be able to justify my flight to Colorado.

  I’ve got two options. I can chase after him and keep asking him questions he doesn’t want to answer, or I can wait him out.

  I like door number two.

  I plop my butt down on the porch outside his little log building and pull out my phone. I wonder what Mr. Alt Park Service is tweeting about right now?

  They’re all the same, these alt accounts. Morally out
raged, full of righteous indignation. Half of them shams to drum up extremist rhetoric and disguise the rapid dismantling of the bureaucratic state. The other half are preaching to the choir. That story has been written. It’s inspiring for the liberal base, and intriguing for journalists—for a hot minute.

  But now what he’s tweeting isn’t nearly as important as where he’s tweeting from—this particular account gave a couple of subtle and accidental clues in early tweets, right after the election, that point to this group of national parks west of Denver—and how he’s doing it without getting caught.

  Also, given the connections I’ve discovered in his background, who has helped him along the way.

  Marcus Dane has some very wealthy friends.

  Are the rules different when you’re besties with billionaires?

  While I wait for him to tweet, or not tweet, because maybe I’ve pissed him off and he’s going to try and throw me off his scent, I pull up the dossier I’ve compiled on him.

  I can’t concentrate on the words, though. There’s no maybe about the pissing him off part. I’ve definitely gotten under his skin. I pushed a little too hard.

  Besides, I don’t need to go over the dossier again. I’ve memorized every single word in it.

  Marcus Dane went to MIT, where he met and befriended Jake Aston and Toby Hunt, when they were ordinary young men with extraordinarily big dreams.

  Reading between the lines, it would be easy to assume that Marcus was a third young men with equally big dreams, but the career that follows belies that hypothesis.

  After graduating, Marcus and Toby headed to California. But where Toby used seed money from Gladiator Inc’s young CEO, Ben Russo, to start his own company, Marcus got a job as a software engineer.

  A regular job.

  Because Marcus Dane, best friend to billionaires, was a regular Joe—hypothesis number two.

  But after a few years of chasing the tech 401k dream, he walked away from the suburban house and workplace-with-a-gym-and-smoothie-bar, for…

  I glance around me.

  Nothing, really.

  Maybe everything.

  Trees. Fresh air.

  Painfully high altitude that sort of makes me faint, although that could also be attributed to the clash of wills with the bearded mountain man.

  Freedom.

  Hypothesis number three, should anyone still care about Marcus Dane after he disappeared up a mountain, is that he’s seen the inside workings of capitalist, tech-worshiping America, and he doesn’t like it. In fact, he hates it, and now that society has broken down to the point of chaos, he’s going to use whatever platform he can find to ensure the things that really matter to him—the environment, protection of the land and animals, water—have a voice.

  No matter what official edict gets handed down from on high, Mr. Alt Park Service won’t be silenced.

  As far as I know, nobody has looked at Marcus Dane but me. I’ve run the story in the loosest of terms past two of my favorite editors. Both were open to hearing more, but I needed to put this trip on my credit card because nobody is paying freelancers to hunt stories like this. Not in the heat of summer. Not when there are courthouses and law offices to stalk.

  If I wanted to pay the rent, I’d join the stringers from MSNBC and CNN outside the Washington DC law firms and wait for the White House staffers to come to me. Most of them are a sympathetic look away from spilling their guts over coffee.

  Except…

  I want to pay my rent, but not by lunging desperately at low-hanging fruit.

  I want to write a good story. Something I had to dig for, that nobody else has any idea about yet.

  I want to expose a real truth, which is getting harder and harder to do these days.

  If I do that, I’ll be able to land a job that pays the rent on a regular basis.

  Teach a man to fish, they say.

  Or in 2017…teach a woman to follow a wild hunch, no matter how high up a mountain it drags her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MARCUS

  I TIP my cup against my lower lip, but it’s empty now. I’d forgotten that as I sat and stewed over the fact she’s still outside.

  Well, coffee break is over.

  I pick up my phone and scroll through the search results that came up when I typed in her name.

  Poppy Lisowski is quite the intrepid reporter. I have no doubt she knows everything about me. Where I went to school, who I’m friends with.

  What my political affiliation is—registered independent, always have been, always will be—and how I like my pizza.

  Extra pepperoni, green peppers, and onions. Always have, always will.

  The thing about me that Poppy Lisowski doesn’t know is that those two things are equally weighted in my world, but I’m not sure I want to tell her that just yet.

  I’m not sure I want her to go away.

  I lift my cup again before remembering…

  Ah, hell.

  Duty calls.

  I stalk to the door and swing it open. “I need to head out to check some day site permits. You want to come with me, Reporter Girl?”

  Her back stiffens for a micro-second, then she scrambles to her feet. “Sure thing, Ranger Boy.”

  I force myself to keep walking and not stop and give her a reaction to that. But I see her, and hear her.

  I’ll only call her a girl again when I want to get a reaction.

  A better man would take the warning completely and not do it at all, but where’s the fun in that?

  We’ve got a three-hour slow climb up and down mountainsides in my truck ahead of us. We’re going to need to have a little fun.

  “Where is the campground?” she asks as I steer down the lane toward the road that will take us back to the highway.

  “Which campground?”

  “The one with the day permits you’re checking?” She pulls a notebook out of her bag, and then the recorder is back, too.

  I glance at it. “Do you want to get the spelling and everything just right for your story?”

  She ignores the barb and waits for me to answer.

  I don’t.

  “I’d like to return to the question about your friendships with Toby Hunt and Ben Russo.”

  Ah. Now she’s dragging Ben into this. I grunt.

  “Mr. Hunt and Mr. Russo haven’t always seen eye-to-eye on political issues…”

  Now it’s my turn to wait, but she doesn’t finish the rest of that thought. “Is that a question?”

  Because if it is, she’s wrong. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the political contributions my friends make, but I know enough about their business interests and their personal realities to know that whatever money they donate, wherever they donate it, that’s no reflection on anything.

  Not much of a reflection, anyway.

  Fuck, I hate this shit.

  “Are you aware—”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t let me ask the question.”

  “Doesn’t matter. The answer is always going to be no. On the record. No, I’m not aware. No, I can’t comment on my friends’ lives. No, I haven’t discussed whatever it is you’re asking about with them. No, no, no.”

  “Are you aware that Toby Hunt’s company is working on a double-encrypted Bluetooth solid state memory device that can invisibly run in the background of a mobile phone? It will, apparently, mask the connection once it’s made. And apps can be installed on the device instead of the phone, making them invisible, too.”

  “That sounds complicated.”

  “Is that a no, you aren’t aware?”

  I can’t answer that question. Might be time to break out another Reporter Girl comment.

  But that makes me think about how her mouth pursed when I did it before, and that feels a little close to tugging on a girl’s pigtails because I like it.

  If I want to see her soft lips pull together like that again, I can find an up-front way to make that happen.

  We st
ill have hours together, after all.

  Plenty of time to explore why I’m drawn to her, even while she’s grilling me on shit I know nothing about—and some shit I know plenty about, but won’t tell her.

  Ever.

  That’s just how friendships go. I’m a vault.

  “Are you aware that your newspaper is owned by a ruthless billionaire who doesn’t think twice about putting competitors out of business to chomp up market share?”

  “I’m not actually employed by any single publication, so it’s not my newspaper. Are you aware that the blog I also write for regularly covers that sort of thing quite critically?”

  No, I’ve never read the blog that was on her business card, but I sure as shit will look it up tonight. “What exactly is your goal here?”

  “You didn’t answer my question about the campground. How far is it?”

  “I said I needed to check day site permits. Plural.” The truck bounces over a rut in the road, and she gasps. I keep going. “And then you pulled out your recorder, like I’m going to say something that might score you a Pulitzer Prize. So I didn’t answer your question, but I will now. We’re not going to ‘a campground’, exactly. I’m doing my daily loop of a number of day site permit locations.”

  She stiffens on the passenger seat, and despite my best efforts to glare straight ahead, I see her out of the corner of my eye. I see her glance down at her recorder, and turn it off. I see her jaw tighten, then relax, and I see her sigh and turn to look out the window.

  I see her cross her legs, flashing me another few inches of soft thigh.

  Damn it. Now my jaw is tight, too.

  That’s not to say I don’t like it. I do, but it’s a performance.

  A trick.

  If a woman is going to slide her skirt up her thighs for me, it’s gotta be because she wants me to chase the hem with my tongue. Because she wants to get lost for a few hours, and part company with a mutually fond memory.

  Not because she thinks I can be distracted by my dick.