Crashing into the Billionaire Brother

The man who rear-ended my forty-dollar scooter was worth more than the entire zip code.

I didn't know that yet. I didn't know most things.

I didn't know the ice-cold billionaire whose spare room I was about to move into had once been a voice on a dead physics forum. The stranger who talked me off the ledge six years ago, back when I was nineteen and sure I'd never be any good at the one thing I loved.

I didn't know he'd figure out who I was long before I suspected a single thing about him.

I didn't know he'd been waiting. Quietly. For six years.

Here's what I did know, because it's my whole field. Pluto and its one big moon are locked face-to-face forever, each one always showing the other the same side, neither ever allowed to look away.

It's called tidal locking.

I'm the astrophysicist. He's the one who ran the math on us first.

I just didn't feel the pull until it was way, way too late.

Chapter 1

Two weeks before graduation, my roommate got dumped, got obliterated on cheap wine, and called me at midnight to come scrape her off a bar floor.

So there I was, ferrying a hundred and ten pounds of heartbreak home on a scooter I'd bought with three months of skipped lunches.

"You know what I am to him?" Remy slurred into my shoulder. "I'm a rose. He watered me. And now he's gone, and how am I even supposed to live."

"Okay, Rose. You keep grieving. I'll keep us alive."

Except she was supposed to be navigating, and the scenery was getting suspiciously nice. Manicured hedges. Gated driveways. The kind of neighborhood where my scooter counted as a crime.

"Remy. Remy. This is a mansion district. Did you send us the wrong way?"

Dead weight. No answer. Great.

I pulled to the curb to pull up a map, and something hit us.

Not hard. Almost polite. A nudge, from a car so black it looked like a hole cut out of the street. My phone flew out of my hand and hit the pavement in three pieces.

There went next month's rent.

I whipped around, ready to go to war. And that was when Remy came back to life.

She lifted her head, squinted at the license plate, went very still, and then, with the solemn focus of the extremely drunk, asked, "Hey. You broke right now?"

"I'm always broke," I said. Honest astrophysics majors don't exactly print money.

She nodded like I'd just confirmed her hypothesis. "Cool. Watch this. Gonna make you rich."

And she slid off the back of the scooter and lay down flat on the asphalt beside that black car, like a woman staging her own crime scene.

"Making you rich," she announced to the sky. "You're welcome."

I have never scrambled so fast in my life. "Get up. Get up, we don't do this" Because I'd finally clocked the plate too, and the horror arrived all at once. She wasn't shaking down a stranger. She knew exactly whose car this was. She was ambushing someone.

I just didn't know who yet.

Then the car door opened.

A pair of long legs planted themselves on the pavement, unhurried. A man rose out of the car in a suit that cost more than my degree, and the temperature of the whole street dropped a degree and stayed there.

Sharp jaw. Sharper eyes. Nothing on his face at all. No irritation, no curiosity, just a flat cold that made my spine want to apologize.

I crouched there shaking my roommate like a maraca. Get up, I begged her silently. Get up, you lunatic. Of all the cars in the world you picked this one to fake-die next to.

A shadow fell over me. I looked up, straight into eyes that were already looking down at me, weighing me, filing me somewhere cold.

"Get up." A beat. "Don't make me say it twice."

Low. Even. Not a request. The kind of voice that had never once had to be repeated.

Rich car. Ruthless face. A voice like a closing vault.

And my roommate, playing dead at his feet.

Worst night of my life, easily.

I had no idea I'd just met the most important person in it.

Chapter 2

Here's the thing. He'd hit us. Technically, legally, he was the one in the wrong.

But my roommate face-down on the asphalt trying to squeeze cash out of him? That part we did not have a leg to stand on.

She showed no sign of getting up. So I did the only thing left. I looked the terrifyingly expensive man in the eye and told the truth.

"Look, sir. We're not shaking you down, I swear. She's just really, really drunk."

He frowned. Then he crouched, leaned in, and sniffed once, near her hair. Something crossed his face that was almost a laugh, if his face did that sort of thing.

"Well," he said. "Look at you, Remy. Drinking now."

I froze. "Wait. You know her?"

He straightened, turned to me, and became, abruptly, painfully polite. "Apologies. My driver clipped your scooter. I'm Remy's brother."

A pause.

"Everett."

Same arctic voice. Zero warmth.

It took my brain a full three seconds to reboot.

This man. This walking cold front in a five-figure suit. Was my roommate's brother.

Which meant my roommate, the girl who split ramen packets with me, who'd cried on my scooter about a boy twenty minutes ago.

I looked down at Rose, passed out cold next to the wreckage of my phone, and felt one single tear of pure betrayal slide down my face.

You're loaded? And you never said?

I pulled it together. "It's fine. It's fine. She just asked me to get her home safe."

Everett gave a small nod and bent to lift her. And my darling secret-heiress friend chose that exact second to resurrect. She grabbed my wrist and would not let go, wailing.

"You don't want me anymore. You're throwing me out the second I'm drunk. I bought you that car"

That wasn't me. That was her ex. I did not buy her a car. I bought my scooter with three months of skipped lunches, and I would die before I let anyone call it a gift.

But I didn't know if Remy had ever told her brother she was even seeing someone. So I just stood there, mouth open, saying nothing, choking on it.

For one long second, all three of us hung there.

Everett holding her.

Her holding me.

Me, holding a shattered phone and the strong urge to lie down on the asphalt myself.

Out of the corner of my eye: Everett, watching me. Not the drunk girl. Me. Reading something off my face I hadn't meant to put there.

I wanted to die.

To his credit, the man had clearly survived worse. He thought for a moment, then loaded all of us into the car. Me, Remy, my mangled scooter, my dead phone. And took us home.

Home turned out to be a mansion so obscenely nice it nearly blinded my broke, exhausted eyes.

So this was how rich people lived. Wow.

And yet. For all the marble and glass, the place felt strangely hollow. I snuck a look around while he settled Remy, and clocked what the place was missing. People. No housekeeper. No staff. Nobody. Just a lot of expensive silence.

He laid my roommate on her bed, straightened her blanket with a care I wasn't expecting, and held out a hand to me.

"What should I call you?"

I blinked, then shook it. A brief, firm grip. "Wren. I'm her roommate."

He nodded. He was tall to begin with, and this close all I could really see was the clean hard line of his jaw.

"It's late. Miss Ashby stays here tonight." His eyes dropped to the ruined phone still in my hand. Flat. Unreadable. "The scooter and the phone. I'll have them handled."

I nodded.

He turned to go. He'd just cleared the doorway when a small, cracked little sound came from the bed behind us.

"Mom"

Remy, mumbling it into her pillow, lost somewhere deep in a drunk dream.

Everett stopped.

He didn't turn around. He just stood there in the doorway with the living-room light behind him, saying nothing, and the glow stretched his shadow long and thin across the floor.

Big man. Broad shoulders. And something in the set of them, right then, looked so alone it put an ache in my chest I couldn't explain.

Why did he look like that?

Chapter 3

He stood there a while longer. Then, without a backward glance, Everett walked out with those long, unhurried strides, and it was just me and a comatose Remy.

Why did he look sad?

Too tired to chase it, I got Remy cleaned up and dropped into bed, still half-convinced I was hallucinating. My ramen-splitting roommate was secretly loaded. She'd tried to fake-injure herself off her own brother's car. None of it made sense, and somewhere in the not-making-sense of it, I passed out.

I woke up to shrieking.

"Oh my GOD. Wren. Why am I HOME?"

I pulled the blanket over my head. My brain was not open for business. "Your brother brought you back," I mumbled.

A wail of pure despair. "My BROTHER. So that's why the plate looked familiar."

So she'd known. She'd clocked her own brother's plate and decided to shake him down. And here I'd thought she was just a menace to society.

She clawed at her hair. "Please tell me I didn't say anything humiliating."

And there it was again, sharp and immediate. Everett alone in that doorway, shadow stretched thin across the floor. I sat straight up, wide awake.

"Depends," I said, fighting a grin. "Humiliating like what?"

She buried her face in the pillow. "Like crying about a boy. Wanting to die over him. That."

Oh, Rose. You did so much more than a little of that.

When I didn't answer, she started shaking me. I threw up my hands. "Nothing, nothing. I had my hand over your mouth the whole time."

She pressed her palms together like a tiny grateful monk. "Bless you. Bless your quick reflexes."

Then I yanked her out from under the blanket. "Okay, gremlin. You told me your brother went off to work after high school."

She nodded, completely earnest. "Yeah. He started a company after high school." A beat, mumbled. "Doing pretty okay now."

Pretty okay. She called this pretty okay. I gave her a slow, reverent thumbs-up. There were no words.

My roommate had split instant ramen with me for two years. Her brother could have bought the company that made it.

"Anyway. You're alive. I'm heading home."

She grabbed me instantly. "Wait. Weren't you totally stuck for summer housing? Just live here. With me."

I stared at her. My beautiful disaster of a roommate. We'd landed on the exact same idea.

Truthfully, I'd been about to ask if she wanted to split a cheap place near our internships. But this? A mansion, with the ice-cold brother in residence? That felt like an excellent way to be uncomfortable for three straight months.

She read my hesitation instantly. "Relax. He's basically never home. And if you don't come, I'm rattling around this giant place all by myself. It's depressing."

I genuinely could not believe this woman was flexing a mansion at me like it was a hardship.

She switched to full pity mode. "You know how it is. I get scared. It's just me here."

I thought about it, then asked, careful, "There's really nobody else? A housekeeper, staff, anyone?"

Because how does a place this size stay this empty.

Remy blinked at me, genuinely puzzled. "Nope. When I'm at the dorms, it's just my brother. He doesn't like having people around."

The shadow surfaced in my head again. Lonelier, this time.

I shook it off. "Fine. I'm in. But you actually have to run it by your brother first"

I never got to finish the sentence.

Chapter 4

Because she hauled me off the bed and down the stairs.

"Then we move fast. He's about to leave for the office."

I stumbled after her and practically fell into the dining room, where Everett was already seated at the table. No telling how long he'd been waiting.

Remy pushed me into a chair. His cool gaze slid over, and his voice came out low, a little rough with sleep.

"Explain. Since when do you drink?"

Remy laughed, strained. "It's, you know. Graduation season. All the bittersweet goodbyes"

"You're graduating this year?" Flat. Not buying a word of it.

Remy shot me a look of pure SOS and started blinking like a distress beacon.

Does this woman ever rehearse.

I cleared my throat and lied with a perfectly straight face. "Yeah. Some seniors in our lab graduated. We're close, so we went out. Had a couple drinks."

Everett's dark eyes settled on me, unhurried, like he was reading fine print printed behind my skull. I smiled back, calm as anything. Inside I was a grease fire.

He was scarier than the meanest dean I ever had.

I braced for the follow-up. It never came. He just picked up his fork. "Eat."

Like he hadn't spent the last thirty seconds running me like a background check. I breathed out. Under the table, Remy snuck me a thumbs-up.

Two bites in, before I'd even finished relaxing, she went for it around a mouthful of food. "Hey. Wren's got nowhere to stay this summer. Can she live here?"

His gaze dropped to me. He weighed it for a second. "She can."

He kept eating, unhurried. "I won't be coming back for a while, then. Anything comes up, call me."

Remy flashed me a shameless peace sign, then launched into a full proud broadcast about me. "Did you know Wren's a genius? The only real brain in our whole suite. Obsessed with astrophysics since she was a kid. Actually loves it." A dramatic pause. "That's PHYSICS."

Different majors, that was all. Our suite was mixed, and everyone was good at their own thing.

Everett looked, oddly, interested. "Always loved it?"

I thought about it and answered honestly. "Not always. For a while it was pretty miserable."

Remy nodded like a sage. "See, Wren decides if it's hard she'll just keep going till she likes it. Me, I keep going till I fail out."

Her face was so tragic I laughed. She held an invisible mic up to my mouth, interview-style. "Tell us. How did you overcome the darkness and fall for astrophysics?"

Nothing dramatic. I picked my words and kept it short. "It's kind of a cheesy story. Back then I met this whiz online. He taught me a ton. And I slowly fell back in love with it."

Everett gave a small nod. "And now?"

"It's the whole plan." I meant it all the way down. "The rest of my life."

Remy nodded, delighted, and held up my keychain like Exhibit A. "She's SO into it. Look, even her keychain's a tiny model of Pluto."

The second the keychain caught the light, Everett went still.

Not paused. Still. His eyes locked onto that cheap little planet in my roommate's hand, and something crossed his face that I couldn't read at all. Something complicated. His brows drew faintly together.

I glanced at Remy, confused. She explained it away without missing a beat. His latest project touched on this stuff, she said. He always perked up around it.

Oh. That was why he'd gone almost talkative the second astrophysics came up.

That explained it.

Didn't it?

Chapter 5

"That keychain. It's from the whiz you mentioned?"

Everett said it out of nowhere, and his voice wasn't quite steady. Almost, underneath the cold, excited.

"Wait, how'd you know that?" It was out before I could stop it.

Freshman year, I'd spent a lot of nights doom-spiraling on an obscure little physics forum. The whiz had sketched Pluto for me once, to cheer me up, and after I drifted off the forum I'd printed it and turned it into a keychain. A keepsake.

Remy lit up, because of course she did, and poked me. "Oh, she treasures that thing. It's very precious to her."

Ever since I'd told her the story, she'd never let it go. She called that keychain my celestial first love.

Heat crawled up my face. I glanced up and accidentally caught Everett's eyes, that complicated look still sitting in them. His face was flat, cold as ever. And yet I'd have sworn the frost in his eyes was thawing, slow, from the inside out.

The next second confirmed it, because Remy tilted her head. "Ev? Why are you suddenly in such a good mood?"

He dropped his gaze, pulled a napkin over, and wiped his hands, unhurried, giving nothing away. "It's nothing. I just guessed right."

There was warmth in it.

He meant guessing the whiz had given me the keychain, I figured. But how did he know in one look? Was it really that obvious?

Remy frowned. "Okay, but how'd you guess?"

Bless her. My own personal comment section.

Everett thought about it, then looked up and explained, with total gravity, "Context."

What a plain little answer. What close, careful attention.

Remy rolled her eyes, muttered whatever, and leaned in to stage-whisper, "My brother loves being mysterious. Total closet softie."

He'd finished eating. He stood, headed for the door, and at the entryway he stopped, like something had just occurred to him, and turned back.

"By the way. I'll be staying home this summer too."

What?

He'd literally just said he wasn't coming back. What happened to that.

Remy said it for me. "Why? You said you weren't coming back."

He stood angled away, so I couldn't see his face, only the slow curve pulling at the corner of his mouth. He took a long moment.

"Because," he said. "Something important came up."

For all his talk of staying, the house stayed mostly me and Remy. I think he was trying to spare me the awkwardness. Aside from the occasional delivery of good food he'd have sent over, Everett barely surfaced.

Until the day I ate it off a rental bike on my way home from my internship and wrecked my leg badly enough to need a few days flat on my back.

Remy still had to intern. So there I was, alone in that enormous house, finally getting the full taste of the depressing she'd promised.

I was face-down in a show, bored out of my skull, when I heard someone moving around outside my door. Not coming in. Hesitating. I lay there on the couch and read the hesitation for exactly what I assumed it was.

Obviously my gremlin roommate, home early to scare me. She did it constantly.

So I hobbled off the couch, crept toward the door in full ambush mode, and threw it open to scare her right back.

I came face to face with Everett.

His hand was still raised to knock. For one rare second his face went blank, caught off guard, which paired with my crouched little goblin lunge to make the whole thing roughly ten times more unhinged.

Oh no.

It was Everett. Why was it Everett.

Chapter 6

How was I supposed to explain this. He was going to think I was clinically unwell.

The silence between us was deafening.

I got myself upright using all four limbs, ran a hundred openers through my head, and produced, finally, "G good afternoon."

Everett blinked. Something like a laugh surfaced in his eyes, and his voice came down from over my head, low, like he was holding one in. Not even cold. "Mm. Good afternoon."

I had mentally excavated a small studio apartment out of sheer embarrassment.

He rescued the moment. "Remy said you were hurt. I came back to bring medicine."

Oh.

Now that he'd said it, I noticed the bag in his hand. Medicine, it looked like. He looked fresh out of a meeting, every inch of him immaculate, and somehow still travel-worn.

He held the bag out. I lunged for it, thank-you-thank-you-ing.

Which was when the day's excitement caught up with me, and I forgot, mid-step, that I was currently half-crippled. My foot came down, my whole body tipped, and over I went.

Two humiliations in one day. Truly. I was so gifted.

One more and I'd be leaving this beautiful world for good.

I shut my eyes and braced for the intimate reunion with the floor, for the spectacular face-plant.

A low grunt sounded by my ear. The impact came wrong. Not floor. I opened my eyes to those forever-unbothered eyes and the faint crease between his brows.

And this time, in those still, level eyes, there was something else in them. Feeling.

Oh my god.

Oh my GOD. How was I in this man's arms.

"You okay?" Everett said, low.

I apologized and scrambled to peel myself off him, except half-crippled, palm throbbing where I'd caught my fall, nerves completely shot, I couldn't get any strength into it, and after a heroic effort I'd relocated approximately one inch.

I could have cried at my own uselessness.

I was gearing up to try again when a soft sigh came from over my head. "Sorry," he said.

And before I'd processed the word he'd swept me up sideways off the floor and was crossing to the living-room couch in long, easy strides.

Effortless. Like he was carrying a head of cabbage. I was tucked against his chest and he wasn't even breathing hard.

I didn't know where to put my hands. I pointed vaguely at a cushion. "You you can just put me down here."

He made a low sound of assent and said nothing else. I snuck a glance up.

His ear was red.

Barely. But on a man who radiated cold like a walk-in freezer, one red ear felt like a glitch in the laws of physics.

And the maddening part was, I still couldn't read him. This exact man had gone to stone over a three-dollar Pluto keychain. Had rearranged his entire summer and wouldn't say why. Was holding something back right now, behind all that calm, and I had no idea what.

"Oh my god"

A voice that was not ours. I startled so hard I nearly dropped, and the arms holding me felt it and drew me in closer.

Then he turned, with me still in his arms, and together we looked toward the source.

And there it was. The whole scene.

A tall man holding a mortified, frozen woman. A second woman in the doorway, grocery basket dangling from one hand, just as frozen. Three faces. Zero functioning brain cells between them.

Oh my god. Why was Remy home RIGHT NOW.

Three