BILLIONAIRE Island: Idyllic Mischief by Savannah May

me alone like a lemon.”
    Sasha said they'd stay home that night and dine on champagne and dim sum. Indie was not looking forward to being ensconced with Tolar and his gross German buddies, both of whom in the past, had tried with no sophistication or charm at all to screw her.
    She went into the kitchen for the ice bucket and screamed loud enough to bring Fi, Youssou's toothless wife, running from their shack in the yard at back of the house. Youssou had arrived clutching a dirty sack and tipped its contents on the countertop – a bloody, mangled rabbit he'd caught for that night's curry.
    “It's quiet around here,” Indie said as they settled on to the terrace in the evening light with icy champagne.
    “Three glorious weeks,” Sasha grinned. “Tolar's gone to the factory in Indonesia for three whole weeks and the naughty mice are coming out to play.”
     
    Sasha turned off the main road into Grand Bay, into the middle of a bush that turned out to be an unmarked dirt track opposite Damien's beach house. She had dragged Indie around all morning, to her factory, to three meetings where she made her wait outside. Now the car headed inland, fighting its way through a thick bank of overgrowth hidden under tall trees. She pulled into a small unkempt yard and let Indie out in front of a tiny box house. Laurent came to the door of the house and they both watched Sasha maneuver a cramped three-point turn and drive out again at full throttle, as though she didn't want to be seen in the neighborhood.
    “So, this is your showroom?” Indie followed Laurent into the bare house- a yellowing kitchen on one side of the stair, a living area on the other, furnished with a round wooden table, simple wood chairs and a sagged sofa, no other decor. The furthest thing from Paco Rabanne Paris.
    “This is my house,” Laurent said. She reckoned the guy was about to fall off the cliff into deep depression the way he was always in the dirge dumps. He was wrapped in an even greater sense of loneliness than she was.
    “Oh, you live here?” Surprise threw out the disdainful response before Indie could bite it back. “Well, it's got a lot of potential, I guess.”
    Laurent looked at her, blinked and they both cracked up laughing.
    “What the fuck are you doing in a place like this? Didn’t Damien invite you to come down here and start a business with him?” she asked, grateful for having a more caring best friend.
    “He did and I was staying with him at the beach house for a month. Then he tossed me over here.”
    “He did not. Why?” Something to do with the fights and tantrums?
    “His big brother got married and the bitch wife, it's a very French girl, wanted the beach so they moved in.”
    “That place looks big enough to contain half the population,” Indie said.
    “Sure, but Madame does not want interlopers in her new relation. She complained to the father and he told me he had a nice place to offer me free of charge.”
    “This place?” Some billionaire with a dump like this in his property portfolio.
    “It's the house of the fucking servants that used to work in the beach house when the family lived there.”
    “Sheesh, no wonder you're mad.” Tee shirts and servants quarters, something must have happened in Paris to make him downgrade quite so far. “Pretty mean of the brother's wife.”
    “She's working on getting Damien out of there too. He's very stubborn and is digging his foots in but I think she will get her ways.” God, his accent was hot, and the way he mashed up words- super sexy. Now Indie understood why he was so sullen and angry in turns. Being seduced then tossed aside by a friend was rotten and she lost a bunch of respect for Damien for his treatment of Laurent.
    “So the obvious thing to do is to rent a place that you two can share,” she said. Laurent shrugged his very Latin shoulders.
    “Damien will do what Damien wants when he's ready.”
“Yeah he's obviously used to getting his own way,” she