Billionaire's Seduction: BILLIONAIRE ROMANCE (Alpha Billionaire Romance Collection) (BBW Pregnancy Marriage of Convenience) by Betsy Poole

morning, I received a FedEx form Mr. Marsh with a cashier’s check for $20,000 and a contract with Myriad Software. The contract was for 3 years at $75,000 per year.
    Yeah, I was suddenly a functioning member of the American middle class, and it felt pretty damn great.

It was my old man’s great big retirement dream to spend his golden years out in Arizona. Like most mid-westerners, my old man had spent a week of his life in the Grand Canyon State when he was a teenager and fell in love with it because he hiked and camped in a big hole in the ground. For forty years the old man carried around that dream, he even carried a snapshot he took with my grandfather of the two of them at the bottom of the Grand Canyon smiling and sweating as a reminder of what he worked for day-in-and-out. Arizona was where he wanted to be, and he would do anything to get there.
    Well, he did do anything and everything in the last ten years of his career to make sure him and mom could afford a condo out in Scottsdale. But when mom got breast cancer and then died two years later, something in my old man died, too. He stopped caring whether he made it out to Arizona. Hell, he stopped caring if he made it out of Chicago alive let alone retire, and because of his lack of caring, he got sloppy, too sloppy, and then he got bust by internal affairs for running numbers, and they ended up bringing him up on corruption and RICO charges. 25 years-to-life in Joliet, plus they stripped him of his pension and cleared out the hundred grand he had stashed in his retirement account because they figured it was his pay off dough. I know it wasn’t, I know that the money in his bank account was him and my mom going without new clothes or car for ten years at a stretch and squirreling away money. I also know that my old man would never be stupid enough to stash dope dealer money in the bank. I men, seriously, you’d have to be half retarded to make that kind of dirty money traceable. I figure he’s got it tucked away in some safe deposit box or buried somewhere. Because the fact is you don’t only make one-hundred grand when you’re rolling dirty. It’s actually probably closer to half-a-million. But I don’t ever press the old man about it when I go to visit him. Because who knows, the state of Illinois just might decide that he’s done his bid and let him out, and that money will actually let him live out his golden years in some kind of comfort.
    But I’ll tell you what, if my old man felt the sun beating down on him like I did when I got off my plane at Sky Harbor International Airport, my guess is he would’ve scrambled back on the plane and would’ve demanded that the pilot take him back home.
    May in Chicago is absolutely freaking gorgeous. Seriously, it’s the best and only time that the city is truly livable. In the winter it’s a freezer and in the summer it’s an absolute toilet, but in the spring, particularly in May, it’s breathtaking. Temperatures never rise above 70 and at night it only dips down into the 40’s. It’s basically sweater weather. It’s the time of year where young couples take long walks out by the gold coast and fall in love; it’s the time of year where everybody leaves their windows open to let in the fresh air. And yeah, it’s the time of year where you spend the weekend in shorts and head out to the parks to have a picnic and ogle all the college girls in their bikinis as they try to tan their sun deprived bodies.
    But May in Phoenix, goddamn, it’s a freaking cesspool, and I’m being kind when I say it’s a cesspool, because it’s actually about as close to Hell as a living human being is going to get.
    When I stepped off the plane it was 95 degrees, and that whole “it’s a dry heat” thing, that’s a crock of crap piled on top of crack. When we landed, the sky was equal parts burning, blistering sun and ominous gray clouds full of rain. The problem was it was so hot that even if it tried to rain, the