The Billionaire Bad Boys Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

times better than store-bought. With a sense that the magic would disappear if she didn’t hurry, she ladled her creation over the boys’ pancakes.
    “Eat,” she urged, setting the portions in front of them.
    Possibly she was acting crazy. The boys looked at her, then the food, then picked up their forks and started shoveling.
    Pete was the first to pause. “Mmm,” he said, a sound she wasn’t certain she’d heard him make before. The noise wasn’t simply pleased; it was shocked. She’d made him pay attention to what he was eating.
    “Mmm,” Charlie agreed, nodding emphatically. “This is better than Mom’s, Becca!”
    They were seven, so those were all the compliments she was getting . . . unless you counted them literally licking their plates clean.
    Delighted by their reactions, she almost forgot to eat herself. When she did, she found her brain ticking through adjustments to make the dish better. She wasn’t even trying, and her mind just did it. She hadn’t known it would. It seemed important. Actually, it seemed epic. Rebecca was okay at lots of things. This suggested there might be something she maybe was great at.
    I could learn to really do this , she thought.
    “Five minutes till the bus,” Charlie broke in to say.
    Charlie lived in fear of missing his ride to school. Sympathetic to the worry—because if anyone needed safe routines it was them—Rebecca handed him a damp washcloth. While he mopped the stickiness from his face, she herded her brothers out of the kitchen and down the entrance hall. On the way, she checked Charlie’s precious non-ripped backpack.
    “Everything is here,” she assured him. Apprehension that he’d forget something was a recent tick of his. “All your books and all your supplies.”
    More relaxed than his sibling, Pete slung his matching sack over his shoulder. His boniness made her gladder that she’d fed him. When his clear gray eyes met hers, they seemed eerily grown up.
    “We’ll remember,” he said before she could start her spiel. “Dad is working in Cincinnati. He called us all last night.”
    “Right.” She bent to kiss his head. She kissed Charlie’s too, holding both of them a little longer than usual.
    “Bus!” Charlie said in a panic.
    “All right,” she surrendered, letting go to open the door for them. “You two have fun today.”
    They galloped down the steps without looking back, exactly like they used to with their mom. Those boys , her mother would sigh. They’d run straight off a cliff if it looked fun enough . Back then, Rebecca’s brothers had seemed like pests. Today she understood her mother’s concern. Pete and Charlie needed someone to be their safety net. Like it or not, she was it.
    I will do better , she told herself.
    From then on, whatever it took, she’d be a real parent.

CHAPTER THREE

    The Night They Met
    THE last four years had been the best of Zane’s life. Finally free of their fathers, he and Trey had gotten into Harvard. Zane’s way was paved by a football scholarship, Trey’s by a special economics prize. Trey might have been more surprised than anyone that he’d won it. His essay on the correlation between macro and micro markets had been submitted by one of his teachers at Franklin High. Though Zane wasn’t stupid, when he’d tried to read the doorstopper of a paper, he’d understood one word in two. The experience taught him an important lesson about his friend.
    Trey Hayworth’s smarts were easier for him to downplay than his sexuality.
    Zane didn’t hesitate to say yes when Trey tentatively suggested they room together off campus. Not only was this convenient for their continuing sexual hookups, but if Zane got lost in his classes, he had a built-in tutor. The arrangement turned out better than either predicted. For four years they worked and played with equal fervor, each one giving the other whatever hand he needed.
    No longer a social outcast, in the university’s broader atmosphere Trey