Hot Billionaire Reconnected: So Hot Billionaires, #19

By Melody Love

Chance Hank hasn't seen Amber Brown since they were teenagers on the verge of turning their friendship into love. Then his family moved upstate, away from their Queens neighborhood, and Chance and Amber lost track of each other.

 

Now he's getting a divorce.

 

And she's a divorce counselor.

 

Reconnecting feels right. Only she has professional ethics in the way of a relationship with her patient.  She also has five year old twin boys and an ex-husband who shirks all responsibility.

 

Chance has an angry soon-to-be ex-wife who'd like to destroy any chance at happiness he might have.

 

Now the clock's ticking as the divorce moves through the court system and the therapy progresses. Do they respect the boundaries of their professional relationship? Or take a chance at getting everything they ever wanted?  

• Language: English
• Publisher: DM
• Release date: May 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393872320

Book preview

Hot Billionaire Reconnected

So Hot Billionaires, Volume 19

Melody Love

Published by DM, 2020.

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

HOT BILLIONAIRE RECONNECTED

First edition. May 25, 2020.

Copyright © 2020 Melody Love.

Written by Melody Love.

Also by Melody Love

So Hot Billionaires

Hot Billionaire's Cinderella

Hot Billionaire Faking It

Hot Billionaire's Baby

Hot Billionaire Mile High

Hot Billionaire Professor

Hot Billionaire's Escort

Hot Billionaire Cowboy

Hot Billionaire Night

Hot Billionaire Rescued

Hot Billionaire's Story

Hot Billionaire Player

Hot Billionaire On A Train

Hot Billionaire Delivered

Hot Billionaire Changed

Hot Billionaire Played

Bride's Hot Billionaire Brother

Hot Billionaire's House

Hot Billionaire's Secret Child

Hot Billionaire Reconnected

Hot Billionaire Pictured

Hot Billionaire Troubled

Hot Billionaire Thanked

Hot Billionaire Putted

Hot Billionaire Shopped

Hot Billionaire Jerk

Hot Billionaire Remembered

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Also By Melody Love

HOT BILLIONAIRE RECONNECTED | By Melody Love | This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental. | Copyright © 2020 Melody Love | Click here to get a FREE book for a limited time

Further Reading: Hot Billionaire Pictured

Also By Melody Love

HOT BILLIONAIRE RECONNECTED

By Melody Love

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2020 Melody Love

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Click here to get a FREE book for a limited time

Chapter 1 – Wednesday – Chance

Chance Hank stood with his hands behind his back legs spread wide, staring down into the Manhattan streets from his office on the eightieth floor of one of the high rise office buildings. His high rise office building.

Around him the office looked the same. It had the same spacious, graceful lines it always had, the same well appointed modern furniture, and the same wet bar he didn't dare indulge himself with because he had no idea if he'd be able to stop again. Same executive desk, a mile or so of highly polished wood he moved to sit behind, his head in his hands, his attention still going to the window and the view outside that he wasn't really taking in.

Same executive in the office, too.  Chance Hank. Nothing new, except that until recent months he'd spent fairly little time sitting in that richly decorated office with his head in his hands, staring directly at the desk surface right under his elbows without really seeing it.

He was thirty-five years old and it was the first time in his life he'd experienced depression. Thirty-five years growing up, getting an education, graduating from Harvard School of Business and going on to get an advanced degree in business. He'd stepped into a family business valued in the millions and turned it into a family business valued in the billions. Not bad for thirty-five. He had the office, the business, the bank account, the authority to run that business and the ability to go off and do whatever he wanted instead of doing so.

He'd trade it all in for a second chance.

Irony there, given that his name was Chance. A family name, his mother said, though she'd never explained which relative originally had the name.

Chance Hank. That was the name he needed to sign on the document he'd buried in the middle drawer of his massive desk. Like if he wasn't looking at it, if he didn't have those pages out where he could see them, maybe they'd just go away. Maybe they'd turn into something else, if he gave them a second chance. Maybe they'd turn into a second chance decree.

Instead of a divorce decree.

It didn't really matter if he signed the document or not.  It was just as final. She'd treat it as final whether he signed or not. She already had. She was already gone, already turned into somebody he didn't even know.

The divorce seemed to have a life of its own. It was steam rolling along with the same force of will that Megan did. When she had an idea in her mind, she was unstoppable.

Sometimes you could know something was over and hang on to it anyway. Chance had never been enamored of the past. He didn't dwell on regrets or build himself up with past accomplishments. He didn't get nostalgic often. But Megan – it was hard to even relegate her to the past.

They'd met at an open house for investors looking to buy a property, flip it quick and make it into rentals. She was hard to miss. Moving a mile a minute, ahead of the tour before it even started, it felt like maybe she'd built the house and invited the whole tour of interested investors to walk through it. It felt like she was going to lecture Chance about the details instead of being there to hear what Chance, the home investment realtor, had to say about it. Tiny, brunette, dressed professionally and somehow sexily, she'd bounded from room to room like she had too much energy to stay with the rest of the pack of hopeful investors.

He wanted to ask her out but he really was the one leading the tour and he couldn't figure out how to even get her alone.

She'd stayed behind when the rest of the group had left, which wasn't really kosher, since they could have been discussing the investment opportunities. Investment groups were supposed to operate as groups.

They didn't discuss anything of the sort. They were outside the group and they definitely weren't discussing investments. Instead they were trying out all the carefully staged furniture in the house that had been artfully arranged to make the house look lived in. That day, in one of his most unprofessional and delightful acts ever, he and Megan had definitely tried out what living in that house would be like. She'd been fearless and brazen and made uninhibited sound tame.

Somewhere along the line, somewhere over the years, that woman had gone away. The woman driven to succeed was still driven but none of her drive made her happy.  She no longer invested, with Chance or with any other investor, and she spent so much time at the gym he'd have suspected her of having an affair except that he could see the difference in her physique nearly daily: Toned. Buff. Ripped. If she was having an affair, it was with a treadmill.

The pages lay on his desk again. He couldn't remember taking them out of the drawer.

People grow apart. People change. One day one wants kids and the other isn't just in a place where they never considered having kids, but where they really, sincerely don't want any. Not just too young to be a dad, but totally uninterested in the responsibility.

And maybe the other person didn't want kids that much, but she wanted something and whatever that was, he just wasn't giving it to her anymore.

Or maybe he never had.

Just past the documents on his desk, his phone buzzed, his assistant calling from the outer office. You have a call on –

No calls.  He almost snapped it. He didn't mean to. Melissa had been his assistant for five years. She was great at her job, took responsibility way past the title of assistant, and could anticipate his needs better than he could. She knew the real estate investment business as well as he did by now. She had no desire to do it herself, though, which made her a perfect assistant, not to mention he enjoyed her company and she didn't deserve to get snapped at.

Then again, you didn't always get what you deserved.

He looked back down at the divorce documents, then away, into his office. His gaze fell on the framed photograph on the edge of his desk. The frame was elegant, highly polished, intricately filigreed silver, and the couple inside the photo were so perfect they looked posed.

They weren't. The photo had been taken during stage one of their honeymoon, when they'd been in Maui where they surfed (she like a professional athlete after classes for tourists, he like the stumbling tourist he was) and ate fish and wedding cake and made love in the long afternoons when the rainstorms thundered overhead.

Megan had taken Chance with her when she went wedding cake taste testing. Who cares what the bridesmaids or maid of honor want? she demanded.  We're the ones getting married – it's our cake! Who knew picking out a wedding cake was such delicious fun? Trying chocolate with raspberry filling, and lightly white chocolate with lemon pudding filling, and delicate white cake with vanilla filling that still managed to have so much flavor. Megan had laughed at him and fired him from the job while his tux still fit. Then when they were on their extended honeymoon, traveling around the world from Mexico to Hawaii, to Italy, Spain and England, at every stop there was one of the flavors they hadn't chosen, waiting in their hotel room the first night. By then it was okay for him to eat every bite, often off of portions of her anatomy, because his own anatomy didn't have to fit into the designer tux. And besides, they worked off every calorie in the most delicious ways.

How had the woman who arranged that treat, who ate chocolate cake off his chest during a rainstorm of epic proportions, how had she turned into the angry, shrewish harpy raging at him night and day? 

He reached over and turned the photo face down on his desk and then, since people had a tendency to right photos they found that way as if the person whose desk it was obviously was too stupid to realize their picture had fallen down, he put it in the drawer where the divorce papers had been.

Those he smoothed onto the desk, so hard and for such a long time they should have become part of the desk. They he studied them, still waiting for them to turn into something else.

Finally, he signed them.

Without thinking, he tossed them into his out basket for Melissa.  Just one more task to take care of.  But no, it wasn't, and he couldn't get anything done with them sitting there, couldn't force himself to just shrug it off. Finally he pulled his keyboard over his desk and brought up a website he'd been studying earlier in the day.

His screen filled with a bewildering array of the names and qualifications of divorce counselors in Manhattan. His finger moved from the mouse to the button on his phone that would buzz Melissa before he realized this was actually something he himself needed to do. He couldn't outsource his emotions, a thought that rang in his head like a really bad advertisement.

Also, it was something he wanted to do, which made it different than every other thing he'd tried to interest himself with all day.

Fine. First things first, he refined his list and eliminated all male counselors. That just didn't sound like a dynamic he wanted to work with. Nothing like a rich alpha male at the head of a dynasty to elicit sympathy from another male, whether or not that sympathy was being paid for.

Or maybe it wouldn't be sympathy. Maybe it would all be actual things he could do to work through this. That would be –

Exactly what I'm looking for.

Though a little sympathy couldn't hurt.

He was scrolling through the last names beginning with B when a name caught his eye.  He had just scrolled past it.  He stopped, backed up, and stared.

No way. No freaking way.

Amber Brown. No, not just Amber Brown.  Doctor Amber Brown.

Had to be a different Amber Brown.  The name wasn't that unusual.  There were even other Chance Hanks out there. But when he clicked the thumbnail photo and the image expanded, those big brown eyes staring candidly into his looked familiar. He clicked through to the About Me on the site and read that Dr. Amber Brown grew up in Queens, New York.

Not that he needed the bio to tell him that. Because on the site itself, that expanded image presented him a face he knew, even if he hadn't seen it in how many years?

"Doctor Brown," he said aloud, trying it out.

Their families had been friends.  Their dads drank beer together and barbecued chicken on weekends until it was indistinguishable from the charcoal, at which point their moms, rolling their eyes, would bring out the emergency backup burgers and franks. His childhood summers had been one long cholesterol fest, with watermelon and a beer or two sneaked when none of the adults were paying attention. Between Chance's brothers and Amber's sister there were five of them running back and forth between the yards. Chance's brothers were both older so by high school it was just Chance and Amber and her little sister trailing around after them until they'd ditch her.

They were friends, Chance and Amber, but he'd always thought they could have been more. She wouldn't have been his first girlfriend and he wouldn't have been her first boyfriend, he didn't think, but they might have been their first other things. They'd known each other for so long it would have either been totally natural or completely weird.

But they never found out. Because the summer between her sophomore and junior years and his junior and senior years, his family moved.  Even in retrospect from his perspective as an adult it seemed sudden. One day they were all barbecuing in the backyard and the next his family was rebuilding the fence between yards because the people buying the house obviously wanted a little privacy by way of a real back yard with a real fence.

They moved to Albany and his dad spent weeks in the city, working, and weekends with the family, upstate. His dad, who wasn't named Chance and Chance really didn't know whose family the name came from or why he'd been given it, owned the investment company Chance was now CEO of. Which meant that he stepped into a multimillion dollar business when he was in his late twenties. What it didn't mean was that his dad was in any way out of the picture just because he was retired.  He still had a lot to say about Hank Investment Properties, Ltd.

Damn. Just looking at the photo of Amber brought back all kinds of memories, all those nights. It seemed like the entire summer was spent in the backyard with the smell of hamburgers and corn on the grill. It was always hot and if a storm was coming; the humidity made everything lush and sticky at the same time. The fireflies would light the twilight and the adults would sit sipping wine or beer while the kids ran through the yards playing complicated games that involved everything from Frisbees to the plot of whatever horror movie someone had managed to see without their folks hearing about it. Even when he was sixteen, the night before his family moved, Amelia was still trailing him and Amber, eleven to their sixteen and fifteen.

In the professional headshot, Amber looked directly at the camera, a little challengingly. Like maybe she had something to prove.  Not a chip on her shoulder, that wasn't quite what the expression on her face was, but more like defiance. Like somebody tried to knock her down but she refused to go under. Or refused to stay down.

Sitting there, staring at the computer monitor like he'd been hypnotized, Chance realized it was almost twenty years since the last time he saw her. They'd had more life apart than they did together. She was probably married. Maybe with children.

Or maybe she was divorced. It happened to some people, after all.

The pity party wasn't the reason he was looking for a counselor. He needed to get past what was happening, past the divorce documents in the desk drawer, and get on with his life. It was weird to consider going into counseling with an old friend. For all he knew, ethics would prevent her from meeting with him once she remembered who he was.

But he was determined to find out.

Chapter 2 – Amber – Wednesday

By the time she forced herself to leave the office, the long summer sunlight was coming through the windows, letting her know exactly how late it was. That didn't change the fact that she went back into her office no fewer than three times to retrieve things she'd left behind, her keys being the third and most important.

The latest counseling case to come her way was weighing on her mind. When her own divorce from Rowan had happened two years ago, it had changed her life in more ways than simply making her the single mom of twin boys. It also paved the way to a life she'd probably never have pursued if she'd stayed married. With Rowan in their lives, she and her husband and the boys had been a small, not really close knit family living in Queens. Amber had worked part time while finishing a degree in marriage and family counseling that it looked likely she'd never use.

With the divorce, however, she had a chance to see for herself how important having a support system outside one's friends and family was because when it was ugly, when he was just not there for his sons and just not there with the financial support and just damn well not there at all, not even to sign the divorce papers or do any other thing? Yeah, friends and family could start to get tired of the drama, no matter how much they cared.

By the time it was all over, she knew what she wanted to do with her newly minted degree and how she was going to make money in her new life.

Some days, though, were harder than others. Some days were all about listening to a beautiful twenty-something young mother who had mad skills as an artist as she made excuses for her brute of a husband who was clearly jealous of every thing she could do and had grown to hate her talent. Never mind that once her paintings caught on he could probably leave that job at the rendering plant that had him commuting every day to a situation he hated. He was angry that right now, right this instant, she wasn't suffering like he was.

Amber had a notion he'd made her suffer a few times. So she was happy that the marriage counseling they first came in for as a couple had rapidly switched to divorce counseling just for her. She deserved a life without that bully in it.

Amber stretched, threw her heels into the battered Honda she drove and headed to Queens through a sea of traffic and heat. When Rowan walked out on the twins and Amber, her dad had insisted she learn to drive so that she never ended up dependent on someone else in the middle of the night when she had a sick kid. While that scenario hadn't happened yet – knock on wood it never did – she'd come to love driving herself and listening to her own music or to an audio book instead of a cab driver or Uber driver or the subway announcements about breakdowns. It was her me time and meant she reached her destination ready for whatever she was supposed to be there – like mother indulging in the insanity that is family time with twin five-year-old boys.

It was still light when she pulled up in front of the modest single story she'd grown up in. The trees were mature, shading the west-facing front lawn. Her parents' Honda sedan was parked in the driveway, windows down. From the backyard she could hear Mason and Luke playing Marco Polo. Her dad taught them the game and neglected to point out it was played in a swimming pool.

They didn't have a swimming pool.

The twins neither knew nor cared.

Amber smiled as she gathered her purse and went around to the back yard to join the party in progress. Her mom was sitting in a white plastic lawn chair with her feet up on another, sipping one of her vile powder-mix diet lemonades. She wore an enormous straw hat, her constant companion outdoors since her one and only brush with skin cancer two summers ago. She was a strawberry blond like her daughter and grandsons and the best advertisement for sun screen anyone could ask for.

Plopping down in a chair next to hers, Amber said, Whew! It's just exhausting having those two all day!  ...Hey, here's an idea. Why don't they stay overnight with you? You're all fresh and rested.

Helen gave her a long, level look. They haven't worn me out enough to fall for that one, my dear. Do you try that 'reverse psychology' on your clients?  The look she gave her daughter meant the next sentence, unspoken, would have been, And please don't try to tell me that it works.

It's not psychology, Amber said. It's bullshit.

Her mother tsked. Your father had to teach them a game that involves yelling. Across the yard, Luke, the larger twin, born five minutes before his brother, was shouting Polo at his brother's Marco and charging around with his eyes closed.

Or maybe closed. Luke liked to win. Maybe he was looking out from under his insanely long golden eyelashes. Either way, his brother would never tell and if there were winners and losers in the game – and not just noise – he'd graciously allow his brother to be the winner even if he knew for certain he himself was. Mason was anything but soft. He had a will of steel.  But where his brother was concerned, he was a born negotiator.

He'd either grow up to be a damn good lawyer with questionable ethics, or to sell used cars. Or both.

Even if they're yelling, Amber said. I'm just so damned glad for dad. If it wasn't for him, they'd have no male role model. She could feel Damn Rowan Moore! Lined up and wanting to exit her tongue and she kept it in. It wouldn't do anyone any good and it wasn't like her mom didn't already know.  He's so good with them.

She leaned over and rubbed a hand over Amber's forearm where it rested on the arm of the chair.  He had you and your sister to practice on.

Amber choked back a laugh. "We were practice?"

Her mother chuckled contentedly. All children are practice for the grandchildren to come.

And here I thought Amelia and I were unique.

That got an honest laugh out of her. That you are.

Not were. Are. Amber smiled.

Mom! Luke seemed to have just noticed she was there. Seconds before he'd been interested in nothing past Marco-ing his brother into stationary objects. Next instant he was in her arms, like a hot hose turned on full blast, all energy and movement and power. He smacked his head into her chin so hard she saw stars and he climbed into her lap, gave her an attack hug of sorts, and was gone before Mason opened his eyes and noticed her. Then he ambled