Indulgence: A Billionaire Virgin Romance Read online

  Indulgence

  A Billionaire Virgin Romance

  Alexis Winter

  Alexis Winter

  Indulgence

  Book 3 Forbidden Desires Series

  A Novella

  By

  Alexis Winter

  © Copyright 2018 by Alexis Winter - All rights reserved.

  * * *

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.

  * * *

  Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.

  Instead of walking away from her, I gave her my heart…Now she’s mine to claim.

  * * *

  Charlotte

  Can you have too much happiness? I have a rock on my finger the size of an iceberg, a dream relationship with a sexy billionaire and a successful bakery that’s growing faster than I can manage and yet I feel like I’m drowning. I’ve barely had time to settle into my new penthouse home with Preston before there’s a wedding date in just a few short weeks and now Preston says he wants to talk to me about his secret desires…Can I be the woman he wants without losing myself in the process or will our entire world come crashing down before we have a chance to begin?

  * * *

  Preston

  I still can’t believe she said yes. I finally have the woman of my dreams in my bed, a diamond on her finger and soon she’ll have my last name…but I want more, I need more. I want to own her body and soul, but when I tell her about my fantasies will she run screaming for the hills? Just when I can’t hold back my desires any longer Charlotte decides she needs some time away to clear her head…Can I convince her I’m worth a second or third chance or have I lost her forever?

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  BONUS CONTENT

  Temptation

  Untitled

  Untitled

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 1

  Charlotte Fairweather looked around the bathroom as she was getting ready to head into the bakery for the day. Preston was fast asleep in the next room. If she listened carefully, she could hear him gently snoring still in the bed. It was one of the consequences of working in a business that served breakfast and frankly it was one of the consequences of owning your own business. She had to get up well before everyone else in the world to make sure that things were prepped and going strong in the bakery before the first customer ever set foot in the door.

  Luckily, she was a morning person, and Jake, her barista, was going to have a steaming hot cup of some coffee concoction he’d created for her within fifteen minutes of walking through the door. He was always the second person in the door since he had to get his machines prepped and ready for the crowd that was going to start trickling in around seven in the morning, only to wind up being a rush by seven-thirty. So, Charlotte was in the door by five, and Jake came in by five-thirty to get it all up and running. Riley, her new bakery assistant, would be in not too long after Jake, at least that was unless she caught a ride with him again.

  It had turned out that Jake and Riley lived on the same block of the city and Riley didn’t have a car. She was young and just getting started on her own so a car was a luxury she just couldn’t afford even if it meant she wound up having to leave home well over an hour before she was expected to be at work. Jake was headed into work at the same time, and the two of them could head in together a lot more quickly than she could take the bus to get here. It didn’t really mean that she could sleep in any more, but it did mean that she was going to be able to save herself an hour on public transportation. Besides, it seemed that the two of them were becoming fast friends.

  Charlotte wondered if there might not be a budding romance there. She smiled to herself thinking about the two of them as she walked into the huge walk-in closet just off the bathroom, still running a towel through her shower damp hair. It was something she wouldn’t have discouraged between the two of them. They were co-workers, so some might frown on it, but the two of them would work so well together. They had very similar temperaments, except that Jake was a lot more outgoing than Riley. She was shy though her confidence was building the longer she worked at the bakery. She was good with customers, if quiet, and she could use something good in her life.

  The two young women were becoming good friends. Working together had a way of bringing people close, but there was more to it than that. They had a lot in common besides their passion for baking. Both were from small towns before moving to the city. Riley had come here to go to culinary school while Charlotte had come here to try to make a go of owning her own business. They both missed their parents very much though Charlotte at least had the chance to talk to hers on the phone when she felt lonely or needed someone to talk to.

  Riley’s parents had died in an accident a little more than a year ago, leaving her unable to afford to continue her culinary education. Everything they’d owned had been mortgaged within an inch of its life to help pay for her education, though Riley hadn’t known it until after they’d passed away. It just meant that everything went to the banks once the probate on their estate was settled, and Riley was left on her own to fend for herself. She had still managed to stay focused and finish that semester at school, and she’d gone on to find a job working in a call center here in the city, so she could afford to keep her apartment. It made ends meet, but it never made her happy. At least now that she was working at Sweet Temptation, she could make enough money to stay in Denver on her own and do what she really enjoyed, baking.

  It turned out that Riley was an excellent baker, and it wasn’t just that she’d done two years of culinary school specializing as a pastry chef. She’d been born to do this. Her parents had been bakers. She’d learned to walk in the kitchen of a bakery, and her first toys had been balls of dough she’d kneaded right along with her father in the back of their bakery. It was in her blood, and it was what she really and truly loved doing. All of that showed through when she was in the kitchen back at the bakery. It gave Charlotte a lot of pleasure to know that she could be the person who gave someone else a new start in life and allowed them to pursue their passion, especially someone as sweet and talented as Riley.

  Charlotte walked into the huge closet that Preston had given her when she’d moved into the place. It was a room off the master bath that was bigger than the bedroom had been back in her old apartment. For some reason, Andy had decided that this was where he was going to live once the two of them had moved into the new apartment. He slept here, and now, he curled around her feet as she walked into the room, meowing and looking up at her indignantly.

  “If you want to eat, you’re going to have to come out and go to the kitchen, you silly cat.” She leaned down and ran a hand along the curve of his spine as Andy leaned up into her touch with a soft purr. “Now, if you’re done trying to trip me, I have to get dressed and head into work.”

  She’d insisted that this was too much space for her clothes, and that she could just share closet space with Preston, though when he’d shown her his closet, she decided that, no, maybe they couldn’t share closet space. He’d had an identical room on the other side of the bedroom,
filled to the brim with suits and black leather shoes on one side and casual clothes on the other. It was a little overwhelming to see it all, especially in comparison to the wardrobe she’d brought with her from her tiny apartment. She’d thought she had far too many clothes, but when it only filled less than a quarter of the space available in the room, she’d been the first one to laugh at herself.

  Preston had started to make a dent in that problem though. He’d begun by having Sophie go shopping for things that he thought would suit Charlotte’s taste after he snuck into the closet and too a peek at her dress size one morning after she had already gone out to open up the bakery. Charlotte came home to what she would have considered an entirely new wardrobe sitting on the king-sized bed in the penthouse’s master bedroom.

  He had slowly been adding to that by shopping himself, whenever he saw something he thought she would look good in, it invariably wound up in her closet or on the bed waiting for her when she got home. Among some items he had purchased were a few tasteful lace panties and matching bra sets. She blushed a little the first time she’d opened the lingerie box, a man had never bought her something so intimate before.

  He had a penchant for seeing her in green though Charlotte supposed that was because it suited her strawberry-blonde hair and enhanced her already green eyes. She knew it was a color she looked good in. It had been the color of her senior prom dress back in Iowa.

  When Charlotte ran her fingers over the emerald green of the latest cocktail dress that Preston had planted in her closet, she let out a soft sigh. That dress reminded her of the one she’d worn a few years ago to the tiny town’s biggest social event for anyone under the age of twenty. It made her miss her parents. She’d worked for months on that dress with her mother. The two of them had driven forty-five minutes to Des Moines to pick out the perfect material, and she’d tried it on a zillion times before Margaret Fairweather had declared it good enough for her only daughter to wear.

  It had been a few weeks since she’d seen her mother. Preston had flown the two of them out to visit once their engagement had been set, and it had been lovely to be home, even if it had just been for a few days. However, ever since she’d left there, it made her want to go back even more. Planning a wedding was a huge deal, and it was usually something a girl did with her mother, though it was hard to do that with her mother several states away. The two of them talked on the phone quite often, and she’d emailed and texted her mother with about a million different question from flowers to what sort of ceremony she should have to the seating arrangements for relatives at the reception.

  It had been a whirlwind few months since she’d wound up being invited into Preston’s office that first night. Things had gone off in directions she’d never anticipated. She would never have thought that she was going to be waking up in a penthouse apartment in downtown Denver every morning in the arms of her fiancé or that that same fiancé was going to be a billionaire owner of more businesses than Charlotte could count. She’d never even had a serious boyfriend before him, and now they were setting dates, picking out wedding decorations and venues, and trying to plan seating charts for a wedding that was coming up in less than six weeks. Everything was happening so fast.

  What had she been thinking when she planned to have a wedding in two months? It wasn’t about the cost. Money wasn’t a factor for Preston, and he was insistent that he was paying for everything. It was more about the sheer amount of work that needed to be done, and between working on keeping her business open and flourishing, being Preston’s fiancée and all the social commitments that came along with that, and just finding time to breathe, it was overwhelming. She didn’t think she’d ever met so many new people in her life. The fact that the most eligible bachelor in Denver was engaged to a woman fifteen years younger than him who had just opened up a tiny bakery in downtown Denver was bigger news than she’d have expected.

  The first time Charlotte had run across a photo of herself online, her eyes had gone wide. It was a photo of the two of them at a charity event. She was standing next to him with her arm through his, she had to admit they looked ridiculously in love. It had only been a couple of weeks since the two of them had decided that their relationship was going to be out in the open. At first, she’d been thrilled to know that he’d wanted her for more than just something to play with. They were out in public, out to her family, and out to the world. She just hadn’t expected the level of attention that had come along with all of that.

  Everything combined was just insane. She let her fingers drift from the dark green satin before she moved on to pick a Kelly-green skirt and button down blouse from the other side of the closet. It was far more practical than the dress she’d stopped to admire, though she had no doubt she would get a chance to wear the cocktail dress sometime soon, perhaps for her engagement party.

  Getting dressed was a quick and painless process though her hair was going to take a little more attention. There had been plenty of mornings when she’d just pulled her damp hair up into a ponytail and headed on into work. Today was a little different though, she had an appointment with a couple coming in to try some wedding cake samples. That thought got her mind back rolling to the list of things she needed to get settled before her own wedding just a few short weeks away. She couldn’t help but notice the surge of heartburn that accompanied those thoughts.

  Riley had agreed to make the cake for her, in fact she’d insisted as soon as she’d found out that Charlotte and Preston were engaged. That took a huge item off of Charlotte’s list but she still hadn’t picked out colors of icing, flavors of cake, or decorations, and everything was coming up quickly. She was behind if she was honest with herself, and she just added talking to Riley about the cake onto the ever-growing list of things that she needed to do that she kept filed away at the back of her mind. That list was starting to get to the point where it felt like she wasn’t going to be able to get any of it done.

  Preston had told her if she needed help then she was welcome to ask him or to call Sophie to get what she needed, but there were a lot of things that Sophie wasn’t going to be able to do. There was no way she could help pick everything and to be honest Charlotte wanted to take the time and effort to do it herself. Well, she’d rather make the decisions with Preston but getting them together with fifteen minutes to spare was a bit of an impossible task in itself. Besides, Sophie had her own job to take care of that involved making sure Preston’s businesses kept running smoothly. Her duties didn’t include helping Charlotte settle on one of the half dozen dresses she hadn’t been able to choose between.

  For the moment, Charlotte had more pressing matters to take care of. She’d spent long enough thinking and dawdling while getting ready this morning that she was just going to make it to the bakery on time. If she got her butt in gear and out the door in the next few minutes, she’d just have enough time to get the croissants and bagels in the oven before the early morning customers started to find their way into the bakery. Hopefully, she wouldn’t have any trouble finding parking this time of morning, but there were times when there was a delivery to one of the other businesses in the building that the spots out back of the building got blocked up with some huge delivery truck or another.

  Once again, her brain slipped automatically into the list of things she had to do today to make sure things were running smoothly. They were the same things every day, so it was easy to go into autopilot to get them accomplished. She needed to get two dozen of each breakfast pastry in the oven and ready to go. Luckily, she’d done as much prep as possible before leaving the night before, so much of it just meant she needed to fire up the industrial ovens and slide the trays of unbaked dough into place. Other items needed prep from scratch to be at their best, even this early in the morning. This would be what she preoccupied herself with for the next few hours while her mind tried to sort through her wedding dilemma.

  Maybe after all of that was over she could give herself a chance to sit down and work on
the looming pile of wedding preparations that were hanging over her head. She let out a long breath, running another hand along Andy’s back as she let herself quietly into the bedroom beyond. She walked as softly as possible not wanting to wake Preston though she did pause to press a soft kiss to his temple. The sheets were laid perfectly across his naked body that lay sprawled across the bed. She bit her bottom lip, resisting the urge to run her fingers across his rippled abs. Instead, she let out a sigh wishing she could spend just a few more minutes in bed with him to relive some memories they made last night. She planted one more soft kiss on him before she made her way out of the bedroom, grabbing her keys from the bowl in the foyer and heading down into the early morning world to start her day.

  The elevator came quickly, dinging softly to announce its arrival as the doors opened to let her inside. She let out a sigh, relaxing against the wall of the elevator as the doors closed behind her and running her hand over her eyes. Charlotte needed a break, or something was going to give. Everything was just getting to be too much. She could feel herself burning out a little more with every hour she spent working on one thing or the other without a moment to do something for herself. Hopefully, she was going to catch a break soon, but to be honest she couldn’t help but feel guilty about needing time to herself. Since when can you have too much happiness?