Fighting Mr. Billionaire

Read and LISTEN. Audiobook Included!Marcus Hale.Calloway Capital's Head of Texas Operations. The most infuriating, most arrogant, most unreasonably attractive man I have ever had the profound misfortune of working directly under.And I mean that in the most professional way possible.He runs the Austin development division like it is his personal kingdom — which, to be fair, it basically is. He makes decisions at the speed of someone who has never once been told no. He walks into rooms and every conversation rearranges itself around him without anyone deciding to let it. He has the kind of jaw that should be regulated and the kind of confidence that should be illegal and absolutely zero awareness that either of these things is a problem.I relocated from Charleston for this job. I left my best friend, my favourite waterfront, and a flat with excellent harbour views for a senior operations role in a city I had never lived in, working for a company I believed in.Nobody told me Marcus Hale would be the reason I needed to believe in something to get through Mondays.I have known him for eight months. I have been professionally adjacent to him for eight months. I have watched him be charming and decisive and genuinely excellent at everything he does for eight months, and I have told Della in approximately four hundred text messages that it means absolutely nothing.It means absolutely nothing.Then Calloway Capital's Austin project gets complicated — a rival development firm moves on the same land corridor, a corporate sabotage threat surfaces from inside the company, and Marcus asks me to trust him with a strategy that requires me to be the one person standing between Calloway Capital and the most expensive mistake in its history.He says: "e;I need you, Jess."e;I say: "e;I know. That's the problem."e;Because the thing about Marcus Hale — the thing I have been very carefully not-saying for eight months — is that he has been paying attention to me the same way I have been paying attention to him, and we are both the kind of people who notice when someone sees them properly, and neither of us has any idea what to do about it now that we are standing in the same city on the same project on the same side.I did not come to Austin to fall for my boss.But sometimes the best things arrive exactly where you were not looking.