The Billionaire From Las Vegas Read online

  THE BILLIONAIRE

  FROM LAS VEGAS

  UNITED STATES OF BILLIONAIRES BOOK 16

  CJ HOWARD

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  Summary

  “This book is so NAUGHTY that I actually LOVE it!”

  Claire Stevenson was going to Vegas but fun was not expected to be on the menu.

  Her father was in deep gambling debt and she was to meet with billionaire casino owner Benjamin Minker to resolve the issue.

  In order to save her father's life, Claire would have to work for Benjamin as his personal assistant to pay off the debt.

  However, for Ben this was never about the money.

  It was about Claire.

  The billionaire just wanted a reason to have her close to him and obeying his every word.

  And soon enough, Ben would demand something else.

  Something Claire knew she should say no to. But that she also secretly craved for at the same time...

  Download now and start reading this steamy billionaire romance novel. This book has dark and naughty themes that should be read by adults only. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas...

  Copyright Notice

  The Billionaire From Las Vegas © 2018, CJ Howard

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.

  Contents

  Chapter1

  Chapter2

  Chapter3

  Chapter4

  Chapter5

  Chapter6

  Chapter7

  chapter 8

  chapter 9

  chapter 10

  chapter 11

  chapter 12

  chapter 13

  chapter 14

  Chapter1

  Claire looked out the window of the plane as the pilot announced the flight’s final descent. She wasn’t sure what it was she was expecting, exactly, but there was something about the island of green in the midst of the desert that was simultaneously impressive and boring. She’d made a point of never entering the city before, and yet here she was, maybe twenty minutes from getting off of a plane that had left Newark at five in the morning. You shouldn’t have even answered the phone, she thought grimly.

  But Claire knew, by the same token, that if she had decided not to come, she would spend at least the next week agonizing over that choice. She would probably even found herself regretting it long-term, depending on just how bad the situation was. Some things you do because you have to.

  She exhaled as she felt the shift in the cabin’s air pressure, signaling the real descent into the city. Claire held her breath and willed her ears to pop as the plane continued to descend, glancing out through the window every few moments as the metallic container she was seated in made its way towards the ground in a gradual slope.

  Finally—after what seemed like almost thirty minutes, though Claire knew it had only been about ten—she felt the jolt through the plane that announced they had landed. The airport moved past the window as the plane slowed down, headed down the runway toward the big building where they would, eventually, be deplaning.

  Claire closed her eyes and remembered the call she’d gotten, at about ten o’clock the night before. “Claire-bear, I need your help.” She had nearly not answered the phone at all—once she’d seen it was her father, there had been about a fifty/fifty chance that she wouldn’t even accept the call. But the dropping feeling in her stomach had finally brought her to answer it. He hadn’t called her in months, ever since she’d told him to get lost. “We have nothing to say to each other anymore.”

  She had heard the creeping, shamed tone in her father’s voice and knew that he must have exhausted the handful of people still in his corner, if he’d resigned himself to calling her. If he wanted help from her, he hadn’t been able to get it from anyone else.

  “...Ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived at McCarran International Airport…” Claire opened her eyes and exhaled, feeling the lingering fullness in her ears from the changes in air pressure. It would, she hoped, go away by the time she got out of the airport. She went back on autopilot as the plane taxied to the gate, but rose to her feet and grabbed her carry-on the second the plane finally stopped.

  She would get to the hotel, meet with the asshole she was supposed to meet with, and find out what it would take to get her father out of trouble. Demand proof of life first—that’s important, she reminded herself. Her father had only had a brief span of time to talk to her, and he hadn’t been able to tell her the exact nature of his situation, but it was clear that he was in trouble, and knowing his history as well as she did, Claire knew that her dad’s troubles generally involved money. She cringed as she walked down the jet bridge, remembering one such phone call in particular: Dad had lost steadily over three days of playing and had ended up stealing someone’s chips—way too many of them. He’d gotten caught, and she’d had to pay back the chips he’d stolen to keep him from going to jail.

  Then, of course, there had been the time, after Mom had left him, that he’d done sex work for enough money to go to the tables in Atlantic City again. Claire clenched her teeth so hard she almost thought she could taste blood, causing her to worry that she had bitten her tongue or cheek without knowing it. She forced herself to breathe slowly through her nose and relax her jaw.

  That was the time he ended up going to rehab—when he got caught and you had to convince the police not to charge him. Claire shook her head, trying to force the memory out of her brain. Even that hadn’t been enough to convince her father to change his life. He’d gone to rehab, gotten “sober” for about nine months, and then had gone right back to the games, heading out to the reservations every other week, working his way into backroom games and over-unders for football and baseball.

  At some point, Claire had finally had enough, though she couldn’t quite piece together what it had been exactly that had made her decide to sever all ties with the man. It was just that one day she had awakened to a text message from him asking for money, and after arguing with him, it had hit her that it was just going to keep happening and keep happening: all the humiliation that came with helping him, all of the disappointment, all of the pain. Unless she ceased participating in his life at all, she would keep dealing with it and keep resenting it—and resenting him. It was easier not to resent him when she didn’t have to hear from him every few days.

  Claire stepped out of the terminal and spotted the sign bearing her name: Claire Stevenson. She thought wryly that if the men holding onto her father were nothing else, they certainly seemed to be courteous in their dealings with her—though it was a little creepy that they’d known updated information about her plane’s arrival. I h
ave my very own driver to take me to the hotel. Talk about conveniences.

  She quickly looked over the man holding the sign, trying to get a feeling for who he was and whether he was likely to harm her. He was maybe five feet eight inches, with coarse, graying brown hair and a pair of glasses perched on the bridge of his hawk-like nose. He was, she thought, nondescript enough—just another driver, waiting at the airport with an entire group to greet her and take her to her hotel.

  With any luck I can take care of this tonight and be on a red-eye flight super early tomorrow, she thought—but Claire had a sense that whatever the situation with her father was, it wasn’t going to be resolved in one night. It was going to take time. That was why, having decided the night before to help the man who’d helped bring her into the world, she had emailed her supervisors and manager at the office to let them know she’d be away for about a week.

  If she did solve the problem quickly, she would just say the emergency was over and not ever explain it. Or maybe I’ll give myself a day or two to unwind before I go back. She was about a month ahead in her work at the office anyway—there wasn’t much for her to do that she couldn’t handle remotely.

  “Ms. Stevenson?” Claire nodded in response to the man’s question. “I’m supposed to take you to the Halston Grand.”

  “That’s what I hear,” Claire said, putting on the most pleasant expression possible. She had no idea whether or not he knew what brought her to Las Vegas or who her father was. Maybe he was just legitimately hired by the hotel to take me there. Maybe he has no idea. But it was hard to believe that it wasn’t common knowledge to whoever might be involved in the plans to get her to the meeting she had to go to. It was almost as if she expected—every time she passed by a reflective surface—to see it branded on her face, on her chest: Child of Disgraced Addict. Better just to play along, at least as far and as long as she could.

  She followed the man out to his waiting car and watched him glance expectantly for a piece of luggage; Claire hadn’t checked anything, hoping against hope that she would be able to solve her father’s problem within a few days and then be able to go home—more than enough space in a carry-on bag for that. “I travel light,” she said with what she hoped was an ingratiating smile.

  “You’re smarter than seventy-five percent of the people I drive from here, then,” the man said with an approving smile. “Hard to lose your shirt when you don’t have a spare one packed, anyway.” Claire chuckled at the joke and handed him her carry-on to stow in the trunk.

  The town car was nice. It had leather seats, and a little mini-cooler was set up in the back with half-pint bottles of water and a few cool snacks. No wine or champagne or anything gaudy like that, but then Claire wanted a clear head for her meeting with the mysterious man who had the answer to just what her father had gotten into this time; if it was an easy solve, she would celebrate afterwards. She settled in and plucked a bottle of water out of the cooler, snapping her seatbelt into place as the driver strode around the car and took up his post behind the wheel.

  The glass was tinted, but, of course, that didn’t prevent her from seeing out; in fact, Claire thought, given how bright it was outside in the desert sun, she was seeing Vegas better than people whose lightly tinted or untinted windows flashed past revealing the omnipresent glare. She couldn’t help the little spur of excitement as key figures of the Strip started passing by her windows: the MGM Grand; Caesar’s Palace, all lights, ostentatious architecture, and misplaced greenery; the Bellagio with its fountains, spewing a wealth of water into the air so parched it would swallow it down without even becoming humid.

  She tried to put her mind on the task at hand, tried to ignore the throng of tourists—men, women, children of all ages—meandering up and down the familiar track going from one overstimulating place to another. They call New York the city that never sleeps, but it’s way more apt here, Claire mused, wondering if there was ever a point in the day when there wasn’t something flashing with electricity, crackling with the promise of wins that would never quite fully materialize.

  If there was one thing she knew with a certainty, down to her bones, it was the truism: the house always wins. How that basic fact could have escaped her father, Claire would never understand. It was as though he knew and didn’t know it, all at the same time. When he was clean—which was rare, but happened—he understood that it was best to just avoid the temptation altogether, that once he got hooked in again, it was eventually going to end badly for him. But when he gave into the temptation, he forgot, thrilling on the wins, thinking it would last as long as he needed it to—and he always needed it to last another few hands of cards, or another few bets on horses.

  “Right up ahead,” the driver said, calling her attention from her thoughts, prompting her to look up. The hotel was not on the main drag of the Vegas Strip, but rather slightly off-Strip. Having checked the address online, she’d thought that it would be a slightly less prestigious casino, but looking at it, she revised her estimates. It wasn’t a sprawling, climbing monument to decadence like most of the gaudy Strip hotels, but as the driver got closer to the entrance, Claire could tell that there was solid money behind its construction and development.

  It was pure, clean white on the exterior, with gleaming, chrome letters proclaiming it to be The Halston Grand. It wasn’t lit up and blinging like the main Strip hotel-casinos, but there was an understated kind of splendor to the lush plantings and the almost demure fountain in the center of the circular driveway.

  The driver pulled up to the double doors and parked, and Claire took another quick, deep breath to steady her nerves and compose herself. She would—in theory, at least—have just enough time to check in and put her bag in her room before she was supposed to meet with the man who held her father’s fate in his hands. Benjamin Minken was not a very flattering-sounding name, Claire thought to herself, as she took her bag from her driver and handed him a twenty-dollar tip—which he tried to reject but which she insisted he take.

  Still, with the kind of money the man must have, she supposed it didn’t matter how flattering his name was. It sounds like the name of an accountant or someone like that, not the name of a power player. He was, she’d learned in a quick search, a billionaire—a young one too. Having inherited his father’s hospitality businesses when he was eighteen, he’d improved on them over the following fifteen years. At thirty-one, he had made more money than most people made in their entire lifetimes—more money than people could believably inherit across generations, even.

  She had tried to avoid any pictures of him, but of course—being young and wealthy—there was no way for anyone in the press to talk about him without adding a photo. Benjamin Minken was classically handsome, with brown hair, brown eyes, and a slim frame that he dressed well. Clean-shaven—Claire was fairly certain he probably even had some form of skincare routine—there was no sign of sun damage on his face, none of the parched, leathery look that Vegas natives sometimes got.

  He wasn’t quite a dandy, but definitely seemed to favor tailored clothes with just a bit of the flair that went with the casino trade. The look of him, in the pictures, was of an untrustworthy charmer—and Claire had taken that aspect of the images much more to heart than his boyish good looks.

  Claire strode up to the front desk and reminded herself that, like it or not, she was a guest; she had to play nice. As she waited in line, she tossed her head a bit to get her braids over her shoulders. Then putting on her most polite expression, she finally stepped up to the bleached-blonde, twenty-something woman running things. “I have a reservation, name Claire Stevenson,” she said, keeping her voice neutral.

  “Ah yes… I was told you’d be coming in soon, Ms. Stevenson,” the woman said, in a flawless, unaccented-yet-pleasant voice. “Mr. Minken has you booked in our Prestige suite for tonight and tomorrow night.” Claire wanted to raise an eyebrow at that but resisted the temptation. At least he’s polite, she thought, nodding along with the woman as she r
attled off information about the room’s amenities, which included a hot tub and five hundred dollars to spend at the casino downstairs.

  “Thank you,” Claire said when the woman had finished; fortunately, as she’d spoken she had been organizing the key card and the other things that Claire would need to access her room. “I appreciate it.”

  “If you need anything, call five-five—that’s the room service and concierge number,” the front desk woman said, looking more respectful than Claire was used to. The Prestige Suite might not be the best one in the casino, but it was clearly a very important one. Claire wondered just how deep in debt her father had gotten himself as she accepted the little envelope with her free chips and the key card and headed for the elevators, feeling even more ill at ease.

  *

  “Mr. Minken, she’s arrived,” the man at the door said, and Benjamin nodded to acknowledge the news. Everything seemed to be going smoothly—for a change—and he sat back in his desk chair, turning slightly to look through the huge windows next to his desk. He could see the grander tops of the big Vegas casinos from his office; they’d served as inspiration for him, as a goad to increase business and make the Halston Grand a go-to spot in the city of sin.

  It had, by dint of hard work and a little intelligence, become the kind of place that drew the less ostentatious high rollers and players—less touristy than somewhere like Caesar’s Palace, but still a place for games and maybe some old-fashioned shows, with luxurious spaces for the sharks and nice rooms for those looking to stay somewhere slightly less stimulating than the rest of the Strip. A refuge for some, a den for others—balanced.

  “If she doesn’t show up in the next thirty minutes, send someone down,” Benjamin told the man guarding his door.