Read Online 4 The Billionaire's Seduction All That He Requires by Olivia Thorne - Free Book Online Page A

leverage. Always watch your back. Destroy your enemies when you have the chance, to make sure they don’t recover and destroy you later.”
    This was unbelievable. “You can’t live life like that!”
    “I said business lessons, not life lessons. It’s not the same.” Suddenly his face grew dark, and he stared off into the distance. “Unless you get involved with someone who treats your relationship like a business.”
    My stomach dropped. “I would never do that!”
    His eyes found mine as he came back to the present, and his expression lightened. “I wasn’t talking about you. I know you would never do that.”
    “Where was your mother in all this?”
    He shrugged again and returned to his food. “If she wasn’t running her charity balls and dinners, then she was telling me to stop being a whiner and beat my father if I was so upset.”
    “Jesus,” I murmured.
    “Poor little rich boy, right? Rich people problems.”
    “Child abuse isn’t ‘rich people problems.’”
    He frowned like I’d just suggested something incredibly outlandish. “My parents didn’t abuse me.”
    “Maybe not physically, but emotional abuse is still abuse.”
    He waved off my comment with one hand. “Lots of people have it way worse than I do. I turned out fine. No harm done.”
    I wondered about that.
    Then I thought of something else I knew about him: according to some E! show I’d seen on the Dubai, Connor was the youngest son of the Templeton family.
    “Don’t you have older brothers or sisters?”
    “One older brother. Vincent.”
    “How much older?”
    “Five years.”
    “What about you guys?”
    “What about us?”
    “Weren’t you close?”
    He made a face like Naaah. The way you might answer if somebody asked if you wanted ketchup on your hotdog. “Not really.”
    “Why not?”
    “Well, I didn’t see much of him during the school year.”
    “He didn’t go to boarding school?”
    “Oh, yeah, he did. But he kept getting thrown out, so my parents kept shipping him around the world to new schools. So I only saw him during summers and Christmas. And not much then.”
    “Why’d he get thrown out?”
    “Sex, alcohol, drugs, bad grades – the usual.”
    “Um… don’t take this the wrong way… but I thought you were the black sheep of the family.”
    Connor laughed. “I am.”
    “If your brother did all those things and isn’t the black sheep, what the hell did you do?!”
    “Vincent shaped up after college. Well, law school, really.” Connor’s voice became tinged with the slightest hint of bitterness. “He figured out which side his bread was buttered on, and he buckled down and became a perfect little heir to the throne. Me… I was pretty much a good kid until my late teens, and then I really pissed off my family.”
    “What did you do?”
    “Well, I quit college my freshman year, for one. That didn’t go over well.”
    “Why’d you quit?”
    “The way I looked at it, the world was full of limitless opportunities, and here I was stuck freezing my ass off in boring classes, just like every other boring school I’d ever been in.”
    “Where’d you go to college?”
    “Harvard.”
    Of course.
    “What’d you do once you quit?”
    “Ha – there’s a fun story. I told my father I wanted out. He said ‘no, absolutely not.’ We had a big fight, I made some grandiose claims about how I could succeed better and faster than any of my ivory tower professors and clueless peers… and he made a bet with me.”
    “What was it?”
    “He’d stake me, to the tune of ten million dollars, and I could go out and have three years to make something of myself.”
    “Ten million dollars?!” I yelped.
    Connor smirked. “And here you were, thinking my father was such a bad guy.”
    “Well… maybe I misjudged him…”
    Connor shook his head. “No you didn’t. Ten million was nothing to him. It would be like you giving your kid the change under your couch cushions to go start a