Read The Bad Boy Billionaire: What a Girl Wants for Free Online

power was still out. Sam had still hurt me—I hadn’t forgotten or imagined it. There was an ache in my muscles and bones and bruises on my arms and breasts. Someone I loved had hurt me. That hadn’t changed.
    I closed my eyes, foolishly hoping that would make it all go away when I opened them again. But the memories were still sharp and fresh: the taste of beer, the stubble scratching my skin, his weight bearing down on me, the hard brick wall at my back. Thank God he stopped before it went further.
    But what if he hadn’t stopped?
    I’d be wrecked.
    Rolling over to my side, I noticed Duke wasn’t in bed. I got up, found his Stanford sweatshirt, put it on and went out to the kitchen.
    “So I got up early to make coffee with the idea that I would bring it to you in bed,” Duke said. “But the power is out.”
    “I know.”
    We both turned to stare at the machine.
    “I need coffee before I can figure out how to make coffee without the machine,” Duke muttered, pushing his fingers through his hair and mussing it up.
    “There must be a way. People have made coffee for hundreds of years without electricity,” I said, staring blankly at the machine. “We’ll have to improvise. And while we’re at it, we might as well cook up everything in your fridge. That is, if your stove still works.”
    “It’s gas, so as long as we have matches it should.” Duke ambled off to find some. I rolled the waistband of the pants he’d given me to wear; they were giant and falling down.
    Then I opened the refrigerator and my heart sank.
    There was plenty of beer. One carton of organic milk, three quarters full, fortunately not expired. There were also delivery leftovers that I was not yet desperate enough to try—who knows how long they’d been in there? I smiled when I saw a bottle of the wine I liked. Fortunately, the Britta filter was full—but it was all the water we had for the foreseeable future.
    In the cabinets, I found a few boxes of cereal. In the freezer there were a few frozen meals.
    “Why don’t you have more food?” I called out to Duke. “We’re going to starve.”
    “We’ll just order some take out,” he said with a shrug. In Duke’s world, food only came from restaurants or Seamless.com.
    “With what cell service? And power?” I asked.
    “There’s got to be some service,” he grumbled as he walked around the apartment with his iPhone out, searching for a few bars.
    “Shouldn’t you turn that off to conserve the battery?”
    Duke looked up at me, with a wounded expression as if I suggested we drown kittens for fun.
    “Turn it off?” he gasped. Well, someone had to be the voice of reason. I smiled faintly and rolled my eyes. He kept walking around the apartment with it, looking for service before finally conceding that we were totally cut off from contacting the rest of the world.
    Just like Prudence and her hero, Castleton.
    Dejected, he joined me next to the coffeemaker. We stared at it. If wishes and will power were enough we’d have a freshly brewed pot.
    “If only you could come up with an idea of how to make the coffee,” I said.
    “What did people do in days of yore in your books?” he asked.
    “They asked the servants,” I answered.
    Yes, I wrote historical romance novels. But most readers, like me, were more interested in the emotional turmoil of the characters—and let’s be real, the sex—than the details of housekeeping and coffee-making. In the end, we poured boiling water over the grinds, making two strong and steaming hot cups of coffee with milk.
    We curled up on the couch with our mugs, under a blanket, huddling together for warmth. We stared out the window at the rain.
    “It doesn’t look so bad,” I said. Being in possession of an active imagination, I had assumed the worst of a Category 4 storm. I had pictured glass windows of Fifth Avenue shops shattering, tree trunks snapping and falling into buildings, or flooding that sent cars floating down Broadway and