Table of Contents
Title Page
The Billionaire’s Christmas Cruise
Copyright
Thank You!
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Epilogue
About the Authors
The Billionaire’s Christmas Cruise
By Dakota Rebel and Brynn Paulin
Supernova Indie Publishing Services, LLC
www.supernovaindie.com
Powered by Your Imagination
The Billionaire’s Christmas Cruise
by
Dakota Rebel and Brynn Paulin
Chase
I see. I want. I take. That’s my mantra, but it’s always been applied to business deals. Never in my life have I thought about using it in regard to a woman. At least, not until I met her. Emerson Blake. The woman of my dreams, who I spied across a crowded bar. I spent ten minutes with her, yet I immediately knew I’d spend the rest of my life loving. She lives on the other side of the country, way too far from my bed and my life in Las Vegas, but I’ve overcome worse obstacles.
She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s about to get the Christmas surprise of a lifetime.
Emerson
Three months ago, we had ten perfect minutes together. That’s all it took for him to impact my life. Everything shifted, and I didn’t even realize it. But my thoughts returned to him over and over. I obsessed over a guy who I barely met and will never see again, longed for him. So the cruise I unexpectedly won seems like a good way to get my head on straight again.
Then in walks Mr. Obsession, and my plans for fun and sun and forgetting him go out the porthole. All I can imagine is spending hours in his arms.
This time, we don’t have ten minutes. We have seven days. Will it be enough to last a lifetime?
Yeah. I doubt it, too.
Copyright
© 2019, Dakota Rebel and Brynn Paulin
The Billionaire’s Christmas Cruise
Cover Art and formatting by Supernova Indie Publishing Services, LLC
Electronic Format ISBN: 978-1-62344-312-2
Published by: Supernova Indie Publishing Services, LLC
Warning: All rights reserved. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and occurrences are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, places or occurrences, is purely coincidental.
Thank You!
Thank you for your purchase of The Billionaire’s Christmas Cruise by Dakota Rebel and Brynn Paulin. We hope you’ve enjoyed the story and will consider leaving a review and telling a friend.
Brynn and Dakota love hearing from readers! Please visit their websites at www.brynnpaulin.com and www.dakotarebel.net.
Dedication
To our readers! Thank you!
Chapter One
~ Emerson ~
Right this second, I suddenly felt like Rose staring up at the Titanic. The cruise ship before me was huge! Sure, I knew the stats on it, because that’s who I was. I’d immediately looked into the ship when I’d won a ticket for this all-expenses-paid trip.
And holy mackerel… No one in the office had even known our security firm had put us all in a pool to win this extra special Christmas bonus. And weren’t they all super jealous that Emerson Blake—that would be me—from the coding team had won.
There I was, minding my own business when this group of people, the awards committee, had converged on me, interrupting me at a critical moment in updating a massive line of code and wiping out a couple hours of work that I’d had to re-do. The moment had been a perfect fucking storm—the center of attention, my project taking a sharp left turn into hell, winning a prize I didn’t want…
All I could do was stare at them with a super-fake expression while they presented this really expensive prize.
Everyone was envious, some a little snotty, and I was stuck. How did the new girl say thanks but no thanks?
She didn’t. She couldn’t. Even if she was deathly afraid of the ocean and more than a little afraid of large bodies of water deeper than her ankles, like lakes and pools and hot tubs. It was crazy since I lived in Chicago, right on Lake Michigan! But I just didn’t go over to Navy Pier or the Lakefront Trail or Lake Shore Drive if I could avoid it.
Water. Me. Ugh.
And so here I was. Way too close to the ocean. Looking up at a mammoth boat and remembering the cruise ship on its side that had been all over the news recently.
Okay…deep breaths, Em. You’ve got this. Ships are safer than airplanes. You know that, and you managed to fly with no problems.
Because I wasn’t afraid of planes. I loved to fly. Just recently, I’d taken a fun, long-weekend trip to Vegas for my college friend’s engagement party. And that had been great. Of course, the Vegas strip didn’t feature huge expanses of water. I could stay way back from the Bellagio fountain and enjoy its beauty.
I sighed, turning to the huge crowd waiting to board the ship. I’d always envisioned just walking up the gangplank and boarding. Nope. They’d checked my luggage, much like if I were flying, and now I was standing on this maze-like corral that wove upward toward the ship with all the other cattle—um, passengers—waiting to board.
Pulling out my phone, I took a few pictures. People back at the office were sure to ask about them. Then I flipped over to look at them. Almost unconsciously, my thumb scrolled me back to the Vegas pics from three months ago. I didn’t have many since I’d offloaded most of them to the cloud. But there was one, I looked at all the time.
Him.
Chase Malloy.
It was silly, really, that I was so hung up on the guy who’d been in and out of my life in what amounted to a split-second in the whole scheme of things. We’d met at a new club that my friends wanted to check out, though in truth, they were all new to me since I wasn’t from Vegas. We’d stopped in before the Thunder Down Under show
