Free Claimed by the Billionaire: Seduction #1 by Danielle Jamesen

Chapter 1
     
    I watched with a
sickening swoop in my stomach as the first pile of dirt went onto my husband’s
coffin. It was though each pile of dirt that fell on the coffin fell on me too
and I was slowly being buried alive. It was all I could do not to break free of
my father’s hold and leap in after him, to be buried with him. But no, I chided
myself, I had my son to think about.
    My son. I glanced down
at him now. His ten year old frame was shaking quietly as he cried into my
dress. I played with his chestnut brown hair gingerly with my fingertips. My
poor son. Too old to be told the lie “Daddy is going away for a while” but too
young to understand what death truly meant.
    My husband. I would now
be a widow, I assumed. That was the correct term of things. Serena the widow is
what I’d be labeled among social circles who were being kind. Serena the widow
who lost everything, among my family. And Serena with the dead husband and no
money to speak of, among my old enemies.
    I glanced at my father.
His skin seemed stretched taunt, bags heavy under his eyes, his suit smelling
of cigarette smoke since he had fallen back into the habit. It was my entire
family who had lost everything, I thought, not just me. My father had lost his
entire empire, my husband had then lost his job at my father’s company and I
had lost my trust fund and my son had lost his college fund.
    I tried to pin point
where my father had gone wrong with his business. They had been well off. He
had invested in real estate from a young age, riding the bubble up, up, up and
spending as though that bubble would never pop. I had had the best of
everything as a child and my husband had sold high end properties for my
father. Business estates, home estates, all of it had been theirs to sell and
rent out. I had met my husband at one of my father’s special meetings for the
company and we were head over heels in love soon after. My son I had had first,
when I was twenty, with a shot gun marriage soon to follow. But I had loved my
husband and the eleven years I had with him.
    I had turned thirty
when the real estate bubble popped and the national recession hit. Business
stopped. No one was buying and everyone was selling. Neither myself, nor my
father, nor my husband had saved up anything, thinking the good fortune would
last forever. My father had lost everything and had to shut the business down.
My husband had lost everything too and the resulting heart attack from finding
out they were poor was too much for him.
    So now here I was, at
my husband’s funeral, with my son clutching to me on one side and my father
clutching me on the other. I stared as the dirt rose on my husband’s coffin. I
knew everything was changing and nothing would be the same again.
    ***
    I finished taping up
one box while my best friend, Cathy, closed up another. I was moving, needing
to sell the house (for half the price of what it normally would have gotten)
and move into a two bedroom apartment to cut costs down. I exhaled heavily as Cathy
looked up.
    “So, should I tell my
friend you want an interview?”
    Cathy had been talking
at length about one of her friends who worked at a high end business in town,
who was now moving and needed to fill her place. I had listened to her describe
the position which basically sounded like a personal assistant position to the
rich owner and how they needed someone ASAP.
    “It really doesn’t
sound like my usual thing.”
    Cathy waved her hand,
“Listen, it’ll pay better than anything you are planning on looking into.”
    “But being someone’s
personal assistant?  Aren’t I just running coffee or something?”
    “Does it matter? The
money is good, more than you’ll need to pay rent on your new place as well as
take care of anything Greg needs.”
    At my son’s name, I
sighed, knowing Cathy was right, “What does this guy do anyway?”
    “He’s loaded,” I wished
Cathy would stop talking about how rich this guy was, “He