Page 1 of The Billionaire's Virgin

Chapter One

Reed

It didn’t happen very often that a more beautiful sight eclipsed the view from my Manhattan penthouse. I looked back at my laptop screen and admired the numbers for the second time. Free Bird Publishers had absolutely smashed its fourth quarter.

We had two books on the New York Times’ Best Seller list, and we had resurging sales for a book that we had published two years ago that was now in cinemas everywhere with Ryan Gosling and Brie Larson in the lead roles. Things couldn’t have been better, and I took an egotistical moment to bask in the triumph.

I was just going over the numbers a third time when my phone rang. “Hi, Jennifer,” I said. “How’s my favorite editor?”

“Are you going over the numbers now?”

“Of course.”

“And?”

“We did brilliantly.”

She laughed and then she took a deep breath. “We got a couple of hundred new manuscripts in the last week alone.”

“With or without agents?” I asked.

Jennifer paused, and I could feel the argument brewing. “Come on, Reed,” she sighed.

“What was the first book we published?” I asked.

Jennifer groaned. “Seriously—”

“What was the first book we published?” I repeated.

“Wickersham Lane,” Jennifer replied tiredly.

“Who was the author of Wickersham Lane?”

“Andrea Harley,” Jennifer replied, and I knew she was already over this conversation.

“She was an unpublished author when her manuscript showed up on my desk.”

“I don’t need to be reminded of that, Reed,” Jennifer said. “But I think you need to be reminded of a few things.”

“Oh?”

“Sure, Andrea was unpublished and unknown… but so were we,” Jennifer continued. “We had been in business for almost a year, and we were desperate. We were running at a loss, and we hadn’t found a novel worth putting our necks out there for. Sure, we took a chance on Andrea, but she took a chance on us too. We couldn’t afford to be picky.”

“And now we can?”

“No one was sending us manuscripts,” Jennifer pointed out. “But now we have a name… we have a reputation. We’re getting thousands upon thousands of new manuscripts a year; we can’t afford to go through them all.”

“Not everyone can afford an agent,” I said. “Andrea couldn’t… she had been rejected from dozens of different publishers because of it. But her novel was brilliant. It’s the reason we even managed to get this company off the ground.”

“I remember, Reed,” Jennifer said tiredly. “I was there.”

“Just because a writer doesn’t have an agent, doesn’t mean they don’t have a good book. It doesn’t mean they don’t have a profitable book.”

“We can’t go through every single manuscript we get,” Jennifer said decidedly. “It’s just not practical.”

“How many books do you look through weekly?”

“Don’t even go there,” Jennifer said firmly. “I do more than my fair share of work. I don’t have the time to take on anything more. If this is so important to you, then you’ll have to make time.”