Page 31 of Auctioned to the Billionaire Surgeon

Some of the hostesses were overtly sexual. They sat on men’s laps and made sure they moved in a way to make the man hard. They disappeared under the table for a while and whatever guy they were sucking off tried to pretend his dick wasn’t in someone’s mouth while he talked to his friends. I’d heard some whisper, “I’m horny,” and reach out their hands to guide some rich sucker to the VIP rooms to part him from a lot of cash.

But the most popular hostesses weren’t like that. They left something to the imagination. They interacted in ways that weren’t only sexual. Jelly fell in that category.

“What the fuck, man?” I realized Javy was talking to me.

“What?”

“You’re never taking your eyes off her.”

I looked down at my glass guiltily. He was right. I couldn’t seem to stop watching her.

“You’re almost as bad as Nico,” Joaquin said casually, as if he didn’t know he was stirring shit up. “The length of time he spends in Sugar each night has increased by about two hundred and fifty percent since Jelly started here.”

My eyes shot over to Nico. He was looking back at me. We stared at each other for a second and silently acknowledged that each of us had a thing for her. Then we looked away.

“Why do I feel like you two are about to break into fisticuffs?” Leo asked. Joaquin burst out laughing, a rare thing for him, but apparently Leo’s archaic language cracked him up.

“Shut the fuck up, idiot. Here she comes.” Nicoadjusted his body language to look casual.

“Hey, y’all.” She put her hands on her hips and smiled playfully. “Let me guess your order.” She tapped her cheek playfully like she had to think hard about it. “Oh, wait. That’s right. Y’all are super boring and only ever order whiskey. I’m ready for Inky over there to order what he really wants.”

Nico couldn’t hide his grin. “And what’s that?”

“You know, strawberry margaritas, mojitos, frozen daiquiris… the normal manly drinks.”

He shook his head, his blue eyes sparkling. “Just get the damn whiskey, Jelly.”

“Be right back.” She blew him a kiss and walked away. His eyes tracked her movement through the entire club.

We all stared at Nico. I was surprised, and jealous, to see how smitten he was with her.

I guessed Jelly had more than one admirer hanging around her.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Paolo

Sadly, my hopes for an elite auction were shot down just a few days later.

“Sorry, guys. The Vanilla Auction is a no go.” Carmen shrugged. She didn’t look all that sorry, but I knew her. If she said she was going to give something a shot, she went after it with everything she had in her. That’s just how she operated.

“Why?” I asked. I glanced over at Enzo. He looked less concerned than I was, but he’d always seemed about half as interested in it as I was.

“I couldn’t get enough girls to sign up. I went after the women I showed y’all in that folder the other day—college-aged girls all the way up to women in their mid-twenties. I only chose women whose families are known to be both financially strapped and to have a history of great wealth and influence.” She chuckled. “It turns out, people don’t like to admit they have problems.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“No one loves to cop to financial issues,” she said. “And rich people? It turns out they’re even more proud than the average joe. They’re not interested in help, and they won’t debase themselves by having a daughter in a sex auction.”

Huh. That made sense. The thought of having a daughter who had to enter a sex auction because I’d lost the family money made me want to break out in hives and simultaneously murder someone. Still, that left me with a big problem.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to totally leave you hanging.” She pushed a folder towards me.

I opened it and flipped through it. There were three young women in it. One of them was Lyla VanHorne, a woman I’d been interested in seeing in the Vanilla Auction. “What’s this?”

“Only these three women were willing to sign up for the auction. When I let them know it was canceled, they were pretty upset. My thought is you should choose one of them to take to a couple of galas. Then you can see how it goes and make some sort of private arrangement.”

I nodded, closing the folder and taking it. I’d looked over my choices for the Vanilla Auction already and pretty much decided on Lyla. She was beautiful, from a good family, had attended all the right schools and graduated from West Bay University with a degree in interior design. She worked in a local architectural firm’s design department.