The Price of a Promise, page 1
The Price of a Promise
The Bad Boys of Wall Street: Prequel
Ember Leigh
Copyright © 2022 by Ember Leigh
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
Editing: Elisabeth Nelson
Cover: Covers by Combs
Formatted with Atticus
emberleighauthor@gmail.com
About 'The Price of a Promise'
Their love never stood a chance...
Axel Fairchild is the eternal outsider, both in his elite MBA program and in the world of NYC finance. Powering through on charm, swagger, and smarts has always worked for him—and it’s poised to pay off in a big way as he prepares to launch his very own finance business with his brothers after graduation. There’s only one thing left on his to-do list: prying the love of his life, Cora Margulis, away from her controlling and manipulative family.
Cora loves Axel’s brash confidence and the way he turns her privileged world upside down. He’s a breath of fresh air in the stuffy, elite enclave she’s lived in her entire life. As she approaches the end of her MBA program and her father pressures her to join the ranks of their realty empire, Cora can see her escape hatch. The future beyond the luxurious world she’s always known scares her, but with Axel at her side, she knows they can create the future of their dreams— together.
But the Margulis family is famous for bending people to their will behind closed doors. The closer Axel and Cora inch to graduation, the more oppressive the pressure grows from Cora’s family to choose the right path. The only thing standing in the way of Cora and Axel’s happily-ever-after is Allan Margulis. And he won’t stop until he gets Cora in his back pocket and Axel is a ruined wreck.
Contents
AUTHOR'S NOTE
CONTENT WARNING
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
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ALSO BY EMBER LEIGH
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Billionaires. Bad boys. Bleeding hearts.
These outsiders are known as the Bad Boys of Wall Street.
The Price of a Promise is the prequel novella to the Bad Boys of Wall Street series. This series is best read in order, since the drama is chronological and cumulative throughout the books. Start this steamy forbidden romance between the wealthy NYC heroine and the Kentucky boy from the wrong side of the tracks. Their love story begins in the Price of the Promise and concludes eight years later in The Price of Revenge.
CONTENT WARNING
-mentions of suicide
CHAPTER ONE
AXEL
“Wait, Axel. I’m almost there.”
“Yeah? By the goth guys playing accordion or up by the vegan punks?”
Cora laughed in that way that sounded like angels sighing. Through the phone, I could hear the churn of the ocean on the West Coast. “The vegan punks.”
“Shit, girl. You are almost there.”
Cora’s wispy breaths through the phone grew more labored. I pinched my eyes shut so I could imagine her—traipsing through the sand on Venice Beach, squinting against the too-bright sunshine of a November California day, which she claimed was against nature for the born-and-bred New York native that she was. She lived in Stanford, but liked to make the trek to LA on occasion for the shopping and the beaches.
“Hurry it up, sweet cheeks,” I chided, grinning to myself as I sat on Coopers Beach in the Hamptons. This was our thing. The way we stayed connected, despite the staggering distance. Twenty-five hundred physical miles meant nothing if we were both standing on beaches facing the ocean. It was the voodoo that kept us together while we weathered grad school on opposite coasts.
Weekly beach visits and the occasional cross-country visit. But only when we could find the right alibi.
“Okay. I’m here.” She sighed exaggeratedly and this time, I imagined her slumping down into the sand. In my mind’s eye, I was there with her. Ready to catch her, to wrap my arms around her and find that perfect nook where she existed in my arms. The one that let me bury my face in the side of her lush, dark-chocolate locks and get drunk on her sweet clementine scent. Holding her like that was the only way to calm my racing heart when my anxiety stalked like a predator. When she was in my arms, I felt like I could fully grasp the roots of my future; like I could look up and watch the blossoms of my happiness unfold.
One of the many ways I knew Cora wasn’t just a good fit for me but the one and only.
I planned to tell her soon. The moment the ring arrived and I could scrape up the money to fly out there again.
“Good.” I rested my elbows on my knees, phone pressed to my right ear as I stared out at the cobalt waves churning under the gray late-afternoon haze. The salty breeze, both humid and cold, bit through me, but Cora’s low hum wrapped me in its warm embrace. “I can almost see you.”
“Yep. I think I can see you too,” she said with a throaty laugh. She had the husky voice of a young blues singer, both ethereal and erotic at the same time. Paired with dark, glossy hair and sage green eyes that doubled as a fucking defibrillator, she was jaw-dropping. A total knockout. And one hundred percent mine.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” I lifted my index finger. This shit never got old for us. A year and some months into our grad school careers, we needed anything that minimized the crushing weight of the distance.
“Two.”
I lifted my middle finger to join the index. “Correct.”
Her soft laugh floated through me, dispelling all the stress I’d brought from the week. Seconds into our calls, everything in the world felt right. Just as if we were at the beach together.
“You’d tell me I was right even if you didn’t have any fingers.”
“Well, sweet cheeks, it’s because you’re always right,” I told her. I dropped a hand to the sand, beginning the absent-minded search for sea glass. The other important ritual of our beach visits.
“Not always.”
“Well you’re right about one thing, at least.”
The smirk on her face was evident in her voice. “And what’s that?”
“Being with me.”
This was the part where I’d wrap her into my arms again and we’d fall back onto the sand and stay there for a long time, possibly until dusk, or until the weird goth guys ran us off with the shitty accordion music (if we were in LA). But I couldn’t, and my chest throbbed with the absence of her heat there. Time wasn’t making things better or easier. In fact, each additional day away from her only proved how much I didn’t want a life without her. We’d spent our third anniversary on opposite coasts, wishing we could tonguefuck each other though FaceTime. I didn’t want our fourth to be more of the same. I gathered my jacket tighter around me as a brisk wind whipped down the beach.
“I miss you, Axel.”
I could hear the deep well of emotion in her voice. My cheeks twitched, caught between a smile and a grimace. “I miss you more. I’m gonna come out there again soon. Then we can visit that other beach you like to visit. What was it? Glass Beach?”
She sighed contentedly. “You’ll love it there. It was a gold mine for Axel-blue glass. When do you think you can come?”
“Once I get paid, I’ll buy the ticket.” My throat tightened, and I looked down at the fine-grained sand between my bent knees. My internship updating the business plan of a Manhattan-based tech company barely paid the bills. I lived mostly off stock dividends, cryptocurrency funds, and sheer ingenuity. The truth was that I had to finish paying off her ring before I could even hope to afford another plane ticket. “And if that doesn’t cover it, I’ll hit up Trace.”
Cora sighed. “Let me put it on my credit card—”
“No. Your dad will flip if you do that. I don’t need him having any more ammo against me.”
A heavy silence thudded between us. Her father gathered ammo against me like a doomsday prepper. I needed to convince him to focus on a new delusion, because I was about to piss him off by asking his daughter to marry me. He’d be pissed no matter what—I just needed to make sure that it was more on the side of the fleeting annoyance end of the scale rather than the nuclear meltdown variety.
Cora’s dad was the type of man to let his nuclear meltdown spill out and affect society. Killing flora and fauna in its wake, rendering entire landscapes barren and radioactive. The man owned a real estate empire that made sheikhs salivate. He had resources at his disposal that I had only dreamed of. The type of money that led to Cora’s actual and profound bewilderment when we started dating and she found out I had a job. Why on earth would you work during college? she’d asked me. Her silver spoon naivete was only the first of the million differences between our upbringings.
But the depth of our connection—our love—surpassed all the differences. Even her father’s ticking closer and closer to radioactive status didn’t matter.
Cora was mine; I was hers. We both knew it, and it didn’t matter what he thought.
“I can come back east,” Cora blurted after our silence had bled into the rush of waves on our respective coasts.
“He wants you to focus on school.” That was the excuse her father always had when she wanted to fly home for a visit. Allan insisted on going to California whenever Cora wanted to see them. The man owned property in Los Angeles, which was where Cora stayed whenever she made the trek from school to Venice Beach. But he also owned Cora’s current home in Stanford, as well as untold amounts of other properties anywhere he happened to glance. Cora could stay wherever she damn well pleased, wherever she wanted to go. I knew how to read the subtext. His express goal was to prevent Cora from seeing me.
“Axel, I can just buy the ticket. Let him rant and rave. I don’t care.”
A smile twitched at my lips. I’d always suspected I’d find the best woman in the world to have at my side. I just didn’t know she’d be so badass to fling herself face first into a radioactive mess on my behalf.
“You know he’s gonna get mad…”
“I don’t care. Let him get mad. This long-distance shit is killing me.”
My fingers connected with a fragment of beach glass, exactly what I’d been searching for. I picked up the smooth remnant. It gleamed translucent blue in the gray day. “How mad is he gonna be when we start having kids?”
She chuckled softly. Maybe it sounded a little sad. “He’ll love them anyway. I know he will.”
I studied the pretty sea glass before chucking it away. It wasn’t the right one. It needed to be green—a blend of emerald and moss. To match Cora’s eyes. I dragged my fingers through the sand again, searching for the next piece. “How mad will he be when we get married?”
My entire body was tense, waiting for her response. She had no idea the ring was in transit. No idea that I planned on asking her within a matter of months, not years. No idea that I physically could not wait any longer than necessary to know that she would be my wife someday.
Her silence felt like an eternity. Finally, she said, “Not mad enough to not come to the wedding.”
“You think?” My fingers connected with another piece of sea glass. Clear. I chucked it.
“How could he miss his only living child’s wedding?”
She had faith in her old man. I, however, did not. “I’d fucking hope so.” My fingers returned to the sand.
“We’ve got plenty of time for him to come around to all of these ideas,” Cora said.
Except we didn’t. Not now. Not when my proposal rattled around inside me like energy particles inside the Hadron Collider. This shit was going to burst out of me. Once the ring arrived, it was game over. I’d been stalking the perfect engagement ring for months and had pounced on it like a lion in the fucking Serengeti when I found it, the perfect pear-cut halo twist for my Cora.
The sound of accordion music swelled in the background from Cora’s end. I laughed, remembering how weird those artists were the last time I visited Venice Beach. Goth dudes on stilts playing Ariana Grande on a goddamn accordion. I never saw shit like that growing up in the rural outskirts of Louisville. There was a lot of shit I didn’t see growing up in rural Kentucky, though. And a few things I wish I’d never seen.
But we’d discovered threads that tied Cora and me up tight like a pair of running shoes. We were both in the “living sibling” category. A designation neither of us ever wanted. But there was one critical difference.
She knew how her brother died. I’d never know where my sister went to or what sort of misery accompanied her to her final days.
“Ooh, I think I found your eyes.” Cora’s breathy excitement made me perk up. There was always an unacknowledged race to see who could find the other’s eye color first in the sea glass. We collected the glass, kept it as an homage to our love. Ten equally beautiful deep moss green pieces were tucked away in the apartment I shared with my brothers. It was one of the few things they didn’t know about me, and I liked that Cora got to have a part of me that even my two best friends—my brothers—couldn’t access. Cora kept her Axel-blue sea glass in a velvet bag that she hid in her lingerie drawer for no other reason than she thought I’d like to be next to her panties. And trust me, I really did like the Axel-inspired sea glass living with her panties.
”Is it a match?” I asked.
“Yep. I think it is.” The smile was evident in her voice. Just then, my fingers connected with another piece. Perfectly emerald moss, with a touch of transparency that made it a shoo-in for adding to my collection.
“I found your eyes too, babe.”
She hummed happily. “See? It’s God letting us know that distance means nothing when it comes to our love.”
I didn’t believe in the God part, but I sure believed in the rest of it. “Distance…time…nothing can come between us.”
The words felt like an edict, reinforcing the truth so that neither of us forgot it. So that it became a weapon that we both could wield in the war that was sure to unfold soon.
Because no matter how much we loved each other, no matter how close to our MBAs we crept, only one thing truly stood a chance of coming between us.
Allan Margulis and his iron grip on his daughter.
CHAPTER TWO
CORA
Clouds swirl.
Evergreen undertones dance in the air. Axel is near.
His raspy laugh threads through me. The cocksure smile appears above my face. He is lined with cumulonimbus fringe and self-assuredness. The velvet softness of his kisses consumes me.
“Will you marry me?”
Of course I will. I want to say it. My heart is dying to say it. But I can’t move my lips. Axel’s handsome features are wrought with confusion.
An alarm is ringing, warning me of the decision I have to make.
I jolted up in bed, panic streaking through my veins. The alarm, at least, wasn’t a dream. My phone was ringing next to my bed, but Axel wasn’t close—he was in New York City. A world away. Too many miles and I felt every single one of them in each breath I took without him near me.
I fumbled to grab the phone, Axel’s proposal weighing heavily on me. He hadn’t asked me to marry him in real life, but I dreamt almost nightly of his proposal. We just talked about marriage as inevitable. The way our MBAs were inevitable. The way Axel choosing pepperoni pizza above all other varieties was inevitable.
The way my decision regarding the family business was inevitable.
I drew a deep breath when I saw who called: my father. I cleared my throat before I answered, trying to hide the groggy evidence in my voice that I’d fallen asleep after my morning Pilates class.
“Hey, Dad,” I said, forcing brightness into my voice.
“Cora Bug.” My father’s gruff voice was at odds with the pet name. My father always had an agenda, and his word choices weren’t exempt. He had so few tender touches for the women in his life that when he employed sweetness, it worked harder for him than any of his employees. “Let’s talk schedule.”
“Of course.” I swung my feet off the bed, heading for my discarded planner in the living room of my condo. The warmth I’d felt from the infrequently used endearment was rapidly fading. “How are you?”
“Let’s talk about next weekend.”
I flipped to the appropriate pages as the familiar iciness spread across my chest. “Okay.”
“You’ve been offered an exciting opportunity. One you’d be remiss to let slip by.”
Exciting for who? My gaze landed on the open blocks of the upcoming weekend. My Friday afternoon mastermind course was the only thing written there. The blank space contained the only constants in my life: study and video chat with Axel.
“What is it?”
“A partnership, and a path into the future.”
The iciness in my chest turned to iron. My eyes fluttered shut. “Let’s hear it.”
“The board of directors and I have been engaging in the long-range planning for the company. Obviously I can’t be CEO forever. And though it’s still at least a decade away, I’m thinking about what will happen after my retirement. Of all the available options, there’s only one that interests me, and that’s with my Cora Bug at the helm.”
