Sold Short (Sidelined Book 3) Read online

  “How sick do you feel?” he said, lips at her neck, so distracting he could cure anything that ailed her.

  “Not sick enough to leave this room without everything I came for.”

  He pulled back. “I said I’d marry you, what more do you want?” He smiled on the word more. “I suppose you’ll want me to pivot with you.”

  Pivot and dip and glide and slump and make more messes and clean them up together. “What about that spotlight?”

  He leaned in for a kiss. Outside someone said, “Hey, this room is supposed to be free.”

  Any minute that door would open and they’d be caught out. If they hid away much longer, Owen or Reid or both of them could come searching. Not that it mattered, there were no more mix-ups, no misunderstandings; and outside this room was the business they’d made together, the friends and partners they both cared for, the families they loved and the new family they’d make together.

  “The only spotlight I want to be in is the one with you and our baby in it,” her talented colleague, best friend, soon-to-be husband said.

  “Our baby.” Their life more deeply, more permanently entwined and better together.

  He stood and pulled her out of the beanbag and into his arms. “Fuck, we’re having a baby, but I want all the sex and debauchery first.”

  First, she’d give him everything. And no one was ever coming second, neither of them would ever be sold short again.

  If you enjoyed Sidelined 3—Sold Short, read on for:

  Information on Plus, including bios for Reid, Owen, Dev and Sarina, and for the first chapter of

  Sidelined 1—Reid and Zarley’s story

  in

  Offensive Behavior

  If you really liked it, you can find out more about the series at: www.ainsliepaton.com.au

  The other book in the series, Damaged Goods,

  is Owen and Cara’s story

  And coming soon is:

  Shotgun Wedding

  And if you really, really enjoyed Sold Short, or you have a comment that might help another reader, think about leaving a review at your favorite ebook retailer or Goodreads.

  From the company website

  About Plus

  Our software helps teams crush it

  We build software and make apps to help people do critical and cool stuff together.

  We’re for dreamers and doers.

  We’re for teams big and small, virtual and formal, creative, collaborative and kickass.

  We’re for start-ups and full-scale enterprises, for co-ops, institutions and nonprofits.

  If you do things in teams, then we’re for you.

  Better Together

  How we came to crush it

  Plus happened because Reid McGrath is a dreamer and doer, Owen Lange is a finance whizz, Dev Patel is an ace bug catcher and Sarina Gallo is a turbo talent wrangler.

  Plus happened because the four of them met at Stanford and decided to do or die, together.

  Now we’re 1500 people focused on making stuff to help other people get things done.

  Here’s what else we are:

  One hundred thousand customers. Plus new ones every day

  Two hundred and fifty user groups

  Fifty-two BBQs a year and twenty-four pizza days

  Fifteen coffee machines

  Twelve products. So far

  Ten candles in the birthday cake

  Five offices in three countries

  One classic American muscle car. It’s Dev’s, don’t touch it

  One percent of our profit to our favorite charities

  Extra vacation time for volunteering

  One remaining original founder’s Better Together t-shirt. It’s Owen’s and he’s keeping it safe.

  How we crush it everyday

  We’re awesome and we want to stay that way so we have some rules to guide us. Here they are:

  No assholes

  No bullshit

  Play as a team

  Don’t screw up with customers

  Add value

  Occasionally we mess up. You might’ve read about it. We’re only human and if we’ve screwed up with your team, we’ll do everything we can to fix whatever’s wrong as soon as possible. You can count on that.

  About our Founders

  Reid McGrath

  Occasional CEO and Chief Innovator

  Tall, dark, broody and bossy. Also a genius, which can be painful. Reid is a small-town boy who had big dreams and he’s busy making them come true. He started Plus in his dorm room at Stanford, yes, we know it’s a cliché, and recruited Owen, Dev and Sarina to play on his team and the rest is history.

  Reid was our CEO for nine years and then he wasn’t and then he was for a short time again. You might’ve read about that too. Now he serves as Plus’ chief innovator and he’s just as bossy as ever, but slightly short on the broody. It’s because of Reid most of us play on dream teams during the day and dream about teams at night.

  Owen Lange

  CEO and Chief of Money

  In another life, Owen Lange might’ve been a Vegas card shark. Instead he chose to sharpen his reflexes on the kinds of zeroes and ones that belong in a balance sheet. The lights stay on and we all get paid every week on time because Owen is our chief of money. He’s also the guy who pays for pizza and keeps stockholders happy, which of course includes every Plus employee. He’s kind of like a dad. He’d let you borrow his car but he’ll send you to your room without supper if you miss curfew. He’s the responsible, nice guy, but don’t let that fool you, he’s also our resident daredevil. He’s jumped out of more planes and scaled more rock faces than Plus has industry awards.

  Dev Patel

  Never wants to be CEO, Chief Engineer

  Code cracker, hacker, UX visionary and muscle car junkie. Dev fixes what Reid breaks and breaks what Reid fixes. It’s worked out well for us so far. If you want to make an unfailingly polite, mild mannered, generous and rational man smack his forehead repeatedly on a hard surface, be a Plus customer with a problem that takes longer than two hours to fix. Dev doesn’t have a superhero suit but as our chief engineer, he sure has a supernatural sense for shipping unbeatably good product and a nose for sniffing out better ways of doing things.

  Sarina Gallo

  One-time stand-in CEO, please don’t make me do it again, Chief of People

  Sarina went to Stanford to learn how to be a game developer and discovered the best game of all was finding and motivating talent. She’s one of the Valley’s best people people—and that’s not a typo. If you want a career in the IT industry, you can’t do better than having Sarina help you plan your start at Plus and your future world domination at whatever you want to do. Also that would make her happy, because she lives for making stars. Sarina is our chief of people and she fixes everything that Reid and Dev and Owen mess up, and you’d never know it.

  Read on for a sample of Sidelined 1:

  Offensive Behavior

  Reid and Zarley’s story

  Reid eyed the glass in his hand. He swirled the amber liquid. This was his sixth or seventh. He wouldn’t be the only drunk loser stumbling toward a foggy San Francisco dawn. But he was probably the only one who was on his way to making his first billion before he turned thirty.

  Whatever the count, the scowling hostess knew by now to keep ’em coming.

  Was it a month or longer this had been his routine? Drink till he was a swallow off face-planting the sticky table of the booth he’d made his new home. It felt like years since he’d had an ordinary life; no, not ordinary, there was nothing ordinary about his life, except that it was gone.

  That was shit ordinary.

  He’d never gotten drunk on bourbon until the night his life came to a dead stop, and then getting drunk and staying that way seemed like the only decent hack left in the world, even though it made him a miserable bastard.

  Right now, all he cared about was the contents of this glass hitting his throat and seeing Lux on sta
ge.

  He’d already seen her first spot. She’d been dressed as a sexy schoolgirl in a short pleated tartan skirt, a white sleeveless shirt tied under her breasts and her hair in pigtails. She’d be dressed differently for her second spot. Didn’t matter what she came out as, harem girl or bikini babe, she was mesmerizing, regardless of how much or how little she wore, the height of her heels or the style of her hair.

  She was his own personal electric shock every time she appeared. More dangerous to his continued health and wellbeing than the cheap swill he was drinking.

  None of the other dancers affected him like Lux did. It’s not that they weren’t as athletic, as graceful or as fuck hot as Lux, it was just that they didn’t send him like she did.

  Lux sent him to places he’d never been and never wanted to come back from while he watched her for five eight-minute sets, six nights a week.

  On Sunday, Lux, and Reid’s liver, rested.

  He was worse than miserable, he was a pathetic excuse for a human being, hiding out in the last place anyone from his old life would ever look for him.

  Like he cared.

  He downed the bourbon and watched while Missy finished her set. Missy was a tiny slip of a girl who danced barefoot and always wore a bright colored bikini. She had short curly hair and a come-get-me smile that made men leave their booth seats for a place nearer the stage. This bar didn’t allow contact between the dancers and the drunks, definitely no touching, but he’d seen Missy leave with another regular, so that rule was wide enough to power a space shuttle through.

  Lux never smiled, never played to the audience like the other girls did. It was as if no one in the room existed for her. The only thing that got her attention was the spinning pole and the beat of the music she worked to. For all he knew, she went with men whose eyeballs had dried out, whose tongues flapped from watching her too, but he liked to think she was just using this place for a workout, to play dress-ups, and getting paid for it.

  But then he’d always been a big dreamer and look where that had gotten him.

  Lucky’s Nightclub.

  Nowhere. With nothing to recommend himself. And no idea how to kick-start his life again.

  About Ainslie Paton

  By day Ainslie Paton is a mild-mannered corporate storyteller working in marketing, public relations and advertising.

  She’s written about everything from the African refugee crisis and Toxic Shock Syndrome, to high-speed data networks and hamburgers.

  Nights and weekends she writes cracking, hyper-real romances. Her heroes are often tongue-tied and brooding, or heartbreakingly beta. Her heroines are the challenge they didn’t know they deserved.

  You can find out more about her books and newsletter at: www.ainsliepaton.com.au

  You can chat to her when she’s avoiding work on Facebook or on Twitter