Trillionaire Boys' Club: The Connector Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Connector

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Connector

  GET A FREE BOOK!

  A Note About Reading Order

  Chapter One - Nathan

  Chapter Two - Alex

  Chapter Three - Nathan

  Chapter Four - Alex

  Chapter Five - Alex

  Chapter Six - Nathan

  Chapter Seven - Alex

  Chapter Eight - Nathan

  Chapter Nine - Alex

  Chapter Ten - Nathan

  Chapter Eleven - Alex

  Chapter Twelve - Alex

  Chapter Thirteen - Alex

  Chapter Fourteen - Alex

  Chapter Fifteen - Nathan

  Chapter Sixteen - Alex

  Chapter Seventeen - Alex

  Chapter Eighteen - Nathan

  Chapter Nineteen - Alex

  Chapter Twenty - Alex

  Chapter Twenty-One - Nathan

  Chapter Twenty-Two - Alex

  Chapter Twenty-Three - Alex

  Chapter Twenty-Four - Nathan

  Chapter Twenty-Five - Alex

  Chapter Twenty-Six - Alex

  Chapter Twenty-Seven - Nathan

  Chapter Twenty-Eight - Alex

  Chapter Twenty-Nine - Alex

  Chapter Thirty - Nathan

  Chapter Thirty-One - Alex

  Chapter Thirty-Two - Alex

  Chapter Thirty-Three - Alex

  Chapter Thirty-Four - Alex

  Chapter Thirty-Five - Alex

  Chapter Thirty-Six - Nathan

  Sneak Peek: The Clothing Mogul

  Chapter One - Ashton

  Want to know what happens next?

  Shit You Should Know

  Trillionaire Boys’ Club: The Connector

  Aubrey Parker

  Copyright © 2016 by Aubrey Parker. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited.

  The author greatly appreciates you taking the time to read this work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought the book, or telling your friends about it, to help spread the word.

  Thank you for supporting Aubrey Parker

  For my readers.

  GET A FREE BOOK!

  THE BURNING OFFER is the first book in my “Trevor’s Harem” series — a hot and suspenseful billionaire’s game of tested limits and forbidden temptations that’s like nothing you’ve ever read before. It normally sells for $2.99, but I’d like to give you a FREE copy. Just click the link below to get it!

  http://aubreyparker.net/aubreyfb/

  THANK YOU FOR READING!

  Aubrey Parker

  All of the books in the Trillionaire Boys’ Club series are meant to be read as standalone novels. That’s why I haven’t numbered the books: the number really doesn’t matter much for most readers, and I don’t want to imply that it does.

  In each book, you’ll read the story of one of the Club’s members and the woman he comes to love. The romance is self-contained and does not require knowledge of earlier books.

  However, some readers will want to read the books in the order I wrote them because behind each book’s love story, there is a slowly building master plot. You don’t have to worry about this “big arc” to appreciate and enjoy any individual book at all, but if you prefer to read “in the ideal order,” you’ll want to start with The Connector — the story of the Club’s founder, Nathan Turner. At the end of that book and each that follows, I suggest the ideal next book … IF you choose to read that way.

  … but you absolutely don’t need to.

  Happy reading!

  - Aubrey Parker

  CHAPTER ONE

  NATHAN

  THE WHITE-HAIRED MAN LOOKS at me from across his desk and says, “Young man, do you even know how much money a trillion dollars is?”

  I smile, saying nothing. I glance at my assistant, Geoffrey, who taps on his mini tablet. The old geezer huffs — either because he thinks tablets are for whippersnappers or because he needs his nurse.

  He waits for my answer. I say nothing, filling the room with silence while I wait. Making connections is half art, half negotiation. And the best negotiation tool in the world, other than lack of need, is silence.

  Wilcox needs nothing. None of us do, not even me.

  But the silence works on him, while I cross my legs and smile.

  I’m sitting in a pristine teak-and-leather chair across an acre of polished mahogany, thinking that Joseph Wilcox must be five thousand years old. He’s not as old as Colby Burton or Rudolph Daugherty, both of whom I’m sure negotiated the hostile takeover of the dinosaur monopoly by a previously under-the-radar mammalian startup, but he might be four times my age. Fine. I’m getting used to the clash of ointments and single-malt scotch. To be a billionaire, you usually have to shut yourself in an office and ignore friends and family for five or six decades, hoarding assets like a greedy dragon. The Old Guard is like that. So far they’ve all been skeptical, just like Wilcox here.

  I don’t care how this meeting works out anymore. Plan B is already moving along, and seems like the clear way to go. Besides, who cares if I don’t get Wilcox? He’s only worth $6.7 billion. Hunter Altman, whom I just got on board, is already worth a third of that and he’s only thirty. And Caspian White? Forget about it.

  “It’s a thousand billions,” says Wilcox.

  I don’t want to be outright insulting. After all, I do want a connection to this man, same as all the others, in time. But if he doesn’t believe in the Syndicate yet? No skin off my back in the long term. He’ll come around in time, and I’ve too much money lined up to beg for his faith now.

  Instead of saying, Thank you for your math skills or Hey, I’ve got that same functionality on the cell phone in my pocket, I find my most polite voice. “I know it’s a tidy sum.”

  “Tidy?” he snaps. “Son, how long have you been in this game?”

  “Depends on how you measure it, Sir.”

  Old men like it when you call them, Sir. For the record, I do, too, but that’s more because I like having my ass kissed than because I feel it’s an appropriate tribute to my authority.

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m 28.”

  This should impress the hell out of Wilcox, but instead he takes it as a point of mockery. He tips his head back, and bounces laughter against the paneled wood, pregnant with the burnt-hair stench of cigar smoke.

  “You’ve barely begun. What does your company do again? A school, right?”

  Now he’s being an asshole. When I started Learn.it back in college, it was just an old Macbook and a dream. It was worth over $100M when I sold it to Teach.org, but instead of resting on my laurels, I 10X’d that shit in four years with a fearless and downright prophetic string of investments that all (I repeat: all) turned meteoric. I was one of the first investors in LiveLyfe, EverCrunch, and GameStorming. There’s more, but those are the best.

  Today I know the founders of those three companies personally — and, more importantly, they know each other because of me. It’s not unfair to argue that without me, LiveLyfe wouldn’t have bought out GameStorming, and Caspian White might only be worth a few billion. Like this old man.

  “It’s an online education platform,” I say. As if he doesn’t know it perfectly well. As if his own assistant didn’t brief him. But that’s the Old Guard. Fine. My Plan B is kicking. Wilcox can hop aboard or miss the train. Cool
either way, so long as I don’t lose my afternoon to backhanded insults.

  “Online,” he says, mouthing the word like liver or Jell-O. “Which is just another way to say ‘inflated.’ This new generation thinks that computers are magical things. Once something is on the computer, it’s somehow ‘worth’ ten times as much as it actually is. But there’s no substance, is there? No books, no buildings, no classrooms. No assets. What is there to ‘online education’ except for electrical signals?”

  I’m pretty sure it’s inaccurate to say that computers do their work solely by “electrical signals,” but I decide then and there to ask Onyx Scott and Aiden Page. I’ll be meeting with them soon. Say, Misters Scott and Page, does your so-called Internet thingamadoodad work on static electricity or witch’s brew? Was the Forage IPO actually a stop on a sideshow selling miracle tonics to cure dropsy and typhoid?

  Move over, Old Guard. A new breed of billionaire has been born.

  I keep my mouth shut, smile where Wilcox can see it. It probably makes me look too young and dumb to be anything more than a nuisance.

  Not his competition. And not his partner … yet.

  “Your idea is absurd, and founded on a fundamental misunderstanding of what business is,” Wilcox tells me. “It’s taken me my whole life to accumulate a few billion dollars. The idea of gathering a trillion dollar pool is laughable. National debts number in the trillions. Gross national products number in the trillions. If you took a trillion one-dollar bills and stacked them one on top of another, they’d reach to—”

  “I understand how much money it is, Sir.”

  “I don’t think you do. I pay attention to what’s happening out there, with you and your ilk. I’ve seen Ashton Moran and Lincoln Moore and Ben Stone all parading around, doing the talk show circuit, making spectacles of themselves. I can’t go to a bookstore without seeing Hunter Altman or Caspian White all over the magazine stand. But just because Trevor Stone thinks it’s important to show his goddamn face everywhere instead of minding the business he’s supposed to be running at Eros doesn’t mean that—”

  “Actually, Trevor is a prop for Eros PR. Daniel Rice runs it.” This is technically a secret, but Wilcox is old-school enough never to violate our cone of silence out of spite. Besides, the geezer will come around; then he’ll need to understand Eros and who’s behind it. Some of what we’re considering, once the Syndicate is up and running, involves Eros and its partners as linchpins.

  Or like my Plan B group has already said: Some day soon, we’ll rule the world.

  “You know what I mean, Son. The problem with you new billionaires is you don’t understand that when you lack real assets, this is all easy come, easy go. My assistant looked you up. She says your net worth is barely one billion dollars. You yourself are barely qualified to be in this billionaire club you want to build.”

  I don’t rise to his bait. The expression goes, Your network is your net worth, and within the year, my network will be worth $1 trillion whether Wilcox joins us or not. I’ve always been a networker — someone who connects people with assets then splits the spoils. Impossible for most, simple for some. For me it’s a gift. Learn.it gave me seed capital, but now the seeds come from my friends. $1 billion, for me, is the opening shot of a lifelong race.

  “So you’re not interested in joining.”

  “Not even a little. I have my own business to run. One with buildings and factories and tangible things. At the end of the day, my work can be measured and weighed. The same can’t be said of you and your young friends.”

  That’s not universally true, of course. Mateo Saint has his restaurants. Clive Spooner has his privacy chips, poised by new legislation to triple or quadruple his worth. Cole Ellison’s business is remarkably similar to Wilcox’s, and Hampton Brooks and Ashton Moran both have vast networks of factories, full of employees and delivery trucks.

  But that’s not what Wilcox wants to think, and I’m no longer in a mood to convince him.

  I force myself to stand before he does, then extend a hand and thank him for his time. Wilcox is polite enough, even while he condescends to my paltry one billion dollar net worth and dumb ideas, to shake it. Fine. I may secretly harbor a grudge against this man for now, but one day his billions will join ours.

  Of course it’s absurd for anyone to be a trillionaire. But it’s going to become irresistible to even the Old Guard soon … once I prove that eighty or so men and women can truthfully claim the same thing.

  “Word of advice, Mr. Turner,” Wilcox says, as our hands part and I turn to leave. “Diversify into the real world. Your online business could lose all of its value tomorrow. If you’re in education, look into brick and mortar. Visit a real institute of higher education for a change, and see how tomorrow’s leaders are properly made.”

  This is such an old man piece of wisdom, I nearly choke trying not to laugh in his face.

  But I fight the urge, and instead tell him that visiting a real institute of higher education is exactly what I’m doing tomorrow.

  Which just so happens to be true.

  Unfortunately.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ALEX

  “WHO IS NATHAN TURNER?” JENNA says into her phone.

  “Jenna. Seriously. We’re going to be late.” I beckon, but she can’t see me. She’s looking down at her phone as she crosses the quad, and she just barely missed one of the fluted black lampposts along the central walkway. They’re made to look antique, but were actually brand new last year. When my mom and I visited campus last fall, half the quad was dug up to install the power lines. It was almost off-putting enough to sour my impression, but Mom’s an alumnus. She kept going on and on about how nice the quad usually is, and how nice it’d be again by freshman year.

  Whatever. School is school.

  Jenna doesn’t miss the next lamppost — she strikes it head-on, then looks up at the thing as if it leapt into her path on purpose.

  “Jenna, seriously!”

  “Oh relax, Alexandra.”

  I hate it when she uses my full name. She goes out of her way to say it when she thinks I’m being anal, and hence worthy of a dowdy moniker. To Jenna, college is a party where we’re occasionally expected to take tests, and my meticulous studies cramp her style. Call me crazy, but I see things in the opposite order. Sue me for wanting the education I paid for.

  “I hate it when we come in late. Professor Simken always glares at people who come in after he’s started talking.”

  “We can sit in the balcony. He won’t even see us up there.” She shrugs, probably deciding that barely being there by way of the balcony isn’t too far from not being there at all. I can already sense her preparing an excuse to skip the lecture completely. Serves me right for trying to synchronize our schedules. Jenna is a bad influence on me.

  She’s still staring at her phone, scrolling down on something. “And what’s ‘LEARN IT’?” She rolls her eyes. “Sounds boring.”

  “What are you reading?”

  “There’s a guest speaker in E.T. today.”

  I turn. E.T, despite Jenna’s frequent references to Spielberg, stands for Educational Theory — one of those classes that’s half business and half overlap for the dedicated education majors. It’s an intro course, but so far fascinating. The prof is a business and marketing junkie after my own heart, somehow turning plain old “education” into “education of managers and leaders within a business, from an owner’s point of view.” I thought it’d be about teaching kids math, and resented the college’s requirement that I take it as a business major. It’s turned out to be a covert course on entrepreneurism and building a private empire. Exactly the sort of thing that lights my fire, like reading write-ups in Fast Company.

  “Alex! Jenna! Wait up!”

  The shout snaps both of our heads toward an open expanse of green. Corey is running toward us, backpack slapping his back. He wears it over both shoulders, as opposed to the one-shoulder-sling that most of us favor. I admire it. The
look is nerdier than the one-shoulder version, because a casually slung backpack tells the world you’re going to class because you’re supposed to, even though you’re cool enough to skip it. Corey’s way of wearing his pack is more comfortable and doesn’t wrench his back. I don’t think Corey is gay, but it doesn’t help that he hangs out with me and Jenna way more than with guys. He says he had a girlfriend in high school, but because neither of us have seen her, Jenna figures he’s Gay Until Proven Straight. She even uses an acronym for it right in front of his face: GUPS.

  I slip my phone from my pocket. We’re going to be late now no matter what we do, but at least it’ll be all three of us. No point in rushing. We’ll get the big-eyed stare no matter what, unless we sneak into the back of the lecture hall balcony like Jenna suggested. But then we’ll miss the whiteboard.

  Corey arrives in front of us, smiling, a bit out of breath. He’s not a bad-looking guy. He needs a haircut and a tweak to his oversized wardrobe, but his face has all the right angles and his smile is wide, white, and kind of adorable. But he’s also like a puppy. Hetero or not, the three of us couldn’t be more than friends. His affections focus outward, not into the circle.

  “You going to Econ?”

  “We were,” I say, sighing. I hate being late. Now that it’s two against one and the on-time ship has sailed, I’ll bet Jenna and Corey lobby to blow it off. I could go solo, but doubt I will. I need Jenna beside me in class. I got used to my first semester classmates, but second semester is brand new. I’m just now getting comfortable being in college, but I’m not yet used to the somehow-judgmental pizza faces that for some reason populate Econ 101.

  “What’s that?” Corey says, his hands on both backpack straps, ticking his chin to indicate Jenna’s renewed attention on her phone.