The Billionaire Bargain #1(20)
“A splendid idea,” Grant said. “I only wish I’d thought to reserve tickets—”
“Don’t you worry about that!” shouted Mr. Jennings. I was beginning to wonder if he was deaf. “The wife and I have an extra pair, you’ll be our guests. Glad to have you!”
“Oh, thank you, but I couldn’t possibly—” I started.
“—say no,” Grant finished for me firmly. “We wouldn’t dream of saying no.”
Did I say I was going to disembowel him with a stapler? That would be over way too quickly. I was going to disembowel him with half of a toothpick.
“I’ll look forward to it then,” Mr. Jennings roared. He shook Grant’s hand with an enthusiasm that made it look like it might fly off at the wrist, through the window, and keep going until it broke the sound barrier. Then he swooped towards me and kissed the back of my hand like he was a knight in some medieval romance. “I’ll see you tonight.”
I rounded on Grant the second the door swung shut. “You complete ass, what the hell was that, I don’t even have anything I can wear to—”
And then Grant’s lips were on mine, burning hot, hungry and insistent, undeniable in their urgency as they claimed me, as his tongue plundered my mouth, working a moan from my throat as his fingers tangled in my hair, as my traitorous hands came up unconsciously to grip at his hips—
“We can’t,” I whispered against his lips.
But I was always half persuaded. If he just kept going—
“He’s watching,” he murmured back.
My eyes snapped open and I saw Mr. Jennings through the office’s glass wall, casually looking away. My cheeks burned and my stomach dropped. Of course that was the only reason Grant kissed me again. Of course.
When was I going to stop torturing myself by thinking otherwise?
If he’d wanted more than he’d gotten four days ago, he’d have pursued me by now. Anything that happened now was just a game to him.
“Better put on a show,” he whispered against my neck, and damn him, but that felt good. More than good—it felt like heaven.
I allowed him to reclaim my mouth, and if my heart felt like it was going to burst, at least I had his lips over mine in this moment. At least I had his hard body pressed against mine, strong and warm and as intoxicating as wine. At least I could imagine, just for this second, that there was something more here than a ploy to save Devlin Media Corp…
No. Too dangerous to imagine, too close to wishing and dreaming. Too close to a broken heart, the kind I swore I’d never give myself again, not after all the bastards who’d used me and then left me when I fell too deeply in love. As soon as Jennings disappeared from sight, I pushed Grant away.
He didn’t even looked ruffled, the bastard. He just smiled that infuriating smile.
“I’ll pick you up at eight.”
ELEVEN
“Shit shit shit shit shit!”
This nigh-Shakespearian bout of eloquence was brought to you by my complete inability to find anything to wear. A gala-worthy dress? On my budget. Ha ha f*cking ha.
Let’s talk about my formal dress options. There was the little classic black number with a pearl neck clasp that I was clinging to in the desperate and probably even delusional hope that one day I would lose twenty pounds and it would look amazing again, assuming that I could ever fix the zipper that had ripped out the back the last time I tried to wear it. There was the scarlet backless dress that Kate had persuaded me to buy last year, which had been completely faded and rumpled beyond repair in a moment of“dry cleaners are a scam, I can wash this myself” insanity on my part. There was—I shit you not—my high school prom dress, which looked like what might happen if you got Cinderella’s ball gown, a vat of green ink past its sell-by date, and all the sequins produced in the entire decade of the 1980s into a room with a drunk seamstress, left the lights on low, and let things proceed to their natural and horrifying conclusion.
There were cabbage-sized green roses on the shoulders, for f*ck’s sake.
What the hell does it matter, I told myself angrily, it’s not like you care what Grant thinks you look like. It’s not like you want anything to happen again, nothing canever happen again. It’s not like you want him to remember the time something did happen, and try to make it happen again, and maybe even let things go even further, his firm cock sliding into you as you oh hell, oh hell, oh damn this all to hell!
I was just about to burst into tears when I was startled by the ring of the doorbell.
“Coming!” I rushed to the door, almost tripping over the edge of my pink bathrobe. Maybe my caller would be a serial killer and then I could have an excuse for not going to this party.
Unfortunately, my caller was actually Grant’s driver, once again wearing an expression that suggested that he was not sure how his life had come to this, but that there were probably worse fates. Maybe.
His arms were laden with bags, and those bags had designer names on them that I had only ever seen only while window shopping. Window shopping in the kind of stores where they don’t put price tags on things because if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. The kind of stores I had only actually stepped a foot into once, before a snooty fitting assistant sidled up to me, looked me up and down like I was a rotting watermelon, and informed me that maybe I would have better luck finding sizes in my price range at the local strip mall.