The Billionaire Bargain #2(3)
“I’m serious, Grant, we have to stay on the ball here.”
“I can think of other things I’d like you to stay on,” he murmured with a rakish grin.
Dammit, no one had a rakish grin in real life! Rakish grins were for sexy pirates and dashing seventeenth century French spies with ruffled shirts! I refused to melt for an attribute real people weren’t even supposed to have.
“You’re not a pirate,”I informed him.“You don’t have a parrot or a hook hand or anything except the sexiness, so you can just stop with the pirateness right now and get back to business.”
It’s just possible that I was becoming tipsy. Maybe. You make a not entirely weak argument for the tipsiness hypothesis.
Grant didn’t even blink at my verbal sidetrip into pirate territory. “Business, hmmm? Ah, a girl with her eye on the prize. Are you into diamonds? Or did you see that movie about blood diamonds and become a sapphire girl?” His hand came up to stroke my cheek; I leaned into it without thinking. “Rubies would certainly be enchanting with your complexion.”
“Please stop talking,” I said into the skin of his palm. Oooh, nice skin. Just slightly weathered enough to be rugged, and so warm.
“If you insist,” he replied with a glint in his eye. He leaned closer.
I slapped him away.“Not like that! I’m pretty sure you can stop talking without using my lips as a breaking mecha—mechamis—stopping thing!”
He pouted. I was nearly overcome with the urge to kiss him in order to stop him from pouting. It would have been for the greater good of humanity. Pouts like that could drive the entire female population of Earth to sex-based insanity.
“Is that really how you want to treat your fiancé?”he asked, his eyes wide in a parody of tragic disappointment.“Lacey, I do believe you’ll give me a complex.”
“You’re not my fiancé,” I mumbled.“The question is invalid.”
“I know a few hundred people who would disagree,” he said.
“Fuck those guys,” I said eloquently.
“I’d rather f*ck you,”he said bluntly, and my entire body lit up like a volcano, magma pulsing through my veins as I swooned towards him, melting.“Though if you’d prefer to wait for the wedding night, I might let myself be persuaded.”
Contrary to this statement, his hand began a leisurely journey up my thigh, occasionally pausing to take in the sights and soak up the atmosphere. I was torn between derailing it and telling it to stop snapping vacation photos and get to its final destination before its hotel reservation was canceled.
“Now, as to the wedding dress and wedding ring—”
The beacon light of the neon Steddy Tatts sign had never looked so inviting, like the shining beam of a lighthouse saving me from the stormy seas of hormones, really bad decisions, and future humiliation. I practically leapt out of the limo almost before the driver had come to a full stop, avoiding spraining my ankle Lord-only-knows-how as I blurted:“We will talk about this tomorrow goodnight goodbye!!”
Grant’s voice pursued me up the steps to my apartment, his accent only broadened by his obvious amusement:“Don’t leave me in suspense, Lacey: do you prefer princess, or square-cut?”
Princess, but there was no way in hell I was telling him that.
TWO
I awoke with an all-drum band going to town in my head, improvising alternatively between meringue, salsa, and a little-known genre of drum music I like to call ‘f*ck you, Lacey, f*ck you so hard for drinking that much, are you a f*cking idiot, oh God I want to die, let me just die if it will only end this pain.’ It’s kind of obscure, but I myself am well-acquainted with its many fascinating variations.
“Fuuuuuuuuuck,”I moaned, and rolled over to blink blearily at the alarm clock. The fuzzy red numerals informed me that it was noon. Noon—there was something important about noon. Work? My heart seized up in a moment of panic before I remembered that it was my weekend off; I wasn’t scheduled to go in till Monday. So, not work then. Oh well. It would come to me.
I let my head fall back into the pillow. Pillows were great. The whole world should be made of great big fleecy pillows, and darkness, and silence. Oh God. That had definitely been too much champagne last night. Was it possible to actually die of a hangover? I would definitely be testing that theory to its limit this morning—er, afternoon. Oh God. Why me? Couldn’t this hangover and its pounding headache have gone to someone who deserved it, like a terrorist or an embezzler or Grant Fucking Devlin? There was no justice in the world. Just blaring noonday light, and that endless pounding drumming sound— Bam, bam, bam. BAM.
Wait a minute.
BAM.
That drumming was not coming from inside my head. It was coming from…my front door? How long had whoever it was been knocking there? Someone was really f*cking determined.
If it was Grant, he better have brought an entire year’s production of aspirin and the annual coffee crop of a random Latin American country if he wanted me to refrain from ripping his head off.
“Hold on a damn minute!” I yelled, and immediately regretted it as the sound waves of my own voice crashed through my head. Wincing and muttering every curse word I could think of, I stood up.
The frantic pounding at the door, if anything, intensified.