Shopping for a Billionaire 3

by Julia Kent

  “Declan!” They shake hands enthusiastically. “Good to see you.” Mom hands Dad the bottle.

  “White!” she chirps.

  “Thank you,” Dad says to Declan. “Want a beer?”

  “What about the wine, Jason?” Mom screeches, scandalized.

  Declan and Dad ignore her, like they planned it in advance. Dad shoots me a wink.

  “Sure. Whatcha got?”

  “You like stouts? I’ve got some microbrew from this little place in Framingham...” Declan walks away, following Dad, and just like that, he’s integrated into the household.

  I stand in my own childhood home and look around the living room. Everyone’s congregated in the tiny kitchen and I overhear Amy telling Carol about running in the marathon. Mom and Dad could buy a five-thousand-square-foot mansion in Osterville with an enormous living room and everyone would still cram into the kitchen to talk and taste and hang out.

  Declan breezed into the house, was told he needed to pee by a child, offered up a bottle of wine, and boom! Dad takes him to his Man Cave in the backyard like we’re married and have been together forever.

  I’m sensing a trend here.

  This might actually happen. Me and Declan.

  Carol walks into the living room, rubbing vanilla-scented lotion on her hands. She stares at me for a second, eyebrows raised. “You okay?”

  “Dad just took Declan to the Man Cave.”

  “He’s being accepted into the tribe.”

  “Is that good or bad?” I give her a helpless look and sink down onto the couch. The springs are shot, so I literally sink down, my feet flying off the floor. I bury my head in my hands.

  Carol stands over me and finishes rubbing the lotion. “I think you’re afraid of success.”

  “What? No. No, I’m not. I never had a problem with Dad taking Steve into the Land of Grunts and Farts.” Dad has a little hundred-square-foot shed that he winterized a while ago. It’s got a television, ancient lounge chairs Mom tried to throw away years ago, and all his old sci-fi paperbacks he’s been collecting since the 1960s, lined on homemade shelves.

  He illegally piped a wood stove in there, and has an old milk jug I suspect doubles as a toilet in a pinch. Sometimes he and Mom have fights so intense he sleeps out there. Just for one night, though. The Man Cave smells like male sweat, Old Spice, and onions. Seriously. There’s a minor methane crisis in there. Jeffrey says it smells like Grandpa.

  “Dad only took him back there to be nice to you. He hated Steve.”

  “I know.” Once Steve dumped me they allllll came out of the woodwork to tell me what an ass Steve was, and Dad led the charge. He was like pressure cooker. Once you popped the seal on the lid, more steam than you knew existed came pouring out.

  Enough to burn if you weren’t careful.

  “‘Pearls after swine’ was the exact phrase he used all the time,” she adds.

  “He said that about you and Todd, too.”

  “I know.”

  “No, like, at your wedding. And when Jeffrey was born. And then Tyler, and—”

  “Got it. Don’t need my nose rubbed in it.”

  Silence hangs between us for a second. I look like a hybrid of Mom and Dad. Carol, though, looks most like Mom. Lighter blonde hair, blue eyes, a round face with dimples, and plump cheeks that make her look perennially cheerful, even when she’s not smiling. She’s the oldest, and life hasn’t been easy these past few years.

  “Any luck with jobs?” I ask. She’s the one who got me into mystery shopping. Back when I was hired on full-time she had a great full-time job. Then Tyler began having huge behavioral problems, Todd dropped off the face of the earth, and she was laid off. Mom and Dad have helped. Carol mystery shops with the kids when she can, and she’s living on unemployment and some vague government assistance I don’t quite understand. She has a degree, and loads of determination, but not a lot of time or hope.

  “I have an interview with a call center. Night shift. Mom says she and Dad can help with babysitting.” Defeat oozes in her voice.

  “Minimum wage?”

  “No, actually. More like a standard three-to-eleven shift. I’d have to rely on Mom and Dad too much. it’s not fair to them.”

  “They love Jeffrey and Tyler,” I protest.

  “I know. It’s just…you don’t have kids. You don’t understand.” Her eyes shift down and she looks like a very serious, contemplative version of our mother. The dissonance is hard to reconcile. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Mom look…reflective.

  “No, you’re right. I don’t.” I do want kids someday. Watching Carol struggle the way she has definitely made me extend “someday” by a few years, though. Tyler and Jeffrey are the best kids ever (I’m biased), but they haven’t been easy to raise without help.

  “And you’re dating a hot billionaire.”

  I roll my eyes and she smirks. Ah. Now she looks like Mom again.

  Hot Billionaire chooses that moment to walk in, overhearing Carol’s comment “You’re dating another guy named Hot Billionaire?” His easy touch as he wraps an arm around my waist just adds to her embarrassment. I remember when she brought Todd home, when I was thirteen, and I thought he was so hot. Jealousy poured through me then, as Todd would give her hugs and kisses and little love pats. That was love, I thought. Back then, before Todd turned out to be pond scum.

  Declan’s not Todd.

  Carol turns bright pink. It looks like she poured a bottle of Pepto-Bismol all over her face. “We thought you were in the Man Cave, grunting and eating roast meat off a stick,” she says.

  “We were, until the little boys found us, and now your dad is playing horsey with them and he sent me in here for a rescue team.”

  Carol laughs and takes the chance to escape. “I’ll rescue him!”

  “Dinner’s soon! Declan, can you help set the table?” Mom comes out of the kitchen, her hair so thoroughly sprayed and set in stone by some chemical that will likely be proven in ten years to cause cancer, but by God keeps her hair in place even as she cooks.

  “Sure.” He winks at me and walks toward Mom. “Where’s the dining room?”

  Mom leads him through the kitchen into the formal dining room, the sanctuary of Good Food and the room we use exactly three times a year: Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. When not in use for a holiday, the dining table doubles as a storage facility for junk mail, LEGO toys Mom finds while vacuuming, and random light bulbs dad needs to remember to replace with LEDs but never does.

  Mom’s really pulled out all the stops, with a pale blue linen tablecloth and matching napkins. I wonder which thrift store she got that deal from, and then I see the glasses. Matching crystal glasses at each seat, the tops edged with gold.

  “Like my table?” she asks proudly.

  “Where’d you get it all?” I ask, definitely admiring. Mom and I have a shared love for “thrifting” and yard-saling.

  “Savers!” she exclaims, then catches Declan’s confused look.

  “What’s Savers?”

  Amy happened to come into the room and is halfway to greeting me and Declan, arms stretched out for a hug, when she stops cold at Declan’s words. “You don’t know what Savers is?”

  “Get me some smelling salts,” Mom jokes, “because I’m about to faint. Declan, we have to take you thrifting!”

  “Thrifting?” He seems amused.

  “Shopping at thrift shops. Yard sales. Estate sales. That sort of thing. And Savers is a chain of thrift shops.”

  “Used items?” He still seems confused. “So you only buy used items? Like antiques?”

  Mom’s turn to look confused. “Declan, you’ve never bought something used?”

  “An antique. Sure. Dad buys them all the time for the office and his house. But otherwise…no.”

  “You just shop in regular stores for everything?”

  “I have shoppers who do that for me. Unless it’s clothing. Then I just go to a tailor.”

  “Oh,” Mom says quie
tly. An awkward pause fills the air.

  “I would love to go ‘thrifting’ with you, Marie,” he says with a smile. “It sounds like fun.”

  He is officially the Best Billionaire Boyfriend I have ever had.

  Mom relaxes and points to the fridge. “Can you get the butter lamb, Declan? It’s time to get the food on the table.”

  His face goes slack, the friendliness replaced by a kind of tempered shock he’s obviously trying to hide. “Butter lamb?”

  I laugh, trying to get him to chill out. “A few generations back, Dad’s family was from the Buffalo area. Polish. There’s this tradition where you—”

  “Where you have a pound of butter that’s pressed and formed into the shape of a lamb, and you put it out on the table at Easter,” he says.

  Everyone freezes. Jaws drop. Eyes open wide.

  “You know about the butter lamb?”

  His hands are shaking, just a tad, as he shoves them in the front pockets of his jeans. “Um, sure. My mom was from that area. We had one every year.” He swallows so hard we can all hear the click in his throat, and his face is uncertain, eyes blinking rapidly. “I haven’t seen once since…”

  “Since she died?” I ask gently, my hand reaching out to his forearm for reassurance. He doesn’t move, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t change his stance. I want to ask him again how his mother died, but this really isn’t the time.

  Nod.

  “Then wonderful!” Mom gushes. “Not wonderful that your mother died, but wonderful that you can reconnect with an old family tradition.” She reaches for his shoulders and directs him to the fridge, then walks past him to the stove to stir something. A timer goes off and she mutters to herself.

  Declan sets the yellow lamb on the table and looks out the back sliding doors toward the yard, where Dad is pushing Tyler on the swing set.

  “Can we go outside?” he asks in a ragged voice.

  “Of course.” We head toward the door and I pause with my handle on it. “If this is too much, we can leave. Go somewhere quiet and—”

  He takes both my hands in his and smiles at me with troubled eyes. “It’s more than enough, but not too much. I want to stay. Your family is lovely.”

  “My family is crazy.”

  “Crazy can be lovely.”

  Chapter Eleven

  By the time dinner and the Easter egg hunt are over, everyone has turned into a human potato bug, round and grey, a series of roly-polies stuffed silly. Conversation has devolved into exclamations of how good all the food was and groans about how our stomachs are about to explode.

  “Can I see your childhood bedroom?” Declan asks. He’s relaxed considerably since he first arrived.

  “Want to examine my Barbies?” But I stand and reach out for his hand, leading him up the stairs. Jeffrey and Tyler are in the backyard shrieking and chasing Amy with little toy guns, shooting foam bullets at her. They miss every single time.

  Dad has actually undone his belt and the top button of his khakis, and rests in a lounge chair like Al Bundy, one hand tucked in his waistband.

  Mom’s in the kitchen fussing over the leftovers. There’s enough food to feed an army.

  “My room isn’t anything special,” I explain as we walk up the carpeted stairs. When Amy turned sixteen Mom finally got her wish—cream carpet—and even now, more than five years later, it feels weird to me. I went away to college and the house had industrial green, flat carpet and came home to a Better Homes and Gardens spread.

  “It’s special because it’s yours.”

  We’re greeted, first, by the giant head of Justin Bieber on my bedroom door.

  “Nice. You were a Belieber?”

  “That’s a sick, sick joke from Amy.”

  I open the door and Justin steps aside. “Voilà!” I sweep my arm around the room. White furniture, all of it “thrifted” and refinished by Dad. Simple sheer curtains. An entire wall of cork squares with push-pinned articles and pictures from teen magazines. A ton of shells from vacations to Cape Cod.

  Nothing amazing. The amazing part, actually, is that Mom hasn’t made me clear it out yet. She claimed Carol’s old bedroom as a yoga studio a few years ago. My time is likely ticking.

  Declan’s hands are all over me suddenly, his lips on my shoulder, caresses in places that tell me exactly what he’s thinking, and he’s not thinking about Justin Bieber.

  At least, I hope not.

  “We can’t have sex in here!” I hiss. Jeffrey and Tyler are thumping up and down the carpeted stairs now, with Jeffrey calling out numbers. An impromptu game of Hide and Go Seek is afoot, and I don’t want the kids to catch us hiding something of Declan inside Auntie Shannon.

  “Why not?”

  “For one, my twin bed is so small you’ll poke my eye out before you hit the target—”

  “Is this the target?”

  I struggle to speak as electric jolts shoot through me like I’m mainlining a battery. The heat pouring out of his rock-solid chest and hips that press into my own belly makes my knees go weak. Teenage Shannon who spent many fitful nights dreaming about this moment is clashing with Responsible Shannon.

  “And for two, I don’t want anyone in my family to hear!”

  As if on cue, Jeffrey shouts, “Ready or not, here I come!”

  “I want to hear you say that,” Declan whispers as he bites my earlobe.

  “You—I—what are you—oh my God,” I gasp as he slips his hands under my waistband and does unspeakable things.

  “Then let’s go have sex in your car.”

  “We can’t have sex in my car!” Teenage Shannon is, like, totally grossed out by the idea of finally having sex in her parents’ house but doing it in a car that looks like it should be sprayed down by the mosquito truck is even worse. All the Shannons agree on this point, even the pulsing little Shannon in my pants, the one that keeps screaming Yes yes yes even though she doesn’t have a mouth.

  “Why not? We already had sex in mine, so fair is fair. Your turn.”

  “I drive a car with a dead insect on top of it.”

  “Maybe that’s my real fetish.”

  “Oh, toilets aren’t enough?”

  “I’ll show you a fetish or two.”

  A rush of warm electricity fires out from my core through every single pore on my body, and I’m about to agree to whatever he wants and throw in a few of my own requests as well, when—

  “SHANNON!” Dad’s voice is joyful and blessedly ingenuous. “Let’s get ready for ice cream.”

  “Ice cream?” Declan murmurs, fingers sliding up to find my throbbing point that makes me inhale so sharply a strand of hair gets caught in my nostril.

  “It’s trad”—my voice hitches with arousal and groaning need—“ition. We stuff ourselves silly and then go out for chocolate-dipped cones. The local ice cream joint opens today. Then we go to the movies.”

  “Ice cream and the movies on Easter? I love your family.”

  “I love your fingers.”

  “I have other long bits of me you might love, too.”

  “THANNON AND DECLAN!” Jeffrey screams, right outside my door. Oh, no. Did I lock it? Did Declan? “It ith time for eyth cream!”

  “I love eyth cream,” Declan says as he kisses me, his tongue probing deep, wet, and luscious. This is the kind of kiss a man gives a woman when there are no preliminaries, where you go right for the marrow and the soul, because all those surface layers peel away with a single touch.

  The kind of kiss you can enjoy and treasure for the rest of your life without ever experiencing any other kind.

  “Hey, Shannon, are you guys—” Amy barges through the door the same way she did when we were kids and living at home. Hell, the same way she does in our shared apartment now.

  Declan smiles against my lips, pulling his hands out of my pants, leaving me frantic and disassembled.

  “Oh, you two are having a different kind of dessert,” she mumbles, pulling back and closing the door, but not quite fast en
ough.

  “Auntie Thannon! Declan! Eyth cream time!” Jeffrey bursts into the room and slides between us, wrapping his little arms around my waist. “Group hug!”

  Amy snickers.

  “Group hug?” Declan ruffles his hair anyhow, but the disappointment and skepticism in his voice makes me snicker, too.

  “Ice cream and the newest Pixar movie will have to be a poor substitute.”

  A spreading grin lights up his face. “No. A great substitute.”

  I smack his shoulder. “Hey!”

  “We have all the time in the world,” he adds, pressing a kiss against my cheek.

  “Groth,” Jeffrey mutters, pulling on my hand. “Eyth cream!”

  “You owe me a double, kid,” I say as we all head downstairs to the waiting crew.

  Chapter Twelve

  “You are the worst wife ever,” I hiss to Amanda as we get out of the Turdmobile. We’ve parked a few blocks away from the credit union and she’s nattering on about strategy in between grilling me about my relationship with Declan. A quick glance at my car and the light bounces off a bunch of little sparkly things littering my floor. The Easter Bunny was good to Jeffrey and Tyler. A little too good. Plus, Mom still insists on giving her own kids a basket, so I have enough chocolate egg foil wrappers on the floor of my car to build three disco balls.

  I kill the engine and climb out of the car. A kid on a skateboard who looks like he’s about twelve, with a Justin Bieber haircut and a Minecraft t-shirt, waves as he skates past and says, “Your car’s a piece of shit.” His laughter trails off.

  So does my self-confidence.

  “Ignore him. Focus on me. Tell me every detail about Declan. Your bedroom after Easter dinner?”We have both been so busy for the past two weeks. Amanda was at a big mystery shopper’s convention in Kansas City last week, and this is the first chance we’ve had to talk in person. It figures: I live a dull, boring life for freaking ever, and just when it gets good she’s not around. And now we can catch up, but we’re about to pretend to be married.