Girl Meets Billionaire

by Brenna Aubrey et al.

  “Me, too,” I whisper thickly.

  “You’re close,” he says, and he begins to move slow and steady. He changes his angle, seems to swell inside me, stretching me. It’s painful and good at the same time.

  His eyes burn into mine. The intimacy of it sears.

  Then he’s hitting my clit, and I’m spinning away. “Henry, please! More.” I grab his hair.

  He goes harder. “Pull it, baby. Take what you need.”

  I cry out as an orgasm tears through me.

  He presses his face to my shoulder, stilling, shuddering inside me, coming with a small guttural sound.

  When we’re done, when he’s out of me, he cages me with his arms. “You are so unbelievable,” he says.

  I slide a finger down his cheek, then run it back up, down and up, loving the feel of his face, his whiskers. I think he likes when I touch his face almost as much as I do. Or maybe because I do.

  “I was going to take more time,” he says. “I had a plan.”

  I smile.

  “I mean it. I want everything perfect for you.”

  “You were supposed to leave your CEO role behind, remember?”

  “Sorry,” he says.

  “Don’t be. You make me feel like one of your people. You’re so beautiful with your people. They’re so lucky.”

  “You are my people.”

  I swallow and press my finger to his lip, trace the pillow of it.

  I’m his people.

  My throat is so clogged up with emotion, I couldn’t reply even if I wanted to.

  He kisses me again, and I’m in heaven on the cool sheets below him.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Vicky

  I shower while he makes phone calls about the Ten.

  I dry off and put on one of his soft, beautifully made dress shirts. When I wander out of the bathroom, the smell of garlic and cheese hits my pleasure center full blast.

  I find him cooking. Shirtless. Bare feet. Jeans hugging his hips just so.

  “What are you making?”

  He turns. His eyes go dark. “What are you wearing?”

  I give him an innocent look. “This?”

  He swears and turns back to the stove. “Alfredo sauce. And I’m at a critical point in this operation. There’s wine breathing. Why don’t you pour us a glass.”

  It’s breathing. He’s so nerdy about doing everything perfectly.

  I pour two glasses and go back. Set his by the stove top.

  “You have to add the cheese to the sauce so slowly,” he says, adding a microscopic amount of cheese to the pound of melted butter and heavy cream he’s been stirring slowly and methodically. “So slowly.”

  “It smells amazing.”

  He adds another micro amount, and another, and another. “Most people don’t do it like this.”

  But Henry does.

  I set down my wine and put my arms around him, making contact with the muscles and hard planes of him.

  “You are so going to ruin dinner.”

  I kiss his back. “I’m trying not to.”

  “Trying.” I can hear the smile in his voice. “Trying is not doing.” He flicks off the stove, smashes a lid onto the pan and turns. “Look at you,” he says, advancing on me.

  I back up. “Look at me what?”

  He reaches out but I move just out of his grasp and turn. And run. His place is huge and you can run in it. I make it to the living room.

  Rough hands grab me, turn me around to face him. He grabs the shirt and rips it open, then pushes me down to the couch.

  A condom appears. We fuck furiously, hands grasping, teeth grazing. His hot weight pins me.

  He pulls up my leg to get deeper.

  I hold his hair, taking him, pain and pleasure mingling.

  He smashes his sweaty forehead to my chest when he comes. I stop pulling his hair and just kiss it, coming down from my orgasm and enjoying his.

  I kiss his hair as he comes. He’s everything.

  He flops over at my side.

  He gets this serious look. “It was never like this.” He slides a hank of my hair through two fingers, with an expression like it’s the most amazing hair he’s ever felt.

  “Me, too,” I say.

  He seems to like that. He watches me with such warmth and affection. It feeds my soul. “I’m glad,” he says. “That was unbelievable. I wanted to do everything to you.”

  “You kind of did.”

  “Oh, hardly.”

  “Oh, hardly.” I smile. “I love to feel you come inside me. I love how your body feels.”

  “I love how you breathe,” he says. “Sometimes you just breathe and I want you.”

  I kiss him on the nose.

  “And that biting thing…”

  “Yeah?” I smile.

  “Yeah,” he says. “And that wet finger thing.”

  I narrow my eyes. “What wet finger thing?”

  “You know. The touch.”

  I furrow my brow, trying to think what he means.

  “When you lightly touched my asshole with your wet finger? It was…hot.”

  I frown. God, was I in that much of a fugue state? “I wasn’t doing anything like that.”

  “You just touched it, really lightly.”

  I study his eyes, trying to figure out if he’s joking or what. That’s when Smuckers jumps up and runs over the back of the couch, looking down at us, tail wagging, tongue hanging out. “Oh…” I say.

  “What? What’s wrong?” He follows the direction of my gaze, and a look of horror comes over him.

  Horror.

  I snort and smash my face to his chest.

  “So not funny,” he says.

  “It’s a little funny,” I say into the sweaty pillow of muscle on his chest.

  “Go away, Smuckers!”

  I’m just laughing. “I honestly don’t know if that clinches your Most Eligible Bastard status or destroys it,” I say.

  “Don’t even,” he says, rolling on top of me, caging me.

  I snort. “And to think I imagined you didn’t like dogs.”

  “That has to be the last joke you make about that.” He leans down, biceps bulging.

  I frown. “The last? Isn’t that a little extreme?”

  He kisses my neck. “I mean it. Or I might retaliate in the most excruciating way.”

  “I might like it,” I say. “But okay. Last joke.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Henry

  It’s after seven by the time we sit down to eat. I pour more wine and watch Vicky pick up her fork.

  “You think the sauce survived?” she asks.

  “I know it did.” I set down the bottle and stand behind her, rest my hands over her shoulders. “I think you’re going to be pleasantly surprised with this dish.”

  She looks up at me. “You just think you’re Mr. Awesome.”

  “Kind of.” I kiss her cheek.

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” She swirls the noodles in the sauce. “The talent portion of Most Eligible Bastard contest,” she jokes.

  I lean in closer. “I do believe I aced the talent portion of the contest earlier tonight.”

  “Hmmm,” she says. “Good point.”

  She slips the forkful of fettuccini between her pretty lips.

  A sheen of pure wonder creeps into her gaze. “Oh my god,” she says.

  “What’s that?”

  She gazes back up at me, brown eyes sparkling. “Parmesan garlic taste freak-out.”

  I sit down. We eat. A lot. She actually has seconds, like the best date ever.

  After dinner we take Smuckers out, strolling around in search of dessert. We decide on a bag of warm baklava from a food truck. We take it into Central Park and sit on a bench, feasting while we watch an extremely acrobatic man dance to a fiddle and a snare drum.

  Vicky makes exactly zero jokes about what I’ll refer to as The Smuckers Incident. In fact, she doesn’t have to; all she has to do is look at Smuckers and the
n look at me with an utterly innocent expression, and the joke is in the air.

  “Fuck off,” I growl.

  “What?” she laughs. “I can’t look at you guys now? My two fave guys?”

  “No, you can’t,” I snarl.

  I’m not mad. It’s fun. It’s all fun with her, like the best kind of escape, the way it was at Southfield Studios, us hiding from the world and carving out our own zone of simple pleasure inside the larger, more complicated real world.

  She leans against me. Whatever hesitation she had about us being together before seems gone.

  What was it?

  She’s an enigma, but I don’t mind. The more layers of her I peel away, the more I like her. The more I want her.

  I put my arm around her. She snuggles closer and something in me warms.

  It’s strange sitting in the park with Vicky. And it strikes me as strange that it would strike me as strange…until it occurs to me that every activity in my life fits into one of two categories: seduction and business.

  Sitting in the moonlit park fits into neither. It’s just nice.

  How did my life get so unbalanced? Even my beach house in the Hamptons—I use it to entertain clients or I don’t use it at all.

  It’s not there for pleasure, and I certainly never take women up there—I don’t like to give them the wrong idea, which is that our short-term hookups might not be short-term hookups.

  “Hey,” I say. “What are you and Carly doing for Labor Day weekend?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Nothing special.”

  “You want to get out of the city? I have a beach place in the Hamptons.”

  She sits up, seeming alarmed.

  I brush a strand of hair from her eyes. It’s so sexy when she wears it down. “What is it?”

  “Well…” She stares at a crushed Pepsi can, shining in the grass. “With everything so crazy…”

  No, she means.

  I almost don’t comprehend it. She’s taking the one night, no roles thing seriously. Treating this as a hookup. It defies my understanding of the universe, like water swirling the wrong way down the drain.

  I spent most of my dating career enforcing hookup rules. I recognize it when I see it.

  Three words: No. Fucking. Way.

  I set my fingertips to her chin with the gentle touch that gets her hot. I brush a kiss onto her lips. “Why not extend it?” I say. “Vacation holiday. Who says we can’t extend it? Nothing intruding.”

  Her pulse bangs in her throat. “Just for the record, things will be set right.” She watches my eyes. It’s important to her that I get that. It feels right to trust her on that.

  “I’m not worried about that. I take you at your word. I’m not talking about the company, I’m talking about this.” I lower my voice. “You know you want to. We’re in this far. Let’s keep it going. All the complications. Screw it all. Three more days.”

  This gets her thinking about it.

  “We leave the whole spiderweb of our lives behind,” I say. “We leave it here.” I kiss her again. “Or, actually, in the limo.”

  “I can’t leave Carly.” She puts her hands in her lap. “Not for a weekend. I mean, she’s sixteen. She would probably be fine. She’d love me to leave her with the place to herself but—”

  “I didn’t mean just you, I meant both of you,” I say. “I’d love to meet her and have her up with us. The best beach is just a few blocks away. We have a full staff. She can have her own room. We could leave Friday, early.”

  I can tell she’s thinking about it. “The traffic....”

  “Right,” I say. “If only I owned a strange machine with a propeller on the top of it that could fly right over cars and buildings. Oh, wait, I do.”

  She grins. “Tell me it’s not blue.”

  “It’s blue.”

  She studies my eyes, as though she’s not sure whether to take me seriously. What’s going on? Am I pushing things too fast?

  She pulls out her phone, swipes around, then groans. “Carly has two day-long can’t-miss dates to run lines with her girlfriend,” she says. “They’re trying to get leads in the fall production. I forgot they carved those out for this long weekend.”

  “Have her bring her girlfriend. Trust me, we have the space.” I trace the shell of her ear. She’s caving.

  “Of course, they might not get much studying done. Two of the guys from One Direction have rented the place next to mine. They might be rehearsing for some kind of duet tour. It could be distracting.”

  Her jaw falls open. “Seriously?”

  “Would I joke about something like One Direction?”

  “This feels like blackmail,” she says. “If I don’t say yes and she finds out, she’ll literally kill me.”

  “That would be terrible,” I say.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Henry

  Carly has Vicky’s laugh, Vicky’s eyes, and definitely Vicky’s spirit.

  But while Vicky has brown hair, Carly is a fiery redhead. It’s amazing to see them together, to see Vicky in girl mode, laughing and pointing with Carly and her sarcastic friend Bess as I take off over the city.

  Carly says soothing words to Smuckers, who’s in his little case in the back and not loving the ride.

  We land on the helipad at the estate garden house.

  It’s fun to see the three of them experience the grandeur of the place, which was built in the 1920s by one of the Vanderbilts. They make me love it all over again.

  Vicky goes to help the girls settle while I give instructions to Francine, the head of the staff. “I know it’s not what you’re used to,” I say to her.

  “It’s a breath of fresh air,” she says.

  “You know how messy teenaged girls are?”

  “It’s thrilling to see you have…friends here. We’re all so pleased.”

  I’m about to protest that I bring friends here. But I don’t.

  The two of them stake out the bedroom on the very end of the south wing. We order in wine and soda and gourmet pizzas. They stay exactly ten minutes. It’s hard to compete with the promise of two guys from One Direction.

  Vicky and I drink wine and talk about everything—even a little business. She wants to make sure we got the software Mandy requested. She changed her mind about it soon after I started taking her on facility tours. I tell her it’s in place.

  Now and then the girls come through with reports that they heard music, and they carry on detailed analyses of whether it was recorded music or if it was the guys in jamming mode.

  And as Vicky and I are fucking that night on the edge of the hot tub on the top veranda, and again as we have slow, lazy sex the next morning, I think to write One Direction a fan letter just for how completely they keep Bess and Carly glued to the other side of the mansion.

  “You take good care of her,” I say that afternoon. Vicky and I sit on the porch overlooking the expanse of lawn, which ends in a pool, a cluster of cabanas, and the beach, edged in sea grass, deep blue-green water beyond.

  Perched under an umbrella at the edge of the actual beach, Bess and Carly are in full teen girl splendor mode, running lines and staking out the neighbors, and Smuckers is a streak of white, running all around the lawn. The umbrellas are Locke blue, a fact that Vicky makes fun of.

  “We’re all each other has,” she says simply.

  I try to get more about her earlier life, but she’s vague, and eventually I find the conversation has circled around to her desire to know why I wear dark suits in the city and beige linen suits in the Hamptons.

  Does she just hate to think about that time? I won’t push her. I pushed her enough. And we’re supposed to be away from it all.

  The four of us walk along the beach for Saturday sunset, a ritual from when I have business visitors, who tend to enjoy the backyard view of the mansions, the lifestyles of the rich and famous, though they rarely admit it. Carly and Bess are no different, but they do admit it, pointing out different displays of
excess. Vicky seems unimpressed, if not slightly hostile toward displays of wealth.

  Between houses, the girls run ahead with Smuckers, kicking around in the surf.

  “Back in your town, remember how you told me about being bullied?” I say.

  Vicky gives me a blank look. “Sure.”

  “Was it somebody wealthy?”

  Her brow furrows. “Why would you think that?”

  “Just wondering. You’re not impressed like a lot of people are. And, well, you did call me a rich, entitled jackass at one point.”

  She takes my hand. “You know I don’t think that.”

  I keep my eyes on the horizon, feeling her gaze on my face. I wonder if that’s why my mother chose her. I hate the question I’m about to ask, but it’s been burning in me. “Did my mother seem…happy in those last years?”

  She squeezes my hand. “Henry—”

  “I just…didn’t know her the last few years. I missed her.” I never say that aloud.

  “She seemed happy…in her way.”

  I nod.

  “I wasn’t sure how much you wanted to know about her. But, yes. She had her routines and Smuckers. She’d terrorize people in the neighborhood, like when they wanted to pet him, she’d act angry. That was kind of her jam.”

  I smile. It’s a bittersweet feeling, more sweet than bitter now.

  “She was such a character,” I say. “I always imagined I could repair things. That somehow I’d break through and we’d have a heart-to-heart.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  I make her tell me all the stories she can remember. We stand in the wet, sucking sand together, the ocean swashing around our ankles, watching Carly and Bess swim, and Vicky tells me little anecdotes. One after another.

  We laugh about it. It feels good. No—it feels utterly amazing.

  “I’m glad she had you around,” I say.

  She kisses me on the shoulder. “I’m glad I could be.”

  “Why do you think my mother chose you?”

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  “Maybe it’s silly to keep wondering about it, but I do. Do you think my mother chose you because she sensed you have an allergy to guys like me? Did you two talk about that sort of thing?”