Page 11 of Unwrapping the Billionaire

She grins at me, and curls her skinny fingers around my red tie again… And then she’s smashing her forehead into mine.

8

Jonas

Past - Three Years Ago

When I come around, I’m in the living room of our old apartment. It’s Christmas Eve again—a year on from the night we first met.

The place looks like a glitter explosion, but Grace always went crazy at this time of year. I never asked her why, but I have a sneaking suspicion she was trying to make up for all the crap Christmases I’d been raised on.

Grace and me are going at it again, but not like before.Take me back to the wild sex, baby.This is far more uncomfortable to watch.

We’re standing over by the window, waving our arms around like windmills, and flinging words at each other. We fucked hard, and we fought even harder. We were too damn similar from the get-go.

“You didn’t have to take your father’s promotion, Jonas!” Grace’s face is screwed up in frustration and anger.Her face looked like that a lot toward the end.“You don't have to take his shit any more. You don't have to prove anything to him. You don'tneedanything from him. You could’ve just walked away.”

“And lose out on a controlling stake in his company?” My upper lip curls in contempt. Exactly how my father’s used to do I realize with a jolt. “He just had his third heart attack. The bastard is finally on his way out... It’s a dance with time now, Grace, and I’m leading the two-step. I’ll do whatever it takes to make Farley Industries mine.”

“But you don’t evenlikeworking in mergers and acquisitions,” she argues.She always did know me better than I knew myself.“You only want it because you’re trying to prove something to yourself… You’re such a tenacious asshole! That company will mold you even more in his image, and he knows it, too. He’s reveling in it, sat up there, in his big expensive penthouse in Tribeca. He’s binding you to that place, and in doing so he’s binding you to him, forever.”

“Now you’re just being delusional. I amnothinglike my father, and I never will be.”

I watch myself push past her and into the kitchen, and then I wait for the refrigerator door to swing open. I always liked to have a cold beer to hand in the heat of an argument with Grace.

She follows me inside chanting, “stubborn, stubborn, stubborn,” under her breath.

“Takes one to know one, sweetheart,” I hear myself scoff. “If I ever sent you an email you took offence to, you wouldn't speak to me for a week.”Two years, to be precise…“You’d graduate in grudges, if you could. You let them marinate for days and days. Have you told your father about your magazine idea, yet?”

Grace groans. “You know I can’t… Nathan says I need to wait a while until he gets better. He only just had the operation… It’s still touch-and-go.”

“He’d recover quicker if he knew his only daughter was about to make him a very rich man.”

“Jonas, please…”

“Tell him…”

“No!”

There’s a pause, and then we’re both shouting, “you stubborn ass” at each other, followed by the sound of the refrigerator door slamming shut again, and her dirtiest, filthiest laugh. She had an entire range to choose from, but I loved that one most of all. It meant I was finally forgiven. It meant that in about five seconds flat we’d be screwing the remnants of our anger out on the kitchen floor. There was no sadistic urge to hurt her back then, or to make her pay—just a fierce hunger to make her come so hard, her eyes rolled back in their sockets.

Sure enough, I can hear her panting out my name already.We always did have the best make-up sex.I don't need to glance down to see how hard my dick is. I can feel the ache radiating up my groin and into my stomach. If we don't leave now, I’m going to explode.

I turn to click my fingers at Past. To my surprise, a raven-haired supermodel twin, wearing a black lace corset and high suspenders, has joined her. Dad was right. It’s sex-kitten overload tonight…

She’s not doing it for me, though. Not even close. She may look like a wank bank fantasy download, but my dick is still hard for the girl in the kitchen who is now screaming out my name.

“What’s this?” I ask. “You girls tag-teaming now?”

Raven blows me a kiss, and then twirls seductively on the spot. I glance down out of pure habit, and then I wish I hadn’t. Stamped across her ass, in the same silver diamantes, is the word ‘Present’.

I can’t wait to see what assholery they’re going to pin on me next.

Present beckons me over with another kiss.

I shoot her a crooked grin. “Sorry, sweetheart, you’re not my type.”

“Oh, I’m everybody’s type,” she says huskily, sounding like Kathleen Turner plus a fifty-a-day habit, as she takes a step closer… And then she’s kicking me hard in the balls with the tip of her black stiletto.

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