Page 68 of My Possessive Billionaire: Our Fake Marriage

By covering it up with a pancake’s worth of foundation, I thought to myself. Again, I didn’t say it out loud, though. I had become too polite since becoming a mother.

Part of it was I didn’t want to upset my hosts. Not even the makeup girl. I wanted tonight to go off absolutely without a hitch. A lot was riding on it.

“Well,” Ramone said as he lifted Stan up and put my child on his lap. “I guess it’s not every day that you appear on Gordon Godfrey Live.”

Ramone pronounced the name of the show with a kind of religious awe. I was never a huge fan of late-night talk shows. Even when I was in high school and college. I always thought there were better things to do at ten thirty at night than watch a bunch of celebs hawk their latest project while a failed stand-up comedian attempts to say pithy things and make the live studio audience laugh.

Like sleep, for example. Or certain other activities which also involve a bed. Watching television seemed like a waste of time to me at that point of the day.

Yet, I knew that millions of people did just that. They watched Gordon Godfrey Live because it was a saccharine take on the world. It made everything easier to take, I supposed. For me, I preferred the unvarnished truth. Then again, look at all of the problems I had because I had a fake relationship and an equally fake marriage.

After all of that chicanery and fakery, I wanted things to be real as possible. Gordon Godfrey was pleasant and entertaining, but he was not exactly real. He was what he was. A huckster, a ringmaster for a three-ring circus that was the Hollywood hit-making machine.

I hoped to use his powers for good tonight. His audience would tune in to hear the juicy details of my fake marriage, real divorce,and subsequent real marriage to Evan. But I would make sure that when they turned off the television at the end of the show, they had a good, thorough understanding of how crucial it was to preserve the Amazon rainforest.

“Ow,” Ramone said as Stan pulled on his beard.

“Stanley, no,” I said from across the room. Stan snapped his gaze over to mine, a sheepish expression on his cherubic face.

“Sorry,” he said, and I think he meant it. Stan wasn’t a bad kid, but he was a kid. He sometimes got overly excited and did things without thinking about them. He would never inflict deliberate harm on his uncle Ramone, or his uncle Jack or Aunt Jennifer for that matter.

Evan and I were raising him right, as far as I was concerned. He would not grow up damaged to the point he had to wear calloused armor to protect himself from the world like his father did. I worked long and hard to help Evan shed his armor and be his real self, unafraid to laugh or sigh. Unafraid to feel.

“Hey, where is your better half, anyway?” Ramone asked.

“Oh, he’s still trying to work,” I said with a laugh. “I’m sure he’s driving the make-up people crazy with how he keeps putting a phone up against his face. I finally told him that if he was going to network, he needed to do it outside.”

“Don’t you worry, hon,” the makeup girl said cheerfully as she flounced my hair a little, then shot it with a cold blast of hair spray. “Everyone is going to be looking at your gorgeous self. Your husband could come out in a potato sack and a ten-dollar haircut and look fine.”

“Ten-dollar haircut. “Ramone sputtered. “What’s wrong with a ten-dollar haircut? I have a ten-dollar haircut.”

“I never would have been able to tell,” I said wryly as he primped his frizzy mane.

The irony of course being that Ramone made more than enoughmoney to get his hair styled anywhere in the city. The truth was, he hated to spend money on himself. He’d lavish his family with gifts and vacations and the like, but he rarely took anything for himself or for his own desires.

The door to the dressing room popped open. My heart lit up as my husband walked through. He looked so dashing in his three-piece tailored Italian suit. Evan knew that part of his function tonight would be to glam up and show the world that caring about the environment didn’t mean you were a frumpy nerd. Even the ‘cool’ people were doing it, to misquote my fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Periwinkle. Sometimes I wondered about whatever happened to her. I couldn’t picture her going home and being a regular person when I was a kid. I assumed she just slept at school.

Evan was still on the phone, and to be polite he didn’t want to come in the dressing room until the conversation was over. However, since he stood halfway through the door with it hanging open and we could hear everything he said, I don’t know why he bothered.

“No, you listen to me, Dave,” Evan said, his eyes narrowing dangerously. “I’ve emailed you about fifteen alternatives to using Dynacamp energy solutions for your project.”

Evan listened for a moment, and then his face twisted into a grimace.

“Well, those other companies don’t cut down vast swaths of forested land around the world to fuel their paper factories. No, Dave, I didn’t ‘turn into’ a tree hugger. I’ve always given a damn about the environment; I just didn’t realize how much power I had to change things until I met my wife.”

Evan’s lips twitched a snarl as Dave said something back.

“Soft? You think I’ve gone soft, Dave? You think I’ve gone soft?”

Evan extracted his other smartphone from his blazer pocket and tapped on the screen with his free hand.

“I’ll show you soft,” he muttered under his breath. “There, it’s done. Oh, what’s done, you ask? You forgot that I get to say which companies get to bid for our contracts. Newsflash—Dynacamp is not going to be on the list.”

Dave said something back. Something loud and obnoxious from the sound of it, though I still couldn’t make out what he specifically said. I heard some cuss words, though.

“Well, you’re the one who called me soft. You started it. I tried to be nice about it. I tried to let you make your own decisions, but you had to go and be a dick about it and insult me and my wife. That means I cut you off. And if you want to continue to draw in that nice six-figure salary and drive around in that leased Tesla, you’re going to do what I say, when I say.”

Dave said something back, sounding more subdued this time.

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