Page 271 of Tormented Billionaire Romance Series

“Charming,” she says.

Lucky for me, I’ve dealt with Naomi’s amateur lie detecting enough to know how to throw her off course. Ever since that first night after I came home with his number, I’ve been hiding my phone between my mattresses.

Naomi dumps out my purse on the couch and glances over its contents.

“Yeah, you should probably start asking yourself if lying to your sister is one of those things you want to have in your life,” she says. For her trouble, she opens my wallet and takes out a twenty.

“Hey!” I protest and cross the room.

She already has the cash in her pocket by the time I’m over there.

“Give it back,” I tell her. “You of all people know exactly how little money I can afford to throw around, and I’m the one who pays the rent.”

“You’re so freaking dramatic,” she says, taking the twenty back out of her pocket and holding it out to me. I reach for it, but she pulls it away, saying, “Talk to him.”

“Why is this so important to you?” I ask. “You have to know it’s not like me going out with a rich guy is going to benefit either of us.”

“You don’t know that until youcall him,” she says.

I snatch the bill from her hand and start gathering the mess that is the collected contents of my purse. A moment later, Naomi is running toward my room.

“Later, sucka,” she says as I’m still trying to get back to my feet. My door is closed and locked before I can reach it.

The cretin planned this.

I knock on the door, saying, “Open up. What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m doing you a favor!” she says, and I can hear her inside tearing my room apart.

Running back into the kitchen, I find and grab a butter knife before returning to my door. I put the tip of the butter knife into the opening of the old lock and twist. The door unlatches easily, and my normally tidy room is now a hazmat area.

Naomi glances over at me but goes right back to her rummaging.

She hasn’t left me much of a choice here.

I get past her and thrust my hand between my mattresses and Naomi’s grabbing at me with one hand and trying to find the phone with the other.

“Get off of me!” I demand, but even when we were kids, she didn’t hear that phrase the way regular people do.

“This is for your own good!” she says while I’m trying to wrench my phone from her grip.

“You’ve never had a bad thing happen to you in your life,” I retort. “You don’t understand real people problems.”

Finally, through a carefully thrown, “accidental” elbow to the gut, I manage to pry the phone out of her rather impressive grip. I run out of the room, pulling the door closed behind me as I’m trying to pull up the number.

Naomi opens the door up again half a second later, but I’ve found the number, and I’m hitting delete. By the time she gets over to me, I’m more than happy to hand her the phone.

“What did you do?” she asks.

“Go ahead,” I tell her. “Call him. You know his name. Find the number and call him.”

“You deleted it?” she asks, though it doesn’t sound a whole lot like a question.

I ask, “Now can I have a little peace and quiet?”

Naomi sighs and continues looking through my phone. It doesn’t take too long. She hands the phone back, saying, “Well, I guess that’s that, then.” She gives me the phone back. “Wanna get some ice cream or something?”

* * *

---