Page 285 of Tormented Billionaire Romance Series

If I offer to do Naomi’s laundry for a week, I wonder if she’d be willing to stay out of the apartment a while longer. I pull out my phone.

* * *

It’s about3:05 when the knock falls on the door, and I’m just finishing up the vodka martini—stirred, not shaken. Max barks lazily from Naomi’s room but doesn’t follow it up with anything. Sammie just sits in the middle of the floor staring at me.

I get to the door and, once it’s open, I poke my head out just far enough to look to the left and then to the right, and I grab Zach by the lapels of his suit jacket and pull him into the apartment. Closing and locking the door, I say, “Hey, sorry about that. Things have been a bit hectic around here.”

“I’d say from the amount of force you used pulling me in here you must feel quite a bit better,” he says.

I cringe. “Yeah,” I say. “Hey, I know this is off-topic, but I was wondering if you had any particular way you deal with people who want something from you.”

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“Never mind,” I tell him. “You look great.”

Zach is wearing a dark gray suit with a deep red tie. While it hardly seems like he uses any product, there’s not a strand of his short, black hair that’s out of place.

“You can take your jacket off,” I tell him. “Stay awhile.”

“Thanks,” he says and starts looking around as he slides the jacket off of him with incredible ease. “Do you have a coat rack or a hanger or something?” he asks.

“I’ll take it,” I tell him and hold out my hands. When he hands me the jacket, it’s all I can do not to start going on about how deceptively soft the material is. “Your martini is waiting for you in the kitchen,” I tell him. “I’m just going to take this back to my room, and I’ll be out to join you.”

“Thanks,” he says, and I head back to my room.

Closing the door behind me, I take a stab at getting the butterflies in my stomach to stop trying to escape.

He looks incredible. Nothing’s changed about him since the last time I saw him—clothes excepted—but I’m noticing, for the first time, the finer points of his physique.

Without the jacket, he’s a lot more muscular than I’d anticipated. I just thought he had a preference for thick fabric. Something has changed, but I don’t believe the change came from him.

I go to my closet and open it up, scowling at my laughably inferior clothing. For a second, I consider changing into something a bit chicer, but I’m already wearing my best low-cut dress.

There’s so much about him I hadn’t noticed, or hadn’t let myself notice, and it was all, every bit of it, in front of me the whole time. I have a little trouble convincing myself, but after another minute, I hang up the suit coat and head back out of the room.

I get to the living room to find Nikolai Scipio looking out one window, martini in hand.

“I like your place,” he says.

“Right,” I scoff.

“Seriously,” he says. “I’m particularly fond of your view. In New York, the best you can hope for is a high vantage point so you can see all the other CEOs somewhere down below you. Apart from the schadenfreude, it’s not all that spectacular.”

I’ve never been to New York, but just like everyone else in the world, I’ve seen plenty of pictures. Maybe a person gets tired of the cityscape when they live in it, but I can’t see anything like that ever happening to me.

“So,” he says, “what would you like to do this evening?”

“Huh?” I ask.

Stop daydreaming, Grace.

“I was just asking what you’d like to do,” he says.

“Oh,” I respond, finally. “You know, I hadn’t thought about it.”

He smiles and then looks back out the window, sipping his drink.

“It’s weird,” I tell him, “you being in this apartment.”

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