Page 17 of Her Billion Dollar Groom

Groggy, I wipe my eyes and glance at the clock. Why is she awake at this time?

Her neighbors must have hated her.

She’s just settling in, I tell myself, not entirely convinced. Once we get our routine settled, everything will work out fine. Sometime around five, finally, the noise abates, and I manage to drift back off into a fitful sleep.

I don’t dream.

I took almost five whole days off for the wedding and the honeymoon, and that means I have a massive backlog of invoices and tax forms, receipts and meeting minutes to get through. My admin staff are all great. They sort out the daily problems of the company, and I trust them to deal with any problems. But when it comes to big spending or quarterly reviews, I like to check all the paperwork myself, manually.

It’s not that I don’t trust them. I just like to be the last line of defense against any stupid mistakes setting us back. And it’s hard to be a fresh pair of eyes when you haven’t slept.

I don’t see Eliza again until the fourth afternoon of her being in my house. She seems to have a routine of waking up late every night, stomping around the kitchen as she makes some sort of breakfast, then blasting music as loudly as humanly possible for hours until she decides, finally, it’s time to sleep the day off.

Everyone’s entitled to their different habits, of course they are. I was just kind of hoping I would actually see her more often than I would hear her.

And I miss a good night’s sleep.

When she emerges that afternoon, she comes and thumps on my office door. “Enter,” I call, forgetting that I don’t need to be quite that formal with the woman who is my wife.

“Hey, Jace,” she beams as she waltzes in.

“Please don’t call me that.”

“Sorry,” she pouts. “Anyway, I was thinking, bowling? You and me. Let’s go.”

“I’m in the middle of work. I can’t.”

“Oh… well, you can stop doing that for like, three hours, can’t you?”

“No, I’m the CEO. My job’s kind of important.”

She pouts harder at me like that’s not an acceptable answer. Already annoyed with her, I decide to air my grievances. “Hey, Eliza,” I start. She turns her attention away from my bookshelf and back to me, blinking her big blue eyes as she smiles. “About the way you’re up at night,” I try to say politely.

She doesn’t understand my gentle approach. “Oh! Did you like it?” She grins. “I’ve been working on this new song really hard, but I can’t quite figure out the bridge yet. Do you have any ideas?”

“I’m not a songwriter,” I stammer.

“No, but sometimes people who aren’t writers have the best ideas for things, you know, so often I ask my mom for help. Okay, sure, she doesn’t have a musical bone in her body, but sometimes she really helps my ideas come to life.”

“Eliza,” I interrupt her. She shuts her mouth with a snap. “I’m glad that you’re making this your home, but… well, I work during the day.”

“I know.” She rolls her eyes at me. “You worksohard. Oh, I’ve just had a brilliant idea.” She reaches out and grabs my wrist. “Just take the rest of the day off. Let’s go to the mall. Let’s get boba.”

“Eliza,” I cut her off again. “I can’t. I am at work. I can have fun with you later, but right now, I have things to do. I have paperwork and meetings. My business isn’t a success by magic. And about your music at night…”

Her eyes grow wide and wet. My heart twists inside my chest.

The way she’s looking at me makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong, which is insane when she’s the one being too loud. But as bad as it makes me feel, I have to put my foot down somewhere. I would like to sleep again in the next year.

“You don’t like it, do you?” she says, her voice wobbling. I swear, if she wanted to, she could burst into tears on the spot. Sometimes it’s hard to tell how much of this is an act and how much it’s just the way she is.

“It’s not that I don’t like it,” I say as gently as I can. “It’s just very loud at night. Can we set some quiet hours? I don’t know, starting at ten PM? And I promise I won’t do anything to wake you up before ten AM. How does that sound?”

She frowns, giving me such a withering look I feel myself wilting. “You’re such a morning person. But maybe one night we could go out to a party or a play or a museum. There’s this great art museum downtown that does late-night showings for couples. It’s so romantic.”

We’re not actually a couple,I want to tell her, but I don’t. Instead, I smile weakly and say, “All right, that sounds good. So you promise to keep quiet hours?”

She pouts and sighs but nods. “Fine, okay! For you. You’re not going to make me into a morning person, though. No one has ever been able to.”

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