Page 106 of The Billionaire's Wake-up-call Girl

“So impertinent.”

“You’re in your pjs. I put you over my knee. I slide them down over your ass, and I spank the shit out of you. Then we fuck.” He kisses my next knuckle.

“So you really don’t spank all the girls?”

“Just you. Only you.” He kisses yet another knuckle.

“You’re running out of unkissed knuckles.”

“I know,” he says sadly. “I have to get back to work anyway.”

There’s this silence where I don’t want him to go.

“I really have to hurry up and get that formula figured out,” he says. “And I can’t.”

“Why is it so important to dehydrate?”

“It makes it portable. It could be issued to soldiers. Cops. Schools. Put in first-aid kits. It would be huge for gunshot victims. I should’ve had it nailed by now.”

I sit up and set a hand on his belly, smoothing down the scant hairs. “Is there some kind of rush on it?”

“Besides people dying?” he says.

“Right, of course,” I say.

He looks miserably at the far wall.

It sounds like an important invention, but I’m suspicious about how much pressure he’s putting on himself about it, like it has to be him and he can’t have a life until he nails it.

In a serious tone, he says, “Sometimes I think it’s beyond my abilities.”

My heart breaks for him a little bit, for how bereft he seems.

I’m about to tell him he can totally do it—he is the great Theo Drummond, right? But I realize that’s probably what anybody would say to him.Of course you can solve it, Theo! You can do anything!

I think about what he said, how the stories about him as some hero make him feel really alone. I say, “Maybe you won’t get it. Maybe you will, but maybe you won’t. But things will still be okay.”

“Things won’t be okay if I don’t get it.”

“Why? I understand that it would be great if you solved it. But there are other chemists in the world. Maybe they could take a crack.”

“I’m the one on the trail of it,” he says. “And people need it. People are dying for the lack of it.”

“Okay.” I rest my chin on his shoulder and put my hand on his chest. “You have such a good heart. I never saw it before.”

“A good heart doesn’t get the formula solved,” he says.

I’m stunned at how merciless he is with himself. “Well, you invented the other formula. So it’s not like you’re some slacker in the saving-lives department.”

“Tell that to the people who die for a lack of the dehydrated version. It drives me crazy, because I know it’s there. Just out of my reach.”

I press my hand harder onto his beating heart, and he puts his hand over mine. We lie like that for a while. It’s nice.

I say, “Who’s the hero now, biotches?”

He snorts. “What did you just say?”

“You heard what I said,” I say.

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