Page 81 of The Billionaire's Wake-up-call Girl

I’m freaking out now. I haven’t ordered anything in a very long time. Is this how the loan sharks think they can get in? Or maybe it’s a dead rat or black roses. Or a horse’s head. So far, the loan shark guys have shown zero originality.

“From who?”

“Vossameer.”

I frown. Did they courier over some severance stuff? Maybe my pro-rated salary? It won’t be the twelve thousand dollars I still need, but it’ll be something.

I whip down the stairs.

Down in the lobby, a delivery boy hands me a large white box with a white ribbon. What? I give the kid a few bucks. Not like that’s going to make a difference at this point.

I happen to look out, across the street just then, and I nearly throw up when I see Lenny’s enforcer leaning against a car out there. He smiles.

I hurry back upstairs and lock the door, then I set the box on the kitchen island and grab the scissors. There are three white boxes inside the main box—one large, one the size of a shoebox and one quite small. I open the large one first. It’s something soft wrapped in gray tissue paper. Something velvet. My heart begins to pound as I pull out a red velvet dress.

Not just any red velvet dress; it’s a beautifully made strapless dress with satin detailing around the bodice. And a matching wrap. So gorgeous, I can’t breathe.

But that’s not what shocks me.

It’s a lot like the dress that Audrey Hepburn wore at the end ofFunny Face. A slightly updated version.

Mr. Drummond. It has to be.

Why would he send me this? He told Sasha our most intimate secrets. Had her fire me. He betrayed and embarrassed me.

Is this some psycho way of saying he’s sorry? Or is he being weirdly mocking?

I clutch it to me. I should be angry, but mostly I feel tired. And sad for all my lost dreams. For how hard I try all the time.

I hold it to myself. My size.

I shouldn’t open the card, but something perverse inside me forces my fingers to open the little envelope.

Tonight. Six. The Blue Stag Club.

I stare, dumbfounded.

Does he really think I’d go out to dinner with him after all of this?

“Screw you,” I say to the card.

The shoebox-sized box is, of course, a shoebox. It has two pairs of Audrey’s shoes in it—seven and a half, the other in eight. I’m an eight. What did he do? Study the security tapes to get my size?

He did, I think.

I assume the smallest box will be a necklace of some sort. Some mocking costume jewelry.

It’s not. It’s a cookie with mostly chocolate frosting but just enough pink and green to create a cellphone. There’s a card, too.

Happy wake-up-call girl discovery day.

I sink into the chair. All my life I’ve baked special little cookies for people, commemorating things that are important or unimportant, but nobody ever made one for me.

And now this. I get a mocking one.

He wants me to go out to dinner at the Blue Stag? I should go, just to rip up the dress in front of him. And maybe I could set fire to the shoes and leave them burning on the table.

Or maybe I wear the dress and shoes. I walk in and give him the sassy mean smile he probably wants from the likes of me. He would sit there in his dinner jacket thinking I’ve capitulated. And I make him buy the most expensive champagne, and then I throw it in his face.In your dreams, asshole!

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