Page 96 of The Billionaire's Wake-up-call Girl

I come to with a jolt, surprised to see that it’s morning. It’s light out.

Lizzie stands over me in jeans and a bright pink T-shirt that has a turtle outlined in sparkles. She’s holding out a cup of coffee.

“What the hell?” I pick up my phone. It’s after seven.

“It’s a little thing called morning.”

I sit up and take the coffee, stunned I slept through the night. I usually spend the first few minutes of my mornings adding clarification notes to my middle-of-the-night brainstorming scribbles, but there was no middle-of-the-night brainstorming. I look down at the steaming mug, feeling unmoored.

“Black. Right?” she says. “When you’re not drinking bulletproof?”

“How’d you know I drank bulletproof?”

She rolls her eyes and shoves in beside me. Like it’s too ridiculous to explain how she could’ve known.

She has shoes on. “Are you going somewhere?” I ask.

“Out,” she says teasingly.

I pull her to me. “Come back to bed.”

“What? I can’t,” she says. “This was great, but…it can’t be. This can’t be a thing.”

My heart races. I’d imagined everything would change now. The idea that she might not want to see me again never crossed my mind.

“Come out to breakfast. You have to eat, right?”

She looks away. “I don’t know about that.”

“It’s breakfast, not a date,” I say.

“It just really can’t happen.”

I set my coffee on the nightstand; then I take her coffee and set it aside, and roll her back into bed, getting her beneath me.

“If you rip this shirt, I swear to god…”

I kiss her breast through the pink cotton.

“I’m serious. Dates are off the table with me. I can’t do a relationship of any kind.”

I kiss her shoulder. Her neck.

“I’m off guys,” she says.

“You don’t seem like you’re off guys. In fact, you were quite recently on a guy, if memory serves.” I kiss her again. “And around a guy.”

“And I’m moving in three weeks.”

I still. “Three weeks?”

“I’m moving back to Fargo.”

You can’t, I’m about to say.I just found you. I won’t let you.

I bite my tongue. If there’s one thing I know about Seven, it’s that she doesn’t like to be pushed.

But I can’t let her leave. We have something special. “Why move?”

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