Page 105 of Most Eligible Billionaire

“Kind of.” I kiss her cheek.

“I’ll be the judge of that.” She swirls the noodles in the sauce. “The talent portion of Most Eligible Bastard contest,” she jokes.

I lean in closer. “I do believe I aced the talent portion of the contest earlier tonight.”

“Hmmm,” she says. “Good point.”

She slips the forkful of fettuccini between her pretty lips.

A sheen of pure wonder creeps into her gaze. “Oh my god,” she says.

“What’s that?”

She gazes back up at me, brown eyes sparkling. “Parmesan garlic taste freak-out.”

I sit down. We eat. A lot. She actually has seconds, like the best date ever.

After dinner we take Smuckers out, strolling around in search of dessert. We decide on a bag of warm baklava from a food truck. We take it into Central Park and sit on a bench, feasting while we watch an extremely acrobatic man dance to a fiddle and a snare drum.

Vicky makes exactly zero jokes about what I’ll refer to as The Smuckers Incident. In fact, she doesn’t have to; all she has to do is look at Smuckers and then look at me with an utterly innocent expression, and the joke is in the air.

“Fuck off,” I growl.

“What?” she laughs. “I can’t look at you guys now? My two fave guys?”

“No, you can’t,” I snarl.

I’m not mad. It’s fun. It’s all fun with her, like the best kind of escape, the way it was at Southfield Studios, us hiding from the world and carving out our own zone of simple pleasure inside the larger, more complicated real world.

She leans against me. Whatever hesitation she had about us being together before seems gone.

What was it?

She’s an enigma, but I don’t mind. The more layers of her I peel away, the more I like her. The more I want her.

I put my arm around her. She snuggles closer and something in me warms.

It’s strange sitting in the park with Vicky. And it strikes me as strange that it would strike me as strange…until it occurs to me that every activity in my life fits into one of two categories: seduction and business.

Sitting in the moonlit park fits into neither. It’s just nice.

How did my life get so unbalanced? Even my beach house in the Hamptons—I use it to entertain clients or I don’t use it at all.

It’s not there for pleasure, and I certainly never take women up there—I don’t like to give them the wrong idea, which is that our short-term hookups might not be short-term hookups.

“Hey,” I say. “What are you and Carly doing for Labor Day weekend?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Nothing special.”

“You want to get out of the city? I have a beach place in the Hamptons.”

She sits up, seeming alarmed.

I brush a strand of hair from her eyes. It’s so sexy when she wears it down. “What is it?”

“Well…” She stares at a crushed Pepsi can, shining in the grass. “With everything so crazy…”

No,she means.

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