Page 60 of Most Eligible Billionaire

It’s infectious.

On another outing, we tour a mammoth prefab facility in New Jersey where they make parts of buildings so they don’t have to build everything on site. He’s just as excited about that. Also infectious.

“How do you know everyone’s names?” I ask on one of our many limo rides.

“I make a point of it.”

“But how? You know so many names.”

“If something’s important, you find a way to do it,” he says.

Bird, I mumble.

He gets that amused smile that always annoys me. “What was that?”

I want to grab his lapels and yank him to me and sayfuck you, lip to lips, and then kiss him.

But I know where that leads.

Instead, I lock my hands together in my lap and turn away.

The worst thing is the family feeling throughout Locke Worldwide. Like they really are one big happy family with Henry Locke as the strong, fierce leader, a man who’d go to the ends of the earth for his people.

It makes him twice as hot, how he fights for his people. How protective he is.

At times, tooling around the five boroughs with Henry, touring sites, meeting employees, learning new things at Locke HQ, I get this feeling like I’m part of that team, part of the family that Henry fights for and protects.

It’s intoxicating.

And so predictable. So pathetic.

It doesn’t take a team of psychoanalysts to understand why that would be wildly attractive to me, considering it’s been me alone for so long, looking after Carly on my own. Even back home, nobody was protecting us. Nobody was fighting for us.

Sometimes when we’re talking about the company I use the wordwe. As if I’m part of the Locke family.So cool that we’re opening an office in Raleigh. How are we doing on our stadium proposal? Wow, our development team is kicking the shit out of those assholes at Dartford & Sons!

I constantly have to remind myself I’m not in the family.

We ride around in elevators and limos and other enclosed spaces and it’s exciting. Sometimes our gazes lock and the earth seems to still.

My vibrator gets a workout at night.

I’m a week through the twenty-one-day cooling off period and I just want to touch him. Even just his arm. He’s irresistible as catnip. Irresistible as a super-charged magnet. Or maybe irresistible as a black hole, the kind that sucks in spaceships and girls who just want to be loved and trusted.

None of his affection is real, that’s the thing I need to remember. He’s had PIs on me, after all. He thinks I’m a scammer.

I’m something far worse. I’m Vonda O’Neil.

Again I remember that picture of me, smiling out at the world so hopefully, repeated a million times across Twitter and Facebook with captions likeI’m a lying whore.

Sometimes, right before I go out the door in the morning to meet the car, I give myself a little pep talk. I remind myself that I don’t need team Locke.

I control a giant company and have access to all the money I could ever want. I ride around in limos with literally the sexiest man in New York, but somehow I’m still that hungry girl looking in from the outside, nose pressed to the bakery window, wanting just anything.

A crumb.

Henry is like the hottest and most charming vacuum cleaner salesman who ever came to your door. And you invite him in and you let him show you the vacuum, how well it cleans and how all of the attachments work. And you see that he loves this vacuum, and his love for the vacuum makes him insanely desirable. And you guys laugh and have fun cleaning the carpet. And it’s nice.

And you keep telling yourself it’s not about you—he just wants to sell you that vacuum cleaner. That is his only motive! Except it’s getting harder and harder to remember that.

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