Page 109 of The Billionaire's Fake Fiancée

“Wait.” I slide a palm over her cheek, needing to connect with her.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

I back her up to the sink. She sucks in a ragged breath. “What are you doing?”

“Kissing you.” I take her lips in mine. She’s sweet and warm and breathy.

“Oh my god, you’re crazy,” she says into the kiss, grabbing my dinner jacket lapels and as much fabric as she can fit into two fists and pulling me to her.

I rumble against her lips. I give her one last kiss, then I go to the door and crack it, listening, feeling her behind me, not quite touching me, but there—close, hot, and so fucking sweet.

When I’m sure nobody’s coming, I pull her out and shut the door behind us. We head to the aft stairs we came up by.

“Easy,” she says as we start down. “Too easy.”

“Is that what they say in soap operas right before they’re caught?” I ask.

“Yes.” She steps off the last step onto the main deck and turns. “We did it.”

I step down to her level. She’s still wound up. I don’t want this to end. It’s fun with her. Everything is fun with her. That used to be my complaint about her; how did I ever see it as a problem?

I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. “We did it,” I say, remembering, with some embarrassment, what a jerk I was to her all of those Fridays of her showing up at eight in the evening when after-hours trading was over. Even insisting my appointment was Friday at eight in the evening was a dick move. But the way she’d launch into my office, upbeat and funny and utterly unflappable, you’d never know it.

Tabitha relates to the world like pink bubblegum, but deep down, she’s pure steel.

“Feel like a cocktail?” I ask.

“Don’t you have your precious Tokyo to attend to?”

“Tokyo can run without me.”

The stars are out as we head over to the bar. She orders something called a Hot Pink Barbie that has coconut rum, vodka, Sprite, and three juices—orange, cranberry, and pineapple—with a cherry. I grab a scotch and we settle into the couch area.

She sighs contentedly, and suddenly I’m thinking about the supposedly funny stories she told at that first dinner. Her dad blowing off her birthday dinner, leaving her to sit alone at the TipTop on her twelfth birthday. That fiancé dumping her in her hospital bed. That thing about her messed-up mom.

“Did your dad really leave you alone on your birthday in a downtown Manhattan restaurant when you were twelve?”

“Who wants to know?” she asks.

“Come on. I’m curious,” I say.

“Too bad you didn’t do a proper questionnaire exchange,” she says. “Or you would know the answer to that question.”

“Tell me now.”

“Too late.”

“It’s your birthday soon,” I say.

“This is good.” She swirls her drink. “I like to think that being in deck chairs conversing with drinks in our hands says,nothing to see here, andwe definitely weren’t in rooms stealing toenails.”

She doesn’t want to talk about it. I let it go. For now. “Hot Pink Barbie,” I say. “Is that your go-to cocktail?”

“One of them.”

Without thinking about it, I’m adding the ingredients to the weekly instructions I give to my staff. I’m imagining her in my living room, the glow of dancing flames reflected in her gaze, on her cheeks.

“What?” she says.

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