Page 44 of The Billionaire's Fake Fiancée

I slide my hand up and down her smooth, muscular arm, palm like a hungry ghost, touching, consuming, but never covering enough of her skin to be satisfied. I tell myself that one inch of her skin is the same as another, but I can’t seem to stop. Our small contact burns in a way that feeds me. A strange sort of nourishment.

I need to focus. With my free hand, I pull out my phone and do a discreet check of the market, disengaging my attention, but I can’t quite bring myself to disengage physically.

I shouldn’t have kissed her like that.

It was just that, back there in the plane, when she was talking about us kissing, I got this perverse idea that I needed to take back control. And suddenly I was yanking her up to me, holding her still, our lips a hair’s breadth apart.

If anything, holding her like that made my control disintegrate.

With every moment I held her still, I’d needed to kiss her more. I was trembling with it. And she was being full-on Tabitha, a panting confection. So that didn’t help.

I’d forced myself to hold her there longer. To make her wait until I didn’t need to kiss her anymore. But when I held her like that, the urge to kiss her just built and built until I couldn’t stand it. So I just kissed her, thinking to get it over with.

But once it started, it was difficult to end—I don’t know why. Maybe it was because we’d been sharing those stupid confidences, creating this faker’s intimacy. I was falling for our own PR.

Eventually I tore myself away. I’m an Olympic-level athlete when it comes to the sport of self-denial, and I tore myself away from the kiss and grabbed my phone and forced myself to type out a message. The message was nonsense, but sometimes you have to settle for the appearance of control on the way to getting it.

Gail prattles on, bringing me back to the present. Tabitha listens, rapt, arm warm and soft under my palm. I scroll through a report, not really seeing it.

It’s so Tabitha to think that Marvin is running an elaborate and entirely pointless identity fraud scam rather than the far more obvious and likely scenario that he’s a jackass who wants to get into her pants.

Heat rises up my neck. I glance over at him and grit my teeth.

Marvin’s interest in Tabitha is a complication I don’t need. What if he openly hits on her? I’ll come down on him like a ton of bricks. It’s what a fiancé does, or at least, it’s what I would damn well do. But then I risk alienating Gail.

Gail finally wraps up her speech with instructions to show up for dinner in the stateroom in two hours. Already this trip is proving to be more time consuming than I’d imagined; my usual twelve-hour workday has been reduced to a small handful of hours and whatever I can secretly do on my phone.

Unfortunately, I can’t blow off the first dinner.

We leave Clark at his door and head to our room.

“Serena,” she says as soon as I shut the door. “Old flame?”

“I don’t have flames, old or otherwise.” I inspect the command center that Clark set up in the center room—three monitors, two laptops, and office supplies arranged the way I like them, right down to the small flip pads I like to jot notes in.

“I thought it went well,” she says.

What? She wants to discuss our performance now? I pull off my jacket and toss it on the couch with maximum annoyance, and then I sit down and tap the laptop to life.

She’s still there. Waiting.

“What?” I bark, keeping my eyes on the set of charts on the central monitor, but not really seeing them. “You need something?” This is usually enough to send people running.

“No,” Tabitha says, standing there with that amused sparkle—I can’t see it, but I hear it in her voice.

“We pulled it off. Keep it up,” I say.

When she doesn’t stir, I turn, annoyed, because instead of attending to the Yorkbridge IPO, which we’ve shorted the shit out of, I’m letting Tabitha distract me.

“This is my work area,” I say. “This whole room is my work space. And where do you live during this trip? Can you remember what you promised?”

She frowns. A frown is definitely the proper reaction, but Tabitha’s frown is more of a pout, as if she’s playfully mirroring my mood. “You don’t have to say it like that.”

“Don’t I?”

“Try a little niceness, maybe?” She heads into her room.

“Wait.”

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