Page 45 of The Billionaire's Fake Fiancée

“Yeah?”

“First dinner’s a black tie.”

“I got it. It’s on the schedule.” She shuts the door behind her.

I turn to focus on the day. I get on to Slack on one monitor while I pull up shared screens with my top traders on another. The data streams in, and I start reacting, falling into the comfortable pattern of work. But I’m thinking about her. What? She’s pouting now?

A knock at the door. Clark.

“Come on in,” I say.

Clark comes in with his tablet. “Where’s Tabitha?”

“Doing her job of staying in her room and not bothering me while I try to squeeze twelve hours of work into two.”

“Ah,” Clark says. Clearly he has more to say about Tabitha, but my look tells him that I’m not in the mood to hear it. We fall to reacting to the data that’s streaming across the bottom of the screen. Nothing’s blown up. People are on track for their quarterly numbers. There’s currency stuff popping, but my people have it.

“Things seemed to go well,” Clark says during a lull in the action.

“I’ll say. Can Wydover be more screwed?” Wydover, my main competitor for Gail’s accounts and the general bane of my existence, made a dubious play today. It’s always nice to see Wydover get stung. People who break the rules don’t get stung nearly enough.

“I mean, things went well at the launch party,” Clark says. “You and the future Mrs. O’Rourke.”

As if Tabitha would change her name. “If things hadn’t gone well, I’d definitely have something to say,” I grumble, turning my attention to the Tokyo futures.

A few minutes later, the shower in Tabitha’s room goes on.

I try to focus on the flashing numbers, but then I hear the shower door open and close, which tells me she’s in there, showering, turning under the water in a way that maximizes the volume with which the spray hits the door, all the better to let everybody in the world know that she’s naked now, taking a shower.

“Rex?” Clark says. He’s been saying something about Hong Kong. I make him repeat it.

Eventually, the shower is finished.

Some time later, Tabitha comes out of her room in a long brown gown that’s…too something. She twirls around, and my mind starts buzzing.

Maybe it’s the way the dress hugs her curves, or the way her neck looks so long and graceful, or the excruciatingly bare expanse of her back, or the way her breasts are pressed together.

I need to fire that personal shopper. Do people not understand the meaning ofno distraction?

Admittedly, it’s more chaste than most gowns people wear at these sorts of things, but there’s something about the way she wears it that makes it way too dramatic, impossible to ignore. And I can’t stop looking at her breasts, specifically at the place where they crowd together. Two smooth globes, pressed distractingly together.

“Tabitha, you look stunning,” Clark says.

“Thank you,” she says.

They both turn to me, the asshole in the room with the buzzing brain. It’s just that, does she have some special bra on? Some new innovation in female witchery?

The dress is all wrong. I barely ever notice women’s clothes unless they’re difficult to remove. But this dress? Absolutely too overwhelming.

And what about Marvin, horndogging all over her? If we thought he was bad before, what about now? Was any thought given to that? Because the idea of his eyes roaming all over her—I really will come down on him like a ton of bricks.

“My personal shopper came up with this?” I bark. “Thisis what you guys decided would be good to wear?”

“D-don’t you like it?” she says.

Clark fixes me with a dark look. “What’s the problem?”

“It’s a bit…much.” I make a hand gesture in the vague region of my torso. My neck. My head. She’s piled her dark hair up onto her head, which just accentuates the effect of her neck and her large eyes, her regal bone structure. It’s all of her, like a shiny lure, tailor-made for creating more Marvin problems.

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