Page 50 of The Billionaire's Fake Fiancée

“Hilarious as a mama bear.”

She seems to think this is amusing. “She is very no-nonsense.”

“That’s an understatement,” I say. “She married into the Driscoll money, but she’s the one responsible for getting this family into the megayacht set. She’d shiv you if she thought you were crossing one of hers.”

“That kind of makes me like her more,” Tabitha says.

“It makes me like her more, too,” I say. “But not when she’s jerking me around with this review. This vacation.”

“A vacay on a yacht—positively medieval,” Tabitha says. “Thumbscrews would be better!”

“Actually, thumbscrews would be better,” I say. “I’d vastly prefer thumbscrews to a two-week yacht trip.”

“What do you hate about yachts so much? A yacht is exciting.”

“A yacht is objectively not exciting,” I say. “The view is nothing but the endless monotony of sky and sea, and there’s nowhere to go. A yacht is just a hotel on water, except you’re trapped together with everybody else who’s in the hotel. And everybody is a stranger in a regular hotel and you’re not expected to talk to them. Here? You’re supposed to talk to people. And this isn’t even a five-star hotel. It’s more of a four. A boat simply isn’t large enough to have the amenities of a five-star hotel. Why? Because it’s a mode of transportation. Humankind should’ve left it as that.”

Tabitha’s suppressing a smile—I can tell by the way she’s moving her cheeks, her lips. The deepening of her dimples.

“Do I amuse you?” I snap.

She tries to disguise her smile by biting her bottom lip. Pretty white teeth crushing her bottom lip. It doesn’t work.

“Yachts.” I grab my straw and shove it into my seltzer, focusing on the bubbles. “Can you argue with any part of what I just said?”

“No!”

When I look back up, her bottom lip is rosy and plump from the force of her teeth, and I have this nearly uncontrollable urge to press my thumb onto the pillowy center of it, just press my thumb onto her lip and stop her from being so…Tabitha-ish.

But more than that. I want to slide my thumb in past her plump bottom lip and right into her mouth. Something in me ripples at the knowledge that she’d suck on it, because that’s a move of hers—that’s what she showed me on the plane.

It would be so wrong.

She’d suck on my thumb the way she sucked on my tongue, gaze just a little bit sassy, with this insinuation that she might not let it go. A messed-up little move that is so her, because she pushes everything. It comes to me then that that’s exactly the way she’d suck my cock, too—pushing things, not letting me go. Because she always needs to make you crazy. Tabitha and her sugar-berry lips and those breasts pushed together just so.

I shake myself back to reality. “What’s more, this constant demand for socialization makes it nearly impossible for me to work. I have a massive global empire to run, and instead I’m stuck in this windowless hellscape of socializing.”

Tabitha’s working yet again to hide her smile, but her dimples have reappeared, giving her away.

“What now?” I demand.

“Whatkind of empire?” she asks. “What kind of empire are you running?”

I give her a dark look.

Two of the Texas cousins, two teenaged granddaughters, and the family’s interior designer choose this moment to join us.

I look around and spot Clark up at a front table. Serena is thankfully at a table with some of the vendors. Gail’s at a table with her daughters and their husbands.

Now the family’s PR woman sits and introduces herself as Nala.

It’s Nala’s birthday. One of the women proposes a toast and everybody is laughing and clinking glasses. The talk turns to birthdays, everybody telling birthday stories. Tabitha gets deeply involved, which works for me—I do some discreet work on my phone.

One of the Driscoll cousins tells a funny story about a birthday gone wrong while I text with my quant team leader.

I’m vaguely aware of Tabitha telling a funny birthday story a few minutes later, something about her as a kid at the TipTop, which is one of those restaurants at the top of a skyscraper where the floor revolves around to provide views of the city. She has the women on the other side of the table roaring with laughter at her description of herself as a twelve-year-old girl all alone, waiting for her dad, crying in a party dress, and how she’d adjust her party hat to milk the sympathy.

“You can’t believe how many free desserts I got,” Tabitha says. “The pretty waitresses would come over on their breaks. It turned out to be a great birthday!”

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