The Billionaire's Proposal Page 11

  It was a testament to how thrown I still was by the hot tub, that I didn’t go and try to drown him in it right then and there.

  “This is a big shock to you, is it?” I asked through gritted teeth. “Not like you could have had anything to do with it. Oh, now I get it. Now I know why you said to enjoy Brooklyn while it lasted. Because you knew you were moving me out. You touched all my stuff!”

  He waded toward me, cutting his arm through the foamy waves.

  “Abigail, I’m offended that you would even suggest it. Of course I had nothing to do with touching your stuff.” He paused, hedging his bets. “I simply called the moving company, and arranged to have all your things put into storage...”

  “NICK!” I exclaimed, throwing my hands up in the air. “What the hell would possess you to do such a thing? I literally walked inside this morning, and all my stuff was gone! I thought for a second that I’d been robbed!”

  “And that’s exactly why I did it,” he countered. There was no shame or remorse. Just the same astronomical level of confidence that carried him through, day by day. “You didn’t put on that necklace yesterday, because you were afraid of getting jumped on the curb. The curb right by your house,” he stressed, in case I was somehow missing his point. “Now tell me how, in good conscience, could I let you go back to a place like that?”

  It was a sweet premise, but the execution was all wrong.

  “How could you LET me go back?” I repeated incredulously, wondering in what state he would survive if I used my purse to bash him over the head. “It’s not up to you, Hunter! It’s my apartment! Understand?! Me! Mine! You have no business interfering like you did!”

  He studied my face for a moment, measuring my rage, before shaking his head with a sympathy so contrived, he didn’t even bother to try and sell it. “I think you mean: I had no business interfering like I did. It’s already done, Abby. No taking it back now.”

  My blood boiled under in my skin, and I threw my bag down on the floor.

  How could he sit there and be so calm?! How could he play puppet-master with people’s lives, and expect there to be no consequences?!

  “This is not over, and it’s certainly not okay,” I said quietly, folding my arms with a dangerous glare. “Now I have no idea why you did what you did, but let me assure you—”

  But before I could finish, he interrupted me—looking positively delighted all the while.

  “Oh Abby—of course you’re upset!” he exclaimed, beaming full force with a sudden smile. “You have no context for this, I haven’t even asked you the question yet!”

  “The question?”

  I kept my arms carefully folded over my chest, bracing myself for whatever mischief my insufferable client/fake boyfriend had up his sleeve. I had seen Nick in these whimsical moods before. The ones where he leapt into grandiose gestures without thought of consequence. I was not about to let myself get taken in by it now.

  “Yes—the question.”

  It was at this point that he stood up. The water streamed away, and my mouth fell open as I stared at all of his naked glory. It took me a second to realize he was still talking to me. That he was asking me a very serious question.

  “Will you move in with me?”

  Chapter 12

  I shook my head, momentarily speechless. It was impossible to talk with him standing naked in front of me. It was impossible to even think.

  He dipped his head a little lower to catch my eye.

  “Abby?”

  I blinked and returned to the present.

  “I’m sorry—what did you say?”

  A little grin flashed across his face. One he made no effort to hide.

  “Move in with me.”

  I made a conscious effort to close my mouth, then stalled—grasping for time.

  “...that’s not a question.”

  He lifted his chin.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  As usual, it was that insufferable arrogance that broke through the spell. My eyes flashed and I folded my arms slowly across my chest.

  “Why the fuck would I want to move in with the same man who evicted me from my old apartment in the first place? Why would I want to live with someone like that?”

  “Abby,” his face melted into a smile, “I’m so glad you asked. Please,” he patted the water beside him, “climb inside and we can talk about it.”

  “Climb in—” My voice cut off with a frustrated shriek. “I am not climbing inside, Nick! I am seriously debating whether or not to start throwing in electric appliances!”

  He nodded slowly, lifting his hands like a cautious shield.

  “Why don’t we shelf that idea for now—”

  “NICK!”

  “Look I’m sorry, okay?” he admitted, finally dropping the act. As if on cue, the jets of bubbles lessened, adding a more subdued note to his remorse. “I was just...worried about you. I was looking up the crime statistics for your neighborhood after our talk that day, and—”

  “Wait,” I cut him off, trying to keep it all straight, “you were looking up crime statistics for my neighborhood?” There was a beat. “By yourself?”

  For a second, his eyes cooled.

  “I know how to work a computer, you know. I don’t just use them as coasters.”

  I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. There was another migraine coming on. And for the first time in years, I didn’t have a place of my own to run back to.

  “Why were you looking up...” Then a more relevant question popped into my mind, and I changed course. “Wait—since what day?”

  Nick paused, caught off guard.

  “What?”

  I opened my eyes and stared him down, growing more curious by the second.

  “You said you looked them up after ‘our talk that day.’” I shook my head, more confused than ever. “We’ve never talked about my neighborhood. What day are you even talking about?”

  Much to my great astonishment, Nick actually blushed. To my even greater astonishment, he bowed his head—looking suddenly shy.

  “You know what day.”

  My eyebrows lifted in surprise, and I shook my head.

  “No—I actually don’t.”

  “Come on, Abby.”

  “Nick,” I emphasized each word, “I honestly have no idea what you’re—”

  “After that day in Dior,” he interrupted. Now that the truth was out, he was suddenly in a rush to get it over with as quickly as possible. “I looked it up after that day we went shopping.”

  I wished I could come up with something to say. I wished I could think of literally anything else to do besides just standing there. But again and again, I came up blank.

  “...why would you do that?”

  He stared at me for a moment, before raking his fingers back through his wet hair with a little sigh. “You said...you said you were proud of being able to take care of yourself, because in the neighborhood where you grew up—it wasn’t the easiest thing to claim.”

  He remembered the quote exactly. That brilliant mind of his working again.

  Not that it made any sense.

  My face softened, and I took a step forward. “Okay, well...Nick, that isn’t exactly a rare thing. There are lots of neighborhoods around New York like that—”

  “But you’re not living in them,” he interrupted fiercely.

  A sudden silence rang out between us, one that grew more and more awkward the longer it was allowed to go on. Twice, we tried to break it. Twice, we came up short.

  In the end, he merely bowed his head with another sigh.

  “I’m sorry I moved you without permission, Abby,” he said softly. “I really am. If you don’t want to stay here, then I’d be happy to find you other arrangements. Not in Brooklyn.”

  The surprises just kept coming.

  My lips parted, and despite having stormed in here with enough rage to power the entire island, I found myself profoundly touched. There was a method to the ma
dness after all. He was trying to take care of me. In his own, bizarre, Nick way...

  This time, it was my turn to avert my eyes. No matter how far the two of us might have gone yesterday, I simply didn’t feel right about seeing him naked. This was still supposed to be an arrangement, after all. I was still supposed to be able to determine between what was real.

  For this next part, I chose my words carefully. Well aware that when you were talking with Nick, there was no practice round. You were playing with live ammunition.

  “I don’t want to be tricked into staying here.” I emphasized the word carefully, hoping like hell it would hit home. I wasn’t disappointed.

  Nick’s eyes lit up, but he kept a careful calm—coaxing me toward that final ledge.

  “Then let me convince you.”

  I took a step back, tilting my head doubtfully to the side as he stood in supplication before me. “Convince me? Well so far today, I’ve already been forcibly evicted. You’re off to a really great start.”

  Most other people would have blushed. Nick didn’t. He rose to the challenge.

  “Then let’s start over.” His eyes danced as his mind began spinning a million miles a minute. “Let me give you a day in my world. We can start with crepes at Le Lapin Blanc, then head over for a private viewing at Christie’s. After that, if you’re not opposed to a little light travel, there’s supposed to be this incredible nightclub opening in Saint-Tropez—”

  “Nick,” I held up a hand to stop him, “I don’t want a day in your world.”

  He pulled up suddenly short, looking as though he didn’t quite understand.

  “You don’t...that’s okay!” He was quick to recover himself. “We can stay Stateside, no reason to go jetting all over the world. I heard that Cartier is actually unveiling a new—”

  “Do you think we could just stay in?”

  Okay—now he definitely didn’t understand. All the words were familiar, and yet, when strung in that particular order, they didn’t compute.

  “Stay in?”

  He glanced down without thinking about it at my breasts, and I realized that in Nick’s world, ‘stay in,’ could mean only one thing. I was quick to dissuade that notion.

  “Normal people don’t go jetting around the globe at the drop of a hat,” I said with the hint of a smile. “When normal people want Chinese food, they order in. They don’t go to China.”

  His eyes tightened almost imperceptibly, and I could tell he was having similar problems with the word normal. Surely he’d heard it somewhere before. What exactly did it mean?

  A little smile crept up the side of my face, and I looked at him fondly.

  “I’ve spent the last two years living in your world. Two years doing anything and everything you wanted to do. How about, for one day only...we live in mine?”

  Nick spoke slowly, trying out the words for the first time.

  “Have a normal day.”

  I grinned.

  “That’s right.”

  He grinned tentatively back, then added on a modifier.

  “A normal Abby day.”

  I nodded, and watched the decision-making process take hold.

  At first, he didn’t know quite what to make of it. But after a moment’s consideration, the thought appealed to him greatly. His eyes lit up, and he took a giant step forward.

  “Where do we begin?”

  I couldn’t help but laugh at his enthusiasm. It was catching. And adorable as hell. He was like a little kid with a new toy, aching to try it out. Dimples and all.

  “Well,” I began slowly, “a good friend of mine recently exiled all my things to an unknown storage locker, so I might start with a little online shopping to replenish.” I took one look at his incredulous expression, and rolled my eyes. “It’s not an urban legend, Nick. People actually do buy things off the internet. Not everything has to be purchased in a private viewing.”

  He shook his head at the floor, eyes wide with wonder.

  “I have to text all my friends...”

  “Very funny,” I snorted. Then I gestured to the couch. “So is that okay? Is it alright if I set up down here, or—”

  This time, it was his turn to laugh.

  “Abby, you don’t need to ask permission. This is your house now too.” He spread his arms wide, gesturing all around. “What’s mine is yours. No exceptions.”

  Again—profoundly touched.

  I hid it well, watching with a touch of amusement as he started rambling on about all the ‘normal’ things the two of us could do. Most of them were clearly stolen from a domestic TV show, and throughout the entire process, he seemed to have completely forgotten he was naked.

  It wasn’t until he started seriously considering the prospect of getting a dog, that I cleared my throat softly to get his attention.

  “Nick...normal people don’t go skinny-dipping in the middle of the living room floor.”

  He paused mid-rant, then glanced down without a hint of shame.

  “Right that...that makes some degree of sense.” With a grin that could scarcely contain his excitement, he scooped up a towel, fastened it around his waist, and sprinted up the stairs, taking them four at a time. “Let me just get dressed, I’ll be down in a minute!”

  “You do that,” I answered, doing my very best to keep from laughing.

  A second later a door slammed shut, but his voice still echoed down the winding stairs.

  “Don’t start without me!”

  * * *

  After over two years of gallivanting all over the globe with Nick, cleaning up his various messes, I had thought there was very little left that could surprise me. Very little ground we had left to cover, or things we had yet to try. I was wrong.

  Nick and I had yet to have a normal day.

  “This is blowing my fucking mind right now.” He leaned past me to get a better look at the screen, inadvertently covering my face with a fan of his hair. “You just type in anything you want, and they’ll find you a seller? Anything you can think of?”

  Although it clearly went against his every restless instinct, he had taken to our newfound stagnancy like a fish to water—deliberately hollowing out a little crater for himself in the couch cushions, just so it looked like he had been there longer than he had. Online shopping, in particular, was a source of great entertainment and fun. Perhaps, because it was the only bit of common ground he was likely to find—Nick loved to spend money.

  “For fuck’s sake,” I spat out a mouthful of his hair, “this cannot possibly be the first time you’ve done this. How have you never heard of Amazon?”

  “I was always under the impression it was a river. Come on,” he reached pleadingly for the keyboard, “give it to me. Let me help.”

  “You’re not helping,” I clarified, shutting down the notion. “If anything, you’re making this take ten times longer than it’s supposed to.”

  He ignored me, eyes lit up with a manic glow from the screen.

  “Go back to ‘patio and garden.’ I think we should buy a rake.”

  “We are not buying a—” I slapped his hand as he reached for the mouse, “don’t touch that! We are not buying a rake. You don’t even have a lawn.”

  “Someday I might have one.” His eyes glassed over as he imagined a million possibilities he’d never considered. “In fact—I bet that’s something we could order from here too!”

  I gave him a long look, before securing the laptop squarely on my own legs.

  “This was a huge mistake.”

  “No, it wasn’t!” he said excitedly. “Abby, you were totally right. This is great! And very normal,” he added seriously, upon seeing the look on my face.

  I let out a snort of laughter, and continued browsing for clothes.

  Nick hadn’t told me where the storage space was—according to him, it was somewhere on the Eastern seaboard, but that was the only thing he could remember. Instead, he had insisted upon building up my wardrobe from scratch—his treat.

>   Under normal circumstances, I would have refused. But no matter how hard we were pretending, these were hardly normal circumstances. And since it was his fault that I didn’t have any clothes in the first place, well...his treat.

  “I still can’t believe you’ve never done this,” I muttered, adding a full length trench coat to my bag. At first, I’d tried to be thrifty. He’d deleted the entire bag and forced me to start over. “I think I could literally do it in my sleep.”

  He bristled defensively.

  “I could do it if I want.” The cool confidence was gone, replaced again with that same little kid. The one who was eyeing the laptop with a strangely covetous expression. “I’m sure I could do it a hell of a lot faster than you.”

  “Oh yeah?” I turned to him expectantly. “What’s your email password?”

  He hesitated, probably wishing he hadn’t made it the name of whatever girlfriend he’d had at the time. There was no way to track it now.

  “It’s...uh, it’s...”

  “What’s your cell phone provider? The name of those Belgian chocolates you like so much? What’s the PIN to your ATM card? I noticed the other night, that the teller just checked your ID and handed you money.”

  Outgunned at every turn, he decided to ignore the problem entirely—turning up his head with a sneer. “Abby, haven’t you ever read Thoreau? That stuff isn’t what’s important. It’s people. It’s the connections we—”

  “Really?” I cut him off with a sarcastic grin. “You’re going to try to get out of this by faking an existential awakening? Will I find you reading down by the pond?”

  “Point is,” he countered defiantly, “all you need to buy those things is money. I have money. Case closed.”

  “I have your bank passwords.”

  The two of us shared a long look. Then he lowered his eyes with a shudder.

  “That’s a chilling thought...”

  I laughed and got back to my shopping, as he folded his hands petulantly in his lap, and tried ever-so-casually to insert what he thought to be vital input.

  “You should get it in the blue...” he muttered, casting a sideways glance at the screen.

  The mouse hovered uncertainly over two different designer slips. I had been going for the black. He was obviously leaning the other way. After another moment’s pause, I went with my original instinct. He leaned back his head with a long-suffering sigh.