The Billionaire's Proposal Read online

  “Really?” I exclaimed, turning to face him. “Who’s going to be the one wearing the slip, Nicholas? Who should be the one to pick it?”

  He sat up—thrilled to finally be included, and just as indignant as me.

  “Who do you buy a slip to impress, Abby? Who’s the one who takes it off?”

  Who the fuck decided it was a good idea to give this man skills in debate? As if he needed another weapon in his arsenal.

  “...my boyfriend.”

  “Exactly,” Nick declared triumphantly. “And as your boyfriend, I’m saying that you should definitely go with the blue!”

  He reached again for the mouse, but I twisted it away.

  “Well given that you’re my fake boyfriend, I’m not entirely sure your opinion matters.”

  “Oh really?” His face lit up with a grin, as he shifted closer to me on the cushion. I bit my lip, but the giggles still leaked through. “Is that the way you want to play it? Give it here!”

  “No!” I squealed, doing my very best to keep the computer out of reach.

  It was no use.

  In an act of desperation, I made a wild leap to freedom—only to get instantly captured by his arms. Then he lunged. Then came the tickling.

  “Nick—don’t! You’ll break it!”

  I would have said more, but his fingers were relentless and I soon lost my breath to waves of uncontrollable laughter. It was torture! I wriggled and gasped and writhed, trying to break free, but his arms created an inescapable circle around me—pulling me tightly against his chest.

  “Surrender!”

  I shrieked again and doubled over, clinging to the computer like it was my whole life. His chest shook with silent laughter behind me, but he showed not an ounce of mercy. His legs wrapped around mine as his fingers dug into my sides. When my head fell back on his shoulder, gasping for air, he took the opportunity to gleefully bite the side of my neck. Even when the laptop slipped free onto the ground, he continued with his crusade.

  It wasn’t until I was sitting squarely in his lap, my hands trapped in his own, that the two of us came to a sudden stop.

  Our laughter faded awkwardly, then quieted completely as the air between us became abruptly tense. Neither one of us had mentioned the rather enormous line we had crossed the previous evening. Neither one of us had even come close.

  Nick loosened his grip as he made a concerted effort to try.

  “Abby, listen—”

  But it was at that moment that he put his foot down—unknowingly—right on top of the fallen computer. There was a tiny crunch, as the screen splintered into a million pieces.

  That’s one way to break the ice...

  The two of us stared down for a long moment, both frozen in surprise, both wondering what to say. Then Nick’s face lit up with sudden inspiration.

  “Don’t worry—we can just go online and buy another one!”

  Chapter 13

  And so the hours passed.

  Considering the fact that Nick had never done ‘normal’ in his entire life, I have to say that he took to it quite beautifully. While I retrieved his computer to finish my shopping, he flipped on the television, and under my guidance, began an old school Netflix fest. After taking a full twenty minutes to read the descriptions of every show, he settled—rather ironically—upon Stranger Things, and it wasn’t long before I abandoned my shopping entirely to watch.

  “I still don’t understand,” I murmured a few episodes later.

  By now, the sun was hanging low in the sky, but we had yet to move even an inch from our original positions. Truth be told, we had yet to blink.

  The buzzer rang. I buzzed the pizza guy in and opened the door. I didn’t want to miss a minute so I ran back to the TV set.

  “Why doesn’t she just tear the whole house down, if he’s in the walls?”

  Nick hushed me without ever breaking his gaze.

  “Because the walls are only a single portal. If she destroys that, then he has no way of contacting her and all those Christmas lights were for nothing.”

  I sat for a minute, considering this.

  “Yeah, but why doesn’t she just—”

  “No, I thought of that. But it would require a comb, remember?”

  “Oh. Right.” I chewed my lip for a second, thinking. “But what if she just—”

  “No more idea, okay sweetheart?”

  “But they’re good ideas, Nick!”

  “Yeah?” He raised his eyebrows defiantly. “Like when you told Barb to go outside and wait by the pool? That turned out to be a great idea!”

  I threw up my hands.

  “How was I supposed to know the thing was waiting for her—”

  A throat cleared softly behind us, and we whipped around to see the most bashful pizza delivery man in the entire city. He grimaced apologetically at startling us, then gestured to the frozen characters on the screen.

  “Episode six?”

  We nodded silently.

  “Yeah—me and my girlfriend started fighting around that point too.” He held out the box with a good-natured smile. “Large pepperoni? Extra cheese?”

  For a second, the two of us simply stared. Half horrified at the atrocities we’d just witnessed on screen, and half stunned senseless at the man’s automatic assumption.

  Girlfriend. Boyfriend. Couple’s television fight.

  There was nothing remotely normal about those words when applied to us, and yet somehow, that happened to be exactly what we were doing.

  Maybe this was turning out to be a normal day after all?

  As I glanced nervously down at the sofa, Nick sprang to his feet to pay for the pizza. He left a rather outrageously large tip, and the guy left with a grin. A grin that I saw mirrored on Nick’s face as he set the pizza on a coffee table and sat back down beside me.

  A grin that abruptly made me suspicious.

  “Did you pay that guy to say that?” I asked suddenly.

  Nick’s head jerked up in surprise. “What?”

  “Oh come on.” I folded my arms across my chest with a grin, tossing my dark waves of hair back behind me. “Like it would be a stretch to assume you’d coached the pizza guy? Like you haven’t gleefully manipulated situations before just to fuck with me?”

  I expected a triumphant confession, but Nick just threw back his head with a laugh.

  “You—Wilder—are entirely too suspicious, you know that?”

  My eyes narrowed as he grabbed a slice of pizza. “That isn’t exactly a denial...”

  He laughed again and took a bite, before pulling off another piece for me.

  “No—alright—I swear. He was just a random pizza guy.”

  I studied him for a moment, a very long moment indeed, before taking the slice with a reluctant smile. I had to admit, when the guy first said it, Nick had looked as surprised as I was.

  But he certainly didn’t look that way now. In fact, he looked rather pleased.

  “What are you grinning about?” I asked as he turned back to the screen.

  He flashed me a dimpled smile, before lifting my feet and laying them across his lap. I looked on in shock as he ate his pizza with one hand, and rubbed my ankles with another.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  Nicholas Hunter was giving me a foot massage. What the fuck was happening?!

  “Come on,” I demanded, propping myself up on my elbows. “Tell me.”

  He glanced at me again, before leaning back with an innocent shrug.

  “This is just nice, you know?”

  I followed his gaze around the domestic little scene, before returning with a question.

  “What’s nice?”

  His lips curved up as he picked up the remote and pressed play.

  “...normal.”

  Chapter 14

  Let me just say: a normal day did not include fucking Nicholas Hunter.

  That being said...I was having some trouble keeping my hands to myself.

  If I had been smitten with int
ernational sensation Nick...the guy who flew across oceans on a whim, the guy who had an ice cream flavor named after him in seventeen states... If I had been smitten with New York bad boy Nick...the guy who knew the bouncers at every club, the guy who spent half his time schmoozing senators, and the other half sleeping with their wives...

  If I had already been smitten with that guy?

  It was nothing compared to how I felt about homebody Nick.

  He was adorable. Irresistibly fucking adorable.

  After consuming an entire box of pizza in one sitting, the two of us had proceeded to turn off the television, and turn to each other instead. Cursory jokes and flippant answers gave way to hard-hitting questions. Questions that the both of us answered as honestly as we could.

  How had I felt when my father left? How had he felt never really having much of a father at all? What did my mother do for a living? Did he have any real interest in taking over the family business, or was Mitchell Hunter living in a dream?

  It was something that neither one of us was prepared for. Something that neither one of us had at all planned for. It was just something we kind of fell into—then kept each other afloat.

  “To be honest...I guess I always assumed that the guy would sort of live forever, that it would never become an actual possibility,” Nick admitted quietly, still rubbing my ankles with a rather thoughtful look on his face. “People like him tend to linger on out of spite, and I have no interest in the corporate world myself. I don’t know what I would do if it ever came down to it.”

  I nodded with wide eyes. A little tipsy. Very interested.

  Just a few hours before, he and I had made a quick visit to the wine cellar to supplement the rest of our evening. As it was technically still in the building, we were technically still ‘at home,’ and had proceeded back upstairs to drain two bottles. The third was open on the table.

  “Well, it’s certainly a huge decision.” I sipped delicately from my glass, trying to envision a world in which Mitchell Hunter was no longer present. “A job like that isn’t just a job—it’s a lifestyle. Not like mine.”

  Nick ignored everything that applied to him, and focused instead on the single line that applied to me. “Not like yours?” he quoted incredulously. “You don’t think that being a PR guru at your level is a lifestyle? Who are you kidding, Abby—of course it is.”

  I shook my head quickly, trying to divert the attention back away from myself.

  “No, that’s not what I meant. My job is crazy time-consuming, but my name isn’t stamped across an international letter-head, you know? If I didn’t show up for work one day, the only person who would suffer would be me.” I gazed at him thoughtfully, eyes lingering on the messy hair and rumpled pajamas. “That’s not like how it is with you. There are people counting on you. People who are counting on you to show up.” I gestured around the living room with a short laugh. “That’s the whole reason we’re doing this.”

  His eyes flickered about for a moment, before circling back to me.

  “We’re doing this,” he scooted a little closer, “because out of all the people on the planet, there’s no one I’d rather be chained to this sofa with than you.”

  My cheeks heated with a flush, and he flashed me a quick smile before continuing.

  “And we’re doing this...” he gestured to the two of us, “because we’re drunk.”

  The serious mood shattered in an instant, and I threw back my head with a laugh. “Is that right? You wouldn’t be talking to me like this if we were sober?”

  “Are you kidding?” He ran a hand back through his hair, keeping the other locked on my ankle the whole time. “I wouldn’t say these things to my priest.” I cocked my eyebrows doubtfully, and he conceded the point. “Fine—I wouldn’t say these things if I had a priest.”

  I snorted and leaned back against the cushions.

  “What—you think your father has infiltrated the clergy? Even words said in confessional are no longer safe?”

  It was said as a joke, but there was a little bit too much truth there for comfort. Not since the robber barons and oil tycoons of the Industrial Revolution had one man in the city possessed so much power. At this point, there was literally nothing and no one out of his reach.

  While most sons of such a man would consider this power a blessing...Nick did not.

  “The thing about my dad is...

  He trailed off, staring at the blank television screen as a small shadow flickered across his handsome face. It was an expression that only Mitchell had ever been able to produce. One that seemed completely out of place on a face so prone to smile. And while I was curious what he’d been about to say—I knew much better than to ask.

  After getting hired by the Hunter family, as I was literally walking back down the hall in Nick’s penthouse after seeing father and son together for the first time, I remember being struck with a single pervading thought:

  I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to grow up with such a man.

  Not that Mitchell had much of a hand in actually raising Nick. Like most children born into wealth and privilege, Nick was raised by nannies until he was shipped off to boarding school to grow up with the rest of the future senators, CEO’s, and leaders of the free world.

  What few childhood memories he had of Mitchell were few and far between, and despite the rest of his life being an open book, Nick certainly wasn’t sharing.

  A few things had slipped out over the years. Things said in rare, unguarded moments of either intoxication or rage. Things that were chilling enough to make my toes curl.

  But for the most part, both father and son seemed content to leave the past in the past. It was for the best, too. Aside from a towering height and proclivity for beautiful women and lots of money—the two had been virtual strangers from the start. It was an uneasy truce, but one that had served as the fundamental basis of their relationship for years.

  Mitchell lived his life, while Nick was free to live his own. It wasn’t until recently that things had begun to overlap, and despite having worked for the family for a little over two years, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen them together.

  That being said, there was still something a little scary about Mitchell—no matter how far removed he might be. Perhaps it was that, even so far away, he was still the only person in the world who could make Nick make that face.

  He saw me looking, and quickly smoothed it clear.

  “The thing about my dad is...he can always manage to ruin a good day. So let’s not talk about him anymore.” He pushed to his feet, rendering the conversation closed. At first, I thought he was upset—but then he reached down his hand with a tender smile. “And I had a really good day, Abby.”

  I beamed back, and let him help me to my feet. According to the clock on the wall, it was already coming up on two in the morning. Had we really been talking that long?

  “Me too.”

  It wasn’t flattery or exaggeration. Truth be told, it was the best day I could remember having in a long, long time.

  “Same thing tomorrow?” I asked, tilting my head with a teasing smile.

  Without seeming to think about it, he reached out and stroked a long finger all the way down the length of my face. I froze beneath his hand, shivering as he lingered near my jaw.

  Then, as quickly as he’d touched me, he pulled away.

  “Actually...how would you feel about something a little different tomorrow?”

  “Different?” I repeated, well aware that in Nick’s world, ‘different’ wasn’t exactly limited to this side of the Atlantic. “What did you have in mind?”

  He let me hang for only a second, before flashing me a sparkling smile.

  “Let me take you out tomorrow...on a date.”

  My eyebrows shot up into my hair. We had been on dates before. The other night at the boxing exhibition was technically a date. But dates were for public viewing. They weren’t a random thing the two of us would dec
ide to do. So...was that supposed to be my cue?

  “Okay...um...” I pushed back my hair, trying my very best to snap back into business mode. “Where did you want to go? If it’s still within the city limits, I could tip off the press—”

  “No press.” He pushed my hands away, and pulled me a step closer. There was just an inch or two of space between us now. I could see every fleck of green in those blue eyes. “No cameras or other people. Just you and me. A date.”

  I shook my head blankly, still trying to understand.

  “Like...a date, date?”

  He grinned, but held back a laugh at my grade-school terminology.

  “Yeah, Abby. Like a date, date.”

  A date. Go out on a date with Nicholas Hunter.

  He watched as I considered, waiting patiently as I turned the phrase over in my mind. No matter which way I looked at it, something didn’t add up.

  “You don’t date.”

  It was true. Nick went out with girls—but not ever with any sort of romantic designs. He went out because he liked to be out. Liked to see shows, go to clubs, eat fancy dinners. They weren’t designed to impress, they weren’t designed to create any added amount of intimacy. To be honest, he knew he didn’t have to. No matter what happened, by the end of the night, they always ended up sleeping with him anyway.

  Hence my confusion.

  He hesitated for a second, acknowledging the awkward truth. But when he looked down into my eyes, there was an honesty and a vulnerability there I had never seen before.

  “I would date you.”

  My heartbeat quickened, as my lips fell open just a hair. It was the very last thing I ever expected him to say. And while I might not exactly understand his reasons, I couldn’t help but feel a little overwhelmed by the whole thing.

  “Come on,” he coaxed, dipping his head to catch my eye. “I won’t even bring Max.”

  I let out a laugh, before gazing back up into his eyes.

  Was he actually serious? Could this actually be happening?

  “Do you even know how to date?” I stalled, leaning back with a coy grin. “What exactly might this date consist of?”