Single Mom Wanted for Fake Marriage: A Billionaire Romance

by Aubrey Dark

  There was a pause. I lowered my hand and cupped my mug of tea. I felt strange about listening in, but William’s soft voice was almost hypnotic.

  “I’m sorry for moving you away from your home. I should have asked your mom first. Hell, I should have asked you first. I hope you like it here. It looks like Shawna brought your animals here to be with you. Let’s see. A giraffe, that’s a good one. Two tigers. Is that your favorite? And a…camel? I think that’s a camel you tore the head off of. You look like such an angel when you’re asleep, it’s hard to believe you could be so destructive.”

  I leaned back against the kitchen table. I’d never heard a man talking like this to Kit. Something choked my throat, made the muscles tight and aching. I could barely breathe as I listened to him talk to her.

  “So see, it won’t be a completely new place. And you’ll have your mom in the room right next to you. And I’ll be on the other side, in case you want to come and chew on any more of my shoes. Soon it’ll be just like home here, I bet.”

  I lifted my mug of tea and sipped through trembling lips.

  “We’ll be listening in case you have any bad dreams, and your mom will be right there. But it looks like you’re sleeping soundly after a long day of mayhem. Goodnight, little girl. Sweet dreams. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  The intercom went back to silent. Dizzy, I punched the off button and walked back down the hallway. A mix of guilt and anger swirled inside of me. And more than that, jealousy. I was jealous that no matter what happened, William would never be mine. He was out of my league, on a completely different level. He would never be my daughter’s father. He would never really be part of our family. And that made me madder than ever.

  I stopped when I saw movement in a room, a jacket being thrown on a bed. William’s room. He’d put the nursery right next to his room. My heart thudded in my chest.

  “William?”

  I paused in the doorway, the cup of tea in my hands. William was loosening his tie in the mirror of his dresser. With strong hands, he unraveled the fabric and slung it back across one shoulder. Then he turned to me, a blank look on his face.

  “Yes? Do you want to go into the office to talk?”

  “No, I— we can talk here. If that’s okay with you.” I bit my lip, nervous for some reason I couldn’t understand.

  “That’s fine. Come in. I wanted to apologize for moving you in without—”

  “It’s okay.” I put my mug of tea down on the side table. His bed was right in the middle of the room, a huge king sized mattress covered with a deep blue cover. I struggled not to think about all of the women he’d brought here, who had laid in that bed with him. I thought of Shawna, her perfect smooth skin and her elegance. The thought burned in my gut.

  “You didn’t even hear what I was going to say. I promise I won’t make any decisions about Kit without asking you first. Alright?”

  “Yes. Alright.” I bent my head. For some reason, my normal confidence had abandoned me. This was the man who was going to send Kit to college, and here I was being upset with him for moving her into a proper nursery. A nursery like the one I could never afford, no matter how many safes I cracked. I should be ashamed of myself.

  “Sierra? What is it?”

  William came closer to me. I lifted a hand to keep him at bay. I couldn’t deal with him being so close to me right now.

  “I—I just—I’m sorry. I shouldn’t ask.”

  “What is it?” He cocked his head. “Is this about Shawna?”

  A sob rose up into my throat and I choked it back down.

  “It’s none of my business,” I said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be involved. If you two are together—”

  “We’re not.”

  His voice was clipped, and when I raised my eyes, he was looking at me strangely.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “She’s my assistant. We’ve grown close over the years.”

  “Sure. Of course.” That made sense. It didn’t drive away the thought of her lying in his bed, but it made sense.

  “And if you want the truth, she’s more likely to be interested in you than me, anyway.”

  I blinked.

  “Really?” Shawna was gay? I couldn’t believe it.

  “Really.” William smiled, and a rush of relief swam through me as he came forward and touched me lightly on the arm. His fingers slid tenderly down, cupped my elbow. “Sierra?”

  “Yes?”

  “I won’t put you in that position. Even if we’re only married in name, I don’t plan on going out carousing with other women.”

  “I—you don’t have to—” I sputtered. “You don’t have to do that for me.”

  “It’s for my appearance as much as anything,” William said. “I don’t want a reputation of being an adulterer.”

  I nodded, unable to say anything. His hand was still on my arm, and oh, God, I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Emotion choked my throat and I looked down into his broad chest.

  “You said something about my brothers,” William continued. “About answering their questions?”

  “Oh!” A flush of embarrassment made me even more flustered. “Oh, that was—it was Sanders. He asked me about your birthmark. If I’d ever seen it. I told him no, that we were taking things slow, but—”

  William’s hand dropped away from my arm. I looked up, but his eyes were distant, calculating.

  “William?”

  “He—no, but he’s right. I’m glad he pointed it out sooner rather than later. I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “I—I don’t—what do you think we should do about it?”

  His expression clicked into decision. This was how he was as a businessman, I thought idly. Thinking hard, then deciding.

  “Well, if you don’t mind being a voyeur, I think you should see my birthmark.”

  Without waiting for my reply, he began to unbutton his shirt. It was good that he hadn’t waited. I don’t know if I could speak. I watched, my body turning more and more aflame, as he stripped down right in front of me. His shirt fell away, revealing hard muscle. Then his pants. Then—

  “Oh. Oh.”

  I swallowed hard, but my face was still burning hot, along with the rest of me.

  He stood in front of me, and my eyes danced down to where the beginning of his birthmark edged above his hipbone. It was a dark brown spot, like an oversized freckle. Its jagged edges ran down sideways to his groin, where his cock hung thick and long. I blinked, my mouth suddenly dry.

  “Well? What do you think?”

  “I think you’ll make your real wife very happy someday,” I quipped, trying to ease the awkwardness with a joke.

  “You’ll have to know every inch of me as much as if we were actual lovers,” William said. “Tell me once you think you’ve seen enough.”

  Seen enough? I didn’t ever want to tear my eyes away from his body. Every angled plane of his muscles tensed, waiting, as my gaze slid down.

  “Need me to turn around? So you can see my, ah—” Will asked, coughing on his last word. I realized that he was nervous, too. More nervous than I was? Maybe. But my eyes drifted down to something else I hadn’t noticed before.

  “What’s that?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Those marks. Right above your knees. What are they?”

  William’s face darkened as I moved closer. The marks were small red welts. Circular. I bent down and he put a hand on my shoulder to stop me.

  “Sierra—”

  “Are those burn marks? Cigarette burns?”

  A hard panic throbbed in my chest.

  “Yes,” William said. His face was closed off completely now, his blue-gray eyes blank and expressionless.

  “Tell me.”

  It was hard to watch his lips move as he tried to find the words. He knew that he had to say something, to give me an explanation. He would have had to with the woman he was going to marry. Finally, he shook his head, and his shoulders lowered slightly.<
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  “My father,” he said. “When I was a teenager.”

  I should have been nervous, standing in front of a man who was completely naked. But now all that burned through me was anger, a pure distilled anger towards the man who would do such a thing to his son. I didn’t know William well—I hardly knew him at all—but there was nobody who deserved this. My fists balled at my sides.

  “He wasn’t a bad man,” William said, and it was to his credit that no trace of bitterness edged his voice. “He was troubled. Deeply troubled. And if he did terrible things, it was because he was under a lot of pressure. I didn’t know back then, and I hated him.”

  Listening to him speak, it was as though he was talking about someone else—another boy, not himself.

  “You had good reason to hate him,” I said, and my voice quivered.

  “I should have pitied him. He was rich, but he never learned to be satisfied with what he had. He was a successful man, not a happy man.”

  “But he did this to you.”

  “He did worse things to other people. What he did to me was nothing in comparison.”

  “But why?”

  “Did your father always treat you kindly?”

  William’s eyes snapped to mine, answering my question with one of his own.

  “Not always,” I said, thinking of how my father would take the money I’d stolen for his own purposes. “But he never—he never physically abused me.”

  “The physical abuse was the easiest to take. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t mind it.”

  “And when he died, you took over his company?”

  I didn’t understand William. I would have run far, far away from a father who had done that to me. But William was still running the business, in his father’s name. I didn’t know how he could stand to do that while being reminded of the scars, seeing them there every day of his life.

  “He was successful, but he never engendered much loyalty among his employees. If I hadn’t taken over the business, it would have fallen apart. My family deserved more than that.”

  “What did you deserve?”

  William shook his head.

  “I got what I deserved. I never wanted anything more.”

  “But you stayed running the company. For… a decade. Why?”

  “I want to make his company mean more than just money. In finance, there’s so much inefficiency. So much waste, so much corruption. I want to end it. I want to do some good in the world, not only for show. I want—”

  William stopped there, as though remembering something. “But you asked about the scars. That’s all you need to know.”

  He turned away and spread his hands across the dresser, leaning against the wood. In the mirror, I could see his closed eyes, the dark lashes hiding the pain hidden deep within. He was naked, but more than that, he was bare to me. Completely and utterly. He’d given me the darkest part of his past, and the most optimistic dreams of his future.

  I didn’t know what to say. Instead, I stepped forward and slipped my arms around his chest, resting my cheek against his strong back. He tensed under the embrace at first. His skin was hot to the touch, as though there was a fire raging inside of him that nobody could see. My hands clasped his chest in a hug, willing him to open up.

  “Sierra—”

  My hands smoothed down his chest to his stomach, where I could feel the rough hair tufting. My heart was pounding, and I had no idea what I was doing. I knew only that I had to do something. I turned my face slightly and kissed him between the shoulder blades, letting my lips press softly to his warm back.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I—”

  He spun around, and before I could finish my sentence, his hands were gripping my arms on either side of my body, lifting me up on tiptoe so that I could no longer touch him. There was a ferocious look in his steel-gray eyes. And I realized, too, that he was hard against my hip, and that he wasn’t bothering to hide his erection.

  “Don’t pity me,” he hissed. “I will not take pity from anyone else, and I certainly will not take it from you.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “We all have our demons, and mine are not unique. We're all cracked, broken in some way. Were all hiding something. Nobody is perfect, and no family is without its problems. But there is nothing missing in my life, and I don’t need your pity. Understood?” He enunciated every single word to the end.

  I nodded. “Understood.”

  “Is there anything else you need from me?”

  His eyes searched my face. And I knew that if I did not ask for what I wanted, I would never be able to ask again.

  “Yes,” I said. “Undress me.”

  Chapter 13

  “Undress me.”

  The words tumbled from her lips, sending another bolt of electric energy straight to the part of me I wished I could control. Surely she had seen what she had done to me, and that was simply with her hands sliding over my bare chest. My breath came hard and hoarse, and my fingers relaxed from her arms where I realized I had been clutching her entirely too tightly.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, letting go of my grip. “I don’t—I can’t—”

  “You said it yourself,” she said. “We need to know each other. Every inch.”

  Before I could stop myself, I licked my bottom lip. Her eyes tracked my tongue, and I wondered if this was manipulation on her part. Her cheeks seemed pink, even in the dim light.

  “Sierra,” I said, starting over, “This has already gone too far tonight.”

  “Then what can it hurt to go farther?”

  I sucked in air between gritted teeth.

  “Alright,” I said. “Take off your clothes.”

  “No. I want you to undress me.”

  Her demand shook me. I wasn’t used to having anyone disobey my commands. Any other employee who’d done the same would have been fired on the spot. But Sierra stood defiantly in front of me, and the thought flashed into my mind: You’ve met your match.

  I didn’t want to wait another second. My cock throbbed uncomfortably, and I was pressing back in the dresser trying to keep it away from her body. She’d brushed it with her hip before, and the agony of desire had almost killed me. Now, I was careful to push her shoulders back slightly as I took in the situation.

  “Turn around,” I said, my voice rasping over my tongue. “So I can unzip you.”

  Sierra’s dark eyes fluttered down, and I was grateful as she turned away from me so that I did not have to see her face. Those tempting lips that had sent lightning down my spine with one kiss. Those eyes, knowing and yet strangely innocent, almost doe-like, in their shape. I let out a breath as her back turned to me. Her chestnut-dark hair flowed over her shoulders, and I brushed it away to get at the zipper. A shiver rippled through the muscles of her shoulders, and it made me long to press a kiss onto her neck, to tempt her in the same way she had tempted me. But I resisted the urge.

  The dress fell away to reveal the creamy skin of her back, broken only by the dark red line of her lacy bra. I lifted my fingers away from the fabric, and the dress pooled at her feet. Her underwear matched her bra, wine-red and laced at the edge.

  My cock twitched and I swallowed hard, forcing myself to examine her arms, her legs. I pushed her hair aside and let my fingers trail down the curve of her shoulder. My gaze swept lower, lingered at the firm curves of her ass, so long that I had to pull my eyes away.

  “You don’t have any marks at all,” I said. “Not a single mole. Not a freckle.”

  She turned around then, wordlessly. I saw then that I was wrong. A thin white seam stretched alongside her stomach, just below her belly button.

  I didn’t think before reaching out to touch it, and she winced. I drew my fingers back.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No,” she said quickly. “I don’t—it doesn’t hurt. It’s only that nobody has ever touched me there before.”

  “Is it from a surgery?”

  She quirked a smile.
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  “Caesarean section. From when Kit was born.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  And nobody had touched her since then? That was something I couldn’t believe.

  “Now my underwear,” she said. When I paused, she added: “You said you would undress me.”

  “So I did. Is that where all of your moles and freckles are hiding?”

  “That’s right. They’re all bunched up on my left tit.” A smile quirked the side of her lip.

  “Hanging around, having a freckle convention.”

  “It’s hideous, actually, but if we’re going to pretend to be married, you really ought to know.”

  Her voice was teasing, but there was a hitch in her breathing that made me throb even more desperately. Before I could think twice about it, I reached around her and unclasped her bra. It fell away from her breasts, and along with it went all of the air in the room.

  “Well?” she asked, tilting her chin up. “I haven’t looked down there in a while. Still hideous?”

  “It looks like your moles have all migrated somewhere else,” I said. My heart thumped in my ears as I took in her gorgeous curves, her pink nipples stiffening in the air. They begged to be sucked and kissed, but I was here only to look at them. The room was so warm. How could she stand it? How could I?

  “Maybe they’ve moved down to my ass,” she said, her voice growing softer. “Would you take off my panties now?”

  This was too much. She had to know what she was playing with here. She was testing me, testing my control. And for the first time in my life, I was close to losing it. If I took off her panties, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to hold myself back. If my fingers touched her skin once more, it would all be over.

  “Do you always get what you want?” I growled.

  “With a two year old? No, I don’t always get what I want,” Sierra said, laughing softly. Her breasts swayed slightly as she laughed, and a fresh ache nearly bent me over with desire. “But with men, yes. Mostly I get what I want.”

  “Because I always get what I want,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “And I don’t know if I can handle this right now. Because of what I want. Do you understand?”