The Billionaire's Fake Fiance

by Annika Martin

  “I feel like this one does.”

  “I got into your business,” he says. “You hate that.”

  “I do,” I say. “Were you awake already?”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “Were you waiting for my call?”

  “Yup.”

  “So what happens now? Do you have a home gym for your insanely punishing workout?”

  “First I’m planning on taking a walk and watching the birds fall from the trees, stunned by my glory. And then the workout. What makes you think it’s insanely punishing?”

  “You’re a bulletproof coffee-drinking workaholic with an unbelievably perfect body who sleeps four hours a night. Let’s call it an educated guess.”

  He makes a little noise, something like a chuckle-groan, followed by rustling, like maybe he rolled over. I wish so hard I was there.

  “Are you in your bedroom?” I ask.

  “Yup.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “You ruled out home visits yesterday. Are we sure about home descriptions?”

  “Pleeeeease.” I want to know. I want to picture him.

  “There are three arched windows in front of me that face west. I can see the moon right now. Building tops. Lights. Long gray curtains on either side.”

  “Gray walls?”

  “White walls,” he says. “Dark wood floor. Most of my art is photography. Architectural photography. But some of it is shapes that the wind makes in sand.”

  “Really?”

  “Sand. Is that surprising? The photographer is from Yemen. She photographs sand. It’s beautiful.”

  “It’s just funny, because sand seems so non-linear.”

  “Maybe it comforts me to trap it in a square frame, control freak that I am.”

  I snort.

  “What are you doing this afternoon?”

  “I don’t know how I feel about that as a transition,” I say.

  “Tell me.”

  Heat steals over me. “Maybe I’m calling wake-up clients who are less assholey than you.”

  He growls, and shivers slide over me. He loves when I’m being impudent, and so do I. It’s probably all sorts of wrong, but I don’t care.

  “I don’t know. Errands and things.”

  “Keep the afternoon open,” he says in the rumbly tone I’ve come to love. “Just keep it open.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I need to teach you and your smart mouth a lesson.”

  I swallow past my dry mouth. And then he’s gone. Before I can even OMG him.

  Later that morning, at a far more decent hour, a courier delivers an envelope with the logo of the Rowell Hotel. Inside is a key card and one of Theo’s business cards with a room number and 2:15 p.m. scribbled in his crisp penmanship, underlined twice.

  The underlines are such a nice Theo touch. I bring the card to my nose and inhale, picking up the faintest traces of a sweet-sharp scent. Like melon and pepper.

  I tell myself I shouldn’t go. I don’t like Theo telling me what to do…except maybe I might like it when it’s in a room at a fabulous luxury hotel.

  The Rowell is dripping with luxury, as it turns out, from the chandeliers up top to the lusciously thick rugs underfoot.

  I ride a deluxe elevator up to the top floor and find the room empty. There’s a note on the bed with just one word: Strip.

  I sit down and check my phone instead. Because Operator Seven doesn’t follow rules. Operator Seven has worn one of the sack dresses. Operator Seven is so impudent, it’s not even funny.

  Theo comes in without knocking. He takes one look at me and shakes his head, stripping off his overcoat with brutal efficiency. His stern manner makes me quiver deep inside.

  I hold up the note. “If I recall, I quit Vossameer. You are no longer the boss of me, Drummond.”

  He rakes me up and down with his gaze. No humor, no lightness. Only hunger. I’m trembling so excitedly, it’s a wonder I don’t rocket right out the window.

  I stand and rip up the note, let the pieces flutter to the posh carpet.

  “Damn,” he says.

  I shiver as he stalks over, skin too tight on my body. He takes my hair in his fist and uses it to spin me around and push me face-first to the wall. He presses the bulk of his weight to me.

  The wallpaper is smooth and cool on my cheek. His breath is ragged in my ear, all desperate desire and vulnerability.

  Massive hands grip my ass, massaging it, grinding my pussy against the wall, kind of making me hump the wall.

  Humping the wall is definitely not an activity I would’ve thought up on my own, sitting around bored on a Saturday night or whatever. I’d reach for the vibrator long before I’d go for humping the wall, but it’s incredibly pleasurable with him lewdly pressing my flesh.

  “I’ve been thinking about this ass all day long,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about this all day long.”

  I want to say something sassy, but the language-formation part of my brain seems to be offline. Maybe the pleasure center of my brain annexed it, needing more space to put up dome-topped skyscrapers and rocket launch pads and other phallic things.

  He slides his hands around to the fronts of my thighs, pulling up my dress, baring my legs. “What the hell do you think you’re wearing?”

  “You don’t like it?”

  He rumbles his displeasure. “Do you like being impudent?” he asks, pressing a finger into my wet folds. My breath hitches at the contact.

  “Yes, I like it,” I say, trembling with excitement. “Yes, I do.”

  Liking it more by the minute.

  He grabs my hair and yanks my head back, looking into my eyes while he does me with his finger. Observing and assessing, sexy scientist that he is, adjusting his stroke for maximum, delicious, excruciating pleasure.

  “What was that?” he asks, voice gravelly with desire.

  “Yes,” I breathe, melting in his hands. “I like being impudent.”

  “God. That smart mouth…that smart…” Instead of finishing his sentence, he kisses me while stroking me nearly to oblivion.

  Nearly.

  Just before I’m about to come, he releases my hair and lets off on my pussy.

  I’m about to protest, but I don’t—his feral gaze steals my words away.

  He grabs the neck of my dress in a two-fisted hold. With just one harsh yank, he rips it asunder—simply tears it in two. I gasp at the suddenness of the motion. At the blast of cool hotel room air hitting my naked skin. Rough fists yank down my bra.

  We’re doing the savage thing now. It’s savage go-time!

  He pulls me flush to him. His breath saws in and out, gravelly with desire. He holds me so tightly that the hard circles of his suit coat buttons jut into my flesh. “You come here,” he growls into my ear.

  It’s an unreasonable thing to say, being that I can hardly be closer to him…unreasonable and awesome.

  Without warning, he begins pulling and tearing off the last bits of my clothes. Desire throbs in my veins, right down to my clit.

  He pulls me from the wall and bends me roughly over a chair.

  I clutch the arms, heart racing.

  “Wider.” He kicks my legs apart.

  I can barely breathe. He’s doing something back there. What? My whole body yearns for him to touch me again.

  I press back, nudging him with my ass. “Where’d you go?” I say. “You know the wake-up-call girl can’t spend all day with just one client.”

  “What’s that?” he growls.

  “You heard me,” I say.

  Suddenly he slaps my ass. Actually spanks me! “The wake-up-call girl will spend as long as I need.”

  I’m trembling. I can’t believe he spanked me! It’s embarrassing and totally exciting, all at once. “You’re a bad client,” I say.

  He slaps my ass again.

  “Oh my god,” I whisper. He smooths his hand over my skin. The back-and-forth between sting and softness makes my nerve endings tremble
and swoon. “You are my worst client!”

  He slaps my ass even harder.

  “Okay, okay!” Every molecule on my skin is alive, afire. I press my face into the chair.

  “You think you get to say when this stops?” he asks, skimming gentle fingers over my ass. It’s a barely-there touch, but it sizzles, sending ripples of heat through me. My sex aches for him.

  He reaches around to my pussy just then, stroking, caressing. I melt a little more with his every stroke.

  “Do you?”

  There’s a question there, but I don’t care. My thoughts have disintegrated into the pleasure of his touch. “More,” I say. “More.”

  “More what?”

  “More…just you.”

  Time suspends in the vulnerable truth of that. For a moment, it’s just the two of us, alone in the spinning world.

  He leans over me, sheltering me with his body. Warm lips press onto my shoulder blade. “I gotcha, baby.”

  I feel his thick crown nudging at my entrance, probing. His breath is rough in my ear. I need him so bad I feel crazed.

  “Theo, yes.”

  He presses in slowly, filling me, owning me, thick and heavy inside me. He pushes in, all the way deep. He stills, and it’s like the earth stills. He runs his hands up and down my hips, a small electric contact. “This,” he says, beginning to pulse into me. “This.”

  “So good,” I mumble. I reach between my legs and stroke myself while he pushes into me, seeming to swell inside me.

  He groans. “Babe, you should’ve warned me you were going to do that—it’s so hot, I almost lost it.”

  I rub my clit even more dramatically while he fucks me. He says nonsensical guy things where his tone matters way more than his words.

  We lose it pretty fast, orgasming almost together, and then we fall into bed, shaky and excited. I want to tell him he’s my favorite guy I ever had by miles. And I think he wants to say it, too, but we’re fuck buddies only, and I’m on my way out of the city, so we just sprawl there.

  Afterward, we take a shower and have sex again. Then we put on the hotel bathrobes and collapse on the bed. I snuggle into the pit of his arm.

  “This is way hotter than what I imagined,” he says, brushing the hair from my forehead with the pad of his thumb.

  “Me, too.” Hotness is safe territory. Fuck buddy territory. “Though I still haven’t gotten my lab-coat fuck.”

  He knits his fingers into mine.

  “Tell me more of yours,” I say. “Of what you imagined us doing.”

  He’s silent a bit, like maybe he doesn’t want to tell. He pulls our joined hands to his mouth and presses his lips to my knuckle.

  I feel like I could get used to this. Probably not the best thing.

  “You drive me so crazy with those calls,” he says, “tormenting me. I spend all this time at my desk looking at the data, but all I can see is your pussy spread before me, and it drives me crazy, and I can’t concentrate on my lifesaving formula.”

  “If people complain, tell them, ‘Buzz off, I was thinking about pussy.’”

  He snorts and kisses another knuckle. “And I come and find you. You’re laughing.”

  “So impertinent.”

  “You’re in your pjs. I put you over my knee. I slide them down over your ass, and I spank the shit out of you. Then we fuck.” He kisses my next knuckle.

  “So you really don’t spank all the girls?”

  “Just you. Only you.” He kisses yet another knuckle.

  “You’re running out of unkissed knuckles.”

  “I know,” he says sadly. “I have to get back to work anyway.”

  There’s this silence where I don’t want him to go.

  “I really have to hurry up and get that formula figured out,” he says. “And I can’t.”

  “Why is it so important to dehydrate?”

  “It makes it portable. It could be issued to soldiers. Cops. Schools. Put in first-aid kits. It would be huge for gunshot victims. I should’ve had it nailed by now.”

  I sit up and set a hand on his belly, smoothing down the scant hairs. “Is there some kind of rush on it?”

  “Besides people dying?” he says.

  “Right, of course,” I say.

  He looks miserably at the far wall.

  It sounds like an important invention, but I’m suspicious about how much pressure he’s putting on himself about it, like it has to be him and he can’t have a life until he nails it.

  In a serious tone, he says, “Sometimes I think it’s beyond my abilities.”

  My heart breaks for him a little bit, for how bereft he seems.

  I’m about to tell him he can totally do it—he is the great Theo Drummond, right? But I realize that’s probably what anybody would say to him. Of course you can solve it, Theo! You can do anything!

  I think about what he said, how the stories about him as some hero make him feel really alone. I say, “Maybe you won’t get it. Maybe you will, but maybe you won’t. But things will still be okay.”

  “Things won’t be okay if I don’t get it.”

  “Why? I understand that it would be great if you solved it. But there are other chemists in the world. Maybe they could take a crack.”

  “I’m the one on the trail of it,” he says. “And people need it. People are dying for the lack of it.”

  “Okay.” I rest my chin on his shoulder and put my hand on his chest. “You have such a good heart. I never saw it before.”

  “A good heart doesn’t get the formula solved,” he says.

  I’m stunned at how merciless he is with himself. “Well, you invented the other formula. So it’s not like you’re some slacker in the saving-lives department.”

  “Tell that to the people who die for a lack of the dehydrated version. It drives me crazy, because I know it’s there. Just out of my reach.”

  I press my hand harder onto his beating heart, and he puts his hand over mine. We lie like that for a while. It’s nice.

  I say, “Who’s the hero now, biotches?”

  He snorts. “What did you just say?”

  “You heard what I said,” I say.

  He rolls me over, pins me to the bed. “You are terrible.”

  “What, you’re wounded? Maybe you should’ve tried not to get wounded.”

  He narrows his gray eyes, like I’m being amazing and terrible all at once. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

  I shrug. Say nothing.

  “You should’ve tried not to get wounded? Jesus.” And then he flops back down and laughs.

  And then I’m laughing.

  “Uh,” he says.

  I prop my head up on my elbow. We just look at each other for a while. And we’re not playing a game; we’re just looking at each other. And it’s as if the world stills. Everything stops. The wind in the trees. The cats riding the vacuum cleaners. Everything.

  And then he kisses me. And I kiss him back.

  It’s a sweet kiss, not a wanna-fuck? kiss. Not a naughty wake-up-call girl kiss. Not a jackalope-boss kiss.

  Just pure affection.

  In other words, it’s the most dangerous kind of kiss we could have.

  I’m the one to stop it. I sit up and put a hand on his arm. To an outside observer, it might look like an affectionate touch. But I suppose it’s like baby goat faces—something that looks nice but is pure vicious survival. A reminding touch. To remind ourselves of the fuck buddies-only pact.

  When I look into his eyes, I know he knows it.

  “Okay,” he says. Because we don’t need the words. Which makes it all the sadder, I suppose.

  I grab my phone, just to mentally reset myself. I find a goat video I saved for him. I make him watch.

  He smiles even though he tries not to, because he’s a serious scientist who shouldn’t love baby goat videos. But really, who can resist baby goat videos?

  I go into my cloud to find him another really good one. We watch it together and he laughs.


  He’s always so happily astonished by them; that’s what makes it fun to show him. It makes me feel like I’m showing him wonders from the future or something.

  After that, I show him a bunch of photos from my phone. Mia and me in the Catskills. The pizzeria attached to the home where I grew up. My mom and dad and me celebrating Three Musketeers Day, a holiday we made up for ourselves. “We didn’t have much money, but we were together in a fierce way,” I say. “March twenty-first. We’d eat all our favorite foods and do our favorite activities. No matter what day of the week it fell on, Mom and Dad would take off work. Sometimes they’d get me out of school early.”

  “It’s coming up,” he says.

  “I know. I’m going to miss it this year.” I flick past. No sense in going down there when I’ll be there at the end of the month.

  I land on another sad image. “This space was for rent a few weeks back. I know they would never rent it to me with my credit, but I had to see it. Look at it. There’s a restaurant going in now, but look at the tin ceiling.”

  He’s not looking at the tin ceiling. He’s looking at me. “Why would you go and see it if you know you can never have it?”

  “You’re gonna laugh,” I say.

  He traces the line of my jaw. “This is me.” Something strange happens in my heart when he says that.

  “I have a dream board,” I say. “I know you’re a scientist and everything—”

  He kisses the words off my lips. “You put the image on your dream board.”

  “Yeah. I feel like it helps to have pictures of what I want. Though to be my ideal space, it would have to be on a corner. And really small and cozy like my old space. I would have one table outside, but none inside. I have a whole rationale about it.”

  He wants to hear my rationale, so I tell him.

  Everything feels so real suddenly, and so far from fuck buddies. His face on my personal Mount Rushmore is getting huger by the second.

  “I should go,” I say.

  He closes his hand around mine. My heart pounds. For a moment, I think he might not let me. But then he does.

  Thirty

  Lizzie

  * * *

  I keep the wake-up calls going.

  Every morning at 4:30 we talk on the phone while the rest of the world sleeps. Sometimes it’s super sexy. Sometimes we talk like friends.