Shopping for a Billionaire's Fiancee

by Julia Kent

  We have all night.

  We have all our lives.

  “Thank you,” she murmurs against the soft skin of my neck, just under my ear.

  “For what?”

  “For loving me.”

  My breath catches. “I never had a choice.”

  In the open room we’re two bodies, two hearts pumping blood, four lungs exchanging air, four eyes and hands taking in the terrain of each other’s body. Her lips on my neck are the sweetest movement, my hands finding her hot skin and sliding up the rolling hills of her breasts, the supple silk of her nipples as they tighten like sculpting desire with my own hands.

  The suite I booked is all clean lines and dark wood, dim lights and wide windows, thirty-nine floors above the city and the bed is as big as a small field. We undress each other, the clothes pooling at our feet with whispers and the hushed sound of gravity at work. Soon we’re nude, bare before each other in all our glory, and her eyes captivate me.

  Slow blues music plays in the background as I pull her into my arms, thighs embedded between hers, the curvature of her spine against my forearms like it was hand-carved to fit my grasp. Her lips and tongue meet mine with abandon, love so different now, forged in commitment and declaration, in promises and—soon—vows.

  I asked. She said yes.

  Now we show each other how true it all is.

  My wanting has a new tone, a different tenor, changed irreparably by my proposal, her acceptance, our joining. At home, wanting Shannon took on a crude sort of steamy demand, like a second set of veins and arteries in me, a pulse that could only be tamed by sex.

  What I feel now is so wholly changed that I cannot call it the same. This is sultry. Mature. Ripe and lush, a give and take that is less about quenching a need and more about tending a flame. She dances in my arms, a slow, languid journey we’ve only just begun.

  “I love you,” she whispers against my mouth.

  “I know.”

  We recline on the bed, hands slow in their ministrations, achingly aware of everything. So many times I’ve made love with Shannon and never noticed the arch of her thigh, this small mole on her hip, the way she bites her lip when I kiss here there.

  How could I have missed so much that has been right in front of me all this time?

  “We’re really doing this.”

  She doesn’t mean making love. “We are, Mrs. McCormick.” My own words make me shiver. She joins me.

  Her hand spreads against my navel, fingers hooking one by one against my skin. “I like the sound of that.”

  I slide one hand to a place where her pleasure often starts. She grinds against me and makes a thick sound from her throat.

  “And I like the sound of that,” I say as I dip down, down, down to a place where I won’t hear more than the coursing of blood through her body, twinned with mine in rhythm.

  The only place in the world I want to be.

  Minutes later she pulls me up, sweat lingering between her breasts, begging to be licked away. Her mouth is fast on mine, urgent and pleading. Her thighs part and a steady hand takes me home.

  The second I’m in her she opens her eyes, staring up with a depth that makes me see other dimensions. Layers of love. The faces of children we have not dreamed of yet.

  And the unfolding of the rest of my life.

  We make love with our bodies, striving to match with flesh what we see in each other’s souls.

  We fail.

  Guess we’ll just have to try again.

  And again and again and again.

  For the next sixty or so years.

  ’Til death do us part.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Momzilla...

  Someone’s using a mirror to reflect the sun on my face, like I’m an ant under a magnifying glass. The pinpoint of heat on my cheekbone is maddening. I crack one eye open and shut it, fast, before I’m blinded.

  Not a magnifying glass.

  That’s Shannon’s diamond.

  It’s morning in NYC, the muted sounds of traffic outside below us a backdrop for the day after the best day of my life. Shannon’s next to me, warm and soft, brown hair a tousled mess and stretched across my chest like tentacles claiming me.

  Her mouth is open in a half smile, as if she’s dreaming happy thoughts, and in repose she is ethereal. Otherworldly. Soft and vulnerable.

  And she’s mine.

  I’m hers right back, too. We’re each other’s love, and in a year and a half or so, we’ll make it official. The wedding, the license, the piece of paper that deems us legally husband and wife isn’t that important. It’s a symbol.

  We’re already joined.

  We’ve been joined since the day I found her with her hand in that damn toilet.

  Love at first flush.

  She moves, rolling over and rubbing her eyes, a shaft of strong sunlight shining in her face. Unlike me, she doesn’t get a tiny tan from it reflecting off a prism. Her face moves toward me, arms wrapping around my neck, ring hand sinking into my hair and cupping the back of my head as we give each other a morning kiss that makes me seek out her warmth.

  The kiss breaks and she whispers:

  “We have to tell my parents. Your dad, too.”

  I groan, the feeling a rebel cry from my fellow men throughout the ages, stretching back to the dawn of time, to cavemen past with mothers-in-law who drove them nuts, too. I’ll bet all those cave drawings aren’t of wooly mammoths being stabbed with spears. If you look close enough, they’re mothers-in-law.

  “I thought waiting for the ring to, uh, come out was the worst part of all this, but Marie? Planning our wedding? You’re killing me.”

  “Just get us into Farmington Country Club and she’ll be happy.” She waves the ring around in the sunlight, a tiny white spot jiggling on the ceiling and walls like a very expensive laser pointer. If Chuckles were here he’d be a furry ping-pong ball, trying to catch it.

  “Your mother will need her own reality television show. Momzilla. She’ll make Bridezillas cringe in fear.”

  Shannon laughs. I don’t think she realizes how serious I am. “It’ll be fine,” Shannon insists, cuddling up against me, her creamy thigh nudging up along mine, knee headed toward my hipbone. That lush warmth drives all thoughts of Marie away and makes me think maybe this wedding won’t be so bad after all.

  Shannon’s phone buzzes again. She sighs, and the thigh disappears as she gets up. While I like the warm skin on mine and miss it, the view of her ass is spectacular. A guy could get used to seeing that every day for the rest of his life.

  My throat closes.

  I will get to see that ass every day. For the rest of my life.

  How did I get so lucky?

  “It’s Mom,” Shannon says, reading her phone. “She wants to know if we can get a cake topper with a woman’s hand in a toilet and a guy in a suit giving her the thumb’s up.”

  I groan again.

  Millions of men through time and space groan with me. I’ll need their support.

  “And Agnes wants an invitation, too.”

  This is going to be a long process.

  Shannon says something into the phone and I hear Marie’s scream of joy. The two speak in fast-forward breakneck speed, until Shannon calls out,

  “Honey? What do you look like in a kilt?”

  I have no idea, but I have a sinking feeling I’m about to find out. At my own wedding.

  A single kiss on Shannon’s shoulder makes her giggle. As I cup her breast with one wanting hand, she stifles a moan. Marie’s voice chatters on, dominated mostly by three words: Farmington, helicopter and kilt.

  I don’t want to know.

  Peeling Shannon off the phone turns out to be easier than expected when she tells Marie to call Farmington and book it.

  Click.

  “I need coffee,” Shannon declares, looking around the room. She pads off to the bathroom. I walk over to the balcony and look out over Central Park. The view is spectacular.

&nbs
p; I look at Shannon.

  Even better.

  My own phone buzzes suddenly.

  “You need to answer that.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Shannon pokes her head out from the bathroom. “Yes, you do. It could be your dad.”

  “Why would my dad call me? He has nineteen-year-old assistants to do that, and they just call Grace, who calls me.”

  “It could be Grace, then.” I crawl back into bed, determined to ignore my phone.

  “Hey! There’s no coffee in this hotel room!” Shannon shouts from across the room. “What kind of fancy hotel doesn’t have a coffeemaker in it?”

  They assume you’ll order room service, but instead of explaining, I seize my chance because I’m a guy, and that’s what we do.

  “You’ll just have to help me wake up the same way you did back home that one morning,” I say, holding the sheet up so she can crawl under.

  “What about me?”

  “I’m happy to wake you up that way, too.”

  She laughs, a throaty sound that makes me tent the sheets. “That makes me sleepy, Dec. Caffeine is what I need.”

  “I promise that my wake-up method will not put you to sleep.” I leer at her. “If not that, how about a nice bath in the tub? I’ll soap you up. You’re a dirty girl.”

  BZZZZ.

  She reaches for my phone and tosses it at me. It’s Grace. I answer.

  “I’m just going to take off my makeup,” Shannon says from the bathroom doorway.

  “Don’t take too long!” I call back. “I can’t wait to soap you up.” I wave her off and turn my attention to the phone.

  “Hi Grace.”

  “Declan, I’m sorry to bother you, but Shannon’s mother is on the phone requesting that we reserve the corporate helicopter, a jet, and a yacht for an unspecified date in 2016. Does Anterdec even have a yacht? And what does she mean when she says she needs fifty bagpipe players and a dozen kilt tuxedoes made from McCormick tartan as well?”

  And Shannon wonders why I have Resting Asshole Face.

  EPILOGUE (SORT OF)

  Shannon

  “I’m just going to take off my make-up,” I shout out to the main room as I slip into the bathroom. Behind me is a jacuzzi bathtub bigger than the neighborhood pool I swam in as a kid. Geez—this place can have a tub like that but can’t bother with a basic Keurig machine in the room?

  Barbarians.

  “Don’t take too long!” Declan calls back. “I can’t wait to soap you up.” He’s just proposed (heh—I love that word) a long, hot soak in the tub and I suspect Declan has plans to make a certain part of his anatomy a loofah for a certain part of mine.

  My reflection smiles back at me, cheeks pink and eyes as glowing as polished amber. Mrs. Declan McCormick. Shannon Jacoby McCormick.

  Declan’s wife.

  I grab the bottle of eye make-up remover and smear some on a tissue, working the mascara off. It’s that new kind, where you use three different gels and one tube of loose fibers that look like ground up cockroach legs and then some pixie dust made from an eleventh century druid’s secret alchemist’s box.

  But I end up with eyelashes that make me look like a character in a Hayao Miyazaki movie, so it’s worth it.

  One eye done, I move on to the other eye and really goop on the eye makeup remover. My ring glitters in the light and I can’t stop smiling. I just can’t. The ring is perfect, no matter where it’s been.

  And this ring has been places...

  As I finish my second eye, a chunk of mascara is stubborn. More eye makeup remover and a lot of rubbing and it’s free. Whew. I reach for more tissues, wipe my eyes, and then wipe the extra off my hands.

  The ring slips off as I’m cleaning my palm, flying high in an eerily familiar arc as I scream “Noooooooooooooooooo” like I’m in slow motion, the platinum circle plunking into the toilet and rotating, diamond down, weighted by three carats of holy shit.

  “Shannon? You okay?” Declan calls out. I ignore him.

  The toilet has automatic flush. If I don’t get there in time—

  My hand goes straight in the water and my fingers are slippery with that waterproof eye makeup remover petroleum product crap that I curse a thousand times as I try to get the ring. I feel like the Gollum. My precious.

  My precious......

  I did not endure #Poopwatch for three days, defile a French fry tray, and endure countless poop jokes from every man I know between the ages of six and fifty-three (which is every man I know) to have the ring going down the sewer pipes and into the Hudson River because I was removing makeup.

  The irony of that is not lost on me.

  The door bursts open and Declan is standing there, completely naked, a fine and glorious specimen of a man. He crosses his arms over his chest and leans against the doorway, hot, sculpted ass propping him.

  “You lied,” is all he says as my fingers work to find the ring.

  “Huh?” My brain halts but those fingers are determined.

  “You said you didn’t have a hand-in-the-toilet fetish. Is this a joke?” he says, laughing. “Playing a little prank? Reliving how we met?”

  When he laughs, things...bounce. It’s distracting. It’s incredibly droolworthy, too. The ring I’m scrambling to grab is a symbol of his commitment to let me touch the bouncy stuff whenever I want.

  C’mon ring. Don’t fail me now.

  His face changes when I don’t answer and he stands up, walking to the toilet, staring down. “No phone?”

  I shake my head.

  “No vibrator?”

  I shake my head.

  “No fetal pink pig?”

  I shake my head.

  “Then what’s so important that you would—oh, don’t you dare tell me you dropped the Goddamn ring in there!” Declan bellows.

  He really does know me a little too well.

  And just then, the toilet flushes automatically.

  He takes one more step and he’s looking down at my arm directly, fist in the bottom of the bowl as the water gurgles and swirls around me. The water sprays up and a thin mist of—yes—toilet water covers my makeupless face.

  He mutters something under his breath in Russian, some kind of curse words. It turns me on. I really don’t want to be turned on while I have my hand in a toilet. The brain makes strange associations and I’d rather not have my erotic dreams for the next few months involve this scenario.

  Again.

  The flush fades and we’re left in silence, me with a disgusting, germy face and my arm still so deep in the toilet I might as well be helping a cow give birth.

  “You do have the ring,” he says slowly, eyes narrowing as he crouches next to me. The light layer of dark hair all over his muscled thighs makes me want to be naked and dirty with him. I can’t help myself.

  A different kind of dirty...

  I slowly pull my hand out of the toilet, fist tight, and reach out within inches of his face. Unfurling my fingers one by one, his creased brow relaxes.

  The light bounces off the three-carat diamond.

  And the, uh, droplets of germ-filled water.

  His nostrils twitch and one side of his mouth twists up in a smile as he says, “Toilet Girl.”

  “Hot Guy,” I say back, eyes racing over him as he laughs. Oh, please, keep laughing. I love the view.

  “You are crazy, Shannon.”

  “That’s why you love me,” I say as I stand and wash my hands.

  “I love you because you stick your hand down toilet bowls?”

  “No, you love me because I’m willing to stick my hand down toilet bowls.”

  He’s looking at me with the same expression he reserves for my mother. “Parse that one out. Does not compute.”

  “Why do you love me?” I ask, throwing the question back at him.

  “Why do I breathe?”

  Oh, this man.

  He bends over and turns on the water for the bathtub, the pounding sound filling the tiny room. The fau
cet is as strong as a firehose. The rich really do live different lives. They even have different plumbing.

  I slide the ring back on my finger and breathe a sigh of relief.

  His arms envelop me and our nude skin touches everywhere it can.

  “I’m covered in toilet water,” I protest as he comes in for a kiss.

  “Not the first time.” He kisses me even as I cringe. It’s not a very good kiss.

  “Dec—who was that on the phone?”

  “Grace.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “It was about your mom.”

  I sigh. “What’s she done now?”

  “She wants Grace to start ordering McCormick tartan plaid for the dozen kilt tuxedoes. And she’d like to commandeer Air Force One.”

  I close my eyes and bite my lip, the rush of the inevitable filling my cotton-headed brain. “This is how she’s starting?” I ask in disbelief. “Ten minutes after I call her?”

  “You expected less? She’ll ask Robert Kraft for Gillette Stadium for the rehearsal party next.” He bends slightly, hand in the water. His arm hooks behind my knees and I’m in his arms, then unceremoniously tossed into the half-full tub like it’s Spring Break and we’re poolside in Cancun.

  I scream with laughter and shock as the water assaults me. Declan follows it, hungry hands and mouth everywhere.

  Bzzzz.

  “Don’t answer that!” we shout in unison.

  And we don’t.

  Hours later, Declan orders room service and I finally get my coffee. Caffeine deprivation leaves me wondering which is worse: the pounding in my head or the pounding in my—

  On the tray there is a pot of coffee and a dozen chocolate covered strawberries, half milk chocolate, half dark.

  And, oddly enough, a bowl of chocolate-covered pretzels mixed with cheese curls.

  Declan walks into the bathroom with the room service cart as I survey it and give him a questioning look. He drops the robe he threw on hastily and stands there, offering me a cup of coffee while my pruney toes turn the hot water back on.

  Look at him.

  Really look at him.

  Is this bathroom aesthetically pleasing?

  Oh, yeah.