The Billionaire's Hired Bride (BWWM Billionaire Romance Book 1)

by Sherie Keys

  She glanced back at James, who was still grinning, before leaning back against the rock. “It’s amazing,” she said quietly.

  “Worth the climb?”

  “Yeah. Definitely.”

  James unpacked lunch while Minnie unrolled a towel, took off the shirt over her bikini top, and settled in to get a little bit of a tan on her caramel skin, dark sunglasses over her closed eyes and the warmth of the sun on her exposed skin. Now that they were actually up here for a few hours together, alone without distractions, she felt that things were getting awkward again, although it might have only been in her imagination. She had the feeling that this spot had been used for both romantic and sexual getaways in the past, and that was probably how James had learned of it.

  That train of thought, luckily, was interrupted by James nudging her side with a bottle. “You put sunscreen on before you started tanning, right?”

  “Crap!” Minnie sat up in a panic and took the bottle from him, rubbing her arms and legs down with the lotion. James picked up the bottle after she set it down, turning it over in his hands.

  “Here, let me do your back.”

  Minnie turned her spine towards him without objection, although she did jump a little at the chill of his lotion-covered fingers. Relaxing into the touch, she found herself leaning back against him before she knew it. That jumped her heart into her throat. Forcing herself to move at a normal pace, she leaned away from him again and rolled over, so she was on her stomach on the towel with her head pillowed on one arm.

  “Thanks. Where’d you put those sandwiches?” she asked, grabbing a water bottle and cracking it open to take a drink. They were tucked into the shade at the edge of the rock, but the water still wasn’t exactly cold. Still, it was cool enough that she wound up drinking half the bottle by the time James slid one of the sandwiches over to her.

  After eating, Minnie dozed off for a while. She mostly remembered waking up, the sun now closer to the horizon than to its peak, and James with a clipboard and some paperwork across his knee, chewing on his lip and tapping his pen on the edge of the paper.

  Minnie stretched and slowly sat up, groaning a little at the stiffness of her muscles. Sleeping on hard cliff rocks was not something she would try to repeat, that was for sure.

  “I thought today was supposed to be a relaxation day,” she said to James as she settled back into a sitting position, working her fingers into the sore muscles of her legs.

  “For you,” he said with a chuckle, “but I thought you might fall asleep, so I figured I might as well bring something along, just in case. How was your nap?”

  “Ugh,” Minnie grumbled. “Next time you decide to take me somewhere special to sleep, just drive me to the mattress store.”

  He laughed at that, opening the clipboard to slide the paperwork in. “The tide’s down enough that we can probably start heading back, if you want.”

  Minnie considered it. “Maybe a snack, first.”

  So they finished off the last of the sandwiches and stuffed the trash into Minnie’s bag, and then Minnie, who was closest to the path down, turned to start lowering herself. Going down was slower than going up; she stopped constantly to check her footholds.

  Even so, that didn’t entirely save her from disaster. Near the bottom of the climb, where James was more parallel to her than above her and the stones were still slick with the descending tide, her foot caught on a slick piece of kelp instead of the ledge.

  She stumbled, that foot sliding dangerously low down the rock while the other strained to not slide off its foothold in turn. Thankfully, one of her hands was also holding onto the ledge of rock above, and James grabbed the other one as she flailed it, anchoring her somewhat more steadily until she could pull herself up and get started again.

  “Thanks,” she said breathlessly, before starting off again towards the shore, being much more careful of seaweed washed up by the waves since the last time they had passed.

  When they made their way free of the cliffs, the sun was just barely sunk low enough to the horizon that the sky was changing colors, and a lot of the people further down the beach had gone home for the day. As soon as they were free of the waves and the larger rocks, Minnie flopped down on the gravel, not caring about the handful of stones that would inevitably get caught in her shorts. They were easier to get out than sand, after all.

  She heard James’ footsteps after her, noisy even of the sound of the waves, and sat up to look at him. “Come here for a minute,” she said, and he bent down next to her, looking confused.

  It wasn’t anything she would have planned, but she had to admit that she was testing him, as she reached up to put a hand around the back of his neck and draw him closer. The kiss she gave him was chaste, lips-on-lips and no farther, and she didn’t hold him there for very long before backing off and leaning back into the gravel.

  “Thanks again,” Minnie said to him, “For the rescue and everything else today.”

  She thought she could see him blushing, just a little, but with the sun behind him, it was hard to really tell. She could hear from his voice that he was smiling, though.

  “My pleasure.”

  Chapter7

  Three days later, Minnie’s passport arrived in the mail.

  In those three days, as far as Minnie could tell, not much had changed, except that she was comfortable around James again. She wasn’t quite sure what she had been looking for, with the experiment of kissing him on the beach, but he had neither become distant towards her nor put pressure on her to go further. It seemed that if anything went further than that, he would be perfectly content to let her initiate at her own pace.

  Ultimately, that was what she had been worried about, she figured out as she was collecting her thoughts on the drive home that night. Whether he was falling for her or not wouldn’t change anything in the moment.

  Still, as she drifted off that night, she briefly entertained the thought of him asking her to stay, at the end of those three years.

  And then three days later her passport arrived, and with that, James talked her into helping to pick a location for their vacation. Not wanting to go too far out of her experience, Minnie kept to fairly standard European destinations – Paris, London – as well as looking at cities along the east coast that she had never gotten the chance to see.

  James laughed at her a little for that, asking what the point of getting a passport was if you stayed domestic, but as Minnie was quick to point out, flustered, she’d never even been on a plane before, much less on an international flight. He relented a bit at that.

  “Just not Florida,” he said as he was looking over her shoulder at an open web page and a couple of travel brochures. “Mom and I made that mistake once; it storms like crazy that time of year, even if there isn’t a hurricane incoming. I’d hate to get trapped there by one.”

  “Scared of a little rain?” Minnie joked, but internally she agreed. There wasn’t much she wanted to see in Florida anyway; Atlanta’s brochure got tossed out for the same reason.

  Eventually, she settled between New York – as much an attraction for the shopping as anything else – and Boston. Unable to decide, she gave the two brochures to James, and told him to surprise her.

  He took it to heart, arranging the flights without telling her which destination he’d decided on. Minnie knew all the details of the first flight – which would take them into Salt Lake City for a two hour layover – but none of the second. She could have peeked easily, with the information from the modified itinerary email James forwarded to her, but she found she kind of liked the idea of the destination being a surprise.

  A few days before the trip, she came home from lunch with Avery – eager as always to give her the latest news and rumors, although the ones about her and James had, thankfully, died down, replaced by more relevant summer gossip – to find a set of suitcases standing beside her door. She’d gotten used to how James left his gifts, by now, and sure enough, there was a note attached to th
e handle of the largest of the three.

  Try not to overfill them. I’d hate to have to buy more on the trip.

  Again, Minnie was struck by how different money made their perspectives on things – the idea of just buying more suitcases on vacation was completely foreign, even given that the trip she and her mother had taken up the Oregon coast when she graduated high school was by car. Still, she packed sparingly as advised, using a pillow that could easily be squashed flatter to fill out some of the space in the largest suitcase. Another pillow got carefully wedged into her carry-on to use on the flight.

  She triple-checked her bags the morning before they left to make sure they wouldn’t have any trouble with the airport regulations. James, by now starting to get used to some of her nervous habits, just loaded the bags into the back of the car. One of his friends would be coming by to house-sit for most of the time they were gone, but Minnie made sure to lock her bedroom door anyway, just in case.

  The airport security check wasn’t nearly as big a deal as Minnie’s mind made it out to be – as James was prompt to remind her once they were through. “It’s a domestic flight,” he said as Minnie pulled her shoes back on. “I’m surprised they even took a second look at our bags.”

  Minnie was glad that she’d insisted on being at the airport fairly early anyway; as it turned out, airport shopping was surprisingly good, even if most everything was overpriced. One of the shops, in spite of being full of the vaguely-New Age stuff that her mother loved, had a couple of strings of star-shaped lights in the window, which she almost bought before reminding herself that there would be plenty of things to buy on the vacation itself. No need to spend her money before the first plane even got off the ground, and besides, where would she put it? There wasn’t really enough space in her carry-on or the backpack she was using in place of a purse.

  The flight itself was fairly uneventful, at least from Minnie’s position in the first-class window seat. It felt like it took a century for the rest of the plane to get to their seats and then for them to actually take off, but once they were in the air, the time passed remarkably quickly. True, this was the shorter of the two flights, but Minnie had been watching the clouds for barely two hours when she felt the plane’s body start to tip for its long descent.

  Luckily, being among the first ones on the plane also meant they could be among the first ones off, and so they didn’t have to wait long after the plane pulled up to the gate to make their way back into the terminal. Minnie followed after James, dragging her rolling bag, to look at the flight listings on the departures and arrivals screens.

  “So, which one is us?” she asked with a grin. Time to reveal the surprise, since either way she would find out once they were on the next plane, as the announcements proclaimed their destination for all passengers to hear.

  James reached up to almost touch a line on the screen that was well above Minnie’s reach. “Here.” The destination column of the line was Boston.

  Minnie grinned. “Honestly, I expected you to pick New York.”

  “I’ve done New York,” James said with a shrug, as he turned away from the screen and the two of them started off towards the next terminal. “Not in a couple of years, but recently enough that it’s nothing new. I wanted to explore a new city with you. Besides, everything on the East Coast is close enough together that we can always drive down to New York if you have your heart set on it.”

  Minnie laughed. “In the rental car? No thanks. Boston is great. We’ll eat lobster three nights a week.”

  “I think you’ll get sick of it if we have it that often. There’s such a thing as seafood besides lobster, you know.”

  “Me? Sick of lobster? Never. Not going to happen. Uh-uh.”

  That thread of discussion lasted them through a quick meal – Minnie surprised at how thirsty being on the plane had made her – and most of the time until their next flight. Then it was back through the terminal, and to the next round of waiting, take-off, and flight.

  Minnie listened to music for an hour or so, but eventually slowly drifted off. She awoke as the plane tipped down to begin its descent, with the impression of a dream of railroad tracks and running from her mother. She glanced to the side, expecting James to be working on paperwork as he had for most of the first flight, but instead, he too was asleep, head resting on one of those wrap-around-the-neck pillows and expression lax. Either before he’d fallen asleep, or sometime during, he’d knitted their fingers together.

  Minnie eyed their connected hands, once again feeling confused about the state of their relationship. It wasn’t like what he’d said to Liz, where people might have overheard; there was no one within a thousand miles of them who would care to spread the gossip of their relationship. Even if James had friends in Boston – which wouldn’t be that surprising, in the age of the internet – there was certainly no one here on the plane he knew, so there was no reason to put on an act.

  She thought she had put the matter out of her mind, but as it turned out, it didn’t even take a kiss to draw it back up again. Minnie gently slid her hand out from under where James gripped it and stuck her headphones back in her ears. It’d been a lot more than the two months they’d been together when she’d overheard that conversation with Liz, too. Five or six months… Yes, James could definitely have developed feelings for her in that time.

  The only way to really know was to ask him. And knowing herself, Minnie knew that she would put it off as long as possible if she could. She’d have to confess to what she heard at the pool party, too.

  She flicked the playlist, looking for something she could use to motivate herself while working on a particularly stubborn animation project. I’ll ask before the end of the vacation, she resolved silently, if I haven’t figured it out myself by then.

  *

  James didn’t wake up until well after Minnie had had to put her headphones away for the landing. Indeed, it was the first bump on the runway that jostled him into waking up, although he didn’t seem fully alert until after they pulled up to the gate. It gratified Minnie a little to know that he wasn’t exactly a morning person.

  “You shouldn’t have let me sleep so long,” he complained gently as they gathered their bags. “I wanted to see the city as we came in.”

  “Consider it payback for when you let me sleep on those rocks at the ocean,” Minnie countered. “I had a sore neck for days.”

  They made it out of the airport and picked up the rental car without a problem, but at the hotel desk, Minnie saw James’ “friendly people smile” narrow into something that was almost a frown.

  “Our deepest apologies,” the woman on the other side of the counter was saying, “but the room we had reserved for you is just down the hall from a broken pipe that had a leak yesterday, and half of that floor is flooded. We’ve arranged another room for you, and would like to give it to you for half price until your originally reserved room is open again, as compensation for the inconvenience.”

  She looked, Minnie thought, like she was scared James was going to threaten her or throw a fit. Probably, she’d already dealt with other customers doing so today. It was getting pretty late, with the time difference, and although she’d had a nap on the plane, Minnie was already feeling tired and a little irritable.

  James just kept that smile in place as best her could, though. “I don’t think that will be a problem. When do you expect the pipe to be fixed?”

  “We’ve modified your reservation for three days, but we don’t expect it to take that long,” the woman said, looking a little relieved. “You’ll probably only be in that room tonight, maybe tomorrow night.” She reached under the desk, then handed James two key cards along with the credit card he’d used to pay.

  “Enjoy your stay.” That last sounded a bit robotic, probably because she said it by rote fifty times a day. The thought almost sent Minnie into giggles.

  Yep, definitely tired. She rolled her bags into the elevator and leaned against the rail as James loaded
himself in and closed the doors. The hotel was so fancy that even the elevator had decorations, but Minnie hardly even noticed them. She was starting to adjust to the richer lifestyle being with James had lead her towards, so those kinds of details were things she almost ignored.

  Their room was actually a small suite, with a separate kitchenette complete with full-sized fridge and a little dining table. What concerned Minnie immediately, though, was the bed.

  The original room they’d reserved had two full-sized beds. This one just had a single, massive king mattress.

  Minnie practically dropped her suitcase to the floor upon seeing it, the tiredness draining out of her in a rush of adrenaline. Or perhaps it just drained out of her skull as blood rushed to her face. “Umm…” she started, not really sure how to call attention to the problem. “James?”

  He came out of the bathroom, toothbrush still in one hand, and took a look at the bed. “Ah,” he said succinctly, setting the brush on the counter, then looked at her. “Well, are you okay with sharing? If not, I can sleep in the chair.” He gestured at the large armchair under a lamp in the corner of the room.