The Billionaire Dating Game: A Romance Novel

by Aubrey Dark

  In the world of TV, where everyone is faking it, I wrote, even falling in love can be dangerous.

  Clarence called me from the office that night for an update.

  “I’m kicking ass and taking names,” I said. “I’ll have the first article written up for you soon.”

  “Make it tomorrow,” Clarence said. “I need to run it by the owners before it goes to print.”

  “The owners?” I frowned. I’d thought Clarence was always the final say on magazine articles.

  “Our parent company also owns the TV network that’s airing this show. You didn’t know that? Are you doing any research on this at all, Lisa?”

  “Of course I am!” I said. “I just didn’t realize—”

  “Is that Lisa?” I heard Jessica’s voice on the line. “Hey, Lisa! I saw the first episode. Congratulations on your win!”

  “Thanks,” I said. It seemed like it had been a hundred years since the cooking contest.

  “So you’re still on the show?” Clarence asked gruffly.

  “Yes,” I said. Hope blossomed in my chest as I remembered something. “Don’t tell anyone, though, we’re not supposed to let anyone know that sort of thing.”

  “Yeah, sure. Lips are sealed,” Clarence said brusquely.

  My voice turned wheedling.

  “You mentioned before that I could maybe get a bonus if I stayed on long enough to write two articles. So, do you think—”

  “Calm your tits,” Clarence said. “Lemme see the first article before you go spending your bonus on new lipstick.”

  I took a deep breath and tried not to scream into the phone.

  “I’ll send it to you tomorrow,” I said. If he liked it, I would have enough money to pay for all of Arlen’s damn medicine.

  “Lisa?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Make it good.”

  Back at the penthouse the next day, I harangued Kate into doing my makeup and hair. In my new summery dress, I looked like a real girly girl—and for the first time, I thought that I had a decent chance of winning the competition. There were only five contestants left after Tanya had been kicked out of the fashion show: Heidi, Julie, Mia, Kate… and me. If I could scrape by in the next few competitions, I would be on my way to never having to worry about money again.

  “It’s date day!” Piers announced, with the five of us sitting on the white leather couch in the middle of the living room. I beamed as the camera crew circled around. “Today, you will each have a chance to spend one hour alone with Dylan Chase on a one-on-one date. This will give you a chance to get to know each other better.”

  He glanced over at me at that last sentence. I saw his blue-green eyes darken, and then his fake persona floated back over his face.

  “After the date, you’ll have the rest of the day free to go out shopping, sightseeing, whatever you want. Be back here at the penthouse tonight, because tomorrow morning we’ll be announcing the winner of the one-on-one dates!”

  “Where are we going on a date?” Heidi piped up.

  “That’s all up to you. You will decide where to go and what to do on your date with Dylan,” Piers said. “So plan something romantic, something fun…and may the best girl win!”

  Kate was first up, so she didn’t have a lot of time to prepare.

  “It’s fine,” I said, trying to bolster her confidence. “You’ll get to make the first impression.”

  “What about roller skating?” she asked. “Do you think he’ll like roller skating?”

  “I think he’ll love roller skating,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said. “And thanks for… you know.” Her eyes darted over to where the camera crew was still taping.

  “Sure thing!” I said, trying not to seem suspicious. “Have a great time!”

  Piers escorted Kate out of the apartment. Heidi was next, then Julie. By the time they called Mia out of the penthouse, I realized that I had to come up with a date idea that nobody else had done. I racked my brain to figure out an idea that Dylan might like.

  Laser tag would be fun, but it wasn’t exactly romantic. We could do a sit-down dinner, but Mia might already have taken him out to eat. And it was getting close to dark, so all of my ideas that involved outside activities weren’t really going to work. And I needed something I could write about for Moi, something that Clarence would like enough to pay me to write another one. I was torn.

  When Piers came in, he was wearing his stupid TV persona like a mask that was glued onto his skin. It irritated me more than ever when he came to talk to me with the same glib voice he’d used with all the other contestants. He wasn’t just Piers Letocci to me, dammit!

  But that was just it, wasn’t it? He was Piers Letocci. He could have any woman he wanted, whenever he wanted. And he’d had me, whenever he’d wanted. I’d let him run his hands over my body the same way he’d let his fingers slide over the piano the first time I’d met him. He’d done what he wanted with me, and now he had dumped me. It made me shiver with rage to think that he might have moved on to another contestant. The camera crew hovered behind his shoulder.

  “Are you ready for your date with a billionaire?”

  “Am I ever!”

  I shot him an uber-fake smile.

  “I’m sure you are,” he said, reaching out to touch my arm playfully. I jerked it away. He’d done that exact same move with Mia earlier today, before her date. Well, he could stick it to Miss Firenze if he wanted to. I wasn’t going to let him charm my pants off again.

  What did they say? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me four times, and you win the prize for biggest dickhead in the universe.

  “Where’s Dylan?” I asked sweetly.

  “He’s downstairs. Do you already know where you’re going to take him for your date?”

  “Nope!”

  Piers raised his eyebrows.

  “Really?”

  “I have a few ideas in mind, but I think I’ll play it by ear,” I said. In reality, I had a few terrible ideas and I wasn’t sure which one to choose. “After all, who doesn’t like a girl who can be spontaneous and romantic?”

  I shot a sharp look at Piers. His face hardened, but only for a second.

  “That sounds… great,” he said.

  “Great.”

  “Great.”

  We rode down in the elevator in silence, the camera crew behind us. When we finally reached the ground floor, Piers let them step out first.

  “I have to talk to you,” he whispered to me, grabbing my arm.

  I jammed my foot against the elevator door to keep it open. There was no way in hell I was going to let Piers trap me in an elevator with him again. Just the thought of what he’d done to me before made me shiver with an emotion I didn’t want to let in.

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” I hissed. “I want to go on a date with a billionaire.”

  “Lisa, listen to me for one bloody second, will you? Please. I just want to apologize.”

  “Apology not accepted.”

  “If you’ll just listen—”

  “Sorry!” I said brightly, loud enough for the camera crew to hear. “I don’t want to be late for my date!”

  I yanked my arm out of his grasp and stepped out of the elevator. He followed, his lips pressed together in a white line.

  “Dylan!” I threw my arms around Dylan’s neck and gave him a big hug. He picked me up and spun me, and I laughed brightly, giving him a kiss on the cheek before he set me down. There. That would give Piers a nice case of jealousy. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him gritting his teeth behind that stupid fake smile.

  “You look awesome, Lisa!” Dylan said, looking down at me appreciatively and holding my hands in his. “Doesn’t she look awesome?”

  “She looks amazing,” Piers said flatly.

  “Aw, thank you!” I said.

  “I’m sure you two will have a wonderful time this evening.” His eyes glared at me, even as his mouth was smiling. “R
emember to be back within one hour. I’ll see you tomorrow morning for the judging.”

  “Can’t wait! See you later, Piers!” I waved at him until he disappeared outside. The camera crew hung around. How weird. I had forgotten that they would be following us on our date.

  “So,” Dylan said, “where are we going?”

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “What have you done already today?”

  “Oh, man,” Dylan said, “I have done everything today! First I went roller skating with Kate, and then we got a bowling game in too. Then Heidi took me to a poetry reading at this art museum thing.”

  “Sounds like a bad date I had recently,” I interjected.

  “Well, I’m not gonna say anything bad about it, but… I can’t say anything good about it.”

  I laughed and pushed my hair behind my ear nervously. The cameraman focused on me. I felt like I couldn’t act like myself with a camera trailing on me at all times. It was weird. I’d gotten so used to it before, but now that I was actually trying to make a good impression on Dylan, it felt strange to have a bunch of guys following us around with video cameras and microphones.

  “And then Julie and I did a walking tour of New York City, which was okay since she doesn’t really know the city. And then Mia took me out for dinner.”

  “Oh,” I said, a bit disappointed. “So you already ate.”

  “Not really!” Dylan said. “She took me to this fancy ass French restaurant, and everything was like this tiny!” He held up two fingers pinched together. “Like, the dessert was one cookie, cut in half to share, with a strawberry for a garnish. And Mia ate the strawberry.”

  His stomach growled, as though to corroborate his story. He slumped against the wall.

  “You look tired,” I said.

  “I’m pretty beat. So much walking! I was like, we can just drive! But Julie wanted to walk.”

  “How about this,” I said, a plan forming in my head. “Let’s chill here at the apartment and order a pizza, and you can beat me at Mario Kart.”

  Dylan’s eyes widened at the mention of video games.

  “Really?” he asked.

  “Really.”

  “But… Like… You’re sure you don’t want to go out anywhere and show off your dress? You look really pretty.”

  “Thanks,” I said, laughing, “but it’s all for you anyway.”

  “Lisa, you’re the best!”

  He swept me up in a big hug again.

  “And you guys,” I said, pointing to the camera crew, “you can skedaddle out of here.”

  “Uh, we’re supposed to follow you on your date,” the main camera guy said. He looked hesitant.

  “And there are already cameras set up throughout the entire apartment,” I said. “Plus Dylan is wearing a microphone. You’ll have plenty of footage of us sitting on a couch and talking and being boring.” Without waiting for an answer, I turned and walked with Dylan back into the elevator.

  “Nice work,” he said, looking surprised.

  “It must be weird to have them following you around everywhere,” I said. “I don’t know if I could handle that.”

  Dylan shrugged.

  “It’s not that weird. I mean, there’s paparazzi following me everywhere I go in the city anyway.”

  “Really? That’s awful.”

  “It’s pretty awful, but, like, you get used to it.”

  I felt a twist of guilt. I’d made fun of Piers for being so famous, but I hadn’t realized how bad it could be.

  “And like, half the week I’m doing interviews and going on TV. I mean, I hate it, but I have to for the business.”

  “What business do you do, anyway?” I asked. “I just realized I don’t know anything about you. You could be a Mafia don as far as I know.”

  Dylan chuckled.

  “I wish. Nah, I work for my dad. He has this business doing, like, I dunno, business stuff.”

  “Business stuff? Fascinating.”

  “You’re being sarcastic, right?” Dylan squinted at me. “Because it’s like, really boring.”

  I smiled. I shouldn’t be sarcastic around someone who was impervious to sarcasm.

  “No, really. I’m sure it’s not boring. What kind of business stuff do you do?”

  “Like, you know, delivering shipments and getting regulations passed for local businesses, that kind of thing.”

  “Sounds like it could be the Mafia.” I raised one eyebrow. “Shipments of guns and drugs, right? You shoot anyone on the city council who doesn’t approve your regulations? Or bribe them to do your bidding? Put horse heads in their bed if they don’t agree?”

  Dylan gave me another look that said he wasn’t sure if I was kidding or not. My expression must have clued him in, because he burst into laughter.

  “You’re hilarious,” he said. He smiled at me with such a genuine appreciation that my heart squeezed a bit in my chest. “I really like you, Lisa.”

  I swallowed. The elevator stopped, thankfully, and I stepped out into the apartment.

  “Let’s see how much you like me once I’m kicking your ass at Mario Kart,” I said. “And I’m not being sarcastic.”

  We spent the whole hour eating pizza and playing video games, and by the end of the night, I was thinking that maybe—just maybe—I had what it takes to date a billionaire.

  I pressed the space bar and stared at my laptop. My fingers were trembling. Dylan had just left, and I was trying to finish up the first part of the article before anybody else got back to the penthouse. My mind was whirling.

  He kissed me, I wrote. Then I deleted the sentence quickly. I put my chin in my hand and stared at the blinking cursor.

  On Rainbow Road, I sabotaged Dylan the way my sister always sabotaged me. I threw myself on top of his lap and blocked the screen, sending his car careening off the edge of the course. To my surprise, he tossed the controller aside, and—

  I leaned back in my chair and deleted the whole paragraph. My face was hot and my pulse was racing. What had I done?

  Dylan had kissed me, and one kiss had turned into a minute or two of making out on the couch. It made me feel like a teenager again, and by the time I remembered that everything was on camera, it was already too late.

  A makeout session. Really, Lisa.

  Maybe I have been too hard on immature guys, I typed. When I came on this show, I was expecting to find a brilliant, witty, mature man. What I got was Dylan Chase. And I’m starting to realize that love doesn’t have to be scripted like a movie. It doesn’t have to be hearts and roses. Love can be immature, and silly, and spontaneous.

  Love can be fun.

  Clarence would love this, I thought. There was a good mix of sex and funny, and lots of pithy sayings about romance.

  As I was typing the last line, I heard the elevator doors open up in the living room. With a last glance over the article, I pressed Send. Before anyone could come in, I quickly shut my laptop and sat back in my chair. I exhaled a puff of air.

  Love? Was that really what this was? I didn’t know how I felt about Dylan, and my emotions got more and more mixed up the more I thought about it. It had been fun to hang out with him, but even when we were kissing, I hadn’t felt the kind of spark I’d felt with Piers—

  No. I shook my head before I could even go down that line of thinking. I’d been falling for jerks for way too long, and now that I was falling for a nice guy—scratch that, a nice billionaire—I wasn’t going to mess it up by comparing it to something else. I needed to stop overthinking things and just go with the flow. If Dylan wasn’t Mr. Right, he was better than any other guy I’d dated.

  Even if that wasn’t saying much.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “What if I get kicked off?” Kate asked, twisting her hands nervously. She kicked her feet back and forth as she sat on the bed. I would have thought that she looked like a little girl, if I hadn’t known that she had a kid herself.

  “We won’t get kicked off,” I said, sounding m
ore confident than I felt. “Didn’t you say that Dylan liked both of us the best?”

  “Sure, sure. It’s just…” Kate trailed off.

  “What? You had fun on your date, didn’t you?”

  “Not really. I mean, I didn’t try.”

  I stopped brushing my hair.

  “You didn’t try to have fun?”

  “Well…” Kate said. “I kind of bombed it. On purpose. I really wanted you to win this one, so—”

  “Wait, wait, wait. You bombed it? What do you mean, you bombed it?”

  I put the hairbrush down and turned around. Kate looked embarrassed.

  “I didn’t flirt with him that much. And at the end, he went to kiss me, and I made him kiss me on the cheek.”

  “Oh, jeez, Kate,” I said. My mind was reeling. It was strange—I didn’t feel jealous, exactly, but it was weird. Dylan had tried to kiss Kate on the same day he’d tried—and succeeded—to kiss me. “You didn’t have to do that!”

  “I did! I mean, you’ve already done so much for me.” She gave me a meaningful look.

  I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t done anything for Kate apart from keeping her secret—that she had a kid. And now she was sabotaging herself to let me win? It was insane.

  “Don’t—don’t do that again,” I said, uncertainly. “Please, Kate. If I win, I want it to be on my own merits. Okay?”

  “Okay, I won’t,” Kate said, still fidgeting. “ Lisa?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did—did Dylan try to kiss you?”

  She looked up at me with innocent doe eyes, and I felt awful.

  After all, I hadn’t just kissed Dylan. We’d had a makeout session for the last ten minutes of our date. And I wasn’t even sure if I liked him or not!

  “Yeah,” I said, turning back to the mirror and brushing my bangs back with my fingers so that Kate wouldn’t see the flush on my cheeks. “Yeah, we kissed.”

  Kate’s face fell, but I could tell she was trying to stay composed. She bit her lip and looked down at the floor.