Shopping for a Billionaire 3(20)
Author: Julia Kent

“The only topic where reason goes out the window is cilantro.”

“Cilantro?”

“Tastes like soap.”

“Same here.”

“Oh my God! It’s true love!” I clap my hand over my mouth as if that will shove the words back in.

The grin he gives me changes as his eyes shift to something behind me. The clock. “We’re going to be late.”

Breathe, Shannon. Breathe. Let respiration restart so you don’t pass out on top of blurting out that you’re in love with him already. It’s only been a month. Who falls in love in a month? People on LastShot.com, where you openly confess to having STD lesions, and gamers, that’s who.

“And,” he says as we stand, stopping me from grabbing a kitchen knife and carving out my vocal cords, “nothing says true love like Mexican food that tastes like laundry detergent.”

* * *

One of Mom’s friends from college moved in a few towns over and took an old chicken coop on her property and turned it into a yoga studio. Yep—chicken coop. Except this is like a chicken spa, and if any actual chickens ever set foot in here I think they’d face twenty-five screaming women all searching for their pillow-sized Vera Bradley bags to bash the poor creatures to death.

Declan and I arrive and immediately change the demographics in the room:

1. We lower the average age by a mere two years, but hey, we’re outnumbered…

2. Declan alone increases the average income by five figures.

3. He adds a male to the group. The only male in the group.

Mom urges us to get in the front row, and I scout it out carefully. Yoga freaks have this thing about their space. No one actually, officially, claims a space, but they do in their minds, and no matter how much yoga is supposed to be about awareness and acceptance and detachment and flow, so help you bloody GOD if you take a yoga freak’s spot in class.

Namaste, motherf—

“I am so glad you’re here!” Mom squeals as Declan rolls out his mat. We’re barefoot and I can’t stop peeking at his feet. For a guy, they’re remarkably nice and athletic and groomed. “Metrosexual” is not the word I’d use to describe Declan, but his feet scream manscaped! I imagine them sliding up and down my calves…

He starts to stretch and smiles at me, beckoning with his eyes to join him. I bend down to unroll my mat and a popcorn popper goes off.

Wait. That’s just my joints.

And twenty old ladies’ necks all turning at once when they realize there’s a man in the room, and he’s not on Viagra.

(At least, I assume he’s not. And it’s no thanks to me. One inch in the wrong direction with that EpiPen and…)

I shudder and he reaches over to give me an affectionate caress. “You cold?”

Twenty sighs fill the air. Mom appears up front, setting up her blocks and yoga mat. This is Restorative Yoga, which means everyone in the room pays $17 each to lie around on a foam mat and fall asleep. How Mom ever got into this business is still a mystery to me, but anyone who can get paid to make her customers zone out and snore and be praised wildly is pretty freaking brilliant as far as I’m concerned.

He leans over for a kiss.

Twenty moans rise up behind us.

And then—scuffling sounds.

“You know Marie will have us do Downward Dog and Cow,” someone hisses. A chorus of voices all say “Ooooooh,” followed by a whispered frenzy. Those are yoga positions where you shove your butt in the air.

Hold on a second…

“I’ll pay your class fee if you give me the spot,” says Agnes. I only know her name because the last time I was here all the other women were gossiping about her because allegedly she’s a bit of a loose woman. How you label a ninety-year-old woman “loose” is beyond me, but all I can think is GO AGNES.

When I’m ninety I hope I’m still doing yoga and that my libido cries out for a piece of a man, Viagra or no Viagra. The clitoris does not have an expiration date. The hard part must be finding a man with similar interests, a similar life timeframe, and one who isn’t in a lovely white cardboard box on someone’s mantle.

“You think you can always get everything you want, Agnes,” one of the other women hisses. “Not everything has a price.”

“Some views are priceless,” another woman sighs. “I’ll pay for two classes if you – ”

As I turn to watch the brewing fight behind us, Declan’s lips are twitching. He leans over and says, “Ten dollars says Agnes ends up leading a Senior WWF brawl back there.”

“MMA is more her style.”

“Corrine, I swear!” Agnes shouts. “You can stand there like a mule all you want and refuse to budge, but I know about your bone density levels.” Her voice carries an ominous tone.

“You wouldn’t!” Corrine cries out. She’s seventy-something going on fifty, with a wig from Farrah Fawcett’s day. She looks like she’s in a wind tunnel. Oh—no. That’s just really bad plastic surgery.

“I’ll nudge you just enough to fall and you have a hip that’s more fragile than Putin’s ego.”

Wait a minute here. These old ladies are threatening bodily harm and broken bones so they can sit behind my boyfriend and ogle his ass?

I crane around behind him and take a good look.

Yep.

Totally worth it.

“Ladies! Ladies!” Declan stands up without using his hands to even touch the ground, displaying ab and core strength that makes everyone freeze, drool, and sigh at once. Someone back there might even have farted.

He holds his hands in the air, palms out, to get the group to pay even more attention to him. “Let’s make it a bit more fun, shall we?”

Mom stops her preparations, her finger about to push the button to start the sonorous soundtrack.

“If one of you can guess how Shannon and I met, you can win the—”

Twenty women shriek, “TOILET GIRL!”

“MOM!” I howl.

“Don’t shake her hand,” Agnes whispers to Corrine, who stares resolutely ahead and doesn’t give Agnes a millimeter as my mom comes over to me and Declan with an Oh, shit look on her face.

“It’s such a charming story!” she says in a stage voice. “My daughter being a professional at the top of her game in business, meeting the billionaire son of James McCormick—”

“The Silver Wolf,” Corrine gasps, giving Declan the once-over with eyes like a Terminator robot from one of those movies, evaluating him for specific fleshy characteristics that meet her mission’s criteria, which I suspect involve twisting her body against his in non-standard yoga positions. “You look like him.”