Shopping for a Billionaire 3(24)
Author: Julia Kent

Mom’s really pulled out all the stops, with a pale blue linen tablecloth and matching napkins. I wonder which thrift store she got that deal from, and then I see the glasses. Matching crystal glasses at each seat, the tops edged with gold.

“Like my table?” she asks proudly.

“Where’d you get it all?” I ask, definitely admiring. Mom and I have a shared love for “thrifting” and yard-saling.

“Savers!” she exclaims, then catches Declan’s confused look.

“What’s Savers?”

Amy happened to come into the room and is halfway to greeting me and Declan, arms stretched out for a hug, when she stops cold at Declan’s words. “You don’t know what Savers is?”

“Get me some smelling salts,” Mom jokes, “because I’m about to faint. Declan, we have to take you thrifting!”

“Thrifting?” He seems amused.

“Shopping at thrift shops. Yard sales. Estate sales. That sort of thing. And Savers is a chain of thrift shops.”

“Used items?” He still seems confused. “So you only buy used items? Like antiques?”

Mom’s turn to look confused. “Declan, you’ve never bought something used?”

“An antique. Sure. Dad buys them all the time for the office and his house. But otherwise…no.”

“You just shop in regular stores for everything?”

“I have shoppers who do that for me. Unless it’s clothing. Then I just go to a tailor.”

“Oh,” Mom says quietly. An awkward pause fills the air.

“I would love to go ‘thrifting’ with you, Marie,” he says with a smile. “It sounds like fun.”

He is officially the Best Billionaire Boyfriend I have ever had.

Mom relaxes and points to the fridge. “Can you get the butter lamb, Declan? It’s time to get the food on the table.”

His face goes slack, the friendliness replaced by a kind of tempered shock he’s obviously trying to hide. “Butter lamb?”

I laugh, trying to get him to chill out. “A few generations back, Dad’s family was from the Buffalo area. Polish. There’s this tradition where you—”

“Where you have a pound of butter that’s pressed and formed into the shape of a lamb, and you put it out on the table at Easter,” he says.

Everyone freezes. Jaws drop. Eyes open wide.

“You know about the butter lamb?”

His hands are shaking, just a tad, as he shoves them in the front pockets of his jeans. “Um, sure. My mom was from that area. We had one every year.” He swallows so hard we can all hear the click in his throat, and his face is uncertain, eyes blinking rapidly. “I haven’t seen once since…”

“Since she died?” I ask gently, my hand reaching out to his forearm for reassurance. He doesn’t move, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t change his stance. I want to ask him again how his mother died, but this really isn’t the time.

Nod.

“Then wonderful!” Mom gushes. “Not wonderful that your mother died, but wonderful that you can reconnect with an old family tradition.” She reaches for his shoulders and directs him to the fridge, then walks past him to the stove to stir something. A timer goes off and she mutters to herself.

Declan sets the yellow lamb on the table and looks out the back sliding doors toward the yard, where Dad is pushing Tyler on the swing set.

“Can we go outside?” he asks in a ragged voice.

“Of course.” We head toward the door and I pause with my handle on it. “If this is too much, we can leave. Go somewhere quiet and—”

He takes both my hands in his and smiles at me with troubled eyes. “It’s more than enough, but not too much. I want to stay. Your family is lovely.”

“My family is crazy.”

“Crazy can be lovely.”

Chapter Eleven

By the time dinner and the Easter egg hunt are over, everyone has turned into a human potato bug, round and grey, a series of roly-polies stuffed silly. Conversation has devolved into exclamations of how good all the food was and groans about how our stomachs are about to explode.

“Can I see your childhood bedroom?” Declan asks. He’s relaxed considerably since he first arrived.

“Want to examine my Barbies?” But I stand and reach out for his hand, leading him up the stairs. Jeffrey and Tyler are in the backyard shrieking and chasing Amy with little toy guns, shooting foam bullets at her. They miss every single time.

Dad has actually undone his belt and the top button of his khakis, and rests in a lounge chair like Al Bundy, one hand tucked in his waistband.

Mom’s in the kitchen fussing over the leftovers. There’s enough food to feed an army.

“My room isn’t anything special,” I explain as we walk up the carpeted stairs. When Amy turned sixteen Mom finally got her wish—cream carpet—and even now, more than five years later, it feels weird to me. I went away to college and the house had industrial green, flat carpet and came home to a Better Homes and Gardens spread.

“It’s special because it’s yours.”

We’re greeted, first, by the giant head of Justin Bieber on my bedroom door.

“Nice. You were a Belieber?”

“That’s a sick, sick joke from Amy.”

I open the door and Justin steps aside. “Voilà!” I sweep my arm around the room. White furniture, all of it “thrifted” and refinished by Dad. Simple sheer curtains. An entire wall of cork squares with push-pinned articles and pictures from teen magazines. A ton of shells from vacations to Cape Cod.

Nothing amazing. The amazing part, actually, is that Mom hasn’t made me clear it out yet. She claimed Carol’s old bedroom as a yoga studio a few years ago. My time is likely ticking.

Declan’s hands are all over me suddenly, his lips on my shoulder, caresses in places that tell me exactly what he’s thinking, and he’s not thinking about Justin Bieber.

At least, I hope not.

“We can’t have sex in here!” I hiss. Jeffrey and Tyler are thumping up and down the carpeted stairs now, with Jeffrey calling out numbers. An impromptu game of Hide and Go Seek is afoot, and I don’t want the kids to catch us hiding something of Declan inside Auntie Shannon.

“Why not?”

“For one, my twin bed is so small you’ll poke my eye out before you hit the target—”

“Is this the target?”

I struggle to speak as electric jolts shoot through me like I’m mainlining a battery. The heat pouring out of his rock-solid chest and h*ps that press into my own belly makes my knees go weak. Teenage Shannon who spent many fitful nights dreaming about this moment is clashing with Responsible Shannon.