Shopping for a Billionaire 4(22)
Author: Julia Kent

Just a silent no.

I refuse the no, though, because I’ve decided that I can do that. Other people have the right to live according to their internal core, and so do I.

So do I.

What I want is equally important, and if someone else has a different opinion then they can express that and instead of living life as one big chain of reactions to other people’s reactions, I’m going to act.

Act.

And process it all later.

My hand covers his, the one pushed against the wall. When our skin connects I feel his trembling. A little too good at making the surface look placid, he keeps all the ripples underneath.

He doesn’t have to do that with me.

And he doesn’t move his hand. If he had, he would drag my heart with it, and right now I can’t handle the road rash.

“Declan?” I prod, my voice as tender as can be. “Where have you been?”

His mouth is set in a firm line, tense and unforgiving, but those eyes narrow with a questioning look, reading my face, and then the tension in his jaw lessens, as if a single layer is peeling back.

His lips part, a thin line of white showing between them as they start to form a word, the beginning of a sentence that will break through whatever wall has been built between us.

“Validating myself.” He says it with such nuanced dryness that I’m not sure whether to laugh or be offended.

And then—

“You’re not supposed to be here,” says a woman’s cold voice behind me.

It sounds like death.

I turn around.

Close.

A Coffin.

Declan doesn’t move his hand. I cling to that single fact. It’s all I have, literally, to hold on to right now.

“Here to take out the garbage? Don’t you need that weird little car that looks like you’re carrying a bowel movement on the roof?” Jessica says with a sneer.

“No,” I say, eyes on her, hard as rock. “If I need a piece of crap to do my job,” I say, looking her up and down slowly, “I can find one anywhere. Even on Twitter.”

Her eyes lock on my hand. The one touching Declan. The one he’s not moving.

Hardened again, he stares at me, then lets his glance dart to her. “You interrupted us,” he says coldly.

Is he talking to me? No. I interrupted him and his brother, not him and Jessica. Instead of opening my mouth and stammering a nonsensical apology, I inhale slowly, as silently as I can, and just keep my eyes on Declan, pretending Jessica doesn’t exist.

Turnabout is fair play.

“The race is ending. We have photo ops to attend to.” Her tongue rolls inside her cheek, the movement so masculine it makes her look like Ann Coulter for a moment.

Declan blinks exactly once, but his fingers move just enough to squeeze mine affectionately, grasping me. “I’ll be there.”

Her eyebrow arches and the look she gives me makes it clear she thinks I deserve my car. “Don’t waste your time. We have more important things to attend to.”

He makes a small, derisive sound. “The world won’t end if I’m not in a picture at the finish line, holding a ribbon.”

She looks like she’s been slapped.

“When your company donated heavily to support this charity, it meant—”

“I know what it meant.” He is iron. Steel. Titanium. But his thumb caresses the back of my hand, and for all his hardness, I turn soft, my insides a twist of silk sheets, my mind airy with a floating feeling that makes it hard to breathe.

“Don’t ruin this for everyone, Declan,” she challenges.

“You should take your own advice, Jessica,” he says, cool as a cucumber. “How’s business?”

She storms off in a mumbling fit.

I don’t know what to say. He’s standing before me, touching me, my hand the center of the universe, his eyes a distant sun. A million questions race through my mind but I can’t capture any of them long enough to read them and translate into coherent speech.

A man’s shout from near the front door cuts through the air.

“Jesus Christ! Get it out of here!” It’s Andrew, backing away toward the elevator.

“It” turns out to be what looks like a fly, but I know it’s not.

It’s so much more.

Declan’s face goes slack again.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I wish this could be different, but my father is right.”

And with that, he grips my hand hard, his face filled with regret, then lets go, the hard clap of his shoes on marble like gunshots.

Chapter Twelve

Limping up the steps to my Soviet-bloc business building makes me feel like one of those over-muscled women on the weightlifting team for Belarus. Except I’m limping and whimpering, and I feel like my pectoral and gluteal muscles have been sent to Siberia for re-education.

For the past three weeks—since right after I saw Declan—my life has been a series of gym shops. Forty-seven of them in twenty days, to be exact. That is more than two per day, which equates to screaming quads and exposing more cellulite per hour than you see on a Cape Cod beach in August.

Rumors of ongoing and persistent underperformance by personal trainers at a particular chain of gyms in the area mean I have to pretend to be a new customer who wants to try the “first hour free” promotion. The gyms generally send the least-senior personal trainer to do these jobs, though the one I just left was quite different. I got a seventy-eight-year-old professional female body builder who had more muscle than my dad, Steve, and possibly Declan combined, and whose skin was the color of the old leather armchair in dad’s Man Cave.

Smelled like it, too.

Her teeth had gleamed like polished Chiclets gum and her eyes were remarkably alert and bright for someone born before WWII. No loose skin under the eyes, no bags at all. Her jaw was so muscled she looked like an aging bulldog.

That woman worked me like Jillian Michaels with a group of mouthy teens sent to some Christian re-education camp in Utah. I haven’t had my inner thighs quiver like this since…

Declan.

Damn it. I was trying so hard not to think about him, but leave it to my overactive adductor muscles to make him float into my mind. Three weeks have passed without seeing him, hearing from him—and yet he’s in my mind, embedded in my skin, deep in my heart.

Still.

I use both hands to physically lift my right leg up the first cement stair. There are nine of them. Nine. As in my legs are screaming “nein!” Pain makes me bilingual.

I’m on stair number four when Josh appears next to me. His legs function. He can hop up those stairs like Richard Simmons after drinking five Red Bulls.