The Billionaire Bargain #3 by Lila Monroe
ONE
Grant’s body, powerful and strong, covered every inch of mine. He gazed deeply into my eyes before dipping his head to kiss my neck, and I moaned as he teased and tortured the sensitive skin there with his teeth and tongue. His hard cock nudged at my thigh. I was slippery with desire, so ready to take him in. I reached for him—
Beep beeeeep. Beep beeeep.
The ancient clock radio beside my bed went off, and my hand slapped out at it automatically. The sun was coming through gauzy white curtains, making a dappled pattern over the faded hand-stitched quilt my mother had made me when I was still a kid. I gazed up at the walls, the dust on my Speech Team trophies and the curled corners of my old rock-star posters. At the end of my childhood bed, Mr. Teddy stared back reproachfully, as if he could sense how lonely and displaced I felt.
This should have felt like a refuge, a safe haven. I should have felt welcomed, and relieved. At home and at peace.
But all these things I used to treasure so much just reminded me that while they had stayed the same, I had become a completely different person.
And that completely different person was a total fucking screw-up.
No. No. I’d promised myself I was going to be positive for at least an hour today. I wasn’t going to think bad thoughts about myself, or my decisions.
No matter how much I deserved it.
? ? ?
“Rise and shine, Lacey Spacey!” Mom said, dishing out a healthy portion of quinoa and acai berries onto my plate.
I eyed them skeptically.
“They’re very good for you!” Mom said mock-reproachfully as she caught my look. “And they’re delicious. Try them, honey! You won’t know until you try them, will you?”
She was trying to be cheerful for me, but all it did was make me feel like I was four fucking years old. “Yes, Mom.”
I took a bite. Okay, it wasn’t terrible. The berries were a little sour, but not bad.
But damn, I missed the days when Mom made comfort breakfasts of bacon and eggs and a foot high stack of blueberry waffles with whipped cream.
“Aren’t you going to eat any more?”
“I guess I’m not very hungry.” I pushed the food around my plate. Who could work up an appetite for this stuff? Yeah, it was definitely my breakfast that was causing my lack of appetite, and not the way my stomach kept twisting every time I thought about Grant or the company or—
Yeah, face it, Lacey. This could be nectar and ambrosia from Mt. Olympus, and you’d still be picking at it like a bird.
Dad came in with the morning paper, and a cup of chicory coffee—Mom and Dad were apparently protesting the treatment of workers who harvested actual coffee, which was morally admirable but also keeping me from getting any damn coffee—and kissed Mom on the cheek. “Ah, both of my two favorite girls! How’s the quinoa?”
“Great,” I said, crossing my fingers under the table. “Very—full of texture. Interesting texture. Yeah.”
“You know, we get that from the local farm down the road, the Lee family,” Dad said for the seventh time already. “Completely sustainable, and you should see the tomatoes they get!”
“Tomatoes are a very spiritual fruit,” my mom added. “I think we could all learn a lesson from tomatoes, the way they thrive in the driest conditions.”
“We certainly could,” my dad agreed, setting down the newspaper. “I had a conversation about that just last week down at the meditation center—”
I took a big bite of quinoa and chewed as noisily as I could, hoping to drown the rest of it out. I loved my parents, but sometimes a girl just longed for the days when they thought ‘meditation’ was something you did in court when two sides of a business dispute couldn’t come to an agreement.
I was so busy chewing quinoa and feeling resentful that I almost missed the quick flash of worry in my mom’s eyes, and the way they darted to the side pointedly before my dad—a little too casually—picked up the paper again, turning the front page away from me. But Mom and Dad, great as they were, were not exactly super-spies, and so despite their efforts I caught a glimpse of the headline they were trying to hide:
DOES DEVLIN MEDIA CORP HAVE A FUTURE?
It didn’t even mention Grant by name, but fresh pain still stabbed into my heart as if I had been shot back into time to that moment in the hotel when I had seen what I had to do, when I had made my fatal decision.
Tears gathered at the corner of my eyes, and I swilled a glass of organic green tea to try to hide my face, but I could feel more, welling up under the surface.
Oh, damn. Why did giving him up have to be so hard? Shouldn’t it be easier, when I knew it was for the best?
“I think I’ll take an early shower,” I said, standing abruptly before either of my parents could see how upset I was.