Page 15 of Her New Billionaire Bosshole (The Billionaire’s Bidding #2)

SOPHIE

I ’m a liar.

I can still feel the shape of the words on my lips, Elliot, this is not a date .

Okay, so maybe that wasn’t a lie — but the sentiment behind it was untrue. Saying that made it sound like I didn’t want it to be a date, but I very, very much do.

Even after the comment about all the women he’s been with — which should have been enough of a reminder to me that this is a bad idea — I can’t ignore the fizz of excitement in my belly.

When was the last time I was on a date? When was the last time a man made me feel like this?

I know the answer without even having to search for it — never.

The food comes, smelling and tasting better than I could have imagined.

Maybe it’s the champagne, or the effect of the glittering Miami skyline, or how Elliot insists that we toast with each new dish that comes to the table — the flat bread, the ceviche, even the crème br?lée.

Our spoons make a little clinking sound when we touch them together, and Elliot holds my gaze as we each take a bite.

I make a noise, then immediately scrunch my nose. “Sorry, I hate when people do that.”

“Do what?”

“Moan over food.”

That seems to render him speechless for a moment, but his eyes are so intently on me, so dark, that it holds me captive.

“What else do you hate when people do?” Elliot asks. “Is there a list somewhere?”

“Well, I hate all the obvious things — cutting me off in traffic, double dipping.”

“What do you hate that I do?”

I laugh, “Oh, that list is long .”

Elliot tilts his head in a way that I’m coming to recognize as being uniquely him, then asks, “Just one. What’s the number-one thing?”

“Buying teams you don’t know anything about?”

His eyebrows shoot nearly to his hairline, then he laughs, nodding, his hand around his glass. “Okay, touché, Kendall.”

“It’s not about you, though,” I have no idea why I feel the need to clarify this, but I do. When I look back at him, his eyes are on me again. Elliot is, against all odds, a very good listener.

“What could that possibly mean?” he asks.

“It’s about the club,” I admit. “Dallas is my home. I grew up there, went to college there, and now, coaching — it’s my baby. More than that, it’s like the blood that runs in my veins. Dallas is the greatest city in the world.”

Elliot laughs. “That’s a bold claim.”

“About Dallas, or about soccer?”

“Both.”

“No, okay.” I’m laughing, too, realizing how that sounded. “Dallas is the greatest city in the world, and I stand by that. But the club — it’s more like… my life’s work.”

When the words come out, they feel so right. I pause, letting them hang in the air, and Elliot pauses too.

“Your life’s work,” he repeats after a second, his eyes carefully on mine. “After your injury.”

My eyes hit the table. This is my chance to share about it, but the last thing I want is to bring the memories to the surface of my mind. Relive them. “Right.”

Mercifully, Elliot jokes, “And now it’s being meddled with. By me.”

“Or helped,” I amend, once again allowing my eyes to wander over to the city, taking it all in right behind Elliot’s head.

“You want to work together, we can work together. I can do that. And if we can… I don’t know.

Maybe things keep going the way they went tonight.

Keep winning. Maybe that’s the energy the team needs. ”

Elliot is staring at me again, and this time I’m staring right back at him. Something about the air between us is shifting, but I can’t figure out quite how.

The moment is broken by the server, who returns to us. “Is there anything else I can get for you?”

“No,” Elliot says, not unkindly. “We’re doing just fine. Thank you.”

“Well,” the server says, his smile never wavering. “I did want to let you know that we’ll be closing in a few minutes. Would you like for me to send you with anything when you go? More dessert? I can have a bottle of champagne sent you your room?”

Now is the time to say no — to end the night. But when I open my mouth, I hear something else come out instead. “Champagne would be wonderful.”

Elliot quirks his eyebrow, and the promise in the movement makes my heart flutter around, trapped in my chest. Wordlessly, we stand and Elliot nods to the server — apparently having paid in some mysterious I-own-this-building way — and steers me to the elevators.

But something is scratching at the back of my mind. The moment the elevator door opens, I realize what it is and turn, racing back inside, telling Elliot I’ll be right back.

“I’m sorry,” I find our server and surprise him by walking up to him, opening my purse. “Did we forget to tip you?”

“No, ma’am,” he says, eyes going wide and flitting to somewhere behind me, as though he expects Elliot to be standing there with me. “I am very well compensated?—”

I’m already shaking my head, “No, you need a tip?—”

“Ma’am.” He lowers his voice, gesturing with his hands toward my purse like he’s shushing it, pulling receipt from his pocket and showing it to me, the line where the tip is scrawled in what must be Elliot’s handwriting. “Mr. Altman left me a very generous tip. Thank you.”

I glance at the receipt, and the number scrawled there makes me suck in a breath. The server smiles when I meet his eyes, nodding his head like, yeah, I hardly believed it.

“Oh,” I say, just as Elliot approaches, his gaze darting between me and the server, his brow wrinkled.

“Everything okay?” he asks.

“Everything’s fine,” I say, voice still light with surprise, that figure dancing through my head.

“Have a good night,” the server says, and I swear he nearly winks at me as we turn and walk back toward the elevator, giving me a look that says, You are one lucky duck .

Elliot’s room is magnificent.

“Okay,” I say, dropping my purse to the couch and spinning around, feeling way too much like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman . “This is stupid.”

Elliot laughs, loosening his tie and leaning on the doorway. “What’s stupid?”

“This room!” I know I’m being too loud, but it’s like I can’t control it. Elliot doesn’t say a thing, just watches me as I move to the sliding door, pulling it open and stepping out onto the balcony.

“I’m not doing the Titanic scene with you,” he warns, and I shake my head, hands firmly wrapped around the rail.

“I’m not scared of heights,” I say, meeting his eyes, “but I’m not not scared of heights, either.”

“Sounds like a good compromise.”

“Really, Elliot, this view is incredible. I thought hotel rooms like this only existed on movie sets.”

“You need to stay in nicer hotels, Sophie.”

I pause, turning to look at him, another comment about him being rich right there on the tip of my tongue, but I hold it back. Elliot might be rich, but he’s clearly not the man I thought he was when I first met him.

“When Olivia and I were little,” I say, staring out at the skyline, “she read so many old books that she would talk like the characters. Like, she might look at this and call it wonderful , or splendid . Adults always ate that stuff up.”

A beat passes, then Elliot says, “Brandon and I used to have little secret code phrases.”

“Like what?”

“Like… pumpernickel. We’d say that when Dad was in a bad mood, and we wanted to avoid him.

Now that I’m thinking about it, a lot of our codes were food.

” He laughs, thinks, then says, “But we also had this thing we’d say when we needed the other one to believe what we were saying.

Total truth — it was kind of like our version of stick a needle in my eye . ”

“But less gruesome,” I say. “That rhyme always made me feel queasy.”

The conversation stretches on, and after an hour, the temperature drops and we move into the living room of his big hotel suite.

I’m not sure who started it — him or me — but neither of us sits on the couch. I’m on the floor, back on the ground, legs up on the couch, a pillow under my head, thanks to Elliot. My dress pools around my hips, but I’m covered with a blanket that’s twisted around my bottom half.

He’s sitting next to me, his back against the couch, his legs stretched out past my head.

For some reason, seeing his socks when he slipped his shoes off felt like the most intimate thing in the world, and now I can’t stop staring at them, can’t stop following the line of each stripe as it stretches onto his ankle.

Somehow, we’re on the topic of the dumbest things we’ve done.

“In college, I drove to Omaha and back in a single weekend, got lost, and almost had to live the rest of my life in Nebraska.”

“Once, I hired one of those skywriters, but forgot to give him a script, so he just did loopty-loops.”

“I ordered bottomless silly pancakes from Pancake Empire when I was drunk, got sick, and puked purple for hours, all over their bathroom.”

Elliot twists around, looking me in the eye, a gleam of victory shining in his. “I bought the Bolts just to get back at this old college rival.”

I suck in a breath, eyes locked on him. Distantly, I think that this should make me mad, but after the night we’ve had, I don’t have it in me. It doesn’t matter why Elliot bought the team, but the reality does make me laugh. “No. You didn’t.”

He nods, laughs, drops his head back against the ground. The man here with me right now isn’t billionaire Elliot, or playboy Elliot, or even owner of the team Elliot — he’s just man, loose-limbed and red in the face from laughter, and I want to wrap myself up in him.

“I did,” he finally says, when the laughter subsides. “This guy, Clark ,” he says it like someone might say s yphilis, “he’s the worst. Arrogant, thinks he knows everything.”

I hum, jokingly, and Elliot ignores me, going on.

“Everything I did, he had to do. Every internship, every job — suddenly, he was applying for it, too. I played doubles in college — tennis — and of course, he found a partner and joined in.”

It’s mesmerizing, watching him talk, and when I say, “Did it ever occur to you that he might want to be your friend?” Elliot looks at me like I’ve just slapped him.

Holding his hands up in the air, he says, “No. Absolutely not — I don’t think Clark even has any friends.”

“That’s why he needed you .”

Without warning, Elliot turns to me, poking me into the side until I curl up with laughter. “Just listen, Kendall, and stop interrupting.”

“I can’t believe you just tickled me! That is so unprofessional?—”

He reaches over, ticking me again more thoroughly, his hands on my sides, his palms hot against my skin. I’m laughing and gasping, squirming to get away — but not really. Because having him this close is intoxicating.

Finally, he stops, his face just an inch from mine. My breath catches in my throat, and for a moment, I think we might kiss.

Then he says, “Clark is truly awful, Sophie, and I need you to know that. I need you to be on my side for this one.”

His breath smells like champagne and strawberries. Though, more just strawberries, because it’s what we’ve been snacking on since we got back up here. We never even opened the bottle for the room.

“Okay,” I whisper back, eyes moving between his. “I believe you.” Then, remembering what Elliot just said, I add, “And he’s awful enough that you bought an entire soccer team? A sport you know nothing about? Why not just buy a tennis team, or something?”

Gently, he runs his hand down my side, sending flutters through my body. “There are no tennis teams, Sophie. At least not like this.”

“So, it was to get back at evil, nasty Clark,” I say, not wanting to do anything to scare him away from the moment.

Elliot sighs, “And now, to impress my dad.”

“He’s impressed that you bought this team?”

“No, he’s horrified. But that’s just the thing — I want to impress him by showing him that sports can be a good investment, and that I wasn’t just acting rashly by purchasing this one.”

“…but you were.”

“Yes,” Elliot says. “I find myself doing that a lot, lately.”

Our faces are close enough that if I lifted my head at all, our noses would brush. I feel his breath with every word he says. His hands are still on my sides, one of his thumbs drawing back and forth lazily, tracing a path of fire that tingles up and down my entire body.

I’m going to kiss him.

Maybe I knew it from the moment we left the bar. Or maybe, from the moment they brought the champagne.

But, if I’m being honest with myself, I probably knew it from the moment I turned around in the elevator bay and saw him there. That I knew he’d been trying to catch up with me, that I was the first person he wanted to see after the game today.

Or maybe I knew it on the plane. In the airport, when he apologized and said he wanted to work together.

In the next second, it doesn’t matter, and my mind is no longer in the past.

It’s firmly in the present, paying full attention to Elliot’s lips on mine.