Page 2 of The Billionaire’s Paradise (My Billionaire #4)

“Sure. But not right now,” he added gently, because of course he had to say that. “It’ll be soon, I promise. Let’s just not do it right before a business dinner with Hal. We’re talking about a man whose emotional range starts at ‘quarterly gains’ and ends at ‘buy low.’”

“Soon is good,” I said with a nod, cool as a cucumber… a cucumber that was about to be diced into a salad. “Soon is fine. I can do soon.”

Cal raised an eyebrow but kissed me again, this time quicker, firmer, like sealing a deal. Then he turned toward the bathroom, unbuttoning his shirt as he walked.

“Wear something nice tonight,” he called over his shoulder. “ Per Se is kinda fancy.”

“Fancy? Hell, fancy is my bag,” I replied, before mumbling to myself. “It’s right up there with emotional instability and trying to cope with rejection letters from publishers like they were hand-written by Satan himself.”

I wandered into the bedroom, trying to pull myself together while figuring out what to wear. “God, am I really going to have to put on pants without elastic?” I asked myself before sighing, already knowing the answer.

Anxiously I stepped into our mansion of a walk-in closet, staring at my reflection in the mirrored doors.

I looked ridiculous. Puffy-eyed. Disheveled.

With a nervous tick in the soul. And under it all was this quiet ache I hadn’t been able to put into words.

I’d thought maybe I was just being needy or hormonal or overly influenced by Instagram reels of single dads bottle-feeding twins to the soundtrack of Enya’s “Orinoco Flow.” But no, it was more than that.

It was something rooted. Ancient. Caveman-deep.

I wanted to be a dad.

I wanted to see Cal hold a tiny human and panic about whether he was cradling the baby’s neck just right.

I wanted spit-up on my shirt and hand-drawn cards on the fridge.

I wanted a secondhand rocking chair that had swayed generations of children to sleep, just so I could doze off with a little person resting peacefully against my chest, listening to my heartbeat, the pair of us rocking ourselves into a weary, blissful slumber.

But what if Cal didn’t want that?

What if he loved our life exactly as it was—quiet penthouse, luxury travel, spontaneous sex on very expensive countertops from Milan—and I was about to blow it all up with my big baby-shaped dream?

From the master bathroom, I heard the water start up, followed by Cal’s voice through the steam.

“Hey babe, can you please pick a tie for me? Something that says I’m professional but still edgy enough to take risks. ”

I padded over and peeked into the bathroom, just so I didn’t have to shout back. And also… just for the chance to peek.

He was in the shower, head tipped back under the cascade, eyes closed, water tracing the long lines of his back, his ass, his everything. Steam swirled around him like a Greek myth in progress.

My stomach did a slow somersault.

It was one thing to be clucky. It was another thing to be clucky and deeply attracted to my husband while he casually stood there like an apology from the universe for everything that had ever gone wrong in my life.

God, how I loved him. In that messy, sacred, impossible-to-unlove way. He was kind and funny and smart and… oof , built. Yeah, he was maddeningly hot. And he was all mine.

“Matt?” he suddenly asked, still not looking. “Are you standing there watching me? You know I have a superhuman Spidey-sense every time you walk into a room.”

“You’ve got a superhuman something ,” I muttered, watching the tight buns of his ass flex and move.

“I heard that. You are there.” He washed shampoo out of his eyes and grinned. “So pervy.”

“Am not,” I said defensively. “I’m just… you know… appreciating you. Like, artistically.”

He chuckled, a low warm sound that made my knees weak.

“Babe, you know I love it when you get all Peeping Tom on me. Makes me downright horny and you know it. But we’re going to be late at this rate. Now go pick a tie. You can seduce me after dinner. I’ll even let you choose the playlist.”

“Yes!” I said with a fist pump. “Babs it is.”

I hurried back to the walk-in closet to do exactly as instructed. I opened his tie drawer, pushed a few neatly rolled ties aside…

And suddenly my hand froze.

There, at the back of the drawer, was a glossy brochure.

You and Surrogacy—Helping You Grow Your Family .

My breath caught. Not in a dramatic, cinematic way, but in a real, stupid way that made my throat do that painful gaspy thing it does right before I cry at insurance commercials.

He had a brochure.

A surrogacy brochure.

He had it.

Not me.

Him.

Which meant he’d been thinking about this. Maybe for a while. Maybe longer than me. Maybe he’d even been waiting for me to bring it up. Maybe we were both standing on either side of a giant canyon yelling the same thing but neither of us could hear it over our own anxiety.

I pressed the brochure back down into the drawer, gently, carefully, like it was a baby. Just as I did, the bathroom door opened.

Cal walked out, towel low on his hips, wet hair slicked back, steam trailing behind him. He caught me looking and smirked. “You find a tie yet?”

Blindly I grabbed a tie. “U-huh. This one. It’s perfect.”

Cal raised both eyebrows. “You wanna impress Hal Chambers—one of the richest men on Wall Street—with Angus’s Daffy Duck tie?”

“What Daffy Duck tie?” I looked at the tie in my hand. “Oh, that one.” I quickly tossed it back into the drawer and pulled out a nice pale blue striped tie. “I meant this one.”

He took it with a smile, looped it around his neck, and kissed me on the cheek like I hadn’t just discovered our entire future in a drawer.

“Perfect. I’ll be ready in ten,” he said, walking past me toward the closet. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Okay? Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

“You know, after the whole Suzy Shortcake thing. You’re okay to hold off chatting a while longer? ”

I nodded, too fast. “Yup. Totally. Look at me, I’m a picture of serenity. Calmer than a National Geographic documentary narrated by Morgan Freeman.”

“You hate those documentaries. You always get upset when the pretty zebras get eaten by the lions.”

“Good point.” I laughed nervously. Excitedly. Trying to keep a lid on what I knew. “But that’s just Simba and the circle of life. Right?”

I suddenly pictured our child’s room packed so high with Lion King plush toys that you couldn’t get the door open, and my heart purred at the thought of our future happiness.

At that moment, it was as if Cal read my mind. “Just don’t mention Lamaze at dinner.”

“Lamaze? Why would I mention that?”

“Because I know you. You’ve got babies on the brain. I told you, we’ll talk about it later. Just not tonight. Not when I need to get Hal on board with his new investments.”

“Of course. It’s a business dinner, I get it. I’ll be all about the lobster. No Lamaze. I promise.”

Busily I started sorting through my clothes for something decent to wear. My heart was still pounding, but for the first time in a long time, it wasn’t from panic.

Cal wanted a baby too.

He wanted it with me.

And come hell, high water, or the entire Mulroney-Banks-Angus circus… this was happening.

We were going to be dads.

I sat back against the butter-soft leather of the limo, watching the busy city pass by soundlessly through the tinted window. It still struck me how quietly rich everything in Cal’s world was. The seats didn’t squeak. The doors didn’t slam. Even the ice in the minibar melted like it had manners.

I wasn’t new to it anymore. The money thing. Not really. But I still had the lingering sense that at any minute someone was going to tap me on the shoulder and say, “Sir, we’ve found your real life, it’s parked out back behind a laundromat.”

Cal sat beside me, relaxed in a navy suit and the tie I’d picked out for him, scrolling through his phone. No posturing. No cufflink-adjusting billionaire theatrics. He looked like a man on his way to dinner. A really good dinner. At Per Se .

“You okay?” he asked, without looking up.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Liar.”

I shrugged. “I’m just… recalibrating. Dinner with Hal is hard work. He doesn’t join conversations—he commandeers them. Like a yacht. Or a small country. Not to mention the fact that every time he walks into the room all I can hear in my head is Right Said Fred singing ‘I’m Too Sexy For My Shirt.’”

Cal chuckled, finally glancing at me. “Well, if it makes any difference, Hal likes you.”

“I don’t think he does. I don’t think he even knows my name.”

Cal leaned over and kissed me. “Just breathe. It’s only dinner.” He smiled and tapped his phone. “I need to check in with Rashida. She’s got updates.”

He hit speaker.

“Talk to me,” came Rashida’s voice. Crisp, clipped, and always three steps ahead of everyone. “Are you on your way to dinner?”

“Yeah,” Cal said. “You got a minute to fill me in on things?”

“For you? Always. For Hal? Less so. I’ve had twelve alerts today that he’s trying to buy an extinct volcano. If that doesn’t give you Bond villain vibes I don’t know what does.”

“He’s not a Bond villain,” Cal said. “He’s just…”

“A weird billionaire. Seems to me there’s a lot of them these days. I’m just glad you’ve got your feet planted firmly on the ground.”

Cal rubbed my hand. “I’ve got a very down-to-earth husband who makes certain of that.”

“And may I say,” Rashida continued. “Thank God for him. If it weren’t for Matt, we’d all be attending Hal’s underwater gala in a volcano lair, clinking glasses with crypto bros while robotic piranhas circled the moat.”

“Rashida,” Cal said with a chuckle. “The update?”