Page 58 of The Thing About My Secret Billionaire

The skip in my heart and the flutter in my belly need to behave themselves. I just need to smooth away the awkwardness, draw a line under what happened yesterday, and move on.

“Hey.” He grabs the top of the door and holds it open for me. Why does he have to be chivalrous as well as all the other perfect things? “I have something to show you.”

“It’d better not be another shitty developer.”

“The exact opposite. You’ll love these guys.”

He walks toward the big barn that now has a ladder resting against the side of it. Scattered around the bottom are various tools and workbenches.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“You’ll see.” He places his hand in the small of my back to guide me forward, his touch sending a shiver up my spine to the base of my neck.

It makes me feel like I belong to him. Like it’s just a usual casual thing for him to touch me like that. And hell,that’s a good feeling. But it’s not a feeling I need. Feelings need to fuck off.

“Hey, fellas,” Miller calls out.

Three men, all in brown overalls, appear from around the back of the building—one maybe in his late fifties or early sixties, the other two younger, probably late twenties.

“Frankie.” Miller’s hand is on my shoulder now, which only gives me more of those annoyingly reassuring I’m-his feelings. “This is my dad, Russell. And my little brothers, Ethan and Luke.”

This is all incredibly confusing.

“Hi,” I say, though it comes out more like a question than a greeting. “Nice to meet you. And good to know that Miller is a real person with a real family. I was starting to wonder if he was in the CIA or a witness protection program living under a new identity.”

Miller flinches and slides his hand off me, the action sending a tingle right across my chest.

“Oh, he can be pretty secretive, this one,” Luke says. “When we were kids he’d always hide the best cookies.”

“For Mom,” Miller snaps. “I hid them so she could have them later because otherwise she wouldn’t take any.”

That sounds like one of those conversations they have over and over at every family gathering. Also, how damn cute is it that he made sure his mom got some of their seemingly limited cookie supply?

“Anyway,” I say, “I don’t know how to say this without it sounding unwelcoming or incredibly rude, which I absolutely don’t mean it to be, but what are you up to?”

“They’re fixing the rot in the barn.” Miller folds his arms across his chest with ahmphofsatisfaction, along with the smile and raised-eyebrow combo of a man who is very proud of himself.

“What?” I look from Miller to the other guys and back to Miller again. “Your dad and brothers are carpenters?”

“Yup. These men have worked on restorations of some of the finest heritage homes in Boston.”

“Miller would have ended up in the biz too,” Luke says, “if he hadn’t quit carpentry school because?—”

Russell nudges his elbow into Luke so hard that it knocks the younger man off-balance.

“To get intoinvestments,” Russell says, finishing his son’s sentence for him.

I look back at Miller, seeing him in a whole new light, like he’s a whole different person. I’d imagined him having parents who worked in finance and growing up around free-flowing cash. Apparently I don’t know him at all.

“You went to carpentry school?” I ask.

“Yup. And fucking loved it. Grandad taught us all from when we were so young we had to stand on boxes to reach the workbench.” His smile softens. “Similar to how your grandpa taught you how to look after donkeys, I imagine.”

“This is amazing.” For some reason, this news makes me like him even more.

And how incredibly thoughtful of Miller to have them come and eradicate any way for Skinner to threaten me with code violations.

So he wasn’t ghosting me at all after what happened yesterday. He was organizing this.