Page 66 of The Thing About My Secret Billionaire

“Yup. Night.” Luke waves but doesn’t move.

Does he know exactly what he’s doing and is cockblocking his brother?

Miller looks at me and shakes his head with a defeated smile. “Thanks again for a great dinner, Frankie.” Then opens the door.

“I’m cooking the guys a big breakfast in the morning to set them up for the day,” I tell Miller. “Be here at eight before it’s all gone.”

“Will do,” he says. “See you then. Good night.”

“Night, night,” I say.

As soon as the door’s closed behind him, Luke turns and heads back upstairs. “Night, Frankie.”

“Good night.” I fall back against the counter and try to catch my breath.

CHAPTER TWENTY

MILLER

Frankie waves until my dad’s work van reaches the end of the driveway and turns onto the road to take them all back to Boston.

While it was great to see them, watching them leave lifts a pressure from my chest. It’s only now that I realize just how tense I’ve been these last forty-eight hours worrying about whether they might accidentally blow my cover.

There was a near miss when Ethan said, “We Malones can take our beer,” but I managed to explain that away as being a quote from a long-lost uncle.

Otherwise, it all went even better than I’d hoped. Their presence definitely boosted my credibility with Frankie. She clearly enjoyed their company—there was plenty of laughing and storytelling over dinner again last night. And she can see that they’ve done a quality job on the barn and the stables, which are all now rock-solid and watertight.

And if she’s seen them as good people who can be trusted to do good work, then that should mean she trusts me by association.

“Thanks again,” she says, kicking at the dirt. “Taking away Skinner’s ability to threaten us gives me some breathing space.”

“Good. I was a bit worried you might be pissed off that I arranged it all without asking.”

“I normally would have been.” She draws a figure eight in the earth with her toe.

“So how come you weren’t?”

“Partially because it was incredibly helpful and something I could never have afforded to do. And partially”—she looks up at me out of the corner of her eye—“because you did it for all the right reasons.”

Oh, fucking hell.

I did not do it for any of the right reasons. I did it for all the wrong, Skinner-related, reasons.

And the list of those wrong reasons is getting longer.

But the new wrong reasons are wrong in a different, Frankie-related, way.

They’re wrong because they include how much pride I feel in doing something that’s lifted her mood these last couple of days. How much I’ve enjoyed seeing the extra brightness in her face, the new spring in her step. How I’ve fed off her infectious positivity that makes me excited and so fucking lucky to get to spend time in her orbit. And how it all makes me not want to leave her side at the end of the day.

There is definitely a deep level of accomplishment to be taken from constructing a luxury building that becomes a Boston landmark. But it’s not an accomplishment I sense in my bones and my heart the way I do when I see Frankielaugh with my family—that’s something that feels like an even more tangible achievement.

Is that what real feelings are? When you perfectly gel with someone does it make every other emotion you’ve ever had seem insignificant? And does it feel new and fresh and like a whole new emotion that your body has invented all by itself, that no one else has ever experienced, one that makes you want to shout it from the rooftops to let them know this amazing feeling is possible and they shouldn’t settle for anything less?

Why does my only experience of feeling this way about someone have to be with a woman who doesn’t even know who I really am and would hate me for lying to her if she did?

The universe is punishing me for deceiving her by making her my perfect person, but who I can never have.

Nice one, universe. You clearly win. And I clearly deserve it.