Page 80 of The Thing About My Secret Billionaire

He pushes mine off my face and kisses my cheek. “I’m so happy I was your first for that.”

“Me too.” I run my fingers down his damp side.

The thought of separating my body from his is as incomprehensible to me right now as chopping off an arm.

We lie there for a while, with no sound other than the beating of our hearts and the heaviness of our breathing.

As I come back to reality, I trail my fingers from his firm butt up to his shoulder.

“You should move into the house. The guest room, I mean.” I definitely don’t want to rush things, but leaving him sleeping in the barn after what we just did seems silly and unnecessary.

“Are you sure?” He lifts his head to reveal a look of surprised delight. “I mean, I’m not saying this cot isn’t comfy.” He jiggles his body and the whole thing rocks. “But an actual bed would feel like a real treat.”

“Of course. I’ll remake it for you.”

Miller suddenly twitches, jerking into me.“What the hell is that?”

His head snaps around to look down toward the end of the cot.

I peer over his shoulder and, damn me, if it isn’t Thelma curling up against his feet.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

MILLER

“Well, it’s all right for some.” I look from the heavy clouds in the early evening darkness outside Frankie’s kitchen window to the sunny blue California sky and lapping Pacific Ocean behind Chase on my laptop screen.

“Yeah, it’s a hellish seventy-two degrees,” he says from the desk of his Malibu home. “Just had a lunch meeting on an outdoor patio. Truly awful.”

“And yet you choose to live in New York and spend a bunch of time in Boston. I’ll never get it.”

“The LA paparazzi.” He throws his hands to the sky. “They drive me fucking crazy. The only reason I could sit on the patio for lunch was because it was behind the restaurant, hidden from view.”

“Well, you do have a face that sells gossip magazines.”

“You’d think they might have figured out I’m really fucking boring by now and given up,” Chase quips.

A black box pops up on-screen, then Leo’s face appears in it.

“Where the hell are you, Miller?” Leo squints, puzzled, at his screen. “Looks like the set ofLittle House on the Prairie.”

“A real working farmhouse kitchen.” I lean to the side so he can also see the tired living room behind me. “Well, it’s a donkey sanctuary, not a farm. But you get the gist.”

The lift of his eyebrows sets off a defensive spark in me. “Certainly a lot more inviting than your all-black office that feels like a badly lit cave,” I add.

Leo is sitting at his desk at his venture capital company in Boston’s downtown financial district.

“All about limiting distractions,” says the most focused man I know. “But why the fuck are you at a donkey sanctuary?”

“Trying to buy the land.” Probably best I keep it simple.

“By working from its kitchen?” Leo’s face screws up in bafflement.

“I’m kind of staying here.” I really do not want to get into this. Especially since the knot of guilt at having sex with Frankie when she has no idea what I’m really doing here or who I really am is crushing me.

And I was totally about to tell her everything. Come clean. Get it all off my chest. I’d worked myself up to do it. I even got as far as explaining the full story of how we lost the house and why I had to quit trade school. But just as I reached the part where the guy behind it all was Skinner, she straddled me, gave me the kiss of my life, and my brain shut down.

I’m not proud.