Billionaires Dollar Series

I swing my legs off the side of the bed, dressed in nothing but a pair of panties, his T-shirt, and his diamond ring. I look down at my hand.

“Can I shower first?” I ask. “I want to see if I can help with breakfast.”

Behind me, Liam takes a deep breath. “Sure,” he says. “I’ll just lie here for a while. Seems like I need a cold one.”

My laughter is strained with nerves and things unsaid.

The warm water does nothing for my body’s awareness of him, my skin remembering where his had been. Like footprints in the snow, he’d marked me, and they refuse to thaw away.

By the time Liam and I climb into his sportscar to head back to Seattle, the sun has already passed its peak and afternoon has begun.

He drums his hands on the steering wheel.

“In a rush?” I ask him, shifting my seat back to give myself space to stretch. He snorts as he looks at me.

“You don’t need that much leg space,” he says. “You haven’t grown an inch in height since we were fourteen.”

“Your comments might be true, but they’re unnecessary.” I stretch my legs out and wiggle my feet in the delicious space. “See how comfortable I am?”

A smile lurks on his lips, but his fingers don’t stop tapping away at the steering wheel.

“Again, what’s the hurry?”

“I’m having dinner at my brother’s house tonight. My mother will be there too.”

“Oh, say hi from me,” I say.

He arches an eyebrow. “As they are blissfully unaware of our little arrangement, I won’t. But thanks for the sentiment.”

I snort. “Right. That’s going to get us in trouble one of these days.”

“Don’t I know it,” he mutters.

“Aren’t family dinners usually a good thing, though?”

Liam takes a moment to answer. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to get used to it.”

“To what? To dinners?”

“To the way you seem to know what I’m thinking, even when I haven’t said a thing.”

“Oh. Well, I do know you quite well. Or at least I did, even though the new you is less familiar.”

Liam’s voice has the faint trace of a smile in it, the trees passing outside the window echoing the green in his jacket. “Yeah, you’re getting to know the new me too, it seems.”

I turn down the little mirror in the car to look at my bangs, hopelessly out of control after my morning shower. “So you’re not excited about dinner?”

“I should be working,” he says, which sounds like a half-truth. “I lost all of yesterday, and half of today.”

“Technically, you were working this weekend. I can testify to that-you were very schmoozy with Albert.”

“That’s not a word.”

“It is now,” I say. “Besides, don’t you want to see your nieces and nephew?”

“The oldest is Ethan through and through, but the middle kid… I can see us in her.”

“Us?”

He turns to me, eyebrow raised at the pitch in my voice. “Yes. The way we were as kids, I mean. She has the energy of a thousand batteries.”Property belongs to Nôvel(D)r/ama.Org.

I can’t help it-I laugh. “Poor Ethan.”

“He’s handling it well enough, but I can’t wait until she’s older. I hope she gives him hell,” Liam says, but his voice is fond.

“I hope I’ll get to meet them one day.”

My words are spoken without thinking, but the words drop like an anchor between us, drawing up a host of questions that neither of us have answered.

Because we’re not in a proper relationship.

So I lean back and search for a change of topic, a way back to our easy conversation.

“It’s been fourteen years since we saw each other every day,” I say. “Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

Amusement laces his voice. “You want a play-by-play of fourteen years’ worth of life?”

“Yes,” I say. “Tell me what you ate for breakfast on the first of March six years ago.”

He laughs. “Probably nothing but a black cup of coffee.”

“Nothing? But breakfast is the best part of the day!”

“No, it absolutely is not,” he says. “It’s an unnecessary hurdle. I wake up and I want to start my day-not pause and eat.”

For a moment, I can do nothing but look at him. His words are blasphemy.

He glances over at me with a cocked eyebrow. “Let me guess. It’s your favorite meal of the day?”

“Undoubtedly.” Looking down at my hand, I dramatically pull my engagement ring off.

Liam chuckles. “No you don’t.”

“I’m sorry.” I roll down my car window, ring clasped in hand. “But this is over.”

He laughs and my window rolls back up again, controlled from his door. “Mercy, please,” he says. “I’ll never say a bad word about breakfast again in your company.”

“It’s enough that you’re thinking it,” I say, but I slide the platinum ring back on my finger. “You’re going to let me prove you wrong.”