Billionaires, Bad Boys, and Alpha Males (45 page)

The man with the ants wrote back and called her
an entitled bitch, which kind of soured her on the whole internet dating
thing.
 
Still, she’d spent all that
time setting up her profile, so she decided to keep it up, hoping that perhaps
someone interesting would reply.

But after a few weeks, sorting through all the
winks had gotten tedious, and she usually just deleted the messages without
even reading them.

A few months later, around ten o’clock on a
warm summer night, Lindsay was trying to catch up on her word count for the day
when she heard a pinging sound come from her computer speakers.
 
She minimized her word document and
clicked on the safari window to see what it was.

A message.
 
From RedSoxChace, a user on the dating site.
 
She must have forgotten to sign out last
time she signed in to delete her winks, and now this guy was using the site’s
instant message service to communicate with her.
 

“I love
romance novels,”
 
the IM said.
 
“
Glad to see you like Susan
Elizabeth Phillips, too,
 
She’s one
of my favorites!”

Lindsay rolled her eyes.
 
Men were always giving her shit about
the fact that she wrote romance books.
 
She couldn’t count the number of times guys asked her if she was going
to write them into a book, or thought she was into kinky sex just because she
wrote love stories.
 

Usually Lindsay would have ignored a message
like that, but it was late, and she was avoiding her manuscript.

She typed out a quick response.
 
“Glad to hear it -- what’s
your favorite book of hers?”

The reply came almost immediately.
 
“MATCH ME IF YOU CAN.
 
I just love sports agents.
 
They’re so sexy.”

She laughed out loud.
 
Yeah, it was a little cheesy, but the
guy got major points for looking up a Susan Elizabeth Phillips book before he
messaged her.
 
It showed a
willingness to make an effort.

“Does
that mean you’re a sports agent?”

“Nah,
just a boring hedge fund manager.”

“So
you’re the one responsible for the financial collapse?”

She expected him to come back with something
defensive, about how not all financial guys were the monsters the media made
them out to be.

But instead he said:

“Well, not me personally. But I know the guy
who is.
 
His name’s Bob, he works on
the sixth floor of my building.”

Lindsay laughed.

 
“Can you
tell Bob he owes me lunch?”
she
wrote back.
 
“That’s about how much I had in my 401k when
the market collapsed.”

“Will do.
 
But with interest, that probably equals dinner by now.”

She hovered the cursor over his name, thinking
she should probably check out his profile.
 
But why?
 
Any guy who was
this cute and funny had to be completely unattractive.
 
Otherwise, why would he be messaging
people?
 
And furthermore, why would
he be messaging her?
 
Lindsay knew
she wasn’t ugly, even considered herself pretty on a good day.
 
But she’d seen the women on this site
– a lot of them were posing with their cleavage hanging out, their bleach
blonde hair tumbling over their tight tank tops as they flashed a perfect white
smile at the camera.

Not that Lindsay cared about what this guy
looked like – first, looks had never been that important to her.
 
And second, it wasn’t like she was ever
going to meet him.
 
It was just a
distraction, a little harmless internet flirting while she worked on her book.

She clicked.
 
His profile popped up, and Lindsay
actually gasped out loud.
 
That’s
how hot this man was.
 
He had short
dark hair, piercing dark eyes, and a smile that made him look like he was
flirting with you, even on the computer screen.
 
It wasn’t one of those posed pictures
that Lindsay hated so much.
 
This
was a picture of him out on a boat, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, a drink in his
hand, the sun setting behind him.
 
His nose was slightly sunburned, and he
looked like he was having a fun day out on the ocean with his family.

She took in a deep breath.
 
There was no way a guy like that would
ever seriously want to date a girl like her.
 
Of course, that’s probably why they were
talking on the internet – if they were in a bar, he probably never would
have started talking to her.

But since she was here, safe in her bedroom,
where he had no idea she was wearing an I HEART NY T-shirt and a pair of
sweatpants with a hole in the knee, he’d initiated conversation.
 
A cyber conversation, but still.
 

“Hello?”
 
he was saying.
 
“Did I
scare you off?”

“No, sorry,”
she said.
 
“I was just doing some online
research.”

It wasn’t really a lie.
 
She
had
 
been doing some research.
 
Some research on him.

“Am I interrupting your work?”

He was, but something about him had her
intrigued.
 
Either that, or she was
just way too bored from being alone with her characters all day.

They ended up talking for hours.
 
Chace was at a conference in New York
City, working on some kind of deal that sounded ridiculously complicated.
 
He had a lot of work to do, too, and so
they’d stop their chat for a little while to work, then come back online to
check in and do a little flirting.

Finally, when the sun was starting to come up,
Lindsay wrote:

“Wow, we stayed up all night.
 
You’re great for my word count.”

“You’re great for my work, too.
 
Can’t remember the last time I had so
much fun working on international finance.”

“Probably in college, when you were studying it
after banging some sorority girl.”

“Ha!
 
Touché!”

“Just kidding
J
”

“Anyway, I should probably go – I need to
get some sleep before my meeting at ten.”

“Wow, that’s only a few hours away.
 
Sorry I kept you up.”

“You didn’t!
 
You were the only thing keeping me
going.”

He was waiting for her to say goodnight, and
even though she was exhausted, she didn’t want to.
 
It was crazy, but for some reason, she
wanted to make sure she was going to talk to him again.
 
The logical side of her knew it was just
an internet conversation, but it was the best conversation she’d had with a man
in a long time.

She told herself not to over think it, and so
finally she said,
“Well,
if you’re around tomorrow night for a little more motivation, I’ll be here,
just me and my characters.”
 

She cringed at that last part, because,
honestly, could she have sounded any more pathetic?
 
She’d be here, just her and her
characters?
 
It was worse than being
a crazy cat lady.
 
At least crazy
cat ladies spent time with actually living things.
 
She was talking about hanging out with
people who existed only in her head.

“Good night, Lindsay,”
 
he’d written back.

She thought she might have a hard time falling
asleep, but she hadn’t, and by the time she woke up, the whole thing felt like
some kind of weird dream.
 
The light
of day turned something that had seemed scandalous and intimate the night
before into something that just seemed silly.
 
So she’d been up all night talking to a
stranger on the internet.
 
Hello,
lonely loser.

She’d spent the morning writing, then met her
friend Hillary for lunch, came home and cleaned her apartment.
 
At around eight, she sat down to email
her agent about something, when she saw she had a notification alerting her to
a message from RedSoxChace.

Hey, nightly inspiration
,
it
said,
you around? I have a lot of
work to do, and don’t know how I’m going to get through it without you.

She immediately logged on.

And for the next two weeks, while Chace was in
New York, it became their nightly ritual. Sometimes they’d end up going to bed
around midnight, but more often than not, they’d stay up all night, taking
breaks from their respective work to chat and flirt.

They got to know things about each other.
 
She told him about her dad, how he had
been a total asshole, how her sister Jamie annoyed her but they were still best
friends.
 
He told her his mom had
died when he was little, how his dad had recently married a new woman who had a
daughter a little younger than him, and how he was glad his dad had finally
found love again.

She thought it was a sweet story, and they
joked about her using it in a book someday.

She looked so forward to the chats that her
word count was growing exponentially.
 
She finished the book she was working on, and even had time to write up
a new proposal for her agent.
 
There
was something comforting about him being on the other end of the computer,
cheering her on, making her feel good.

When it was time for him to leave New York and
come back to Boston, she felt a little sad that their late night chats were
coming to an end.

So, he said the night before he was scheduled
to leave New York,
 
when I get back
to Boston, you up for doing some in person work together?

Her face flushed, and her hands froze on the
keyboard.
 
She didn’t know what to
say.
 
Of course she’d imagined what
it would be like to meet him, to see him, to actually spend time with him.
 
At the same time, she was so enjoying
the fantasy that she didn’t know if she wanted to ruin it.

What if you’re a psycho stalker?
 
she stalled.
 

She knew he wasn’t.
 
Well, that wasn’t quite true.
 
Anyone could be a psycho stalker these
days, even the people you’d never suspect. But she’d googled him, and he’d
checked out.
 
His job, his family,
everything.

“How do I know
you’re
not a psycho stalker?”

“Oh, I am.”

“I think I can handle you.”

She hesitated.

“Okay,”
she typed finally.
 
“Let’s do it.”

They made plans to meet up the first weekend he
was back.
 
But then the email
came.
 
He was being sent to
California.
 
He didn’t want her to
think it was a lie, so he was forwarding the email his boss had sent.

She was equal parts disappointed and
relieved.
 
It was one thing for her
to be charming and cute on the computer. It was quite another to be that way in
person, when she had to worry about things like whether or not her Spanx were
showing, or if she had spinach in her teeth, or if he was expecting her to
sleep with him at the end of the night.

They could still have their nightly inspiration
sessions, he said.
 

She agreed.

But the first night he was in California, he
suggested talking on the phone.

Her heart was racing as she dialed his number.

“Hey, Inspiration,” he said when he
answered.
 
Her pulse sped up.
 
His voice was deep and sexy, the exact
kind of voice you’d expect to belong to a man that looked like he did.