Shopping for a Billionaire's Wife (26 page)

“This was all a scheme to get your hands on that coffee. What the hell is so special about it?” As he asks, his frown deepens. 

I open my mouth to explain, but he interrupts.

“Geordi, take us back to our hotel.” 

“Yes, sir.”

“Dec, c’mon.”

He’s silent, tapping on his phone, and then: 

“We’re having room service. One of the chefs at Litraeon has been experimenting with tapas. We’ll be his taste testers.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” Declan says with a wolfish grin, shaking his head at me. He looks like he’s not sure whether to kiss me or throttle me. “He’s confirmed a Moroccan melon dish with fish and Mexican mocha.”  

Before I can protest, he’s kissing me. Whew.

Being busted has its perks.

Chapter Seventeen

The next morning, I awake in Declan’s arms, his naked body pressed against my back. He’s breathing slowly, clearly still in some state of slumber, though one part of him most decidedly is
not
. We’d made love with abandon, a joyful enthusiasm triggered as much by the strangely erotic set of missteps between us as by the gradual recovery from the insanity of our almost-wedding back in Boston. 

Last night was epic. Bizarre and ripe in all the ways regular life can’t be. Our misunderstanding took us both to places we’d never imagined, and left me looking at Declan with new eyes.

He certainly thought I’d changed.

Chaos loves a vacuum.

I throw on a robe and check my phone, finding more than enough messages from old high school friends, some college buddies, a former boss from an internship I had years ago—and they all include attachments of pictures of me.

With a Minion.

A little digging gives me the answer I suspect: the Minion chick sold that picture for five thousand dollars to an unidentified gossip website. A quick look at Jessica Coffin’s Twitter feed shows that she posted it ages ago.

Hmmm. Wonder who that “gossip website” is.

Declan will hit the roof when he sees this. Between the topless/tapas bar fiasco and now a pic of me with a painted, naked woman posing as a Minion, the viral story of the runaway billionaire groom just got more legs.

“Are you kidding me?” he says from the other room, his voice dark and sleepy, a little dangerous. He sleeps with his phone on his nightstand, so I can only guess what he’s seeing.

“Shannon?” he calls out. I wonder if this how Mom feels when she’s been caught doing something wrong. Except—this isn’t my fault. Dad snapped a picture and the woman took off. Preparing my defense, I walk over to the bed and sit on the edge, sighing. 

“Did you really send back all those clothes?” He frowns. “Evie sent me an email explaining how sorry she was that she couldn’t help you find more than two outfits to your liking.”

“Wait. This isn’t about the Minion boob picture?”

His eyebrow arches. “The
what?
”

“Never mind.”

“What’s a Minion boob picture?” 

I tell him the story in a rush. He doesn’t laugh. He sends Grace a few texts, then turns to me and says, “It’s taken care of. PR will handle it. You didn’t do anything wrong. Just an opportunist.”

“Great,” I say, picking up the corded phone by the bed. “Should I call room service for breakfast?”

He gives me a curt nod. I call and within a minute the deed is done.

As I walk away to go shower and dress, I expect him to follow. Shower sex—especially in a suite with so many shower heads—is a Declan delight.

But I shower alone.

As I dress, he jumps in the shower, and while I muddle through my tangled thread of thoughts, the staff delivers breakfast. By the time Dec’s out of the shower, toweling his wet, dark hair, I’m drinking coffee, legs crossed in a chair that faces the fountain and the fake Eiffel Tower on the strip.

“Is that one of the outfits Evie helped you with?”

I look down. “No. It’s a little from Marcello, and a little from her...” I don’t finish my sentence, because some element in his voice makes me pause.

He is angry.

Not this again. As I sit here watching the sun against the brush-covered beige mountains in the distance, the long metropolis before the base of the hills teeming with industry and debauchery in the form of skyscraper casinos and nightclubs, I feel a deep determination. Ever since we arrived here in Vegas, we’ve been prickly over any issue involving money.

His
money.

Then again, we can’t really talk about
my
money, because that would be a three-second conversation.

His phone is the center of his attention now, as he stands in front of the room service cart, idly picking at a berry bowl and scrolling through messages. “Grand Canyon and solar panels,” he mutters. Must be some new business venture Anterdec’s involved with.

“We need to figure out what we’re doing here,” I say. “I feel like I’m living in suspended animation. We got away from the crazy wedding mess back in Massachusetts, and we’ve been here in Vegas for three days. What’s next?” I figure this is safe territory.

“I don’t know. Dad’s sticking his nose in the resort VP’s face constantly and driving her nuts. Your mom and dad dumped us to go watch 1970s entertainers. And you’re rejecting me left and right.” 

“You could have followed me into the shower!” I protest.

“That’s not what I meant.”

And I know it.

“I’m not rejecting you,” I say gently. I don’t stand up, instead gazing out at the horizon, my eyes going unfocused as the line between mountain and sky blurs. “I just don’t want all this.” 

“You don’t want me?”

“Ha ha.”

“That wasn’t a joke.”

A chill whips through me so fast that I reel, the dissonance too great. “Of course I want you!”

“But not my life.”

“What?”

“I try to share my life with you, Shannon.” 

“You
are
sharing your life,” I say calmly, my grounded tone entirely fake. I’m trembling inside. “We live together. We’re about to get married.” 

“And when I try to give you a nice wardrobe, or share a wonderful meal from a new chef, or buy you fine jewelry, you—”

“Don’t you understand that every time I look at a designer dress you buy for me, I see a car payment. When you talk about going out to dinner at private clubs, I see a student loan payment. When we take Carol and her boys to Canobie Lake Park and you treat everyone to all the goodies in there, Carol and I secretly feel really strange, because we’re used to packing a cooler and eating on the cheap—because just the tickets alone were hard enough for Mom and Dad to manage. And—” I sputter, trying to make up for anything I’ve said that might offend him—“it’s not that I don’t appreciate it all. I do. I know it comes from the heart, but I can’t unfeel what I feel.” 

All those words come rushing out of me like a flash flood on a mountain pass, debris rising with the water line, destroying the only path along the way.

He softens, but doesn’t back down.

“And don’t you see, Shannon, that I am sharing who I am with you when I ask you to enter my world. I
am
designer clothing and private clubs and limos and Teslas and waterfront apartments. I
am
Milton Academy and private tutors and Harvard legacy. I hire people to manage the smaller details of my life because I can. Because I want to. I live like this because it’s all I know. You’re not the only one who looks at the other’s life and has a knee-jerk evaluative reaction to it.”

“Huh?”

“Every time we go to your parents’ house and Jason’s washing the car, I think, ‘What a waste of his time. He could be doing something else.’ Whenever yet another relative butts into our personal life, I wonder why they devote their psychological energy to someone else like that, when they could be working, or traveling, or just living quietly and entertaining themselves with something other than another person’s choices. Conversations around the dinner table about accepting what I consider abusive behavior from bosses get head nods and reinforcement, and in my world—growing up—that would never have happened.”

“Because you didn’t have a job as a teen?” I feel the sneer before I hear it, and pull back just in time. 

I hope.

“No. I did.” He tips his head back and forth, thinking. “Internships. I learned to stand up for myself. I learned not to take shit from any boss. Especially my dad.”

“Was your ability to remain in your house dependent on that paycheck?”

He pauses, green eyes taking me in. “No.”

“That’s the difference.”

“That’s not the
only
difference.”

“No. It’s not,” I concede. 

“Shannon, you’re entering my life by marrying me. I’m entering yours. I don’t reject any part of your family culture—”

“Hah!”

“—except for the intrusiveness by your mother.”

“Which
is
our family culture!”

We both marinate in that for a few beats.

“Why, then, is it acceptable for you to reject everything that has shaped me into being the man you love? You’re about to become a billionaire’s wife. I won’t hide my money. I have zero shame about wealth.”

“And I do?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Shame? How can I have shame about money that isn’t even mine?”

Damn. One eyebrow goes up, a perfect, thick dark arc over that blazing green eye. 

“That’s it, isn’t it? Self-worth again.”

“No! Why are you always making any decision of mine that doesn’t agree with yours into some kind of psychological problem with my self-worth at the heart of it all?”

“And why does any disagreement on my part always boil down to my being out of touch because I’m wealthy?”

Oh, burn.

My chest aches. The air in the room thickens with a kind of stifling feeling, an almost viscous quality that makes me think my lungs are sticking together. Each breath takes all my effort. Mind, body, soul, volition. 

All of it.

“We keep coming back to this for a reason,” Declan finally says, his voice tight. A flaring panic fills me, his instant distance like having a knife plunged into my neck. “It’s not going away. Maybe this is the real reason you wanted to run away from your mom at the wedding.”

That knife in my neck moves to my chest.

“What?” I gasp.

Music begins outside our window, the lulling drift of a classical symphony that quickly evolves into an operatic tune. My ears perk and some bones in my body vibrate and turn toward the sound, instinct strong. I don’t give in to impulse, instead watching Declan with open hurt and a simmering resentment that finally boils over. 

“We fled that wedding.
We
did. I came to you and told you I couldn’t stand it anymore, and—”

“Why couldn’t you stand it?”

“Two words: Jessica the Bitch.”

He opens his mouth to correct my math, then smartly doesn’t.

“Why are you so obsessed with Jessica?”

“Because she’s such a bitch!”

“Why?”

“Why is she a bitch? Come on, Declan. Don’t do this.”

“Don’t do what? Try to solve a problem?”

“Try to create one.”

“I’m creating
your
shame about
my
money?”

“You’re driving us apart if you keep this up.”

“Keep
what
up?”

“Pretending that the reason you’re giving me all these gifts isn’t because you’re competing with your brother.”

“Andrew is giving you emerald necklaces?”

“Andrew is CEO. Your father hand-picked him. The second he’s around, you compete for attention. Taking care of your woman and making sure she looks the part of a billionaire’s wife is important for being the one on top. So....” 

“You think I want to give you nice things that represent my life because I want to one-up my own brother? That’s crazy!”

“I have a seven-foot animatronic teddy bear in our hotel suite that is crazy. Not me.”

“Let me get this straight: you think I am giving you gifts and asking you to live a billionaire’s lifestyle because I’m competing with my brother.”

“And you think I can’t handle being given these luxuries because I don’t think I deserve them.”

We both nod, but I can see his breathing grow harder, his anger bubbling below the surface, ready to emerge. We’ve had disagreements. We’ve gone cold with each other and had to thaw, eventually talking problems out.

Never, in more than two years together, have we faced each other from such a distance, as if ready to jump into a foxhole for safety from an unknown weapon.

“You’re wrong,” he says shortly, words clipped and fast. One hand drags through his thick, dark hair, a nervous fidget if Declan ever had one. “I’m not competing with Andrew by using you as a proxy!”

“Not consciously, no.”

“Not one damn bit!” He slams his fist against the bureau, upsetting the dry minibar, hundreds of dollars worth of chocolate-covered gummy bears and iPod headphones flying.

In the face of this kind of anger, I typically freeze. My dad doesn’t blow up like this. Dad’s anger emerges in a different way. Blood rushes so hard through my ears it sounds like a waterfall in my head, and I unlock my knees, willing myself to take steps toward the door so I can leave. Think. Breathe.

Be.

I take two steps, and before I can stop myself, I give him back his anger and more. “Shame? You think I have some misplaced shame around your money? I think you’ve got it backwards. You’re always going on and on about how I need to find my power, how I give my power away to others, and blah blah blah.” My face feels like someone napalmed it, and I’m stammering, tears filling my eyes because when I’m flustered, I cry. I shouldn’t say any of this. Not one word.

I do anyhow.

“How about
your
power, huh? I think you’re the one who has it backwards. It’s convenient to think you’re the cool, calm, self-controlled, unflappable Declan McCormick, the wunderkind who was poised to take over Anterdec one day. Was.
Was
,” I repeat, vicious now. “I think you go on about my power because deep down inside, you can’t figure out how to exert your
own
.”