The Bad Boy Billionaire's Girl Gone Wild (3 page)

After a quick pause for a condom, he was inside me with one strong thrust. I forgot about my questions and just allowed myself to get lost in all the sensations: his weight atop me, the slick heat of his skin, his mouth closing around my breasts to tease my nipples until they were unbearably stiff, the hot, hard length of him filling me up inside.

And then the orgasms: one after another, I couldn’t stop them if I wanted to. I cried out, calling his name and God’s until I was sure I’d lose my voice. I felt myself close around him, bringing him to his own climax. He shouted my name.

This
was
real. On some level, this was Something.

The next morning, my questions remained unanswered. We hadn’t exactly done much talking during the night.

“So now what?” I murmured, rolling over to nestle up against him. I pressed my cheek to the smooth skin on his muscled chest. The early morning light filtered through the floor to ceiling windows in his bedroom.

“Shower, breakfast, work,” he said. But he pulled me closer.

“No. With us. You have the money now . . .”

“And you’ve got your ex thinking about getting back together.”

“While that may or may not be true, it doesn’t clarify anything with us,” I pulled away and propped up on my elbow so I could look him in the eye. “Is this for real, Duke? Or is it time to give up the ruse?”

He just grinned. God, that grin of his.

“If I remember correctly, I promised you a hot date to your reunion. So until then . . .”

He pulled me into a tight embrace and rolled us over until he was on top of me, inside of me and I forgot all about those pesky questions because I had much more exquisite sensations to dwell on.

Chapter Two

258 West 15th Street, Jane and Roxanna’s apartment

A
BOUT A WEEK
or so passed between the night of Duke’s party and the Friday night that I walked into the apartment I shared with Roxanna and found her reading my book. She had curled up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and a stack of the three hundred double-spaced printed pages I had written of a historical romance novel based on my whatever-was-happening-with-Duke-Austen. Some were on a pile beside her, others were strewn about the floor, and still more were in her hand.

“Hey! What are you doing?” I rushed in and started picking up the pages, even trying to wrench away the ones she was holding.

Roxanna looked up, not even faking a guilty expression.

“Jane, this is just wicked.” She grinned. “I had
no
idea about you! You seem all prim and proper and dress like you live at a country club. But the things you write about . . .” She fanned herself with the pages.

“Are private. The things I write about are private!” I dropped my bag on the floor and clutched a random assortment of pages against my chest. “It’s a rough draft. It’s not
finished.”

The story had a beginning, middle and end. By “not finished” I meant that I hadn’t revised it a thousand times (just a hundred). By “not finished” I meant that I wasn’t ready to share this part of myself with the world.

Roxanna shrugged and said, “Well, then you shouldn’t have left it on your desk for anyone to read.”

“I froze, mouth open, speechless. On the tip of my tongue there was a speech about respecting privacy and private property but I just couldn’t deliver the words.”

“What were you doing in my desk?”

“The point is, I just glanced at the first page and then I got kind of sucked in,” Roxanna said. “So tell me, how much of these sex scenes are based on real life experiences?”

“Roxanna!” I could feel my cheeks turning red.

“You’re right. I don’t really want to know. Major TMI. So when are you going to publish it?” I opened my mouth to reply, but she cut me off. “Do not tell me you’re not going to publish it.”

“First I’d need an agent, and then a publisher, and then I’ll probably have to do revisions. It’ll be
years
before it’s published,
if
I decide to publish it,” I said with a sigh.

“Or you could self-publish it this weekend,” Roxanna replied. “I’ll get some wine and whiskey. We’ll order take out.”

“Because copy editing under the influence is the best idea ever,” I said, picking up more pages and not even bothering to put them back in order.

“At least we won’t be driving or operating heavy machinery,” Roxanna quipped.

“I don’t know . . .” I said. I hadn’t really considered publishing it anytime soon. The main goal had been to just write the darned thing. Of course, I had fantasies of a bigwig editor at a New York publisher taking my agent and me out to lunch to discuss the terms of the huge advance and the national publicity tour they would arrange and pay for. I also knew that
never
happened to people like me. There was also a more plausible and terrifying situation to consider: “What if he reads it?”

“Duke Austen reading a romance novel?” Roxanna echoed. Then she burst out laughing. It has to be noted that Roxanna has one of those loud, throaty laughs that the neighbors could probably hear.

“Or Sam? What if Sam reads it? He’s a literature professor. And he was talking about my book the other night. He might read the book,” I said. “And that will be embarrassing and weird and awkward and a million bad things.”

“Or it’ll show him what he’s missing,” Roxanna remarked.

“What if my mother reads it?” I asked in a horrified whisper. “My mother can’t know that I know about sex.”

“OK, never mind the fact that you’re twenty-eight years old and the Victorian era ended some time ago, Your mom only reads the inspirational self-help books recommended by her book club and it’s doubtful they’ll pick yours. So you don’t have to worry about that.”

“You just have it all figured out, don’t you?”

“I’m a terrible influence, I know. But Jane, you wanted to write a novel and you wrote a damn fine one. Why not share it with the world?”

Because what I wrote could destroy whatever Duke and I had if anyone in the tech world read it. But then again—he’d gotten his huge investment. Did he really need the charade anymore? Or was I too pleased to hear my novel was “damn fine” to consider anything else?

Roxanna could also be very persuasive. And when she wasn’t being persuasive, she was downright devious. Roxanna was known to, say, take someone’s phone and post an engagement announcement on their Facebook page when said people were not engaged.

She also immediately developed this really annoying habit of reading sections of my novel to me.

“His eyes, dear God, his eyes. When his gaze rested on her, it felt like sunshine on her bare skin,”
she said, while I was attempting to eat my take-out dinner of pork lo-mien, brown rice and vegetable dumplings.

“But she was aware—too aware—of the stupid wager he had made. She was aware that this wasn’t true desire, it was just the Ashbrooke affect and legions of women had been similarly afflicted. It wasn’t special,”
she read, while I rinsed out the take-out containers and put them in our recycling bin.

“I have been haunted by fantasies, wishing to claim you, to ravish you, to possess you, to show you such pleasures you have never even imagined
,” she said, as I was brushing my teeth in our tiny bathroom that
really
was not designed for two people, one of whom was holding a three-hundred-page manuscript.

It wasn’t that I was opposed to publishing the book. I just kept thinking about Duke reading it. Or Sam. There was too much of
us
in it; it wasn’t purely fictional. That was the problem with drawing inspiration from real life.

Roxanna, being intrusive and freakily able to read my mind, came into my darkened bedroom later that night and said, “Stop thinking about what the boys think, Jane. Jeezus. This is the twenty-first century. What do you want?”

I turned on the light beside my bed.

“What do I want? I’ll tell you what I want. I want Duke Austen to walk in here right now and say that he wants our relationship to be real. But I also want Sam to ask me to get back together and say that I’m the one and he was a fool to let me go. I want to publish my book and I want
everyone
in the world to buy it and read it—except for Duke, Sam and anyone I’m related to. I want it to get rave reviews and hit the
New York Times
bestseller list. At the heart of it, what I really want is to be liked and to be successful and to stop feeling like my life ended the day that Sam walked out on me.”

Roxanna, being Roxanna, did not bat an eyelash at my outburst.

“It’s a romance novel set in 1820’s England,” she said with a shrug. “I’m sure they won’t read it. What with them having penises and all.”

“Nine percent of romance readers are men.”

“And zero percent of them are your ex-boyfriends. Probably.”

“I want to care less about what people think of me,” I muttered, a soft and sad finale to my dramatic speech.

“I’ll get the whiskey,” Roxanna said. “And let’s get started.”

W
E WORKED ALL
through the weekend to polish, copyedit and format the manuscript. Fortunately, my new best friend and roommate happened to be a gifted and eagle-eyed writer who had no trouble with formatting and all other Internet-y things. She used her Photoshop skills to make a cover with an image we snagged off Shutterstock for a few bucks. And then at my insistence, she made one without Duke’s face superimposed onto a bare-chested model. However, the one we kept did feature a hot guy with his shirt off, rippling muscles to be exposed and drooled over.

Let’s just say we took a moment to appreciate it.

“Let’s call it
The Duke Belongs With Me,
” I suggested. “Like the Taylor Swift song.”

“Ok, if you want to be lame and/or obvious,” Roxanna replied.

“What about . . .
Wedding the Wallflower
?”

“Cute,” Roxanna chirped. Since she never chirped, I braced myself for more. “It’s the perfect title if you want to pretend the women’s movement never happened and you’re eager to perpetuate the myth that marriage is the end-all and be-all of a woman’s existence.”

“I like the word
Wallflower.
It’s how I feel so much of the time—like I’m standing on the sidelines wanting to participate in the world but just . . . can’t.”

“You’re waiting for permission. Or someone to ask you to dance.”

“Yes. That.”

“But your heroine . . . she’s a bit wicked,” Roxanna said.

“The Wicked Wallflower?”

“YES,” Roxanna said, turning back to the computer to add the words to the cover.

Next she added my name, Jane Sparks, in a really large font. I hesitated. If I really didn’t want Duke or Sam to read it, publishing a book online under my real name was probably not the best idea.

“I think I need a pseudonym,” I said. “Just in case.”

“Because of what the boys think?” Roxanna asked.

“It’s a story about two people faking an engagement in order to get a ton of money. It would cause major problems for Duke if anyone were to read it. I want to publish this, but I don’t want to get in the way of his dreams.”

“Awww. How noble of you. What are we changing your name to?” Roxanna asked.

I paused for a moment. “I’ve always liked the name Maya.”

I glanced around the room, looking at the names on the spines of books for inspiration for a last name. My gaze settled on the thick, red leather volume on my desk:
The Synonym Finder
by J.I. Rodale.

“Maya Rodale,” I said. That was a pretty name. I could be that girl.

“I like it,” Roxanna declared. She deleted “Jane Sparks” and replaced it with “Maya Rodale.”

“Oh wow!” I gushed when I saw the finished cover: A woman ripping of a man’s shirt, revealing lots of his chest, all against a stunning hot pink background. “It’s real!”

It was really real sometime long after midnight on Sunday, when all the files were formatted and uploaded and we clicked “Publish!” at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, and Kobo.

“And now a glass of alcohol to celebrate,” Roxanna declared as she stepped away from the computer and stretched out her arms. She wandered into the kitchen and reached for a bottle of chardonnay, which was my usual drink of choice.

“No, this calls for whiskey,” I said, reaching for the bottle of Bulleit Bourbon, which was her usual drink.

“Look at you. Demure librarian by day. Badass, sexy book-writing, whiskey-drinking girl by night.”

“Look at you, an amazing editor with mad Photoshop skills and a lack of fear about the Internet,” I said. “I would have
never
managed this without you Roxanna. Thank you.”

“Don’t get all sappy on me now,” Roxanna said. We toasted with our glasses of whiskey and then caught an episode of a reality TV show before heading off to bed.

I had done it: written and published a novel with a little help from my fake fiancé and my good friend.

Chapter Three

New York Public Library

F
OR A MOMENT
there, it seemed like my life was coming together perfectly. I lived in the greatest city in the world with an awesome friend and roommate, I had published a novel like I said I would, and there were even rumors about the possibility of a promotion at work when another librarian planned to quit to be a stay-at-home mom. For a moment there—that night at the bar—it seemed like I could have my pick between Duke and Sam.

I agonized over which guy I should give my heart to—and for nothing. Duke didn’t call (or text, or tweet, or Snapchat, or IM or Facebook message or any of the thousands of forms of communication guys like him had invented)—other than a quick text to say he was slammed with work. Apparently, Project-TK wasted no time in using the investment money to get bigger and better,
fast.

Also, Sam posted something on Facebook about “a sexy and chill weekend getaway with my girl,” otherwise known as the loathsome Kate Abbott.