The Billionaire Dating Game: A Romance Novel (23 page)

The door next to ours opened, and I spun around to see our neighbor standing in the doorway.

“Don’t say a word,” I hissed at him. He frowned and shut the door angrily.

“Shhh, Arlen,” Emma murmured, swaying with the baby in her arms. I put my arm around her and guided her down the hallway. I hated to see my baby sister looking like this. It wasn’t like her to be so worried, so nervous. I hoped she was worrying about nothing.

“Come on, Em.”

At urgent care, there were a dozen other families sitting in the waiting room. None of them looked happy to see a screaming baby walk in. I left Emma sitting in the waiting room while I signed in at the front desk.

“Please get us in as fast as you can,” I pleaded to the nurse behind the desk. “Arlen has a really high fever. It’s urgent.”

“Everyone’s here for something urgent,” the nurse said blankly. “That’s why it’s called urgent care.”

I sighed and gave up for now. I didn’t want to make things worse by insisting we get special treatment. I only hoped we wouldn’t have to go to the emergency room. We’d gone once before, and it had cost a fortune.

As I started to walk back to the waiting room, I saw someone I didn’t expect to see coming out of the doctor’s offices.

“Kate!” I said, startled.

Kate turned around, her long blonde ponytail flying over her shoulder. She was wearing loose sweatpants and had no makeup on. I barely recognized her—she looked so different.

“Lisa?” Her eyes went wide. “What are you doing here?”

“My niece has a fever,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

Just then, I saw a face peeking out from behind Kate. A little boy, maybe four or five, was holding tightly onto Kate’s hand.

“Oh, is this—”

“My little brother!” Kate blurted out. “He was—uh—he had an ear infection and we had to get antibiotics.”

“He’s so cute!” I bent down. “Hi! I’m Lisa! What’s your name?”

The little boy turned away shyly and buried his face into Kate’s pants.

“His name’s Jacob,” Kate said. She looked nervous. “Sorry, we have to go. I—”

“Mama!”

Kate bent down and picked up the little boy.

“I know, I know, you want your mama,” she said, avoiding my eyes.

I frowned, my journalist’s suspicion making all of my instincts ring out in alarm.
Was this what I thought it was?

“I’ll see you back at the penthouse,” Kate said.

“Mama, I want my juice!” Jacob cried, shaking his head against Kate’s shoulder.

It was. Kate didn’t have a little brother. She’d lied to us. She’d lied to everyone.

Kate… had a
kid
.

“Here you go,” Kate mumbled, pulling a juice bottle from the bag draped over her shoulder. Jacob took it, contented.

“Kate?”

Kate looked up at me. Her cheeks were bright pink, and her long blonde eyelashes fluttered.

“Please don’t tell,” she whispered.

My heart sank. I couldn’t believe that she had kept such a big secret from me. She had a kid!

“Does Piers know?” I asked. “Does Dylan know?”

She shook her head tightly.

“I lied to get on the show.”

“But—but—they do background checks, don’t they? How did they not find out?” A thousand questions whirled in my mind.

Kate hugged Jacob tightly to her side and kissed him on top of his head.

“I was still a teenager when I had him,” she said. She pressed her lips together, and at that moment she looked ten years older than she had when I first met her. “My parents didn’t want anyone to know, so they adopted him before we moved to New York and pretended that he was my brother until I grew up and got enough money to move out.”

“Wow. Why?” was all I could say.

“They didn’t want anyone knowing that they raised a teenage mom,” Kate said, her voice turning bitter. “They didn’t want to help me at all after I disappointed them like that.”

“Is the dad—I mean, he’s not in the picture anymore, right?”

“No! Of course not!” Kate’s eyes flashed with a deep hurt. “He’s…he’s long gone. He was gone before Jacob was born.”

“That’s why your parents wanted to hide it.” I thought back to the picnic, when Kate had mentioned her little brother. It made so much more sense now. I wondered how I hadn’t seen it all along.

“I don’t know what my parents did to keep the records sealed, but I guess it worked,” Kate was saying. “They let me on the show, anyway.”

“But—I mean—what are you planning to do if you win?”

“I don’t know. Honestly, I didn’t expect to get this far. I just wanted to get on the show and hopefully make some contacts with the TV network. You know, for my cooking show.”

“Kate, you are a
hustler
!” I was astonished. For such a young woman, she had everything figured out. “So you didn’t actually want to win?”

“I mean, I didn’t at first. I just wanted to get some television experience.”

“But now?”

Kate blushed.

“I didn’t expect to fall for Dylan.”

“And you didn’t expect him to fall for you, either.”

Her face flushed even harder at that.

“Lisa, please promise me you won’t tell. I’ll do anything—if you want, I’ll make sure I lose the final contest if it comes to that.”

“No—no, it’s okay. I won’t tell. I promise.” My mind was whirling.

“I… well, I don’t want to go crawling back to my parents for help, and I’ve been working at this shitty restaurant forever, going to open auditions and hoping for a break into television. I know it’s wrong to lie. And it’s such a big lie. I didn’t know it would get this far, and now I feel like such a bad person.”

Kate looked miserable. I put a hand on her shoulder.

“It’s alright,” I said. “This contest has been turning me into a bad person, too.” I thought of Piers, and Dylan, and how I didn’t even know the real reason I was still in the competition. Looking at her twisting in guilt made me want to confess my own sins.

But I wasn’t as good of a person as she was.

Chapter Twenty-Four

We spent half the day at the urgent care. The doctor wanted to give Arlen some more intense antibiotics to fight off whatever infection she had. Emma looked worried about dosing her baby with so much medicine.

“And how much will it cost?” she asked. “Are we going to be able to pay for all this?”

“I’ll figure something out,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

Inside, of course, I was worrying like crazy. I hoped that the article I was writing about
The Billionaire Dating Game
would impress Clarence so much he would give me a raise, but I wasn’t counting on it. I had my eyes on the second prize—if I could just make it to the final round of the competition and get Dylan to pick me, I’d be walking away with a hundred grand. Heck, even if I could win another one of the contests, there might be some money in it.

I spent the rest of the afternoon shopping for dresses. At night, I made dinner for everyone and collapsed into the couch, typing furiously. I wanted to add Kate’s story about her secret son to the article, but I obviously wasn’t going to be able to send that part in until after the competition was over.

In the world of TV, where everyone is faking it
, I wrote,
even falling in love can be dangerous.

Clarence called me from the office that night for an update.

“I’m kicking ass and taking names,” I said. “I’ll have the first article written up for you soon.”

“Make it tomorrow,” Clarence said. “I need to run it by the owners before it goes to print.”

“The owners?” I frowned. I’d thought Clarence was always the final say on magazine articles.

“Our parent company also owns the TV network that’s airing this show. You didn’t know that? Are you doing any research on this at all, Lisa?”

“Of course I am!” I said. “I just didn’t realize—”

“Is that Lisa?” I heard Jessica’s voice on the line. “Hey, Lisa! I saw the first episode. Congratulations on your win!”

“Thanks,” I said. It seemed like it had been a hundred years since the cooking contest.

“So you’re still on the show?” Clarence asked gruffly.

“Yes,” I said. Hope blossomed in my chest as I remembered something. “Don’t tell anyone, though, we’re not supposed to let anyone know that sort of thing.”

“Yeah, sure. Lips are sealed,” Clarence said brusquely.

My voice turned wheedling.

“You mentioned before that I could maybe get a bonus if I stayed on long enough to write two articles. So, do you think—”

“Calm your tits,” Clarence said. “Lemme see the first article before you go spending your bonus on new lipstick.”

I took a deep breath and tried not to scream into the phone.

“I’ll send it to you tomorrow,” I said. If he liked it, I would have enough money to pay for all of Arlen’s damn medicine.

“Lisa?”

“Yeah?”

“
Make it good
.”

Back at the penthouse the next day, I harangued Kate into doing my makeup and hair. In my new summery dress, I looked like a real girly girl—and for the first time, I thought that I had a decent chance of winning the competition. There were only five contestants left after Tanya had been kicked out of the fashion show: Heidi, Julie, Mia, Kate… and me. If I could scrape by in the next few competitions, I would be on my way to never having to worry about money again.

“It’s date day!” Piers announced, with the five of us sitting on the white leather couch in the middle of the living room. I beamed as the camera crew circled around. “Today, you will each have a chance to spend one hour alone with Dylan Chase on a one-on-one date. This will give you a chance to get to know each other better.”

He glanced over at me at that last sentence. I saw his blue-green eyes darken, and then his fake persona floated back over his face.

“After the date, you’ll have the rest of the day free to go out shopping, sightseeing, whatever you want. Be back here at the penthouse tonight, because tomorrow morning we’ll be announcing the winner of the one-on-one dates!”

“Where are we going on a date?” Heidi piped up.

“That’s all up to you. You will decide where to go and what to do on your date with Dylan,” Piers said. “So plan something romantic, something fun…and may the best girl win!”

Kate was first up, so she didn’t have a lot of time to prepare.

“It’s fine,” I said, trying to bolster her confidence. “You’ll get to make the first impression.”

“What about roller skating?” she asked. “Do you think he’ll like roller skating?”

“I think he’ll
love
roller skating,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said. “And thanks for… you know.” Her eyes darted over to where the camera crew was still taping.

“Sure thing!” I said, trying not to seem suspicious. “Have a great time!”

Piers escorted Kate out of the apartment. Heidi was next, then Julie. By the time they called Mia out of the penthouse, I realized that I had to come up with a date idea that nobody else had done. I racked my brain to figure out an idea that Dylan might like.

Laser tag would be fun, but it wasn’t exactly romantic. We could do a sit-down dinner, but Mia might already have taken him out to eat. And it was getting close to dark, so all of my ideas that involved outside activities weren’t really going to work. And I needed something I could write about for
Moi,
something that Clarence would like enough to pay me to write another one. I was torn.

When Piers came in, he was wearing his stupid TV persona like a mask that was glued onto his skin. It irritated me more than ever when he came to talk to me with the same glib voice he’d used with all the other contestants. He wasn’t just Piers Letocci to me, dammit!

But that was just it, wasn’t it? He was Piers Letocci. He could have any woman he wanted, whenever he wanted. And he’d had me, whenever he’d wanted. I’d let him run his hands over my body the same way he’d let his fingers slide over the piano the first time I’d met him. He’d done what he wanted with me, and now he had dumped me. It made me shiver with rage to think that he might have moved on to another contestant. The camera crew hovered behind his shoulder.

“Are you ready for your date with a billionaire?”

“Am I ever!”

I shot him an uber-fake smile.

“I’m sure you are,” he said, reaching out to touch my arm playfully. I jerked it away. He’d done that exact same move with Mia earlier today, before her date. Well, he could stick it to Miss Firenze if he wanted to. I wasn’t going to let him charm my pants off again.

What did they say?
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Fool me four times, and you win the prize for biggest dickhead in the universe.

“Where’s Dylan?” I asked sweetly.

“He’s downstairs. Do you already know where you’re going to take him for your date?”

“Nope!”

Piers raised his eyebrows.

“Really?”

“I have a few ideas in mind, but I think I’ll play it by ear,” I said. In reality, I had a few terrible ideas and I wasn’t sure which one to choose. “After all, who doesn’t like a girl who can be spontaneous and romantic?”

I shot a sharp look at Piers.
His face hardened, but only for a second.

“That sounds… great,” he said.

“Great.”

“
Great
.”

We rode down in the elevator in silence, the camera crew behind us. When we finally reached the ground floor, Piers let them step out first.

“I have to talk to you,” he whispered to me, grabbing my arm.

I jammed my foot against the elevator door to keep it open. There was no way in hell I was going to let Piers trap me in an elevator with him again. Just the thought of what he’d done to me before made me shiver with an emotion I didn’t want to let in.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” I hissed. “I want to go on a date with a billionaire.”

“Lisa, listen to me for one bloody second, will you? Please. I just want to apologize.”

“Apology not accepted.”

“If you’ll just listen—”

“Sorry!” I said brightly, loud enough for the camera crew to hear. “I don’t want to be late for my date!”