The Billionaire Dating Game: A Romance Novel (7 page)

“Are you finished yet?”

“No!” I said. “This top is confusing.”

“I was under the impression that you were an intelligent woman.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?” I asked, trying again with a different opening. Was I putting this on upside down? Where had the tag gone?

“If putting on a shirt is too hard, I’d be happy to assist.”

“I’m fine!” I wasn’t fine. I had it on backwards. I could see the tag now. It was—

“Holy shit,” I gasped, staring at the price on the blouse.

“Well, aren’t you a deliciously hot mess?”

I turned my head, peeking through the tangled fabric. Piers had put his hands down and was staring at my chest openly. I blushed the same color as the soft blouse currently in a bunched up noose around my neck.

“This cost over two hundred dollars!” I said, staring back down at the tag.
One hundred percent cashmere. Dry clean only.
That Mitch Hedberg joke flashed through my mind:
This shirt is dry clean only. Which means… it’s dirty.

“And?”

“And?” I looked back over at Piers. “Are you kidding me? I can’t pay you back for this!”

“Then don’t. But at least get it on properly.” He reached over.

Before the protest could reach my lips, his fingers had slipped around my neck. All of my words dried up on my tongue. His hands were hot against the skin of my neck as he slid the shirt around to face the correct way. His touch was so possessive, so familiar. Like he touched me like this all the time. A shiver went through my whole body.

“Now the arms,” he said, smiling down at me. He could tell what he was doing to me.
Dammit
.

I struggled to get control of my raging libido. Awkwardly, I slid my hands through the proper places. I hadn’t felt this betrayed by my body since puberty, but when his hand touched my wrist to guide me through the armhole, my whole core twisted with desire.

When the shirt was over my head, he adjusted it at the waist. My heart leapt into my throat as his hand grazed my hip.

That’s where he had touched me before. When he kissed me.

The thought sent another barrage of electricity through my nerves. I closed my eyes and willed it to pass. I was supposed to be doing an interview. That was all this was.

Then I felt Piers put one hand on the back of my neck. It was the same as before. A fierce need surged up inside of me. Despite myself, I tilted my head back and let my lips part. At any moment, his mouth would come crashing down on mine, seizing me again in another passionate kiss. At any moment…

I opened my eyes. Piers was grinning at me from inches away. His hand yanked sharply at my neck, and then he dangled something in front of my face.

The shirt tag.

I didn’t know if spontaneous combustion was real, but if it was, I surely would have combusted right then and there. My blood pulsed in my temples as my skin turned bright red. He wasn’t going to kiss me. Of course not. I was an idiot. He turned away from me, and I could see him trying not to laugh.

“So,” he said, “ready to go to dinner?”

Chapter Seven

Tucked up on the top floor of a luxury highrise, the
nice little Italian place
was, bar none, the swankiest restaurant I’d ever been to. We walked in through a garden patio, where small waterfalls trickled over pebbled walls and women in jeweled cocktail dresses laughed softly over glasses of white wine. Marble bas-relief sculptures lined the corridor to the dining area.

Shirt and shoes required? I should have listened to Clarence and changed my outfit. As we walked to the hostess stand, I noticed a few heads turning to look at me. Eyes flashed up and down my body, over my overpriced blouse and too-tight skirt. I tensed under the scrutiny and focused my attention on the restaurant decor.

Wine bottles lined the shelves near the ceiling, and the lathe and plaster arches were lit with thick wax candles in iron sconces. Oil paintings hung against the plaster, showing bucolic scenes in Tuscan pastures. If it hadn’t been for all the people, I could have imagined myself back in the Italian Renaissance. My eyes fell onto the gold silk dress of a woman seated nearby. As soon as my eyes caught her gaze, she turned away and whispered something to the man she was sitting with.

“Something wrong?” Piers asked. His hand came around and touched my back. Despite my previous embarrassment, my body responded instantly, twisting inside.

“All of these women are wearing dresses,” I hissed. “And they’re all looking at me.”

Piers smiled wryly.

“They’re looking at
us
,” he said.

A fierce emotion pierced my chest.
Us.
Just that one word was enough to wrench my heart from where it was attached. Just his hand on the small of my back was enough to make my pulse jump into nervous jitters.

“Part and parcel of the job. Don’t worry. Nobody will be crass enough to approach us. This place has a reputation for discretion.”

I gulped. That wasn’t exactly what I was worried about. As the hostess led us back through the restaurant, though, I breathed easier. We sat in the far back of the restaurant, in a small secluded booth. The back wall of the booth was lined with dusty wine bottles.

“Buonasera, signor Letocci. Il solito??” our waiter asked. He had appeared out of nowhere, and the Italian rolled off of his tongue. The only word I caught was Piers’ last name.

“Sì. Grazie,” Piers said.

The waiter bowed and left.

“What was that? Did you order me a plate of sardines?” I asked, miffed. “How does the waiter know you?”

“Are we starting the interview now?” Piers teased. “So many questions.”

“Do you really speak Italian?”

“I guess you’ll see when the waiter comes back with your plate of sardines.”

“For real, though,” I said. “When did you learn Italian?”

“I’m half English, half Italian,” Piers said. “When you interview someone, do you normally make a point of it not to know anything about them?”

“Hey, this is my interview,” I said archly. “I’ll ask the questions.”

The waiter came back with appetizers at that moment, cutting off Piers’ reply.

It wasn’t a plate of sardines after all. The dish he brought was a wood platter piled high with different meats, cheeses, and an assortment of olives and other pickled dishes. The waiter produced a bottle of red wine, and chatted in Italian with Piers for a few moments before leaving the wine on the table. Piers picked up the bottle and poured a glass for me, twisting the bottle at the last second to avoid a spill.

“Thank you,” I said, tasting the wine. “This is delicious.”

It was more than delicious. I wasn’t exactly a wine connoisseur, but this one pricked my taste buds in all the right places. It was smooth, dark like blackberries, but the way it lingered on my tongue after I swallowed made me think of butter. Like a blackberry pie. I closed my eyes as I swallowed, letting the flavors play through my mouth, and when I opened them Piers was looking at me. I pressed my lips together and stared down at the wine glass as the heat moved down my throat.

“I’m glad you like it,” he said. “It’s one of my favorite vintages.”

“Is that so?”

He grinned. I could tell he was pleased to be showing off. And it made me feel strangely proud to have someone who wanted to show off to me. It had been a while since a guy had paid so much attention to what I liked.

For the next few minutes, we distracted ourselves with sampling all of the different dishes on the platter. Some of the meats were spicy, and some were subtly sweet, and I let Piers help me pair the cheeses to best advantage. One thinly sliced meat seemed to melt on my tongue. I was happily gorging myself on a bowl of olives when I noticed that Piers was staring at my lips. I licked them clean and dabbed at my mouth with a napkin, a faint blush rising to my cheeks. There was a reason I was here, after all.

“Sorry I didn’t know you were half Italian,” I said. “I’m not normally so unprepared for interviews, but my boss kind of sprung it on me at the last minute.”

I wanted to get back into the interview questions, but Piers broke my concentration with a teasing smile.

“Here’s a riddle for you,” he said. “If you’re American when you’re in my bedroom, what are you when you’re in my bathroom?”

“I know that joke,” I said, taking a sip of the wine. “You’re a-peein’.”

Eur-o-pean. Hardy har.

“No, actually.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s not the correct answer to the riddle.”

“Oh? What would I be when I’m in your bathroom?”

“You’d be naked.”

“What?”

“Do you really think that I’d let a beautiful American girl stroll around my apartment with all of her clothes on?”

His eyes started to drift downwards, as though imagining me in such a scenario. I snapped my fingers at him and his eyes jerked back up from my cleavage.

“Listen to me, Senor Medici Copperfield. You and me? Not happening.”

“It’s a shame you failed my riddle—”

“I didn’t fail your riddle—”

“But now that we’re talking about getting you naked—”

“We are
not
talking about that!”

“Really? What were we talking about?”

“I was interviewing you,” I said. “Ahem. So. Interview question two. What made you come to America?”

“The women,” he said, not pausing to think.

I raised an eyebrow at him.

“Have you seen the BBC lately?” he asked. “We can’t even find attractive women to put on TV. America is where it’s at. To put it in your slang. I love American women.”

He leaned over the table, his strong fingers interlocking under his chin. I could have lost myself in those green-blue eyes if I let my gaze linger. So I didn’t.

“I’m glad you like American women,” I said, struggling to remember the other questions on Jessica’s list and giving up. “So tell me more about what you do on TV.”

Piers bit his lip and raised his eyes to the ceiling.

“TV,” he murmured. “What do I do on TV?”

A second passed, and I thought that maybe he shouldn’t have drunk two glasses of wine so quickly. Then he looked back down at me, his eyes hard.

“TV is all the same,” he said. “It’s selling a fantasy to people so that they don’t think about reality too much.”

“A fantasy? But you do—”

“Reality TV? Sure. But it’s not real. There’s nothing real on television. Everything’s scripted. Everything’s fake.”

He bit his lip again in consternation.

“Don’t print that, alright? Here, I’ll give you a better answer.”

“Um, okay.”

His voice changed, went up a register, as he spoke. It was the same glib charm that he’d used throughout all of the auditions. I recognized it as his stage voice.

“What do I do on TV? I make people’s wishes come true. Anyone on my show could become famous or rich in the snap of a finger. I’m like a genie in a lamp. Anything is possible.”

“Genies are mischievous, though,” I pointed out. “Sometimes a wish comes with unintended consequences.”

“That’s not my problem,” he said, shrugging as the persona slipped. “I do what people want me to do.”

“That doesn’t sound like a very fulfilling job for you.” I remembered what he had told me the first night we met. “It sounds… superficial? Unsatisfying?”

Piers stopped mid-sip of his wine.

“Is that an interview question?” he asked.

“I’m just curious,” I said. “Why do you do it if you hate it?”

“I never said I hated it.”

“Do you hate it?”

He smiled then, but the smile never reached his eyes.

“No comment.”

Our meals came, and I avoided asking Piers anything else about his work. I’d gotten the answers to all of the questions I needed already. Instead, we chatted about New York and America in general, a topic on which he had a few strong opinions.

“Healthcare,” he said, waving his fork in the air for emphasis. “The American system is so unnecessarily convoluted. I went to a hospital last month for a surgery—”

“Surgery? For what?”

He waved away my question.

“And do you know how many bills came in the mail? Twenty-six different bills. Half of them were from the hospital. Then another handful from my insurance company, one from the studio’s human resources for a premium increase, bills from every specialist that so much as looked at me as I went through the surgery—”

“But you can afford to pay them,” I said.

“Of course I can! That’s not the point.”

“What’s the point?”

“My lawyer told me that he would go through them. After more than twenty-six phone calls, he had gotten half of the bills dropped and most of the rest reduced. It didn’t really make a difference to me, his billable rate ended up about the same. But
why
? Why go through all that nonsense? And what about people without lawyers? What do they do?”

“They don’t go to the hospital.”

“It’s insane. I’m not saying that the European way is perfect. There is no perfect system right now. But if I’m going to spend a lot of money, I want it going to the doctors and nurses giving care, not to pad the pockets of insurance executives.”

“Why don’t you do a TV show about this?” I asked. “You’re obviously passionate about it—”

“Ha!” Piers slumped back, and all of the energy in his body seemed to drain out in an instant. “There’s not a network in existence that would approve a show like that. Who would watch it? Who would care?”

“I bet a lot of people would watch it if you wore a speedo and smeared peanut butter on yourself.”

Piers gave me a half smile.

“That guy shows up every week at that coffee shop,” he said.

“Do you perform every week?”

At that question, Piers clamped his lips shut. He had opened himself up to me, but now I could see him closing the door as clearly as day.

“I don’t think I’ll go back there,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Honestly?” He looked at me over the rim of his glass of wine. We were on our second bottle, and while he’d drunk more than I had, he didn’t seem to be the least bit tipsy.