The Billionaire's Hired Bride (BWWM Billionaire Romance Book 1) (3 page)

It took a surprising amount of time to get her clothes sorted out. She was still hanging coats in her closet when there was a knock on the door. “Come in,” she called.

She wasn’t especially surprised that it was James who nudged the door open; except at the party, she had yet to see anyone else around the manor, although James had said that there was a cleaning company who came by every Tuesday. It made the place feel incredibly empty, although part of that might have been that her first impression of it was at a fairly full party. With the vast majority of those people gone, any size of house would feel unoccupied.

James stepped over the bag she still had out on the floor (full mostly of thick winter socks and the one amusingly-horrific Christmas sweater one of her mother’s friends had given her, the one she was actually fond of) and came over to where she was in the closet. “So are you going to come see the rest of the house?” he asked.

Minnie put the hanger she was holding into the rack before answering. “Why, are you offering a tour?”

“Well,” he answered, “I’d hate for you to go hungry because you couldn’t find the kitchen.”

He was getting good at making her laugh. Minnie let him lead her out of the room and down to the kitchen first, and there she took stock of what was in the fridge. It was a good mix of both fancy things (there were at least three cheeses she’d never even heard of) and more normal, almost junk food items. A container or two of leftover takeout, a bunch of tater tots in the freezer… It was so refreshing, after years of her mother’s health food, that Minnie actually sighed with relief.

James, catching sight of it from over the fridge door, gave her a funny look. “What, were you expecting me to eat caviar for every meal?”

“No, it’s just…” Minnie debated what to tell him, and decided,
to hell with it. I signed the contract yesterday, he’s not going to back out now, right?
“My mom is one of those health diet nuts. It’s just so nice to see
real
food, instead of whatever the Diet Book Club has decided is okay to eat this year.” 

Rather than being put off by mention of her mom (and really, after Avery’s comment that first day they met, she was trying hard not to complain, to not even think about it), James looked sympathetic. “Okay, yeah, I can see why you’d relish junk food. There’s chips in this cupboard.” He reached over the counter to rap his knuckles slightly on the cupboard door in question.

Minnie could hardly contain her enthusiasm. “What kind?”

“There’s like four, they’re left over from the party.”

She didn’t wait for an invitation. She didn’t even grab a bowl, just slid past him and reached up to the cupboard, grabbing a half-full sack of barbeque chips that was barely within her shorter reach.

“These are mine now,” she said, wrapping her arms around the bag as though it were a baby or wiggly small animal she had to keep a hold of. The bag crinkled loudly as she spoke. “I’m not sharing.”

James just shook his head and chuckled a bit, as she carried the sack of chips around for the rest of the tour, once in a while reaching in to munch on a small handful.

So far, life seemed pretty good.

*

Two months later, it still seemed pretty good.

For the most part, James left her the space to do her own thing, which was a luxury Minnie hadn’t even expected, and one she was coming to appreciate more than anything else. She was far too used to her mother constantly interrupting, especially when she was doing her school work, and so she was realizing that she had always been on edge about it, expecting every set of footsteps down the hall to come in and bother her.

That wasn’t the case, for the most part, and she was finally starting to relax. If James needed her for something, he usually sent a text message rather than coming in and bothering her; Minnie realized by the end of the second week that it was because it was nearly impossible to know whether she was in the house or not, when it was so large, and James spent a lot of the time that he wasn’t in meetings in the garage. (He had the expensive hobby of rebuilding old cars, giving them a new paint job, and selling them off, usually at a loss; he told her the only reason he sold them at all was because he needed the space in his garage for the next project.)

Her school work was much easier without all the interruptions; her grades were fairly good, but she was surprised to see them go up across the board by at least a point or two, even though she was actually spending less time on assignments because her concentration wasn’t broken nearly as frequently.

Of course, it wasn’t all good – there were several times when she woke up late for class because she’d stayed up too long working on a project or watching Netflix the night before, and so for the first time since her early high school mornings, Minnie had to get acquainted with the alarm clock function on her phone.

She’d met James’ mother, who came over about once a month to have a day with her son, and was already beginning to grow fond of the woman, something that she thought was mutual. At the very least, Florence Marie – Flor, she insisted Minnie call her the first time they met – seemed glad her son was settling down a bit, although she told Minnie to not let him get too comfortable. “He’s always had everything,” she said as she was preparing to leave. “Don’t give it to him easy.”

Then she’d left to get ready to go white-water rafting with some of her friends for the weekend. Minnie wasn’t quite sure what kind of person Flor was, but “intense” was definitely the word that sprang to mind first. She had yet to meet James’ father, since he was busy with work, but James told her not to worry about it, that his dad would work until the day he died, and insist on taking some paperwork with him into the grave.

And so two months passed about like that, with school and a new home and sometimes dates, or James bringing over a business contact for dinner. Those were the only times they really sat down at the big dining room table and did anything fancy, which was a relief; otherwise, the times they ate together tended to be things like nachos on the couch during a movie, or hot dogs at the park.

Business wasn’t booming yet, but there was no point trying to rush it, James said. Minnie wasn’t as worried about it as he seemed to think she was – whether his business succeeded or not, after all, she was still here for three years – it was more the feeling of the visitors’ eyes on her that made her uncomfortable. The dinners weren’t intolerable or something to dread, but she much preferred weekends when they didn’t happen to the ones where they did.

All in all, so far, so good. And so when spring break rolled around, and James brought up the idea of going to a party together (as she really should have known he would), Minnie didn’t really have any reason to object. The date was set, and she spent two hours digging through the clothes she hadn’t looked at since arriving, for a swimsuit.

After all, there wasn’t much point to a pool party if you didn’t go swimming, was there?

Chapter4

The day of the pool party was bright and sunny enough to be too bright, to make Minnie want to crawl into a good hiding place back in the manor instead of being social.  She put  on her best face anyway, though, as James held the door open for her to get into one of his fancy old cars, a Ford something or other, that she could remember the details of about as well as he could remember the different keyboard shortcuts to her animation programs.

(It was good to have different interests, she’d always heard, and they certainly qualified for that.)

The venue was another mansion owned by one of James’ rich kid friends, a woman called Liz whom he had known for a long time and, Minnie thought to herself privately, probably banged a few times. When they arrived, her suspicions were somewhat confirmed; Liz came out to greet them personally and gave James a kiss on the cheek before giving Minnie one of those looks that she knew meant she was in the other woman’s way.

And fuck you too
, Minnie thought hard at the woman’s back as she walked off to greet someone else. James must have caught her expression, because he leaned over her with a concerned look. “Something the matter?”

Minnie shook her head. “No, I just don’t think I like her very much.”
And it’s mutual
.

James shrugged, in the way he sometimes did after a business dinner didn’t go particularly well, a “can’t win ‘em all” gesture. “Well, there’s still the rest of the party.”

The rest of the party was still a bunch of strangers, but none of them gave her the same kind of evil eyes that Liz did. Minnie followed James around and got introduced to people with names ranging from the normal (Jeremy and Nate, twins who dyed their hair different colors to keep people from confusing them, or so she figured) to the ridiculous (
Crispy
, a girl who probably wasn’t very far over eighteen, who was rolling a joint in a corner when James and Minnie passed her again later).

Most of the girls were the kind with model builds and dressed in very revealing swimsuits; Minnie’s own was a bikini, but she felt positively conservative in comparison.

For all that it was a pool party, though, there were only two or three people in the pool at any given time. Most of them seemed to prefer snacks, dancing, or just hanging out on the lounge chairs around the edges. Minnie shook her head and then deposited her towel and phone into James’ arms. “Here, keep an eye on these for me, would you?”

He took the folded towel and tucked her phone into his pocket. “We have a pool, too, you know.”

“It’s different when it’s at a party,” she insisted, before sitting down on the edge and sliding in with a small splash. The water was cool but not incredibly cold, so she kicked her way towards the deeper section – away from the other occupants – and swam a lap or two. By the time she looked up again, James had disappeared, taking her towel with him.

*

That hour she spent at the pool was the most fun she’d had at a social event in the last couple of years. When more people got into the pool, they wound up playing a round of pool volleyball with a cheap beach ball someone had brought along. Minnie wound up on a team with Nate and two other girls, and by the end of it, she didn’t really know who had won, but it was enough that it left her breathing a bit hard when she ducked out of the pool and headed over to the refreshments table.

There was still no sign of James and her towel, so she let herself drip dry while she ate, before heading into the glass-walled sunroom of the house. There were three or four people playing DDR on the TV there, but still no sign of James. Much as she couldn’t imagine DDR being his kind of game, something about the way he was missing gnawed at her.

So, once she was confident that she wouldn’t leave a trail of pool water across the hardwood floors of the house, she slipped from the sun room into the hallway proper and went looking.

It took surprisingly little time to find James; Minnie heard his voice before she saw him, which she was grateful for as soon as her brain put together the words –

“Liz, it’s great of you to offer, but I’m not interested. I told you, I’m trying to clean up my act.”

“I thought you’re trying to clean up your act was an act?” answered Liz’s voice, a few steps closer. Minnie glanced around, then slid silently into a nearby bathroom, leaving the door just open enough that she could see if the pair went by her.

“That was the plan, but plans change. She’s got something about her…” James trailed off, which made Liz snort, an awful derisive noise that didn’t go at all with her appearance.

“Don’t tell me you’re falling for her, James. That’s so unlike you.”
 

James didn’t answer, so Liz kept going. “She’s not going to care, anyway. She’s just there for the money. You said it yourself, she’s not interested in sex.”

They were definitely talking about her, which made Minnie all the more glad that she was hidden away. In truth, she felt like she would rather have not come across this conversation at all, but now that she was listening, it was impossible to pull away.

“She’s
nervous
about sex.” Footsteps, probably his, lead the way a little further out of her hearing, another door or two further down the hall around the corner. “And it’s not going to help if she knows I’m getting involved with every girl who invites us to a party.”

“She doesn’t have to know – “ Liz began, but stopped at the sound of more footsteps. Those
had
to be James walking away from her. “She might not ever be interested! You can’t just decide she’s the one after two months!”

“I haven’t decided anything,” James responded, his voice growing too faint to hear down the hallway. “But I don’t lose anything by trying. I do have
hands
, Liz, I know how to use them.”

Blushing a bit, Minnie had to bite on the back of her wrist to stifle a giggle. Liz didn’t answer, and after a moment, her footsteps turned the other way, the clack of her heels on the floor coming right past Minnie’s hiding place. It wasn’t until that sound, too, was gone that Minnie risked slipping out, and quickly made her way back to the party.

*

It didn’t seem as lively, somehow, after she made her way back. What she’d heard was too heavy on her mind, and she didn’t even know how to think about it. From the glares Liz shot her every now and then, Minnie felt she could be sure that her side of the conversation, at least, was authentic. But she couldn’t help being suspicious that James’ words had been staged, planned ahead for listening ears like her own, for the endless  rumors and gossip that came out of these sorts of parties.

Liz was right about that one thing; two months was far too quick to decide that you loved someone, as far as Minnie was concerned. And true, James hadn’t said that, but it was all too easy to make the leap in her mind. By the time he came back to the party, Minnie was having to forcefully remind herself of that, at the same time she was trying to remind herself to act normal.

The second of those reminders was easier to follow through on than she expected, though. When James appeared, Minnie took her towel with a laugh, chastising him for being late and telling him that she’d been out of the pool for nearly an hour. The look on his face as he made a small, embarrassed apology was strangely cute, a word she didn’t think would have gone with James under any other circumstances.

Perhaps because of the awkwardness with Liz that followed both of them around for the rest of the party, they went home early, not long after sundown. Neither of them talked much on the way home, and Minnie had to make efforts to not convince herself that it was because he knew what she’d heard.

It wound up being a quiet popcorn and movie night, instead, which she couldn’t really complain about, even if the Transformers movies seemed to be getting worse with every sequel.