The Billionaire's Hired Bride (BWWM Billionaire Romance Book 1) (4 page)

Chapter5

As Minnie had pretty much expected, she hadn’t been the only one to overhear that conversation between James and Liz. The rumor reached her first through Avery, predictably, over text –

[Heard he’s falling for you. What’s your secret?]

Luckily, Minnie was out between classes at the time, and didn’t have to hide the sour frown she made at her phone. It was
probably
teasing, but…

[haven’t heard anything like that]

Avery didn’t answer her again for nearly half an hour, but she knew he would. He couldn’t resist rumors, which was probably how he’d found out about James looking for a paid girlfriend in the first place.

On the other hand, he knew rumors well enough that he could probably sort out at least some of the facts, and the next message proved that Minnie’s faith in that ability was well-placed.

[Guess he turned down sex at some party because he’s trying to be faithful. You haven’t gotten involved with him, right?]

It didn’t take any kind of guesswork to know exactly what kind of involved Avery was talking about. Minnie’s response was a single short [no].

[Didn’t think so.]

They left it at that, with Minnie wondering still if there had been anything genuine to James’ words, or if it was all an act.

*

If James himself had heard the rumors, nothing of it came through in their interactions. He treated her just as he had when she first arrived, which made it easier to pretend that nothing had changed. As far as he knew, nothing had.

Minnie tried to not let herself get worked up over it; luckily, after spring break, she didn’t have much free time in which to do so. Finals were approaching, and her workload went up steadily as April and May passed by. A week before June, she officially went into “no dates, no fun” mode, spending most of her days either at class or slaving away over animation projects, and thinking of James only in the sense that she was glad that someone else would do the dishes.

On the day of her last exam, Minnie came home and thoroughly intended to collapse into bed, but was hindered by the bouquet of flowers thrown in the middle of it. There was no doubt of the source, even before she looked at the note attached to it.

Congrats on your exams. Want to go to the beach tomorrow?

Too tired for even the most basic of social functions, Minnie just texted him her reply, after she set the flowers up in the vase that had been left on her dresser.

[sleep tomorrow. beach day after.]

And that was that.

Chapter6

Even though they arrived early in the day, the beach was already fairly crowded, mostly with college students who, like Minnie, were seizing the chance to enjoy their first round of freedom after finals. The central sandy portion of the beach – where the tide had gone out, leaving a formerly level patch of packed sand – was covered in towels and the occasional chair or tall sun umbrella. Further down, closer to the waves, a group of children built sand castles while their parents watched.

Luckily, neither Minnie nor James had any intention of joining the crowd. James pulled up near the far end of the beach, where the sand was at least as much gravel as anything else, and rocky cliffs hung shadows over the surf. Rather than sandals, they had boots for a better grip on the slippery rocks.

Minnie had spent most of the day before in post-finals recovery mode, but as she’d said to James at dinner that night, if they were going to go to the beach, she didn’t want to just lay there on the sand. Her mind hadn’t really relaxed yet, and now that she wasn’t in danger of passing out, she felt again the need to do something, anything.

So instead of a lazy day chasing waves, they were going to go looking at the tide pools instead, climbing over rocks and expending some of Minnie’s energy so that she didn’t stay up all night refreshing her online grade tracker until exam results were posted. Marine biology wasn’t super interesting to her, but she’d taken one class way back in high school, and James had a couple of guide books that they’d loaded up into a waterproof pack in case they needed the reference. Minnie was carrying those, while James had their lunch strapped to his back, and so they set off down along the rocks into the spray.

At first, all they found were barnacles and mussels, but going out a little farther, to where the waves crashed around the base of the rocks, gave them at least something more interesting, snails and limpets clinging to the rocks and a few clumps of seaweed. Further still, and Minnie called James over excitedly to a crack between the rocks, where green shapes were clustered up, just barely beneath the water level, which still had a little further to drop before the lowest point of the tide.

“Look! These are anemones, aren’t they?” she said, pointing down into the crevice, careful not to actually put her hand down there – she didn’t know how nasty the sting of these might be, if they were what she thought they were.

James, leaning over from a rock behind her, nodded. “They must have closed off to retain water during low tide. I didn’t know that they could be found this close to the water level.”

“It is an unusually low tide,” Minnie pointed out, thinking of the tide chart she’d seen online earlier that morning. “The moon’s almost full, right?”

James nodded. “And that means it’ll come in farther when it does, so if we want to get to our lunch spot before then, we should keep moving.”

Minnie nodded, and slid closer to the cliffs on the rock to let him go past, leading the way towards whatever spot he was talking about. James claimed it was a flat rock and fairly private, high enough to be above most of the tides but not hard to climb to, as long as you were careful. Once they got there, they’d be trapped by the tides throughout most of the afternoon, but Minnie’s impression of the area so far was that, after the climb, she’d be glad for the break.

They worked their way slowly around the cliffs, only stopping once more to examine a crab skittering back into its hole on their way. By that time they were over the water properly, and it was deep enough, with strange currents between the rocks, that being pulled out to sea was a real danger. Minnie knew how to make her way back in theory, if that happened.  She wasn’t particularly eager to try it out, and so she was extra careful as James finally started leading them up.

The rock he stopped on was plenty large enough for the two of them, mostly flat with a slow slope down towards the water. There were a couple cracks across the worn, smooth stone that were full of tiny, clustered barnacles, but other than that there was little to distinguish it from the rest of the cliff. It was close enough to the edge of the cliff that now, with the sun only an hour or so from its peak, most of it was bathed in sunshine. Minnie was surprised to feel how warm the stone was when she put her hands on it to climb up after James, who scooted near to the far edge to give her room up after him. He stayed there even after she was up, leaning against the wall of stone that bordered the back and most of that side of the platform.

“So,” he started, grinning, “What do you think of the view?”

Minnie, still busy catching her breath after the climb, hadn’t even looked yet. When she looked up, out over the ocean, it wound up being that even trying to catch her breath was pointless, as it all escaped her again immediately in a gasp at the sight.

The cliffs stretched far enough out that the waves at the base were tall and white with foam. Beyond that, she could see the line were the blue-green of the water darkened, the seafloor underneath dipping down a hundred, two hundred feet beneath the surface. What really amazed her, though, was what she
couldn’t
see – there was no shore and no evidence at all of people beyond the cliffs, just a few gulls flapping over the water. From this spot, with the sound of the waves drowning out the sound of the people on the beach below, it was possible to pretend that no other human had seen the sight before.

She glanced back at James, who was still grinning, before leaning back against the rock. “It’s amazing,” she said quietly.

“Worth the climb?”

“Yeah. Definitely.”

James unpacked lunch while Minnie unrolled a towel, took off the shirt over her bikini top, and settled in to get a little bit of a tan on her caramel skin, dark sunglasses over her closed eyes and the warmth of the sun on her exposed skin. Now that they were actually up here for a few hours together, alone without distractions, she felt that things were getting awkward again, although it might have only been in her imagination. She had the feeling that this spot had been used for both romantic and sexual getaways in the past, and that was probably how James had learned of it.

That train of thought, luckily, was interrupted by James nudging her side with a bottle. “You put sunscreen on before you started tanning, right?”

“Crap!” Minnie sat up in a panic and took the bottle from him, rubbing her arms and legs down with the lotion. James picked up the bottle after she set it down, turning it over in his hands.

“Here, let me do your back.”

Minnie turned her spine towards him without objection, although she did jump a little at the chill of his lotion-covered fingers. Relaxing into the touch, she found herself leaning back against him before she knew it. That jumped her heart into her throat. Forcing herself to move at a normal pace, she leaned away from him again and rolled over, so she was on her stomach on the towel with her head pillowed on one arm.

“Thanks. Where’d you put those sandwiches?” she asked, grabbing a water bottle and cracking it open to take a drink. They were tucked into the shade at the edge of the rock, but the water still wasn’t exactly cold. Still, it was cool enough that she wound up drinking half the bottle by the time James slid one of the sandwiches over to her.

After eating, Minnie dozed off for a while. She mostly remembered waking up, the sun now closer to the horizon than to its peak, and James with a clipboard and some paperwork across his knee, chewing on his lip and tapping his pen on the edge of the paper.

Minnie stretched and slowly sat up, groaning a little at the stiffness of her muscles. Sleeping on hard cliff rocks was not something she would try to repeat, that was for sure.

“I thought today was supposed to be a relaxation day,” she said to James as she settled back into a sitting position, working her fingers into the sore muscles of her legs.

“For you,” he said with a chuckle, “but I thought you might fall asleep, so I figured I might as well bring something along, just in case. How was your nap?”

“Ugh,” Minnie grumbled. “Next time you decide to take me somewhere special to sleep, just drive me to the mattress store.”

He laughed at that, opening the clipboard to slide the paperwork in. “The tide’s down enough that we can probably start heading back, if you want.”

Minnie considered it. “Maybe a snack, first.”

So they finished off the last of the sandwiches and stuffed the trash into Minnie’s bag, and then Minnie, who was closest to the path down, turned to start lowering herself. Going down was slower than going up; she stopped constantly to check her footholds.

Even so, that didn’t entirely save her from disaster. Near the bottom of the climb, where James was more parallel to her than above her and the stones were still slick with the descending tide, her foot caught on a slick piece of kelp instead of the ledge.

She stumbled, that foot sliding dangerously low down the rock while the other strained to not slide off its foothold in turn. Thankfully, one of her hands was also holding onto the ledge of rock above, and James grabbed the other one as she flailed it, anchoring her somewhat more steadily until she could pull herself up and get started again.

“Thanks,” she said breathlessly, before starting off again towards the shore, being much more careful of seaweed washed up by the waves since the last time they had passed.

When they made their way free of the cliffs, the sun was just barely sunk low enough to the horizon that the sky was changing colors, and a lot of the people further down the beach had gone home for the day. As soon as they were free of the waves and the larger rocks, Minnie flopped down on the gravel, not caring about the handful of stones that would inevitably get caught in her shorts. They were easier to get out than sand, after all.

She heard James’ footsteps after her, noisy even of the sound of the waves, and sat up to look at him. “Come here for a minute,” she said, and he bent down next to her, looking confused.

It wasn’t anything she would have planned, but she had to admit that she was testing him, as she reached up to put a hand around the back of his neck and draw him closer. The kiss she gave him was chaste, lips-on-lips and no farther, and she didn’t hold him there for very long before backing off and leaning back into the gravel.

“Thanks again,” Minnie said to him, “For the rescue and everything else today.”

She thought she could see him blushing, just a little, but with the sun behind him, it was hard to really tell. She could hear from his voice that he was smiling, though.

“My pleasure.”