Accidentally Married to the Billionaire 2(12)

Her pulse beat in her throat, her whole body flushed and ready. Marj loved being beneath him, loved his warm hands on her skin, loved the needy, powerful feeling where they were joined. She gripped his face in her hands and kissed him until he came. She felt every thrust, every jerk of his cock so fully, the hot rush as he emptied into her. It was that, the strange, alien feel of him shooting out inside her that took her over the edge.

“Wife,” he said, “You’re all mine.”

The narrow intensity of his gaze, the dark caress of his voice seemed to lick her as tremors still rippled through her sensitive skin. He dragged the duvet over her as her skin began to chill. He hauled her body against his, the smooth skin slick with sweat from the exertion. She burrowed into his warmth, hiding her face in his shoulder to keep him from seeing the sheen of tears in her eyes. It was the only way she could conceal the flood of emotion she had experienced just now. The depth of trust and the connection.

Thankfully, he didn’t try to look in her face, didn’t lift her chin to make her meet his gaze. He was perhaps just as comfortable keeping something hidden. So it was that the most personal, most intimate experience of Marj’s life concluded with the embrace of strangers, strangely diffident and separate.

When he rolled over to go to sleep, Marj hurried to the bathroom. She took a long shower, scrubbing every inch of her body with the floral body wash the housekeeper had supplied. When she was scoured clean and wrapped in a thick robe, she returned to bed, scrabbled some covers away from Brandon and wished heartily that he would sleep in another room. Being close to him while he was asleep and totally vulnerable was another layer of intimacy she could have done without. After the shatteringly good sex, she could have used some space.

She refused to roll over and gaze at him. The mere thought made her roll her eyes reflexively. Despite her weakness for Titanic, she wasn’t one of those girls who thought everything was romantic. This was convenient is what it was—a short-term marriage to a rich guy to score several million dollars and have great sex in the meantime. It would make waiting for the money to come through a lot less boring. And that was what she already thought—that without the hot sex, being married to a billionaire was boring. He had to work all the time, which is where the money came from, but it meant a great deal of sitting around and waiting. For a woman who’d spent her adult life hustling to make ends meet, the lifestyle was hardly a natural fit.

So maybe she wasn’t cut out for this, for being a rich man’s wife. He was wealthy and powerful and more than reasonably desirable. She should spend her time working out and doing juice fasts and ordering ruinously expensive handbags online. It sounded really, really dull to Marj. Except for the sex part, obviously. Dull was not a word she could use to describe sex with Brandon Cates, who was more than adequate in that department.

She’d get used to sleeping beside him. She wouldn’t pine and yearn for him. She’d keep herself busy, show up dressed in designer labels when they had an event to attend, and in a few months, she’d collect her jackpot and move on. It was the only practical method of getting through a situation that seemed to come with loads of thorny complications. Move forward, ignoring anything that made her uncomfortable like those damn feelings she kept having and do extra sit-ups in the morning. With that resolution in mind, Marj went to sleep just as she’d planned.





Chapter 4




At six in the morning when her alarm went off and she cussed and smacked at her phone until it stopped its infernal beeping. It seemed like a profoundly stupid idea to have insisted upon working when she could easily have slept another two hours and then gone to get a real spray tan, the kind Jennifer Lopez had, not the kind she had gotten at a discount. Marj dressed, muttering to herself about her own stubbornness, the unreasonable hour at which office work began, and a litany of curses upon whoever created the ringtone that her alarm used.

Brandon was still in bed, still looking handsome and muscled in the way that turned her knees to water and her resolve to mush. She had to talk herself out of getting right back in bed with him and twisting the sheets for a while. It wasn’t like she’d get fired for being late if she was shagging the boss, she thought wickedly. Then, of course, she’d grabbed her purse and left. She did treat herself to a latte on the way to work, though. She figured she could afford the large nonfat with skim foam now, just as a treat.

It turned out to be nothing you could call a productive day. Unless productivity was measured by the number of virtual strangers who dropped by to ‘see the ring’ or demand to know the whole story as to how the sudden matrimonial escapades went down. She had taken the precaution of texting Angelica a few messages on the plane home so her work bestie would know that it was a whirlwind romance like nothing she’d ever imagined. That way, she’d artfully placed a fairy tale in the gossip machine to ease her way when explanations were demanded.