Billionaire Bad Boys of Romance 1(12)

Outside, the cold slap of damp wind smacked me full in the face. It was February, and I'd been over a year on the job with Felicia as my boss. Pulling a cigarette from my coat pocket, I stuck it in my mouth, lit it, and took a long drag, willing the nicotine to cut through the hangover fog. This had to be my eight thousandth cigarette since starting this job as Felicia's personal assistant, and I was beginning to feel it. The cold rattled my bones and the smoke burned my lungs.#p#分页标题#e#

Maybe Felicia was right. Maybe I was stressed out. Maybe I should just try to enjoy my afternoon posing for a rich crazy guy, smiling and laughing and pretending I wasn't a surly failed artist spending her time organizing the lives of the rich and famous.

And maybe I should scoop my eyes out with a melon baller. I sucked my cigarette down as fast as I could and threw it on the ground before stomping off toward the subway station to go home and get ready. If I was going to keep up a facade, I might as well put some effort into it.





Chapter Three

At precisely four o'clock I arrived at Malcolm Ward's mansion as ready as I would ever be: primped, powdered, and wishing I were high. The house sat on a corner uptown where all the better people lived. It was a tall, red brick building with a polygonal tower and a peaked roof. The majority of the house stretched out behind the narrow facade, dotted with stained glass windows and iron railings and jutting gables, a classic example of the American Queen Anne style. It made me feel grubby and cheap, even though I'd put on a pair of expensive designer jeans and a thick sweater and taken an extra long bath at Felicia's behest.

Intellectually I knew my clothes were top-of-the-line, and Felicia and I had both had our hair done by one of the finer hairdressers in the city, but I'd been a starving artist for years, using cheap shampoo and getting all my clothes at real thrift stores, the ones that smell like mothballs, not the trendy ones in the cutesy artsy areas of Manhattan, and that sort of life is hard to shake off. I'd never, ever felt weird and out of place when I was poor. I wore my poverty like a badge of honor, flaunting it in front of the people in suits with “real” jobs who infested the city like roaches. There had been kind of an honor in it, even though most of the time it sucked. Now that I was expected to wear nice clothes and be polite, I felt poor and grubby without even having the nominal honor of actually being poor and grubby. Standing in front of Malcolm Ward's magnificent house, I felt it even more acutely than ever.

It put me in a foul mood.

I rang the doorbell. Once. Twice. Then I started compulsively pushing it, trying to force my bad mood out through my fingertip. I fell into sort of a trance. Push, push, push...

Abruptly the door opened, startling me, and I stepped back.

Malcolm Ward stood there, looking... well, magnificent. Also exhausted. Huge dark circles were smudged under his beautiful eyes, and his hair stuck out at odd angles, as though he had been running his hands through it. He also wore a plain white t-shirt and pajama bottoms. His feet were bare, and he held a huge black monster of a camera in his hand.

Now I felt overdressed.

“Uh,” I said. “Weren't you expecting me?” Had I steeled myself for nothing?

“Oh yes, of course, come in, come in.” He paused, letting his gaze sweep over me. I must have been getting used to it because this time I only felt a small, illicit shiver at the intimate touch of his gaze. “Good, good,” he murmured. “Come in.” And he stepped aside.

I slipped through the door and entered...

...a hoarder house.

Okay, maybe not that bad, but my god. I'd never seen so much stuff in one place that wasn't on television with a professional psychologist staring into the abyss as the owner of said stuff waxed rhapsodic about the cat-hair collection they were going to felt into dolls some day when they got around to it.

Every surface was crowded with curios and knick-knacks, some of them extremely valuable and some of them utterly worthless. Just the table in the foyer was a wealth of treasure and junk. Right next to what I recognized as an extremely valuable sculpture—probably done by a student of Rodin—was an antique tin Pepsi advertisement, proclaiming the drink to be refreshing and healthful, streaked with rust. Next to that was an old pocket watch, studded either with diamonds or rhinestones, though it was impossible to tell, and the chain holding it disappeared into a collection of moth-eaten Madame Alexander dolls.

My brain tried to shut down at the sheer volume of input. The walls were covered in framed photographs, prints, mirrors and paintings, organized seemingly only by their size and whether or not they would fit into current available space. Beneath the riot of color, the wall was white, and when I forced myself to look down, I saw the floor—between Persian-style rugs—was a simple blond wood. The house had a color scheme ideal for refinement and sophistication, but instead it was utterly buried under a ragtag collection of things.