Billionaire Novelist 4 : Every Romance is a Revenge Fantasy(16)
Over the next few days, she didn't know it, but the redhead typist had complete, total control over the billionaire novelist. She could have asked him to stick a jar of jam up his ass, and he would have, for her. At every meal, she toyed with him, gazing at him through her pale blond-red eyelashes, a button or two of her blouse "accidentally" unfastened.
They were playing house together, playing at being grown-ups, and he loved it. He didn't know a girl could be so much fun.
When she flirted with the boy from town, Callum, Smith had pretended to be merely pouty and jealous, but inside he was a pool of hot lava. The idea of another man touching Tori made him so crazy, that it wasn't until he was pounding into her sweet pu**y in an alley that he was able to finally think straight again. Fireworks banged overhead, and he wanted to tell her he loved her, but it would have sounded so stupid. They barely knew each other. He'd be the old fool, spilling his heart and guts along with his seed.
He took her to Montreal, because he was fearful of being alone with her, and what he might say in the cabin full of memories. Brynn had spent very little time there in Vermont, but he still caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye, complaining that the cabin had no central air conditioning, or saying that she hated the antlers on the chandelier.
Tori, by comparison, loved everything. She thought the charter plane, which was nothing fancy, was the "cutest thing ever," and she talked to the pilot for nearly an hour, asking question after question.
She had a fascination with how things worked, and what other people were thinking. Smith would simply stare at strangers, trying to guess at their personalities by their behavior, but Tori would just come right out and ask.
"Do you love being a pilot?" she asked the man.
He grinned and said he did, which surprised Smith, but not Tori.
On the plane, he'd noticed how the lighting made his face look sallow and old, but Tori looked luminous. He decided he wasn't good enough for her, and then she complained of nausea from the flight, and the ghost of Brynn had appeared once more.
Would his ex-wife ever be gone from his mind?
The first night in Montreal, after Tori had staged her little one-woman show in the restaurant (Smith had enjoyed her performance, but he knew not to laugh and encourage such a thing-the same as not snickering when a baby swears, lest you want to positively reinforce such behavior) he'd walked the city streets, alone with his thoughts.
Before the sun came up again, he'd changed his mind a hundred times. Tori was perfect for him. A perfect storm. A gorgeous disaster.
He tried to push her away, tried to tarnish her in his mind. The whole business with bringing her ex-boyfriend in for group sex had been a tactic he'd learned from his women reader fans on Facebook.
The Garbage Icing tactic.
The trick was to take something you really craved, such as a cupcake, and imagine that the chocolate sprinkles on top were dirt, and that the pastry had been rolled around in the garbage.
He thought seeing another man ha**ng s*x with Tori would help him break the habit, but the outcome was the exact opposite. She made eye contact with Smith while everything was happening, and he felt her looking into his soul. The other man in the room could have been an inanimate object. She wanted him, and he wanted her just as badly.
He changed his mind for the six-hundredth time.
He bought her a necklace, but chickened out of giving it to her.
On the final day of the contract, he was going to tell Tori everything she wanted to know about what had happened with his ex-wife. As the details came out, though, she seemed less and less keen to know. He cut out the part about Brynn pulling a gun on him and chucking it at the back of the head, because who would believe such a thing?
When the story came out, it sounded much worse than he'd expected, the words hanging in the air like a chemical burn. Tori's face grew more pale, her body language rigid.
Smith disappeared down a wormhole where time was no longer linear, and he was experiencing moments out of time, with Brynn. The memory became visceral, the back of his head stinging from where the gun had hit him. He saw the door of Brynn's new apartment opening, and her and that long-haired ass**le. He wanted to hit the man in his bearded face, but he'd struck the lamp instead.
He couldn't blame Tori for leaving. Not one bit.
She was young and smart, and she could do so much better than him.
Alone in the penthouse at the Hotel Le St. James, he wandered from room to room, calling her name softly, like a prayer. He lay on her bed, smelling her shampoo on the pillow, and her absence fell down around him like hail.
He pulled out his phone and made the call he'd been avoiding.
"I'm ready to come back," he said.