Billionaire Boys Club 5 : Romancing the Billionaire(36)

 

 

And it was making her antsy as hell.

She shifted in her chair again.

"Can't sleep?" Jonathan asked, and his foot nudged her leg from across the aisle.

Well, no sense in pretending any longer. She straightened up and propped her chin on her hand. "Something tells me that all that Starbucks earlier was a bad call." Your proximity isn't helping. She didn't say that aloud, though. Not while they were on neutral ground. But still, the man should have guessed that his sitting directly across from her in a plane with at least a dozen other empty seats would rattle her, right? Or he should have known that when he sat with his legs open and sprawled as if he owned the place, it would make her body break out in goose bumps.

Heck, he probably did own the place. "Too much coffee," she muttered when a new round of goose bumps pricked her arms and she rubbed them.

The smile he gave her was slow, gorgeous, his gaze utterly focused on her. "You'll wind down in a bit."

For some reason, she felt nervous and fluttery under that intense stare. "I suppose." Now that they'd vowed to just be friends, it seemed her body-stupid, stupid body-was fixated on other, non-friend-like things.

"Can I ask you a question?"

Her heart started thumping faster, and her gaze went to his sensual mouth. She tried to play it casual, though. "Oh, um . . . question? Sure?"

"How many do you think there will be?"

For the life of her, she couldn't figure out what he was talking about. "How many what?"

"Letters? Clues to follow?"

"Oh!" Her mind had been anywhere but on their actual business together. "Usually there were about four."

"Mmm. So we're looking at two more." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

Violet found herself staring at his long fingers as he rubbed. She flexed her own. Down, girl. It's still Jonathan, jerk at heart. Except she wasn't so sure she believed that anymore. "Don't get too excited," she blurted. "I've found every single one of these chases to be a disappointment at the end."

"Even so." He continued to rub his chin idly, and she had to hold back the urge to snatch his hand away from his jaw. That slow, thoughtful rubbing was driving her to distraction. "There has to be a point to this little postmortem game of his. Even if we discount the fact that he hid his journals, it's not like Dr. DeWitt to steal from an excavation site."

"I told you the point already," Violet said, her irritation ratcheting up a notch. "He wants to get me back in your life so you'll continue to fund all of his projects. My face in front of yours will be a nice little reminder of what he wants. This is all just more maneuvering from him." 

"Mmm. You sound angry. He wasn't a very good father to you, was he?"

She sighed. "Are we going to talk about this now?"

"What's wrong with now? Was I keeping you from your sleep?" Damn it, now he was aiming that lethal smile at her again, as if they were sharing a secret.

"No," she snapped, her tone a little more brusque than it should have been. Violet straightened in her chair again. "But of the two of us, you're the only one who seems to have pleasant memories of him."

"I don't recall you hating him that summer-"

"That was a fluke," she interrupted. She knew exactly how she felt about her father, and didn't need anyone else reminding her. "That was back when I still thought I could get him to care about me. I learned my lesson and didn't make that mistake again."

"I find it hard to believe he didn't care about you at all," Jonathan said in a quiet voice. "In fact, I find it almost impossible to conceive of anyone willfully disliking you."

She squirmed in her seat. Surely she'd mistaken the heat in his tone. It was her own imagination running away from her. "My father cared about one person and one person alone. Himself. Everything he did was to further his own ambitions. He destroyed my mother with his neglect."

Jonathan tilted his head, regarding her. "Dr. DeWitt never talked about your mother."

"That doesn't surprise me."

"Why?"

"Well, what's there to talk about?" Violet rested her head against the back of the chair and tried to think of her mother without tears in her eyes. It was surprisingly difficult; all her lingering memories of Connie DeWitt involved her depression, her drinking, and how it had affected Violet. "She married him when she was twenty and he was fifty. My mom was one of his students, back when he still taught at the university. She was young and pretty and totally in love with him. He was, well . . . He was an old perv."

Jonathan didn't laugh.