The Billionaire Game 3(13)

The past few weeks had seen me busier than a bee, and about twice as frazzled and prone to stinging others, though admittedly in my case only with stinging remarks. The upside of spending every waking minute restocking sales, assisting sales, supervising production, keeping track of day-to-day operations and potential trends, and preparing for the busiest fashion show of the year—wait, what had I been thinking about when I began that thought?

Oh right—that the upside of being too busy to breathe was that I had also been too busy to think, particularly about worthless playboys with pretty green eyes and smiles that were too charming for their own good.

Still, the charity auction made a nice change of pace. It was at the home of one of Grant’s friends, a rambling Victorian monstrosity—the home, not the friend—in a typically San-Francisco-kooky shade of purple, with a private garden even larger than the house itself, filled with rare orchids and lilies and exotic blooms whose names I couldn’t even guess at, their perfume filling the night air as Lacey and I wandered the grounds.

That was officially my reason for being there: to give Lacey someone to talk to, and to be her emotional support. Lacey was running on almost as few fumes at I was these days with her event-of-the-year wedding coming up, and she insisted that she wouldn’t be up to being the face of Devlin Media Corp.’s charitable giving without me by her side, an emergency martini in hand and a barbed quip at the tip of my tongue as she smiled and schmoozed with potential donors.

“So, I’ve been meaning to ask, how’s business?” Lacey asked as we took our leave of yet another group—oil magnates, I think, though to be honest, all the billionaires started to blur together after a while. Same thousand dollar suits, same stress paunch, same fake smiles. “I haven’t checked in with you in so long; I feel terrible.”

“Don’t even worry about it,” I said. “You’ve got a fuller plate than most presidents. Speaking of plates—”

I snagged a couple of samosas off a passing waiter’s tray and handed one to Lacey, digging into my own with relish. Soliciting donations from bored WASPs was hungry work.

“Business is great,” I continued. “The bras couldn’t be flying off the shelves faster if I’d genetically spliced them with falcons. And the show with Blossom is coming along great! I’ve already talked to a few different consultants, and Evangeline has been giving me a lot of advice; we’ve narrowed it down to ten finalist outfits for the catwalk, and we’re auditioning models tomorrow.”

“That’s fantastic!” Lacey said with a grin, before adding more carefully, “And how is the more…personal business…going?”

I lost my appetite, but I kept my face neutral as I forced myself to swallow the last bite of my samosa, which suddenly tasted like cement. It hung in my stomach like cement too, as I looked away from Lacey and out into the night-darkened foliage, rustling in the breeze off the bay. “It’s…well, it was never going to be ideal.”

“Never?” Lacey asked, hinting stronger than a desperate player in charades.

“Never,” I said firmly. The last thing I needed was Lacey getting me to doubt my decision.

She sighed. “All right. So how’s it not-ideally going?”

I drained my glass of champagne and switched it with a full one from a passing waiter’s tray in a move of such deftness that the cast of The Fast and the Furious would have been impressed. “Well, he’s keeping his distance like I asked.”

“But?” Lacey prompted.

“But nothing.” But I miss him. But I keep feeling disappointed when he doesn’t show, even though it’s what I asked for. But I can’t help but remember all the fun we had together, goofing around in the water, saving the store at the last minute, in that dressing room together with his body slamming into mine…

I can’t help wanting him back, no matter how bad of an idea I know it is.

“You haven’t seen him at all,” Lacey said skeptically. “At. All.”

“Oh, wait, I have seen him—in the society pages,” I snarked.

A pang of bitterness shot through me as the truth of that statement sank in. I could ban Asher the person from my life, but I couldn’t ban Asher the celebrity personality from the media. I had seen him in the society pages almost every day—and there had been a different girl on his arm every time. Somehow each one had managed to be thinner, blonder, and more scantily clad than the one before her.

I grimaced and downed my new champagne. “Let’s talk about something happier, like polio.”