All That He Loves (Volume 2 The Billionaires Seduction) (17 page)

I kissed him back, moving my hands up to touch his chest.

But before we could really get going, he pulled away.

“I’ll be back before you know it,” he whispered.

I hope that’s true
.

But I knew that it wasn’t.

He gestured back to the main room and said with an Arnold Schwarzenegger accent, “Come along, Herr Sebastian is waiting.”

I giggled in spite of myself, took his hand, and followed him into the main room.

Johnny and Sebastian were waiting out in the main room. Sebastian was standing with his arms crossed, tapping his foot impatiently on the floor; Johnny caught my eye, blushed, and looked away.

I cringed inwardly, hoping he hadn’t heard any of what Sebastian apparently had.

“Here’s the itinerary, with addresses, contacts, phone numbers, and call times,” Sebastian said in a snippy voice as he held out a sheet of paper. “Don’t forget you’ve got to be at – ”

“Fine, thanks,” Connor said as he snatched the paper out of Sebastian’s hand, then folded it and put it inside his jacket.

Sebastian huffed and narrowed his eyes to slits, then turned to Johnny and produced another paper as if by magic. “I got you one, too, plus I emailed you both the itineraries, so if you’re late or you miss an interview, do
not
come crying to me.”

Johnny nodded uncomfortably, took the paper, and shoved it in his pocket.

“We ready?” Connor asked Johnny.

“Yeah, the car’s already loaded. You don’t have any bags, do you? I figured – ”

“No, it’s all staying here. See that my stuff gets laundered, will you?” Connor asked Sebastian.

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure they get the stains out of your pants,” Sebastian said evilly, flicking his eyes over at me.

Oh my GOD.

Johnny blushed a little more.

Connor glared at Sebastian and got right up in his face. “See that you do,” he said menacingly.

Sebastian actually leaned back a bit in alarm.

Connor turned away from Sebastian, faced me – and rolled his eyes. I had to suppress a smile.

He leaned over and kissed me, then pulled back just an inch as he held my face in his hands. “Before you know it,” he whispered, echoing his words from a few minutes before. Then he kissed me again.

Say it,
I implored him silently.
Just whisper it in my ear, or mouth it to me, I don’t care –

But he didn’t. Instead he pulled away and went to the door with Johnny. The last thing Connor did before the door closed was look at me and smile sadly as he walked out –

And then he was gone.

Sebastian was quite obviously pissed off by his new role as my guardian.

At least he ignored me as he paced back and forth through the penthouse, making last-minute phone calls while I watched television with the sound down low. Nice, safe, mindless sitcoms, with nary a mention of billionaire blackmail.

It made the 11 o’clock local news, though. Unimpeded by primetime standards, they lingered heavily on the shots of me and Connor – with all the appropriate black bars over the naughty bits, of course. Wouldn’t want to corrupt the young minds of America with an errant nipple. Especially not during exhaustive sex scandal coverage.

There were multiple interview clips of Connor being Connor – handsome, witty, eloquent, and effortlessly charming. They even snuck in a shot of Miranda, the one where the reporter called her on her bullshit.

Thank heaven for small favors.

The only shot of Mr. Templeton was him storming off the set, which was even better.

In an interesting twist I hadn’t seen coming, the anchor also reported on stocks connected with the key players.

Connor’s various companies were up an average of 7.4%. An energy company he owned – apparently the one that would implement the Nevada solar plan – was up a whopping 23%.

The Templeton family’s various companies were down an average of 4%. Templeton Energy was down the most, by 15%.

Sebastian had done his job well.

I wondered how many tens of millions of dollars – maybe even hundreds of millions – the Templetons had lost today.

Eh, they’d probably make it all back in the next week when the stocks returned to normal. This would all go away, and no one would remember it anymore –

“And now,”
the anchor’s voice intoned,
“a look at the young Los Angeles woman at the center of the controversy.”

My eyes bugged out as a familiar, very
horrible
picture of me appeared on the screen.

My senior yearbook picture.

Li’l 18-year-old me.

With bangs.

And a zit on my cheek.

And a horrible, goofy smile that made me look half-stoned.

“AAAAAAH!” I screamed, clutching at the sofa like I was in the middle of childbirth.

Sebastian came running. “What? What happened?”

Then he saw the yearbook picture, and his hand shot to his chest. “Oh my God, they’re drawing and quartering you in public.”

The anchor kept talking, and talking, and talking, as more photos showed up – mostly from Facebook, which made me want to kick Mark Zuckerberg’s ass and go delete my profile immediately. Thankfully none of them were as ugly as the high school yearbook photo, but there was one of me at Anh’s last birthday party, drunk off my ass in a nightclub and barely hanging onto my tiny friend. They’d blurred out
her
face, I noticed, but – ho ho! – not mine. No, when the news programs have already showed your ta-ta’s to the world, apparently
any
photo of you is fair game.

There were other pictures, but they were relatively tame by comparison. For the first time in my life I uttered a silent prayer of thanks that I had been an uptight, boring stick-in-the-mud during college, and that I’d always said ‘no’ when past boyfriends wanted to take ‘special pictures.’

Although now, of course, there were enough ‘special pictures’ to keep me ‘internet famous’ for fifteen minutes
after
I died.

The segment ended and the anchor went on to cover the most recent battle in Congress over the national debt. Y’know… boring, insignificant stuff.

I hunched over and cradled my head in my hands.

“You’re not going to throw up, are you?” Sebastian asked, both wary and disapproving at the same time.

“No,” I muttered, though now that he’d mentioned it…

“Good, I do
not
need that right now.”

Asshole.

He hesitated for the briefest of seconds, then said, “I called Javier – I’m going over there. There’s no reason to suffer more than I have to. If you need me, I left my number on the table.”

“Okay,” I mumbled, still hunched over.

“Do you need anything?”

I sat up and paused to think…

“If you do, just call room service,” Sebastian said.

I glared at him over my shoulder, but he just gave me his back as he walked over to the door.

“Don’t wait up,” was the last thing he said before he disappeared into the hall.

I
did
end up calling room service – for a pint of Haagen Dazs, which I ate during a
Big Bang Theory
rerun.

My phone kept buzzing on the coffee table. I checked it every time it did, hoping it was Connor.

It never was. Just a bunch of phone numbers I didn’t recognize. Many different area codes, but a lot of New York and LA prefixes – 212, 310, 213.

He’s still flying,
I thought.

He can’t call from the plane,
I rationalized, even though I was pretty sure you could in a private jet.

When I checked the messages, I realized Dad had left another one earlier, when Connor was still here. That’s why I hadn’t seen it.

Tomorrow,
I promised silently, feeling sick to my stomach.
I’ll call tomorrow.

Sure enough, Connor was on both Jimmy Kimmel and Leno – at the same time. Sebastian really
was
good.

I flipped back and forth between the channels, watching Connor appear in two different places seemingly at once. Ah, the magic of pre-taped shows.

Both shows had all the same things in common – the sexual innuendoes. The wink-wink-nudge-nudge jokes. The astonishment over his family’s involvement in the blackmail. Connor’s 30-second pitch on bringing clean, cheap energy to everyone in America.

And, of course, the same questions about me.

“So, you guys are in love, I understand?”

“Is this the future Mrs. Templeton, do you think?”

And the same desperation in Connor’s eyes, the same forced smile, the same rote answers.

I clicked off the TV halfway through and checked my phone one last time.

He still hadn’t called.

I went into the bedroom, turned off my phone’s ringer, and cried myself to sleep.

I woke up early and checked my phone for messages.

None from Connor. About fifty more from numbers I didn’t recognize, though.

I felt too sick to check them, and I couldn’t go back to sleep. The bed was too empty, and my heart was too sad to lie still and think, so I got up and took a shower.

When I walked into the main room at 8AM, Sebastian was already at work, pacing and talking into his cell phones, plural – one in each hand, alternating between them. Occasionally he would stop by his laptop on the coffee table and rattle off an email, then start dialing and pacing and threatening people again.

All he said to me was, “Well look who slept in.”

I stuck out my tongue, but he had already turned away.

I didn’t know what to do. I turned on the television, but the scandal wasn’t all over the place like it was yesterday. Which I was thankful for, don’t get me wrong… but there was a weird feeling of… incompleteness or something. Like,
Oh, they moved on without me…

I know that’s messed up. I mean, all I wanted yesterday was for it to all go away. But now that it had started to wane, for the first time ever I think I got a glimpse of why certain celebrities (
cough, cough,
Lindsay Lohan) self-destruct in public. When everybody pays attention to you – even if you don’t want it – it’s kind of strange and unsatisfying when they don’t anymore.

Like I said – messed
UP.

I checked the onscreen menu for
The View,
found out it would be on at 10 AM, then ordered breakfast from room service – fruit and croissants. I could only pick at it when it came. Sebastian actually ate more of it than I did as he paced back and forth.

I considered going out to the pool on the balcony – until I noticed the black dots hovering in the skies above, like slow insects against the cloudless blue.

Helicopters.

I couldn’t hear them through the glass, but that’s definitely what they were. A couple got close enough for me to read their TV station call sign letters.

This is unreal…

“Don’t go out there,” Sebastian ordered, a cell phone plastered to his ear. Obviously he was talking to me, but it became harder to tell after that. “No, Shia, not you. That’s all they need, a photo of you in a bikini by the pool,” he said, obviously speaking to me again.

“I’m not. I’m not blind, you know.”

“No, I can’t check with him because he’s not
here,
” Sebastian said, apparently to Shia whoever. “I
know.
No, I’m
babysitting,
” he snarled, throwing a venomous look my way.

“The baby’s old enough not to be babysat,” I snapped.

He covered the mouthpiece of his cell and scowled. “
I
certainly know that – ”

“Well then, take it out on your boss, ‘cause the baby’s tired of your bitching,” I said as I walked out of the room.

I noticed he didn’t come back with a snappy reply.

I waited for Connor to call all morning, but he never did.

Then
The View
came on. I guess Sebastian decided to call a truce, because he didn’t throw any nasty looks or comments my way as he sat down on the couch beside me. He didn’t stop taking phone calls, but he became much more brusque, and ended them as fast as he could.

He watched the show like a hawk, hanging on every word. Every so often he would smile proudly at one of Connor’s one-liners and say, “I told him to say that.”

I won’t go into it. It was more of the same, although the women alternately grilled him harder and swooned harder. Whoopi came to his defense over and over, making some incredibly funny jokes about the situation. If I hadn’t been so depressed, I might have laughed a couple of times. As it was, I barely smiled.

And, of course, they brought
me
up.

“Why haven’t we seen her?”

“Where are you hiding her?”

“When is she going to talk to the press?”

“You’ve got to have her come on here, Connor.”

And they also asked him about our relationship.

He was a little less stressed when he answered – maybe that’s what being 2500 miles away from me did for him – but only a little. The discomfort was still there.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Sebastian glancing at me worriedly whenever Connor gave his plastic answers about his ‘girlfriend’ and ‘marriage.’ Sebastian didn’t look worried that I might break my word on the NDA; instead, he looked almost… sympathetic.

So I’m not imagining it,
I thought, which was cold comfort.

About five minutes after the show was over, Sebastian’s phone rang, and his eyes glowed as he answered it.

“We just watched it – perfect, you were absolutely great!” Then the snarky Drama Queen snuck back in. “Although it would have been better if I were there.”

Connor.

My stomach twisted.

He called Sebastian before he called me.

“No, no, just follow the schedule, you’ll be fine,” Sebastian said, and rattled off a series of times, names, and addresses. “You’re good for another thirty minutes, but after that your schedule gets jam-packed, so make sure to eat something. After Letterman the jet will be waiting to bring you back to – what?”