At the Billionaire’s Wedding (50 page)

“She’s having second thoughts about her dress,” Roxanna said, showing him a picture of Jane in the sort of dress that made him want to run in the opposite direction. She looked like a bird in that dress stuck with feathers.

“I encourage her to have third or fourth thoughts about that dress,” he said.

“Oh! And these are the flowers and some pictures of the Gold Saloon. But you don’t care about all that.”

“You are amazing,” he said, pressing a kiss on her cheek.

“I haven’t published these yet,” she warned.

There was a tense moment between them. She stared brazenly into his eyes. He bit back a growl. She didn’t blink.

“You want to know why I need this story so badly,” he said finally.

“Your intelligence is one thing I find so sexy about you.”

He was about to tell her. There was no reason not to, other than that it had been such a stupid move on his part and she just said his intelligence turned her on. But then there was a rustling in the bushes—too big to be a squirrel or some other little rodent. It was possibly a deer or a fox. But the unmistakable sound of a soft
click click click click click click
told him exactly what kind of rodent was lurking in the bushes.

Species: paparazzi. Habitat: wherever famous people go, especially if the masses are excluded, and especially if there is a wedding.

Known Predators: people who value their privacy, the law, and Damien Knightly.

He leapt over the balustrade, dropping into the bushes, while Roxanna shouted after him.

“Damien! What the hell are you doing?”

He quickly spied the bastard: a trim, ginger-haired man with a Canon camera bearing a huge, extra long lens around his neck. He
knew
that bastard. It was Snooper MacBracken, infamous and reviled freelance paparazzo and gossip. Damien had no doubt that Algernon Gardner at
The Daily Post
had hired him.

Then Snooper, the bastard, spied him and started running away, clutching the camera and shielding his face from all the branches. Damien sprinted after him. And then, good God, Roxanna was dashing after them both. For a few moments, the only sounds were of footsteps pounding against the earth, brush and foliage being shoved aside, and heavy breathing.

And then a thud. Followed by a certain four-letter word.

Roxanna had tripped over a root and sprawled on the ground. His heart clenched—was she all right?

“Roxanna! Are you okay?”

Her iPhone, which she’d been holding in her hand, went flying in the air toward … oh bloody hell.

“Get the phone!” she screamed.

Damien dove for it, colliding with Snooper. They both hit the ground and wrestled for it.

Snooper MacBracken did not fight like a gentleman. Damien wasn’t sure why he expected he would. He took a fist to the face. Stunned, he released his grip on the iPhone for just a second. Just one little second as his hand instinctively went to the pain.

Snooper grabbed it, and tried to push Damien off. After some scuffling, the wiry bastard succeeded in scrabbling to his feet—phone in hand—and he ran helter-skelter through the woods.

“Oh no you don’t,” Damien panted. He leapt to his feet and took off at a sprint.

Armani loafers were not ideal for running. Neither were bespoke suits from Savile Row. It didn’t matter. Especially when he saw a clearing looming ahead—and a road. With a motorcycle. The man had an escape plan, and in his hand, pictures that would destroy a friendship and pictures that could cause
him
to lose his most treasured possession.

“Damien hurry!” Roxanna shouted.

His lungs were burning. Muscles, screaming. He dug down deep for every shred of strength and force he possessed. Sprinting faster now, he was Just. Behind. The. Bastard. He launched himself forward, grabbing the paparazzo and taking them both down to the ground. They hit the earth with a thud.

The phone flew from MacBracken’s hand. Roxanna dashed over to snatch it up with a ferocious scowl.

“Bugger off,” Damien growled, gripping the man’s T-shirt in his fist and twisting hard until it was a little too tight around the neck. Snooper’s face started to turn red.

“Damien, darling…” Roxanna’s voice gently reminded him not to go too far.

“Fuck off,” he spat at the pap. Then he stood, watching his foe shuffle to his feet and sloppily run toward his motorcycle. With a roar of the engine, he was gone.

He heard Roxanna approaching behind him. Every fiber of his being was attuned to her, and how she alone possessed the ability to ruin him or save him.

He wasn’t just thinking about the story.

“You have a very rakish James Bond thing happening right now,” she said, eyeing him hungrily. He glanced down at his gray suit and white shirt, all rumpled and askew, with dirt and sweat stains, possibly even some blood.

She reached out and lightly touched his cheekbone where he’d been hit. He flinched, slightly.

“I hope you’re okay. But for what it’s worth, I like it,” she murmured.

“Not the time, darling,” he said. His heart was hammering. And he glanced down at the phone in her hand with pictures of the wedding of the year—and the pictures he needed to win the bet, save his family birthright, and
not
be the one to lose a two-hundred-year-old family treasure.

He hated that he was torn between business and pleasure. He took a long lusty look at Roxanna and thought about tumbling her right here, right now.

“I can see that you are in the throes of a major crisis,” Roxanna continued casually. “Anytime you want to, you know, confide in your … whatever the word is for what we are… Or should I just say
me
. Anytime you want to confide in me… Go for it.”

He stared at her for a moment, trying to tease out all the things contained in that rambling speech while there was limited flow of oxygen to his brain.

She had, perhaps inadvertently, started the “What are we? How serious is this?” conversation. There was something about how he didn’t confide in her. And then there was the way this normally bold and brash woman suddenly became ever-so-slightly shy and uncertain.

There was one thing to say: the truth.

“I bet Algernon Gardner of
The Daily Post
that I would be the first to publish pictures of the wedding.”

“What did you bet him?”

“I wagered
The London Weekly
.”

He winced, remembering the one night when he had had one whiskey too many and, so certain of Roxanna and their access to the bride and groom, agreed to a wager that he thought he couldn’t lose.

He thought he knew her, and that she was like him: emotionless, driven to succeed in business at all costs. He didn’t know her. She was loyal, devoted, and caring to her friends.

“Oh wow,” she said dramatically, eyes widening. “That is horrible, Damien. That is a disaster. That is the worst possible thing, isn’t it? It’s like stabbing you and twisting the knife right in your heart.”

He started walking back to the house. God, he hurt.

“Thank you for reminding me why I don’t make a habit of confiding in people.”

She followed behind him.

“I’m sorry. Apologies for not reminding you why people don’t usually confide in me.” He smiled a bit, but she didn’t see it. “Fortunately for you, I have a devious mind.”

“Splendid.”

“For example, you might be interested to know that those pictures were fake.”

He stopped, turned around. She was serious.

“Fake? That looked just like Jane in that ghastly dress.”

“But it was
a ghastly dress
.” She repeated this and mimicked his accent, too. “Obviously she would never wear it. We spent the morning at Oldwart’s Bridal Shoppe in the village.”

“And the flowers and other things?”

“The work of Mark, the most amazing hotel concierge who didn’t bat an eyelash when Jane told him we needed to stage fake photographs of the bride.”

“Why?”

“Because selling out my friend is not an option,” Roxanna said. And biting her lip, she added. “But I wanted to do this for you too. I figured you would have a good reason.”

“Thank you,” he said. And then because he was so grateful he said it again. “Thank you.”

Roxanna Lane was amazing. He knew in that moment that she was the woman he wanted on his side, by his side. Always.

He swept her into his arms and kissed her passionately.

Then he set her back on her feet and said, “We need to publish. Immediately.”

Roxanna had left her bag with her laptop at the gazebo, where the other guests of the wedding had kept an eye on it while reveling in this one little patch of cellular access.

“What was that all about?” Piers asked, leaning against a pillar and glancing up from his phone.

“Nothing,” they said at the same time

“Really?” Duke asked, glancing up quizzically from his iPhone.

“Damien was just chasing off a paparazzo,” Roxanna said.

“Thanks, dude,” Duke said, even though Damien was so not a dude. He was too posh for that. “Jane is obsessed with making sure nothing about this wedding shows up online.”

“Oh, I know,” Roxanna said. Then she proceeded to spend the next hour making sure the fake wedding pictures were posted online. On Jezebel.com.

The Bad Boy Billionaire’s Bride

They’re the wedding pictures I know you all have been waiting for: one of tech’s most debauched dudes is getting hitched. Who is the woman who managed to reform this bad boy billionaire when so many others have failed? Jane Sparks, the future Mrs. Jane Austen, who publishes romance novels under the pseudonym Maya Rodale. Jezebel—and only Jezebel—has scored exclusive photos of the bride getting the final fitting for her wedding gown. The groom should stop reading now, but the rest of y’all should take a look and try to guess the designer!

Writing snarky articles, uploading the pictures, and formatting everything was something she did every day. But there was something different about it when Damien was beside her, watching as she corrected typos, rewrote a phrase, or tweaked the HTML. She was acutely aware of her every move, and acutely aware of
him
.

Usually, their workplace interactions consisted of him striding around glass-walled conference rooms, dominating meetings, issuing orders, and bossing people around while she snuck glances from behind her monitor.

Then there were all the little illicit moments: walking too closely in the hall and accidentally brushing up against one another, a stolen kiss in the stairwell, sending sexy text messages when she knew he was in budget meetings, or when he knew she was on deadline.

She finished tweaking the article for SEO, added a few links to previous stories on Jane and Duke, and did one last preview.

“Time to publish!”

Within seconds it was live on the website.

Moments after she sent in her post, there was a ping from someone’s phone. Duke’s iPhone. He looked at it, followed the link, then looked over at them with a really lethal glare.

“What the
fuck
?”

“Darling, I think we’d better run,” Damien murmured.

Roxanna laughed as they dashed along the path to the house, Duke chasing angrily behind them. Her heart didn’t stop pounding for the trip back—because of the running, she told herself. But then it didn’t stop once they got back to their room and locked the door behind them.

Anticipation, that.

They laughed over their adventures. They kissed. Lips against lips, imperfectly but perfectly wonderful. Her back up against the door, his weight leaning into her. She threaded her fingers through his hair and kissed him deeply.

There was a knock on the door.

“Shhh. It could be Duke.”

“Just a sec!”

“Just wanted to see if you were ready for dinner.” It was Cali.

“I need a few minutes,” Roxanna called out. “We have to get ready,” she whispered reluctantly.

“Then we’ll finish this later,” Damien murmured, pressing a kiss on the hollow of her throat.

And they began to get ready for dinner.

It should have been so unremarkable. Off with the skinny jeans and into the slinky dress. Off with his disheveled and dirty suit, then into another sexy black suit from Savile Row. Putting clothing
on
shouldn’t be so sexy. Though they had undressed each other dozens of times, they had never really put on clothes together.

They had spent nights and days together, lying in bed, tangled in sheets. They had spent Hurricane Geoffrey delightfully ensconced in his apartment, watching the rain by candlelight. There were long lunches marked with “do not book” on the calendars. There were sexy late nights. There were dinners at the most intimate and exclusive restaurants where they had the most discreet tables, the best wine, obsessively attentive service. There were gifts of lingerie and expensive bouquets of flowers. There was something secretive and illicit about them, not because there was anyone else—there was no one—but because they worked together. Though, while it wouldn’t be ideal to find themselves the subject of office gossip, it wouldn’t be the end of the world or their careers.

They were not a “we” or an “us” couple. They didn’t do events together. The bathroom door was always closed. Neither kept a drawer of toiletries and such at the other’s place. They were all about the romance and not at all about the day-to-day. It went without saying that Roxanna had never thought of them as a “couple who attends formal events together.” But Jane had insisted she bring her mysterious millionaire lover as her date and in this moment, Roxanna wasn’t sorry at all.

She liked him. Maybe even more. Maybe she could even enjoy this intimacy.

Because there was something about this—dressing together for a formal dinner at a house party wedding—that felt more intimate. It felt downright seriously romantic. Like they were a couple. A serious couple with joint bank accounts, arguments over who remembered to pay the maintenance bill (oh shit! She already missed living with Jane, who took care of that stuff), and who said “we” at every opportunity.