Billionaire Bad Boys of Romance Boxed Set (10 Book Bundle) (9 page)

He shrugged. "Since those hors d'ouvres at the auction?" he said, and the way he said it made me think that he was only guessing.

I gave him a scowl. "Really? I mean... really?"

He tilted his head. "What's so shocking about that?" he asked me. "I've been working on my art since then."

"Artists eat, too," I told him.

"What about starving artists?"

"That's a bug, not a feature of being an artist." I blew a sweaty strand of hair out of my face. "Okay, you need to eat something. Before we do anything else, you have to eat."

"I just did."

I gave him a hard look, but his face was entirely innocent. He was fucking with me, right? He had to be. "Man cannot live by pussy alone," I said, hauling myself gracelessly out of his lap and standing up. Reaching under my skirt I readjusted my panties, getting my own slick juices all over my fingers as I did so. I took my hand out and held it up, glancing around for a tissue or something, but then Malcolm stood up as well, reached out, and took my wrist in his hand, drawing my fingers to his mouth.

With a slow, sensuous suck he cleaned my fingers for me.

I stared into his dark cherry wood eyes, my cheeks burning, before I found the strength to pull away. The second growl from his stomach might have helped me make that decision.

"Food first," I said. "Art and sex later."

He reached down and adjusted his cock in his pants, but I'm pretty sure his hunger was cutting through his arousal, because it was already shrinking from its previously large size. "Very well," he said. "If you insist."

Chapter Five

I waited on the sidewalk for Malcolm to come downstairs, trying to collect myself. The icy wind and gray sky were going a long way towards helping me get centered and alert. Mostly I was reeling from our sexual encounter and trying to maintain my customary ironic distance. It was rather difficult, however, since my legs still shook with the aftermath of his ministrations.

What was going on with me? I wondered. I'd been really into guys before, but this didn't feel quite the same. The way I fell into his embrace, welcoming the pleasure he gave me... it truly did feel as though we'd known each other before. Bound by the red thread of fate? Was that what he'd said the other day? We'd known each other in another life?

The idea freaked me right the fuck out, and by the time he exited the door of his mansion, impeccably dressed, I was well on my way toward my much loved ironic distance.

But when he reached me, he pulled my hand into the crook of his arm and began to lead me down the sidewalk, just like a Victorian gentleman, and my distance was halved. At least.

"So where do you want to go to lunch?" I asked him. I kept my eyes straight ahead, but I could see him smile from the corner of my field of vision.

"I'm not sure," he said. "I am a very easy date. I have only negative preferences."

"Negative preferences?"

"Meaning I only know what I do not want."

Oh. One of those people. "Okay. Well, we're in New York, there's really nothing in the world we can't find here."

He nodded. "What would you prefer?"

I pursed my lips and took a fearless inventory of my wants and desires. "What about... Vietnamese? This is the perfect day for pho."

He nodded and I almost smiled, but then he said, "It is, but I'm not in the mood for broth."

"Hmm. How about Lebanese?"

"I enjoy Lebanese, but it is more of a summer food. I always think of summer when I am eating food laced with lemon."

Great. "Chinese? Greek? Italian?"

"Maybe."

"That's not helpful. You're the one who hasn't eaten for two days, you tell me what you think your stomach can handle."

He appeared to think about this for quite a while, and I glanced around as we exited his neighborhood and set out toward the nearest subway station. For the first time, I wondered why he hadn't just called a car, but I thought it would be rude to ask. I didn't care about private cars or limos or anything like that, but I thought it was a little weird that a billionaire with all that money and prestige at his fingertips would instead choose to walk to the subway station.

Then again, a billionaire forgetting to eat and living in a house crowded with the most useless nick-knacks imaginable was not what I had imagined either. My Batman was in the middle of his soul-searching phase, it seemed. Or, since he was in his late thirties, perhaps he had simply never exited said phase. It happened to the best of them.

"I know a little Indian place," he said at last. "They make the most wonderful lamb shahi korma. I could eat it all day."

"Like pussy?" The words were past my lips before I could stop myself and I clapped my hand over my mouth, mortified.

But he just laughed. "Only yours, Sadie. Only yours."

My pussy was on par with lamb shahi korma. That was good to know. I guess.

We walked the rest of the way to the subway in companionable silence, and when I used my metrocard for both of us he didn't object. Somehow, I liked that. He was walking around with the riffraff, just as if he were people himself. When we boarded the train heading downtown, I flopped into my seat and let out a sigh of relief.

"Tired?" he asked as he settled down beside me. His knee brushed against mine, sending little shivers of heat through me, but I didn't move away. I let my leg stay there, touching his. A bit of illicit contact, right out in the open. I forged into the breach of his conversation starter with a shrug.

"I don't know," I said. "It's nice to go out to lunch, I think. I haven't gone out to a lunch that wasn't a business lunch or a hotdog on the street corner in... Jesus, I don't know how long. It's been a long time. I don't have a lot of a social life now."

He raised his eyebrows. "Now?" he asked. "I read that you and Felicia have been friends for a very long time. Is being her personal assistant really so difficult?"

I waved a hand. "Oh man, you don't even know the half of it. She's gotta do all this dumb shit to keep up appearances in society or whatever and I have to organize it all. She's huge into charity, so I'm always running around trying to get charity events up and running without letting all the rich folks know exactly what they're giving to."

He laughed at that. "Oh?" he said.

I gave him a sly smile. "Felicia fancies herself a revolutionary. She likes to give her money to anarchist groups and such. When she married Anton, he set up an allowance for her 'pet projects,' as he liked to call them, and whatever she raises for charity for a more acceptable organization she dumps an equal amount into something else. Or a large number of something elses. She's a bit scattered in her ideology, but she does good work. I can't really fault her for it. It's just exhausting running around trying to make everything all hoity-toity for the rich folks when you grew up poor in Jersey."

"Oh, you did?"

His voice was merely curious, not judgmental, but I immediately went on guard. I'd been saying too much, distracted by his knee against mine. I didn't like talking about my childhood. All that shit was over and done with, as I liked to say, and I'd spent years convincing Felicia of the same thing. She'd been hung up on her parents and fixing their lives, and it had been holding her back. Marrying Anton, though he was a rich man like her father, had been the best thing to happen to her, frankly. Me, I'd already moved on. That was in the past, and they say that place is a whole other country, and I'd probably get dysentery there.

"Yeah," I said, making it clear that I didn't want to talk about it. To his credit, Malcolm took the hint and backed off. "So what about you?" I said, trying to change the subject.

"What about me?" he asked.

Yeah, that would probably be a good thing to specify... "Don't you have a personal assistant?" I asked him. "Hopping around from place to place, booking appearances and accepting invitations to charity functions and whatnot?"

Malcolm shook his head. "I have a secretary at my office," he said, "but I rarely go in any more. He holds down the fort while I'm away."

The way he said it left me with the impression that he didn't work much at all. Which might explain his behavior. Perhaps he was bored and looking to spice up his life with a little eccentricity and a little sex in front of a camera? For some reason, the idea annoyed me. I'm not sure why it did. After a bad breakup I'd once seriously contemplated feigning amnesia so I wouldn't have to go through the inevitable postmortem period with all our mutual friends. Surely that was worse? "So he knows all your business stuff?"

Malcolm nodded. "He does. He's very dedicated to his job, and we go out for dinner twice a week where he tells me everything that's been going on. Most of the meetings can be handled by people under me, and I compensate them for the risks they take. Really, the life of a CEO can get repetitive, and most problems are the same problem in different clothing. Most of the time the heads of other companies just want me to go play golf so they can convince me to do some business deal or other." A rueful smile crossed his lips, and I realized I had turned completely toward him as he spoke. I was leaning forward, hanging on his words. I had to force myself to move back as I made a curious noise, trying to not make my interest in him so screamingly obvious. I'm not sure why. After all, his interest in me was apparent, and if I weren't so attracted to him it might have been rather creepy.

"I chose the wrong thing to do," he said. "I hate golf. I'm not sure you can hate golf and be a CEO. It's just not possible.

"Do you hate it because you're bad at it, or because it's boring and wasteful?" I asked him.

A grin broke across his face. "The latter," he said. "I'm very good at it. I'm very good at most things."

I raised my eyebrows. "And modest, too."

He shrugged. "It is just fact."

Oh really? "And what are you not good at?"

He pursed his lips. "Art. Yet," he said.

I supposed that was true. "You do have talent," I had to admit to him. "There was something in those photos that was very... magnetic."

"It's you," he said, catching me off guard. "You are the magnetic part of those pictures."

I looked away. "I didn't look half as terrible as I usually do in photos," I conceded grudgingly. "But that was maybe the lighting. And I actually took the time to do my make up yesterday."

"And today?" he said as the subway car screeched to a halt. People got off, and people got on. An old hobo staggered through the doors. One of the ones that likes to sing. I hate those guys, because I never have enough cash to give to all of them, and it makes me feel like shit. I know, I know, living in the city, I should be over this by now, but I could have been one of those guys. Anyone could. It's just an accident of birth. Absently I patted my pockets as I tried to formulate an answer to his question.

"I probably dolled myself up a bit," I admitted with a sigh. Just as I'd thought, I didn't have any cash on me. I'd spent the last of it on beer and cigarettes. If I'd had one of those beers still with me, I could have given it to him, but that probably wasn't the wisest decision. I'd feel better, but the next thing you know there's a homeless dude frozen stiff under a bridge.

The hobo clanged a beat-up cane against the subway car pole. "Attention," he said. "Attention please." The car started up and he stumbled, only managing to catch himself at the last moment. He cleared his throat as he straightened up and I looked away. I hated to see people like this. I wish I had Felicia's idealism when it came to the world, but no amount of money was going to change that guy's life. Money could never make him sober, or induce his kids to talk to him again, or whatever terrible, sad story he had hidden away inside.

He gave a little speech in a gruff voice, and then launched into Goodbye, My Coney Island Baby. I wanted to sink into the floor. He held his hat out as he walked up and down the car, and he passed me quickly, seeing that I had nothing. His voice was quite fine, but it was so sad to see his talent wasted on a subway car full of commuters that it mostly made me depressed, and I averted my eyes.

Next to me, Malcolm stood up as the hobo launched into the "never gonna see you" part.

Malcolm flung his arms wide and took a deep breath. "Never gonna see you any more," he sang in harmony, a deep bass voice booming from his chest as he leaned into the man, clearly indicating that he should lead. The man's eyes lit up and together they finished out the first verse in perfect harmony to a smattering of applause. Then Malcolm reached into his inside pocket, pulled out his wallet, and handed the man a wad of bills. Then he sat down again.

I stared at Malcolm. I wouldn't have been more surprised if he'd ripped off his skin and revealed himself to be a robot underneath. In fact, I would have been significantly less surprised by his behavior than I had been up to this point.

"I didn't know you could sing," I said stupidly.

He held a hand up and tilted it back and forth, indicating that of his panoply of talents, singing merely fell into the fair to middling range. I watched the hobo counting his haul, his eyes wide as saucers. "How much money did you give him?" I asked in a low voice.

"A little over a thousand," he replied.

I backed away and stared at him. "Are you serious?" I said at last.

"Why shouldn't I?" he said. "What good is it doing me?"

I had no idea. Probably buying me lunch, but that was selfish. "And the singing?"

He shrugged, a little one-shouldered affair, self-deprecating. "Allah will not show mercy to the unmerciful," he told me.

Of all the things I had expected him to say, that certainly wasn't it, but when I opened my mouth and tried to comment on it, we arrived at our destination. The train screeched to a stop and he stood up again, holding his hand out. "Let's go eat," he said.

Without thinking, I put my hand in his and I felt the zing of attraction spark between us. Then he was pulling me to my feet and we were out among the press of people, jostling through the corrals of the underground until we reached the surface, all together, and streamed out into the city.

* * * *

"So are you Muslim?" I asked him finally as the waiter wandered off to the kitchen with our order. The Indian restaurant he'd taken me to was a little out-of-the-way place that I'd never heard of before, and the proprietor seemed to know Malcolm, though he only said, "Welcome back," before ushering us to our table—the best in the house, though that was a dubious honor.

We sat together in the booth, as though we were boyfriend and girlfriend. Where our knees had touched on the subway train, here Malcolm pressed his entire thigh against mine, and I had to remind myself not to swoon. The food also smelled amazing, and Malcolm insisted on ordering for us. I let him. His thigh may or may not have had something to do with the allowance of that liberty. And, well, I know what I like and what I don't, and he hadn't ordered anything that would send up alarm bells for me. Such as too many chickpeas. I like chickpeas, but one of my friends used to live on chickpeas, and they made him gassier than a heifer.