Billionaire BWWM Romance 1: The Billionaire's Arranged Marriage (13 page)

“I…” she couldn’t seem to catch her breath or straighten out her thoughts, “I have to think about it,” she whispered, her eyes closed and her head leaned back into the pillows on the bed as his mouth moved slowly down her neck toward her collar bone and she moaned softly again.

He grinned at her and kissed her mouth. “That’s my girl,” he whispered, “My girl… my Jillian. Hold on to me.” Obediently, she slowly slid her arms around his chest to his back as he lowered himself onto her body, pushing her legs apart with his and kissed her mouth, savoring every moment there.

“Wait, Anderson, I don’t know if this is the right-” she started to say, but he leaned over and stopped her mouth with a deep kiss, and closed his arms around hers tightly as he moved his erection against her body, rubbing back and forth over the outside of her clothes, drawing the heat in her right to the surface and making her cry out softly. Then he lifted his mouth from hers and continued to rub himself firmly on her core as he spoke.

“It’s right, baby, it’s exactly right. I’m going to be your husband and your lover, for the rest of your life, and this is what lovers and husbands do. It’s going to feel so good, and I’m going to do this with you all the time.” His tone grew slightly husky and his mouth and hands became ravenous for her.

“It couldn’t be more right,” he said excitedly, rubbing himself against her more fervently as he kissed her mouth and neck. “It’s poetic justice. Reed always got everything, got his way, got all the women, got whatever he wanted, and he was going to get the money, the business, the house, everything there was to get, everything he wanted, including you, and now that’s all gone… and look what I get.

“I get it all because you broke it off with him and chose me. I get the money, the business, the house,” he kissed her hard and hungrily, “I get the beautiful bride… the one woman in the world who doesn’t want him, the woman he wants so much and can’t have…” he laughed and grasped her breast, “I get to have a woman he hasn’t ever had before, finally, I come first. I win.”

She opened her eyes wide as she realized that the thing which had eluded her since they had first walked into the bedroom had finally clicked. She scooted out from under him. “Anderson! Stop!” she said, irritation flashing across her face. He sat up quickly and stared at her.

“What’s wrong? What is it?” he asked, panic filling his voice.

She shook her head at him. “I haven’t said yes, I haven’t made up my mind about anything. I have no idea what I’m going to do, or who will or won’t be a lover or husband of mine, and I certainly don’t want to wind up becoming the prize of some ages old competition between the two of you! I might not marry either of you at all!”

Anderson looked worriedly at her for a moment and then pushed himself off the bed. He  pulled his shirt back on, buttoning it up with his back to her. He took a deep breath and then finally turned and looked at her.

“Jillian, that isn’t at all what’s going on here. I’m your friend. I’m here to help you and support you. I just happen to be falling for you at the same time, and it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if you really looked at Reed and I both and chose me to be your husband.

“You’re entering into what amounts to an arranged marriage. I’m the better of the brothers and you have a choice. You could choose the one who wants you, who would treat you the best and give you the whole world.” He walked toward her and slid his hands around her cheeks, cupping her face and lifting it toward him.

“You are an amazing woman, I know that and he doesn’t. He couldn’t care less who you are. I would cherish you. I would make your life wonderful. Please, just think about it,” he said softly, lowering his face to hers and kissing her lips slowly, then opening his eyes and sighing as he let his hands fall away. He turned and looked over his shoulder at her. “We’ll be landing soon; you need to buckle yourself in somewhere.”

Chapter6

Jillian was not looking forward to the conversation she was going to have to have with her mother. When she got home, she walked into her mother’s office and sat down at her desk. Kimiko turned to look at her and her brow furrowed.

“Well? What is it? What’s that look on your face?” she asked her daughter.

“The wedding is off, Mother,” Jillian answered, her heart in her throat.

Her mother raised her chin and looked down her nose at her daughter for a long silent moment. “Why is the wedding off?”

“Because I have walked in on Reed having sex with another woman twice already, once right before he asked me to marry him and once yesterday,” she answered shortly.

Her mother scowled at her. “You think you aren’t going to marry him because he is having a good time with other women? Most men go and enjoy women outside of their marriage beds. It’s natural. It’s the way men are.”

“Daddy doesn’t do that to you,” Jillian said quietly.

Kimiko didn’t even blink. “Your father is a very rare man. All the same, it’s not an issue that should prevent you from marrying Reed. It is an unacceptable break. You will marry him.”

“Mother! I won’t! I don’t want to marry a man who won’t be faithful to me!” Jillian spoke against her mother’s wishes, which was something she almost never did.

Kimiko’s eyes narrowed and she looked at her daughter for another long, silent moment. “You wish to be disobedient and dishonor your parents and your uncles; to go against our decisions for you?” She turned her chair toward the table behind her and picked a file up off of it. She turned back toward Jillian and placed it before her on her desk.

“This, dishonorable child, will be your future if you choose to disobey me and break your marriage agreement.” Kimiko leaned back in her chair and folded her hands beneath her chin. “You will be sent to Japan immediately and you will live with your uncles there until your wedding day to the man in the file. He is the wealthy owner of a finance company in Japan. He has even more money than Carter’s family does.

“Should you marry him, you will not see the United States again. You will be a Japanese citizen and you will live in that country for the rest of your life. You will have Japanese children, you will raise them with Japanese customs in a Japanese culture, and that is how you will live out all of your days.”

Her mother leaned forward and looked at her with unblinking eyes. “Also, in case you are wondering, Japanese men have lovers on the side as well, and you will not be permitted to have an opinion about it.”

Jillian opened the file and looked at the face of an old man with thin gray hair and the beginnings of liver spots on his face.

“Mother! How old is he?” Jillian asked, horrified.

“He is sixty-seven. Don’t believe for a moment that he will die anytime soon and release you of your duty to him as his wife. The men in his family all lived to be over one hundred and ten years old.” Her mother smiled at her with a shallow smile.

“So, you can see your two options and you can see that I have obviously chosen a better husband for you. He is a wealthy and attractive man. You could do much worse.”

Jillian thought for a moment and looked at her mother. “What if there was an option you haven’t considered yet?”

Kimiko frowned. “What option would that be?” she asked cynically.

“Well, Carter told Reed that if he didn’t marry me, he would be disinherited and would be made to leave their home and their family. If that was to happen, Reed’s younger brother Anderson would inherit everything and he would be running the company and handling the business. He has asked me to marry him. I could marry the younger brother and our families would still be united, you would still have the business opportunity you are hoping to create.” Jillian held her breath, waiting for her mother’s response.

She hadn’t even decided for herself whether she would accept Anderson, whether or not Reed was still in the picture. He seemed somewhat jealous and greedy.

Kimiko shrugged. “I don’t care which brother you marry. Talk to Carter about it and see what he has to say. Marry one of them. Do it soon. We are finished discussing this.”

Jillian glanced back down at the old man in the photo of the file on her mother’s desk. She wanted to believe that her mother was kidding and that she would never be married off to an old man in another country, but there he was, staring back from his photo at her, and she knew that her mother would indeed do such a thing. She walked out and closed the screen door of her mother’s office behind her.

So she was to marry one of the brothers, but which one? She would go and talk to Carter as Kimiko had instructed. She might hate that she was being made to marry anyone at all, but her mother did have good advice. She walked to the garden and sat at the Koi pond, missing her father and wishing she had a little more control over her life.

A short while later, Kimiko slid the screen door of the house open and called to Jillian.

“You have a visitor!” she announced with a wide smile. Jillian looked up and saw Reed walking toward her, fully dressed, she noted, and she lowered her eyes and scowled as her mother closed the door with a warning look.

He walked up to Jillian and stopped before her. “May I speak with you, please?” he asked hopefully.

She nodded and walked to the bench beneath the tree, overlooking the koi. He sat beside her and his voice was soft as he spoke. “Jillian, I owe you an apology you should probably never accept, but I’m going to give it to you anyway, and I want to share some things with you that might help you hurt less.”

She turned her head slightly toward him to indicate that she was listening, but she didn’t look at him.

“Okay, I know I deserve that. Actually, I deserve much worse, but I just had to come and try to make this right with you. The girl that you saw me with both of those times, her name is Daisy. She is a stripper and she was a friend of mine for a long time. Well, not really so much as friend as a bed companion. I realized when you left the hotel that I have been using her to make myself feel good and doing nothing at all that’s beneficial to her. I don’t love her. I’m never going to love her. We aren’t friends, we don’t hang out, we don’t have a relationship like that.

“I was just in it for the physical affection from a pretty girl, but that was selling her short, that was taking her for granted, using her, disrespecting her, and stealing away any chance she might have at real happiness with someone who might actually love her in ways that I never will. I realized how utterly selfish I’ve been over the time I’ve known her and I had to cut our ties and let her go. I couldn’t keep using her like I have been, and I will be honest with you, lately the only thing I want her around for… uh… this is going to be tough.” He ran his hand through his dark hair and the tousled locks fell into his eyes because he was looking down.

Jillian turned her gaze toward him finally, dumbfounded by the things he was saying to her. This did not sound anything like the man she had gotten to know over the last few weeks. Nothing at all like him. She watched him carefully, wondering what to believe.

“One thing you’re going to learn about me, I hope, is that I’m honest. I don’t always make the right decisions, but I am honest. Lying takes too much work. I can’t ever remember the lies, so I just stick with what I know is true.” He smiled at her. “In case you wondered.”

He shifted uncomfortably and took a deep breath. “This is pretty embarrassing, so just hear me out, please. Something happened to me after I went on that date with you. You sort of… I guess you sort of saturated my brain and my heart, and I just couldn’t get you out of my head. I normally wouldn’t see Daisy that often, but I was trying to get you off my mind and I was using her as a distraction, trying to focus on her, but it backfired terribly.”

He looked away from her as he spoke. He couldn’t bear to look her in the eye. “I slept with her the day after our date, and when we were together, all I could think about was you. That day, when I was with her, when I was…” he nodded at Jillian and Jillian closed her eyes for a moment.

“I get it,” she said quietly.

“When that was happening, all I could think of was you. I wanted you so much I wanted it to be you with me in that bed, and it was one of the most incredible experiences I’ve ever had; not because it was Daisy with me, but because I was imagining it was you with me… imagining that you wanted me as much as I wanted you. Well, I was mad as hell afterward that I had thought of you like that.

“You slapped me. You hated me. Why would I think of you that way? But then I couldn’t get you out of my mind again and I asked you to come over to the house because Carter told me if I didn’t ask you to marry me that I was going to lose everything; my family, my home, the business I was supposed to take over when he retires; all of it. So, I was up against a wall. Somehow, I had to figure out how to get a girl who hated me to marry me and I had one week to do it.

“I was so stressed out. So worried. I thought my whole life was over right then. Daisy had driven me home that morning and we were in the pool house. I went to take a shower and all I could think about was you. All I wanted was you. I just couldn’t get you off of my mind, it drove me crazy.

“I got out of the shower and tried to use Daisy to distract me, to get you off my mind. But suddenly there you were again, when I closed my eyes. I pretended it was you I was with and then you walked in on me. I thought that was the end of the universe, but I had to ask you to marry me.

“I had to ask you to take the chance on me, and you did. I was serious about it. I mean, I am serious about it, but then Anderson sent me off to Vegas for my bachelor party and he arranged for Daisy to be there. Every time she touched me, all I wanted to do was pretend it was you. I’m so addicted to the thought of you; it’s like I’ve inhaled you and nothing I can do will get you out of my system.

“I just can’t get over you. It’s why I was calling your name out when I was with her and you and Anderson walked in on us. I was pretending it was you beneath me, that it was you I was kissing. I needed you, and you hate me. That just became the closest I could get to you. She became my ‘Jillian Substitute’. I realized after you left that I was using her and it was the most unfair thing I could ever have done. I told her the truth and broke it off with her; a clean break.

“I gave her money to go start a new life so she doesn’t have to strip anymore and I told her I don’t want to see her again. I hope she finds someone someday who will really love her, but I told her it was never going to be me.”

He stopped and covered his face, then ran his hands through his hair. He was hoping that some of that made sense to Jillian, and he desperately hoped that he hadn’t come across as an obsessed creep.

“Does Anderson know that you started liking me?” Jillian asked quietly. She was absorbing all he said, but his honesty, his confession and his genuine interest in her had made a significant change in her heart, though she wasn’t sure she wanted him to know that yet.

“Yeah, I told him before the Vegas trip. He came to talk with me and asked me how I was feeling about you, asked if I was really serious about the marriage. He thought I might go off with Daisy and forget about you, but I told him how much I’ve been thinking about you and he was surprised.”

Jillian’s brow furrowed as she thought about the things that Anderson had said on the plane. “Would you say he’s really competitive with you?” she asked curiously, knowing the side of him that she had seen was extremely competitive and also very sneaky and conniving.

Anderson had arranged for Reed and Daisy to go to Vegas after Reed admitted to wanting her and Anderson had taken Jillian to Vegas with him on purpose, so that she would see Reed with Daisy and break the marriage off so he could ask her to marry him without looking like he was butting in on his brother’s girl.

It didn’t justify Reed having intercourse with Daisy while he was engaged to Jillian; she solidly felt  that never should have happened, but she could see that both of them wanted her, and they were both willing to do what it took to get her.

Her dark and sad world brightened slightly. She decided not to say anything to Reed just then about his brother trying to steal her away from him, as Reed seemed unaware of it.