Shopping for a CEO (Shopping for a Billionaire Series Book 7) (33 page)

“No,” I say fiercely. “
No
.” 

“It would have been better than what happened that day! What happened after. Do you have any idea,” he says, his voice going low and taut, like a tightrope between twelve years ago and now, “what it is like to wake up in a hospital with a hollow brother with shell-shocked eyes, an enraged father, and a nurse kindly holding your hand as you’re informed your mother died because of—” 

“No, no, Andrew, it wasn’t—”

“Because of
me
.”  

He said it. The ragged savagery of his voice feels like my heart has been clawed out of its chest by a bear and rests on the ground between us, beating.

Right alongside his.

I have stayed in my seat, looking up at him, respecting his space, but instinct makes me leap up and go to him. Touch him. He is impossibly hot and icily cold all at once, heat pouring off clammy skin.

“Your mother did not die because of you!”

He makes a keening sound and begins to pace. At least he’s not leaving. At least there’s that.

“Your mother died because of a freak, one-in-a-million accident that was so unfair.” 

“One that was
preventable
,” he spits out.

“How?
How
was it preventable? Your parents did everything they could. They tested you. No one knew you had the same allergy. Your mom and dad and you and Declan did everything right—”

“Even when you do everything right people still leave you. You of all people should understand that.”

I am
struck dumb
.

“When people pick me, their lives fall apart. They lose everyone they love,” Andrew continues, his voice soft and quiet, the unsophisticated tone of a teen. He drops into a chair and holds his head in his hands, elbows on his knees. The back of his neck is vulnerable. A tiny hint of sweat darkens the hairline, making the edge of his hair curl. It’s boyish. Childlike.

Remarkably innocent. I can see the teen he once was. The emergent man. If only I could unwind time. Time is the one thing I cannot fix. 

He lets out a long sigh, like the past is being pushed out, like memory being born and crossing from one life to the next. Andrew stands, the movement so abrupt my eyes flit from his neck to his waist to shoe laces, like a series of still images scattered across a cinema screen in rapid-fire sequence.

As I scramble to meet him, he turns away. His shoulders are squared, the fabric tight across the wide upper back. My eyes take in the white cotton cloth, how it hugs his ribs and waist, tucked in and rumpled, the flat lines of wrinkles at odd angles, as if the cloth forgot how to listen and behave.

And then he looks at me with eyes so wounded and ragged its as if they’ve been torn.

“Don’t pick me, Amanda. Don’t pick me.”

“What?” Suddenly, this conversation has nothing to do with the wedding. Not one bit. 

“You heard me. Don’t pick me.”

“I—” With numb legs, I move toward him. So many words fill my mind. I want to reach up and wipe the crease of worry from his brow. I want to heal those eyes, to reach back in time and cradle his soul to my heart and let it find my rhythm. I want to breathe for him, just long enough so he can rest. 

I want to make him know that my world will fall apart if I pick him, but not for the reasons he thinks.

And I’m ready to fall right along with it.

“Andrew, oh, Andrew, I’m falling for you and I don’t care about the wasps or the risks or—” 

He steps back and shakes his head, eyes clear in the way that can only come from a deep abyss of despair.

His voice is full of regret and longing. “I won’t
let
you pick me.”

And with that he turns, long, determined strides taking him down the hallway, out of my sight, and out of my heart.

Leaving me out of my mind.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“The problem with having so many women all working together on this wedding is that we are spending a ton of time together. Too much time. So much time that our cycles suddenly, painfully, align themselves,” I lie to Marie, who has just arrived at Amy’s apartment to get ready to caravan over to the party Marie scheduled. 

Remember how Marie tried to take over the bachelorette soirée and I found a fix?

Well. Here we go.

“Poor Shannon! My baby!” Marie descends on morose, aching Shannon with a level of motherly sympathy that triggers a massive guilt complex in me. I don’t like to lie. But if it fixes a problem... 

“I am an entire week early!” Shannon screams as we ply her with ice cream and salt-n-vinegar potato chips and ibuprofen and heating wraps filled with lavender and aerosolized Xanax.

(Kidding about that last one, but wouldn’t that be
awesome
if it existed?)

“Amy, Shannon, Carol and I all have our periods. Everyone started today. We’re like lemmings, only instead of jumping off cliffs, we’re using tampons,” I say to Marie, whose face is scrunched in sympathy, eyes impossibly framed by lashes that could only be created by a penis enlargement device maker. 

They’re
that
long.

“How could this happen?” Marie moans. “It seems so bizarre.” My mom is behind her, at the front door, and shoots me a look so skeptical she might as well rename herself Sherlock Holmes. Even Spritzy, dangling from her forearm, rolls his eyes. 

Chuckles makes a hiss of warning at Spritzy, who starts to quiver in his bag and hunkers down.

“Yeah,” my mom says. “Statistically impossible, in fact.”

Uh oh.

Never try to pull one over an on actuary. I hadn’t counted on my mother being part of a drinking sexfest.

She comes over to me, gives me a longer-than-usual hug, and whispers, “What are you all up to?” in my ear.

As I pull back I play the innocent, wide eyes and all. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I get a cocked eyebrow in return.

Huh. She looks just like me right now.

“See?” Marie crows as we sit around Amy’s apartment looking like a bunch of post-roller-derby players, curled into fetal positions with various cold and hot packs on our body parts, groaning in pain. “Finally, that stupid menopause comes in handy!” She glances at my mother and they share a look that makes me want to rip out my uterus and beat them with it.

“I can’t eat any of this!” Shannon cries out, then shoves another mouthful of caramel chunk ice cream between her teeth. “I’ll never fit into my wedding dress.” 

“That’s okay, dear,” Marie says with sympathy, patting her arm. “We never thought you could manage anyway, so I had the seamstress add some gussets for the inevitable.”

“WHAT?”

“I have not spent twenty-six years as your mother to not realize that you have the self control of Agnes at a yoga class for male underwear models.”

My mom clears her throat and asks, blushing, “You offer yoga classes for male underwear models?”

“No, but isn’t that a
great
idea?”

My mom nods. “I’d exercise more if that were an option.”

Marie just beams.

“I am going to stand in front of a thousand people in two days and look like a big, white whale next to a god in a kilt!” Shannon sobs. I’m impressed. She’s taking this acting thing way too far, but it seems to be fooling Marie. 

“A
billionaire
god,” Amy adds. 

“That’s not helpful!” Shannon snaps. She scrapes the bottom of her ice cream pint and pokes furiously with a spoon, as if viciously stabbing Ben and Jerry.

“Don’t be silly,” Marie soothes. “The photographer is an expert in Photoshop. You won’t look like a whale. I promise.”

“I don’t want to have my wedding photographs doctored!”

“Not doctored. More like....finessed.”

“That’s fakery!”

“That’s reality, Shannon,” Marie argues. “Fake is the new black.”

“What is that supposed to mean? That makes no sense!”

“Just eat your ice cream and wait for the pills to kick in, dear.” Marie and my mother sling their purses over their shoulders and start to walk out the door. 

“Where are you going?” Carol asks.

“To Shannon’s bachelorette party.”

“There is no party.”

Marie and my mom share an uneasy look. Marie taps one fingernail against her front teeth as she screws up some courage.

“Spit it out, Mom,” Carol says with a resigned sigh. “Whatever this is, it’s gonna be good.”

“Well, just because you all have uncooperative uterii doesn’t mean Pam and I need to miss out on all the fun!”

“Uncooperative Uterii sounds like the name of a garage band at Smith College,” Amy groans.

“You’re going to,” Shannon says slowly, her eyes still closed, head slung up against the back of the couch, “have my bachelorette party without
me
?” 

“If you insist, sweetie!” Marie chirps. She and my mom high tail it for the door. “We’ll do a blow job in your honor!”

“A what?”

“It’s a drink. A shot. Don’t worry. She’s not really...they’re not really, you know....” My mother sputters more than a lawn mower warming up. 

“Although, Pam isn’t married. She can whore it up all she wants.”

The words
whore
and
my mother
should never, ever be in the same sentence.

My mom just winks at me. Winks!

And with that, they’re off, Spritzy as their mascot. Mom has a letter from her doctor that sort of certifies Spritzy as a service dog. Not really, but the letterhead shuts people up fairly quickly. Mom’s anxiety over her pain from the fibromyalgia means having Spritzy helps. 

Not sure how having Spritzy at a bachelorette party is going to work, but...

Carol’s phone buzzes with a text. She reads it and makes a sound of disbelief.

“Everything okay with Jeffrey and Tyler?” Shannon asks, her brow creased with concern.

“What? That? Oh, yeah. Dad’s keeping them overnight. Taking them out to their favorite restaurant and spoiling them rotten.”

“You gave poor Jason earplugs for Chuck E. Cheese, right?” I ask.

Carol smiles and looks just like Marie. “We gave him a twelve pack for Christmas this year.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

“
Josh
just sent me a text asking where the party is.”

“Josh? Why would Josh think he’s been invited to my bachelorette party?” Shannon asks.

“Let me find out.” Carol taps her screen a few times and we wait.

And wait.

Bzzzzz.

She reads the text aloud:

“Your mother invited me.”

Jaws drop in disbelief.

“He has a penis! He can’t come to my party!”

“He likes the same eye candy.”

“Besides, I’m pretty sure Andrew invited him to Declan’s bachelor party.”

“And there will be plenty of penises at your bachelorette party,” Carol groans.  

“Not Josh’s penis! Stripper penii!”

“Tell him where Mom and Pam are,” Shannon says with a gleam in her eye. She looks at Carol and adds a mopey sigh.  

Carol taps on her screen. “Done. Josh says he’ll save some stripper belly lint for us to keep as a memento.”

“Ewww,” I say, recoiling.

Amy has been standing by the front door, looking outside. She turns around, slowly pulling her long, auburn curls out of the crooked ponytail she made.

“They’re gone. It’s safe.”

“Whew!” Shannon exclaims. “I thought I was going to have to eat the entire pint and get sick before they left.”

“That whole ‘I’m going to look like a whale in my dress’ act was great! You really sold it, Shannon,” I tell her. 

“I wasn’t joking,” Shannon says weakly.

Carol looks at us in confusion as Amy starts finger-combing her hair and Shannon grabs a small gym bag and heads for the bathroom.

“What are you doing?”

The three of us stop our bustling around. Amy gets an uneasy look, her eyes floating to me. Clearly, I’m the one who is going to have to explain what just happened.

“We, um...there actually
is
a bachelorette party.”

“I know! Mom booked it behind your and Shannon’s back and now...oh....” She’s looking at us critically, as if she’s processing nanosecond by nanosecond what we’re up to.

We’re silent as I struggle to figure out how to say this.

“We faked Mom out,” Amy says bluntly. “We all pretended to get our periods and cancel the bachelorette party because we knew Mom would crash it.”

The brownie in Carol’s hand breaks in half. Chuckles is in her lap and it falls on his head. He sniffs it like it’s a live hand grenade, then scurries off. 

“You
what
?” 

“It was easy for Amanda to pretend she was in pain,” Amy says, coming over to me and rubbing my back compassionately. “She’s in break-up mode. That’s worse than period mode.”

I nod.

Shannon comes back into the room wearing a glittery outfit clearly designed for pub crawling fun. It’s a pale purple, with a shiny silver sheen, and a cowl neckline. Retro ’70s.

“That just means Amanda can drink alcohol out of a man’s navel and not worry about remembering his name when she wakes up next to him in the morning,” she says with a wink. 

“But he won’t know to get me a breve latte,” I joke, mortified to find that real tears are threatening my eyelids as I say the words.

“Wait. Hold on. Back up,” Carol insists. “This is all...you were just
pretending
you all got your periods to get Mom to go off on a snipe hunt? Isn’t that really cruel?”

“A half-naked man stripper snipe hunt,” Amy adds.

Carol wavers. “That’s not so bad, I guess.”

“Amy probably has something you can borrow to wear,” Shannon says to her older sister. “I’m sorry we didn’t tell you so you could prepare,” Shannon adds nervously, her words coming out like air from a tire pump. “But you’re the worst liar, Carol, and—”

“Hey! I am not! I’m a very good liar. You try eloping with Todd and being married to that jackass and not learn how to lie.”

“But you can’t lie to Daddy. And he can’t lie to Mom. We had to limit the circle of knowledge.” Shannon fluffs her hair with Amy’s hair pick, but because Shannon has hair with the consistency of Easter basket grass and the waviness of a straight edge, she just looks like she’s picking through brown corn silk.