The Billionaire's Wife (19 page)

That was pretty rich coming from a
guy who blew all his credit, capital, and concrete assets on bad business
ventures and had to sell his own daughter into modern-day sexual-slavery to
save his own ass, but I stayed silent. He was never going to change, and I
didn't need to fight with him. Besides, as much as I hated to admit it, things
could have gone a lot worse than they had. I liked Anton. And I didn't really mind
being married to him so much. There were worse things to be.

"I guess I'd better get some
coffee started," I said.

He moved aside for me and I brushed
past him and descended the stairs.

*

I found ten texts and two
voicemails from Sadie warning me of my parents' impending arrival. Clearly I
needed to glue my phone to my forehead so I didn't miss anything important.

I wanted to kick myself. I should
have been able to warn Anton. We could have turned off all the lights and hid
behind the couch and pretended we weren't at home. As it was, my mother whirled
into the breakfast nook at nine, in high dudgeon. Anton had left the house half
an hour earlier, pausing only to give me a cursory, distant kiss on the
forehead. He didn't even look me in the eye before he drifted out the front
door. My mother thought it rude of him to leave without greeting his
houseguests.

"You are kind of
unexpected," I told her. "He has things to do that don't involve you.
Or me. Like running a financial empire."

"Felicia," my mother said,
plopping herself down in the chair across from mine at the breakfast table,
"why on earth did you marry a rich man? You are never going to be the
first the first thing in his life. He is always going to be a businessman first
and a husband second. Sometimes third or fourth! What
were
you
thinking?"

I wanted to strangle her. Or hug
her. I couldn't tell which.

"I was thinking, wow, he's
really hot and rich and wants to marry me, let's do this," I said, which
was kind of half the truth. He was really hot. I loved fucking him. On the
other hand, now that I had some coffee in me and the damage from last night was
becoming apparent, I hoped I had satsified him for at least a week. My pussy
was raw and aching, and I kept shifting uncomfortably in my chair.

My mother, thankfully, didn't seem
to notice. "Well, we are going to his office and retrieving him after I've
had breakfast."

I blinked at her. "What?"

"We're going to go pick out
wedding cakes and inivitations today. And we'll need to secure a venue."
She sighed, as though this were a great burden and not something she had
decided to do without even asking me. "It's going to be a lot of work.
You'll both need to pick a wedding date, too."

I stared. She sipped her coffee and
sighed. "Why do we have to do it this morning?" I asked her.
"Can't it wait? Anton and I haven't even been married for forty-eight
hours yet. Can't we... you know, ease into it?"

"That is not my problem,"
my mother told me. "My problem is your wedding, and I will not sit idly by
while your husband blows you off like mine did."

Not for the first time, I thought
that there was probably a reason my father blew her off, but I kept my mouth
shut. Nothing was a sorer subject with my mother. She could talk about how
terrible a husband my father was for hours on end if she really wanted to—my
therapist had told me that it was highly inappropriate that she had done just
that to me on several occasions—but the second someone on the outside of their
relationship said anything she would burst into tears. It was maddening.

"He's not blowing me
off," I said. "Believe me, he pays me plenty of attention."

She gave me a cool eye. "Not
enough attention to give you a proper wedding," she said. "If he
truly cared about you, he would have wanted to meet your family, given you two
a proper start in life."

He doesn't care about me,
I
thought.
He doesn't
want
to care about me. He just wants a companion.
A roommate fuckbuddy.
It didn't really matter how much he liked to fuck me
if he didn't actually like me, did it? And I
had
missed out on the
wedding of my dreams. Which wasn't much, but I still wanted that princess
dress.

And if he was angry with us barging
in? Then maybe he'd talk some sense into my mother. If he could get my mother
out of this absolutely insane, irritating obsession with seeing me married in a
ceremony, it would be worth it to bug him this morning. Ten minutes of hassle
and a possible spanking versus two months of stress and parental hovering? I
couldn't imagine Anton putting up with that sort of shit. I was a slave to my
family, and he was the opposite. Maybe I could get something out of this
marriage besides a sore cooch.

"Fine, we can go see
him," I said.

"I wasn't asking your
permission, dear," my mother said. "And we should leave as soon as
I've had some toast. I have an appointment this afternoon that I must
keep."

I pressed my lips together and said
nothing.

*

To say that Anton was surprised by
his newly-minted wife and mother-in-law showing up at his office was an
understatement. Even as we walked in the door, I felt him shut down from across
the room. I wished I'd been able to get ahold of Sadie, but she wasn't
answering her phone and I knew she'd been at Anton's office earlier this
morning to discuss her employment. Maybe Anton had eaten her.

His sparse office, perfectly
appointed for a rich man without attachments, seemed far too spare to me when I
walked into it. Where before I had been impressed by its restraint, looking at
it now I saw the repression that boiled over whenever Anton touched me. He was
pushing a lot of things down, keeping them deep inside, and every refined,
understated piece of furniture in the office gave me the willies, like I was
looking at the pit of a long-dormant volcano and seeing the swell of the ground
as something molten hot underneath struggled to come to the surface.

"Good morning, Anton," my
mother said, striding toward his desk. "We have several appointments that
require your attention this morning."

"Oh?" he said. "Do
you?" His eyes shifted to mine and I tried to look contrite, mouthing
sorry
to him over my mother's shoulder. He raised a brow at me, but left it at that.

"Yes, wedding cake, venue,
date, and invitations need to be sorted out this morning."

"That's a tall order. I do
have a lot of work to do..."

"Yes, well, be that as it
may," my mother cut in, "you are a married man now and have
responsibilities."

He grew very still.

Oh, shit.

"Ma'am, I assure you I know my
responsibilities and obligations," he said, his voice quiet.

"Then you will be able to
spare a morning for wedding planning," my mother said. "I'll not have
my little girl play mistress to a man married to a job."

For a long moment Anton sat in his
chair, very still. Then he stood abruptly and closed his thin laptop.
"Very well," he said, sending a shock through me, "I will
accompany you. But we must be done by lunch. There are many important things I
must attend to here."

"My daughter
is
important," my mother said, and I wanted to melt into the floor and
disappear. Why had I thought this was a good idea? And why wasn't Anton
stopping
her?

Anton rounded his desk, not even
glancing at me, the faint smile I had come to think of as Buddha-like plastered
over his face and in a flash I realized he only wore that face when he was
feeling something very strongly but desperately wanted to keep it hidden. The
thought rocked me and I stared as he held his arm out to my mother.
"Please, let us go, Mrs. Dare. There is much work to be done."

My mother seemed slightly taken
aback by his acquiescence, then drew herself up to her full height—not very
high, admittedly—and gave him a regal nod. "Thank you, Anton." And
she looped her hand around his arm and let him escort her to the door.

I trailed behind them, suddenly
feeling like a third wheel. At least it gave me a chance to watch Anton when
the full force of his attention wasn't riveted on me.

His dark head tilted and leaned
toward my mother, that Zen-master smile softening his gaze, and yet behind it I
saw emptiness, as though he were wearing a mask made of his own face. I had
seen that mask drop not once, but several times, and behind it I knew lurked a
man full of something painful and dark. Seeing him adopt his persona so
smoothly—I knew he must have had great practice at it. Years. Decades.
Somewhere along the line he had decided that it was better to hide than to be
forthright. Perhaps that was true in the world of business, but now I was bound
to him, and I wished I could lift the mask away and see the man underneath. The
glimpses I'd seen weren't enough for me.

As I observed him with my mother,
all courtesy and dead inside, my heart twisted in my chest, a little ache born
of pure human empathy, and a little jealousy, too. If I could hide like that...
I probably wouldn't have had to get married in the first place, for a start.
And yet we'd both arrived at the same place despite our opposite natures.

I chewed my lip and shadowed them
to the car, my mother chattering away and Anton nodding politely. As he handed
her inside, his eyes caught mine.

For a brief moment, I saw a fire in
him as we stared at each other, a warning, a feeling, a passion flaring up, and
my breath caught.

Then he broke away and the moment
was gone. "Yes, of course, Mrs. Dare," he said formally as he slid
into the car after my mother, in response to something I couldn't hear.

Thoughtful, I let the driver guide
me into the front seat, and we were off.

*

Twenty minutes later I wished I had
a gun. I didn't know what I was going to shoot, but it was going to be
something, and it was going to be dramatic. All over the news. Billionaire
Bridezilla Busts Boutique, Caps Cake. I'd be the lead-in on the late night talk
shows for months. It would be grand.

"Do you think we should do the
boxes or the plaques?" my mother was asking my husband. "The boxes
are lovely, make me think of a little gift, but the plaques are more
commemorative."

"I think you are right,"
Anton said noncommitally. In the ten minutes we'd been in the shop, my mother
had gone through at least twenty different wedding invitation designs, cooing
over each of them as if they were her grandchildren. I felt like I was on a
Real Housewives episode. There hadn't been Real Housewives when I was a little
girl, but it was exactly like my childhood.

And I was thirteen again, awkwardly
standing in the background while my mother whirlwinded her way through
thousands of dollars,
oohing
and
aahing
over the most ridiculous
things. No one needed a five thousand dollar picnic basket, and yet we owned
two. And I just let her dress me up like a doll all those years, even when I
was most comfortable in a t-shirt and jeans. And sneakers. I liked my Nikes. And
yet she'd taken me shoe shopping once a month, simply because no girl could
possibly go longer than a month without buying a set of ridiculous heels.

I hate shopping. I wished,
suddenly, that I had turned Anton down. Nothing was worse than being held captive
to my mother's acquisitive whims. If I'd known it was all going to end in
frilly-boxed wedding invitations, I would have said no and moved out of the
country.

I should probably still do that.

"Felicia, dear, you still
haven't told me your wedding colors."

I started. I'd been too lost in
thought and stuck in the past to realize that my mother had been speaking to
me.

"What? Oh. I don't know."

She gave an exasperated sigh.
"You don't know? You don't have a favorite color? Just pick your favorite
color and we'll decide what others will go with it."

God, this was all so inane.
Pressing my lips together, I racked my brain. "Orange?" I said at
last.

My mother turned and looked at me.
Then she closed her eyes and appeared to collect herself. "Orange?"
she said at last.

"I like orange roses," I
said defensively.

"Not yellow? Or white or
red?" she asked hopefully. "Even purple... there are some lovely
purple-hued roses..."

I turned to Anton, mutely pleading
with him for help, but he simply stared back at me. His gaze was watchful.
Curious. He was waiting to see what I would do.

Thanks, douche,
I thought.
Way
to stick up for your wife.

My therapist had told me to set
boundaries and stick to them, and I was determined to do it. "No, I said
orange," I told my mother.

"Nothing goes with
orange," she said. "Why not pink?"

"I like orange."

Her lips thinned and she seemed to
be sizing me up. "I think cream would work best. Cream with a tinge of
pink. Orange is too gauche for a wedding, and cream with a tinge of pink is
almost orange."

Almost orange is not orange!
I
wanted to scream. I didn't even care about colors, but now I wanted orange
because I wanted my orange roses, goddammit, and why did I care so much now? It
didn't even matter because I was
already fucking married.

She was just going to push and push
and get her way. I'd already had a wedding. And, I realized, it had at least
been
my
wedding. I'd walked down that aisle with a vibrating bullet
against my clit and my husband-to-be bringing me to climax, and while no little
girl had ever dreamed of a wedding like that, it had been between Anton and me,
and that was what had mattered. It was all kinds of fucked up, but it was
my
fucked up. This was for my mom, and she had cancer for God's sake. Why was
I even thinking of fighting with her?