The Ultimate Billionaire Romance

I've had a secret crush on a billionaire for two years, but tonight I'm at his sister's wedding pretending to be his girlfriend.

The party continues around me—laughing, dancing, celebrating—while I try to look normal.

I find my way back to where I left Deanne.

She's been looking for me, apparently, because she appears at my elbow within seconds, already leaning.

Her earlier energy has burned down to embers.

I sit. She curls against me without asking.

First her head on my shoulder, then her whole weight settling against my side as the minutes pass. 

By the time the cake is cut, she's asleep, her head on my chest, one hand still loosely holding a blue crayon. 

The napkin drawings are spread around us like fallen leaves—the piano, my hands, Reid in the doorway, the three of us together.

I sit very still, afraid to move and wake her.

Her weight against me feels both foreign and familiar—I'm not a mother, but holding Deanne feels like something I've always known how to do. 

Her braids tickle my chin, and I can smell the peach shampoo Reid buys because she picked it out herself.

I try to file this feeling away, as I do with everything else, into neat categories in my mind where emotions go to be processed later.

But this one won't fit anywhere. It's too big, too much. It spills over the edges of whatever box I try to put it in.

I think about Tuesday afternoons in Reid's music room.

The blue mug that's become mine without either of us discussing it. 

Deanne's crayon drawings were left on the piano bench.

The way Reid appears in the doorway barefoot, already halfway back to being himself.

I can't move without waking Deanne, so I sit and feel everything I've been trying not to feel for months.

I don't manage it this time. I don't file it away. I just let it wash over me like a wave I'm too tired to swim against.

I'm still sitting there, Deanne's weight warm against my chest, when the music between songs stops.

One of those brief silences that seems louder than the noise before it.

In that pause, the main door opens.

She walks in like someone who knows exactly where she belongs.

I don't know who she is.

But I watch her scan the space with calm, specific focus—past the dancing couples, past the cake table, past the older relatives with champagne flutes—until she finds Reid.

And I watch Reid find her.

It's a small thing. Just a shift in his posture, a tightening along his jaw. The kind of thing most people would miss. I don't miss it.

She starts toward him.

Reid crosses the room first. Not rushing, not hesitating.

Moving with the same deliberate control he brings to everything.

His hand finds the small of my back—warm, present, different from the logistics touches earlier in the evening.

His jaw is tight. He leans slightly toward me,

“She’s going to ask if we’re really together,” he growls, low enough that only I can hear.

“Do you want me to lie, or finally tell the truth?”