Page 58 of Pucking Billionaire

Her eyes widen. “All of them?”

“Yes.”

She thoughtfully bites into the healthiest item on her plate: a blueberry tart. “You spent a fortune just to talk to me.”

I nod.

“I guess I could’ve avoided this if I hadn’t dodged your calls,” she says after a pause.

“True, but you have the right not to talk to me. I’m in the wrong… but I appreciate you saying that.”

She cocks her head. “So, back to the information you bribed me with?”

“What about it?” I look at our non-empty plates.

“Can you tell me what it is? I’ll stick around here until the end of breakfast. I promise.”

I tsk-tsk. “You’d make a bad hockey strategist.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” She tosses a tiny muffin at me, which I catch and set back on her plate before putting on my best poker face—something I do during critical game moments.

“If you want the info early, you’ll have to go on an excursion with me,” I say.

She purses her lips and looks thoughtful. Meanwhile, her drink comes, and she pushes it toward me.

I take a tiny sip and can’t help but flinch.

“What?” she demands.

“I think they forgot to add coffee to all that sugar.” I take a gulp of tomato juice to get the treacle taste out of my mouth. “But hey, at least it wasn’t even remotely bitter.”

She samples the drink and sighs. “If you ask me, this needs another spoonful of sugar. What’s the excursion?”

I shrug. “Anything involving nature. You pick.”

She arches an eyebrow.

All right. The best way for me to make up for my invasion of her privacy is to share something embarrassing about myself. “They didn’t have any nature documentaries on the TV in my room, and I need my nature fix.”

She cocks her head. “You like nature shows?”

“Love them.”

I prepare for the onslaught of the usual jokes, but she just smiles approvingly. “You’d probably enjoy visiting my mansion.”

“On account of the tortoises?”

She purses her lips. “Your dossier on me is that thorough?”

I shake my head. “I knew about Donatello and April before we met. Theodore showed them to me.”

“Oh. You guys hung out?” Is that a hint of jealousy in her voice?

“We didn’t hang out that much, but when he heard about my fondness for all things nature, he had me visit his sanctuary, and I had a nice chat with Dr. Kelpcon.” Or it was nice until it started to seem like she wanted to use me for some sort of human breeding experiment… involving the two of us. Oh, and what made that last bit worse was that her flirtations coincided with the moment I noticed the white buttons on her lab coat.

Sophia waggles her eyebrows. “Did Dr. Kelpcon tell you all about Donatello’s sexual prowess?”

I grin. “She did, but she also shared some fun facts I didn’t previously know, like how those tortoises have lungs on their back.”

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