Page 32 of The Billionaire's Beauty

“Sure, sure. I’ll be at the nursery for a few hours. I may get a massage for my back. But I’ll be home after that.”

“Good deal. Love you.”

I hang up and discover Griffin watching me thoughtfully.

“My father would lose his mind over your garden,” I tell him. “He’d probably ask for some rose cuttings to take back home with him for his garden.”

“Does he come to town often? I don’t recall seeing him at the office.”

“Every few months or so,” I say.

“When is he due again? Anytime soon?”

“Ah, no,” I say, surprised by his interest. He almost sounds like he wants to meet my father. If so, it would be an unprecedented occurrence for this woman whose previous boyfriends made a habit of catching the flu and disappearing for days at a time every time the topic of parents came up. “I’ll be seeing him soon when I move.”

Griffin nods, his jaw tightening.

My mind shifts to my pending relocation, casting a shadow over the sunny day. I honestly don’t know what I’m doing here with Griffin other than setting myself up for enormous heartache one way or the other. Either he pulls the plug on me when his short relationship attention span inevitably shifts to the next pretty face that catches his eye, or the plug gets pulled on both of us when I relocate for law school.

The one thing I can’t see happening, no matter how hard I squint my mind’s eye?

Mepulling the plug for any reason.

“I thought I’d show you around,” he says, saving me from my gloomy thoughts. “You probably didn’t get much of a chance to see things yesterday when we were setting up for the party.”

“I didn’t,” I say, brightening.

“Eat up, then.”

We finish our breakfast, then make a quick stop upstairs to change into walking shoes. As we start back down the sweeping staircase, it dawns on me that there’s a whole chunk of the house off in the other direction that he doesn’t seem inclined to show me.

“What’s down there?” I ask, pointing.

He hesitates, his expression sour. “That’s the, ah, west wing.”

“Okay,” I say, not liking the look on his face. At all. “Did someone commit a triple homicide down there, or…?”

His expression eases, but not by much. “I don’t go down there.” Another long pause. “My mother had her rooms down there. Before she, ah, left. A lot of, ah, bad memories.”

“Oh,” I say, feeling terrible for bringing up this nasty reminder of his painful past. Everyone at the office knows the story of how his mother walked out when Griffin and his brothers were little, leaving their wealthy father to marry his even wealthier best friend just as his father ran into financial difficulties. The tabloids gleefully reported on the story back in the day. I know a lot of the fine details because I, of course, researched Griffin the first chance I had when I started working for him last year. “You know what you should do, right? Do vacation rentals down there. Think of all the interest you’d get if you threw in a free breakfast and Wi-Fi.”

This elicits a sharp bark of laughter from him, which is exactly what I had in mind. I’m laughing along with him when he takes my face in his hands and kisses me long and hard.

Once again, he leaves me breathless. When he pulls back and I catch a glimpse of those bright blue eyes, I find myself once again tiptoeing right up to the edge of falling in love and peering over into the other side.

“We’re together now. All summer. Until you leave for school. Okay?”

It takes everything inside me not to grin and squeal like I did back in high school when the debate captain tucked a note in my hand after practice.

“That sounds okay to me. Unless…” I furrow my brow. “Did you want to take a vote?”

We burst into joint laughter, followed by another round of kissing. Then he takes my hand and tugs me behind him down the stairs. The foyer spins off in multiple directions. He takes me down a hallway that was closed off last night before stopping at a shut door.

“Let’s start here,” he says. “You’ll love this.”

“Hang on,” I say as a thrilling thought hits me. “You don’t have a library, do you? Isn’t that a requirement in a mansion like this?”

“No. Sorry. Billiards room.” He snaps his fingers, his expression falling. “That’s right. You like to read a lot, don’t you? You always have a romance novel on your desk.”

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