Page 15 of The Billionaire's Cinderella

I grab a cup of steaming English breakfast, park myself in Aunt Gilda’s ruthlessly neat office, shut the door and give Bellamy a call. Now is a good time for me to catch her before her day really gets going. As an excellent best friend, it’s her job to produce a few words of wisdom to snap me out of my growing obsession with a man I’ll never see again.

“Hey,” she says. “Where the hell have you been? I thought for sure you’d be blowing up my phone and demanding to know what happened the other night.”

“I’ve got my own issues,” I say. “I needed time to process.”

“Process what?” she demands with the keen nosiness you’d expect from a best friend.

“I met someone at Bemelmans. Right after you and I spoke. We bonded over your birthday cake.”

“That was my cake,” she says with horrified delight. Neither one of us is prone to wild and impromptu sexual adventures, so this is not the sort of conversation we have all the time. “So who was he? What’s he like?”

I hesitate, then decide to spill the entire can of beans.

“You tell me,” I finally say. “It was Ryker Black. Your beloved’s brother.”

Long silence while this information sinks in.

“What?” she cries in a scandalized whisper. “Are you telling me you hooked up with Ryker Black?”

I glanced around at the door, making sure it’s still firmly closed.

“Hooking up is such a tacky term.”

We burst into joint laughter and try to minimize our girlish squeals. We’re not at a junior high sleepover, after all. But it sure feels like it.

“How was it?” she asks.

“About like your night was, I’m guessing.”

“Is that right?” I hear the smirk in her voice, confirming my suspicion that the sexual prowess of men in the Black family is a genetic gift. “Are you seeing each other again?”

“Of course not,” I say quickly, eager to nip this kind of foolishness in the bud. It would be far too easy to let my simmering interest in Ryker blossom into unmanageable proportions.

“Why do you say it like that?” She sounds disappointed. “Did he escort you from the premises when it was over?”

“No. I left, actually. I stayed until, I don’t know, midnight or so. Then he fell asleep, I wrote him a little note and I left.”

The memory of me skulking out in the middle of the night makes me feel glum. I didn’t want to leave, but I couldn’t figure out how to stay. Why risk an awkward and painful morning scene after such a glorious night? Why give him the chance to cold-shoulder me after showing me such tenderness? Isn’t it better to sneak out with the cherished memory than to stick around long enough for that memory to get tarnished in the stark light of day?

“Yeah, but it went well, right? What if he wanted to see you again?” Bellamy asks.

Leave it to my best friend to immediately put her thumb on the niggling little doubt that’s been bothering me for the last forty-eight hours. What if he did like me as much as I liked him? Now I’ll never know, will I?

That’s what part of me thinks, anyway.

Another, smarter, part of me is determined to stick to my script and inject some logic into the proceedings.

“It doesn’t matter if he did,” I tell her. “You know my policy on dating right now. Especially dating wealthy men who are likely to look down their noses at me.”

“What, you mean going out with some guy you met online twice a month or so? Your policy is stupid. How about just making it a policy not to date jerks?”

“Since men rarely show up displaying scarlet Js on their foreheads, I choose to eliminate entire categories of high-risk individuals. That’s a nice, safe policy. And in keeping with that policy, I left in the middle of the night. Which served the double purpose of preventing any awkward scenes in the morning and stopping me from getting too attached to the wrong guy.”

“There’s a lot of that going around,” she says, sounding as ambivalent as I feel. “Leaving in the middle of the night.”

“I mean, that’s what you do with one-night stands when you meet a guy at a bar, right?”

“You’re asking me?”

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