Page 40 of The Billionaires

He holds the door for me on the way out and when we get to the limo—proving you can be rude and a gentleman in one infuriating package.

We sit opposite each other, and he offers me a drink.

Wow, really playing up the gentleman bit.

“Thanks,” I say pointedly when he hands it to me, so that maybe he’ll add the word to his vocabulary at some point.

We sip our drinks in awkward silence. Then he says, “What kind of dog are you?”

I nearly choke on my champagne. “What?” Is this a roundabout way of him calling me a bitch?

He sighs, like my reaction is super unreasonable. “If we were dogs instead of humans, what breed would you be?”

“Why?” I ask—which is only the tip of the iceberg as far as my questions go.

“It’s just a get-to-know-each-other question.”

I cock my head. “You sure?”

He pulls out his phone and shows me the screen. “I looked up a few online.”

He prepped for this? I scan the list of questions. Wow. The one he chose wasn’t actually the worst one. There are pearls like: “If you were invisible, who would you snoop on?” and “What smell do you consider the worst?”

I blow out a breath in exasperation. “If I had to play this stupid game, I guess I’d pick a Chihuahua.”

He nods approvingly. “Yappy, tiny, and mean—that tracks.”

Will I break a clause in our contract if I throw this champagne in his face? “I chose a Chihuahua because of the Chihuahuan Desert, home to the Mexican fire-barrel and Arizona rainbow cactuses.”

He sips his drink. “It’s actually cacti, not cactuses.”

My hackles rise. Or is it hackli? Dyslexia or not, I know this one. “You’ll find both spellings in the dictionary, so why have something be an exception when it doesn’t need to be?”

In general, if the English language were more regular, I’d have an easier time reading.

Lucius glares at me. “What do you mean, ‘exception?’ Cactus is of Latin origin and has an ‘us’ at the end. It’s stimulus and stimuli, not stimuluses. Bacillus and bacilli, not bacilluses. Locus and loci, not locuses.”

I roll my eyes. “Is grammar nazi the plural of ‘grammar nazus?’”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” he says.

“Neither does cacti.”

He sighs. “Fine. You want the next question?”

“No. You never said what kind of a dog you are.” Probably a pit bull, or some other breed famous for bad temperament.

“Rottweiler,” he says proudly.

Huh. I was close. “Untrainable and bad-tempered? That totally tracks.”

“Those are misconceptions,” he says. “Rottweilers have served humans for two thousand years. They were used in Ancient Rome.”

I scoff. “How about I choose the next get-to-know-you question?”

He starts to hand me his phone, but I shake my head. “A normal question.”

He arches an eyebrow. “Normal? You? Sure. What is it?”

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