Page 127 of The Billionaires

She keeps staring at the helmet without taking it.

With a sigh, I walk up to her, gently place the helmet on her tiny head, then strap it under her dainty chin.

Fuck. She smells like cherries and incense again, and I finally identify the flowery scent—roses.

She stares up at me, her lips parted. Lips that are like sirens singing their devilish songs. My breath speeds up, and heat moves through my body as some magnetic force draws me down toward her.

My lips are mere inches from hers when I realize she’s holding her breath like she’s afraid I might choke her, and her eyes are wide and filled with something suspiciously like panic.

Shit.

What am I doing?

I straighten abruptly and pointedly examine how she looks in the cursed helmet—as though that’s what I was doing all along.

Unfortunately, despite looking like an extra from Mad Max, she’s still unfathomably sexy.

She blinks up at me and touches her lips, as if on autopilot. Then she takes out her phone and uses the front camera to look herself over.

An annoyed huff escapes that tempting mouth of hers. “Anything else?” she deadpans. “Maybe I should be tarred and feathered before every walk, so the birds think I’m one of their own?”

“Actually, yes.” I pick up an air horn and thrust it into her hands. “Use this if you see so much as a shadow. It should scare the birds, and I’ve instructed security to come to your rescue if they hear it.”

I’ll come too, with a shotgun, but she doesn’t need to know that.

She shakes her head in exasperation, causing the spikes on her bird-deterrent helmet to jingle. “What else?”

“Don’t go near the lakes,” I say. “They have gators.”

She scoffs. “Unlike you, I’m a native Floridian.”

There. Much easier not to think about kissing that mouth when it spouts things like that. “How do you know I’m not a native?”

She winces. “If I told you I read up on you, would it boost your mastiff-sized ego?”

“No.” Yet the idea that she was interested in learning about me is appealing.

“All I know is you worked on Wall Street for most of your career,” she says. “Since that’s in New York, I figured you’re not a Florida man.”

“That may be for the best,” I say. “‘Florida man’ conjures up an image of someone getting a DUI on a lawnmower… and then trying to sell the officer meth during the arrest.”

She narrows her eyes. “Just like ‘New Yorker’ conjures up an image of a rude, miserable, loud, snobby workaholic.”

I scoff. “Rude? That’s just what outsiders call the efficient way New Yorkers speak. Miserable? Never heard that one. Loud? It’s a noisy city. Snobby? That’s just what people without taste say about people who have it. As to ‘workaholic’—that’s precisely what a lazy person would label someone who’s hardworking, driven, and ambitious.”

The latter I know from personal experience. Just because I work eighty hours a week doesn’t make it right for anyone to compare me to an addict. Hell, if the people around me were more competent, I would gladly not work so much.

“Right,” Lilly says snidely. “I forgot ‘argumentative.’”

She’s got the stones to call me argumentative? “Seems like some Floridians are like proverbial pots. Us New York kettles have a term for that: ‘putz.’”

“Isn’t that term usually applied to males?” she snaps.

I shrug. “Yes, but when the tiny shoe fits, exceptions can be made.”

Did she just stomp said tiny shoe?

“Anyway,” she says, and I can see she’s making an effort to stay civil. “If you’re done with the insults, I think Colossus and I will go for that walk now.”

---