Page 231 of The Billionaires

“Want to see my studios?” Adrian asks, hovering his finger over the button for the second-highest floor. “Or should we go straight to the living quarters?” He moves his finger to the penthouse button.

“You’re the starved one,” I say. “You decide.”

He presses the button for the studios—plural—and the elevator whooshes there with incredible speed.

“This is where I paint,” Adrian says when we exit and turn a corner.

Yep. The giant loft is littered with brushes, easels, and other miscellaneous items I don’t know the names of. An air purifier hums as it struggles to clean the air, but you can still smell paints, glue, and some other chemicals that must be part of the painting process.

In the next room is where he sculpts.

The one after that looks like a garage where a metal band practices.

“Can you play that?” I gesture at the bass guitar.

With a crooked smile, Adrian picks up the guitar and starts playing. It sounds good to my unfamiliar-with-this-music ears—like something from a Metallica album.

Miss Miller thinks this is exactly the kind of music that demons would enjoy as they frolic around in hell.

The next room is filled with classical musical instruments, of which I recognize the piano, the cello, the violin, and the oboe.

At my prompting, Adrian plays a tune on each one—and if it were possible to have an orgasm from being impressed, I’m pretty much there now.

“What’s back there?” I ask, pointing at an entrance we passed without him showing it to me.

“That’s my private gallery,” Adrian says and gestures for me to continue on a path that doesn’t seem to include said gallery.

I narrow my eyes at him. “Are you a taxidermist too?”

“What?” He glances at Leo as though for answers.

I do my best to keep a straight face. “Do you keep stuffed women in the gallery? Perhaps the other dopes you lured here under the pretext of becoming your wife?”

Adrian chuckles humorlessly. “It’s just a private gallery. Some of the pieces there are not meant to be seen by anyone but me. That is all.”

“Right, right, right. But didn’t Bluebeard also have a secret room the new wife wasn’t supposed to enter?”

He sighs. “You agree to this being covered by the NDA agreement in the secret contract that you’re going to sign?”

I nod eagerly.

“Turn off your phone,” he orders.

“Hmm. If this were a Bluebeard situation, wouldn’t he have me do that too?”

He rolls his eyes. “I think Bluebeard would sneak you into his building without alerting security.”

I turn off my phone and follow as he leads me in.

The moment we clear the door, I gasp—but not because the room is full of tubs of blood, with the murdered corpses of his six prior wives hanging on hooks, as per the Bluebeard story. (Side note: wouldn’t wife number seven have smelled the corpses?) No, my gasp is due to the works of art, each more remarkable than the last.

“They’re not all mine,” Adrian says when he catches me gaping at a suit of armor on display. “Some are pieces I got at auctions—for future inspiration.”

“And that?” I point at a pyramid-shaped cloth structure attached to the ceiling.

“A parachute based on the design by Leonardo da Vinci,” he says proudly. “It’s made out of materials that were available in that day, and it actually works.”

“Wow. Are you a fan of his because he was also a polymath?”

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