Page 84 of The Billionaires

Lucius sighs. “Will you ladies excuse me for a second? I want to have a word with Aleksy.”

Pearl narrows her eyes. “Why? I assure you, my sugar has been between seventy and ninety. My blood pressure is that of an athlete. No back pain still, without pills. Even my bow?—”

“I’d like to hear all this from Aleksy,” Lucius says firmly, standing up.

“Doesn’t trust me,” Pearl whispers to me so loudly that he can definitely hear.

Before Lucius can exit the room, my phone rings.

I show Pearl my phone screen. “See? That’s my friend and your namesake calling.” I decline the call and put my phone on the coffee table. “I’ll call her back later.”

Lucius shakes his head, the way he does every time he spots my not-smart-phone, and then goes off to talk to Aleksy.

As soon as he’s gone, Pearl leans toward me and says in a low voice, “I’m glad you didn’t take that call.”

“Oh?”

Pearl’s gaze locks with mine. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about without my grandson present.”

My pulse speeds up. “Oh, sure. What is it?”

She hesitates for a second. “Lucius… he can be a little prickly.”

I almost burst out laughing. “A little prickly?”

She sighs. “Is he very prickly?”

I smile sheepishly. “Well, maybe not very. At least not to me.”

“Good,” she says softly. “I was worried. He seems to care a lot about you.”

More like he’s a great actor. “We’re fine.”

“You don’t seem to mean that,” she says, cocking her head.

Damn it. Am I messing up the whole fartlek? “I guess…” I take a breath and search for something to say that would ring true to her. “Sometimes, I get the sense that he holds back. Like he’s wary of getting close.”

Actually, that’s true, period. Not that I can blame him, given the fakeness of our relationship. I hold back myself because that’s just logical.

She nods. “He is—wary, that is. I hope you can be patient with him. He may be rich now, but he hasn’t had an easy life. First, his useless father left him and my daughter. Then she turned out to be a less-than-ideal mother, as much as it saddens me to say it.” She lets out a heavy sigh. “When things like that happen, a boy is bound to question if he’s lovable—and the high school girls didn’t help matters.”

“High school girls?” I say dubiously. The rest of what she said I’ve already suspected—though my heart aches to hear it confirmed. “I would’ve thought high school girls swarmed Lucius like angry bees. In heat.”

I know I would have, if we’d been in school together.

Pearl scrunches her face. “You’d think so, looking at him now, right? But that wasn’t the case, I’m afraid. As cute as he was as a child, it was an ugly duckling situation when he was a teen. At least for a time. He got gangly overnight, and it took him a few years to grow into his body. Didn’t help that he was already starting to be prickly.” She sighs again. “As far as I know, he didn’t start dating at all until he made big money—and now he thinks that’s all any woman is interested in when it comes to him.”

Of course. That would explain why his first kiss happened around the time he made his first million—and why he didn’t want to elaborate on it when I asked.

“Since I can tell what the two of you have is real,” Pearl continues, “I wanted to?—”

Lucius strides into the room, his eyes flinty. “Of course, what Juno and I have is real. But go on, what was it you wanted to do?”

“I wanted to tell Juno that you seem like the perfect couple,” Pearl says—and sounds so earnest that I would believe her if I didn’t know for a fact she was going to say something else. Something like “give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“Try again,” Lucius says.

“Fine.” Pearl’s eyes gleam mutinously. “I was going to tell her about your PhD in Roman history. I know you never would.”

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