Page 25 of Forking the Billionaire

Something shifted behind Esme’s eyes. She shrugged, and smiled again. This time, though, the smile didn’t feel real. It felt like she was holding something back. And no matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t seem to clear the dryness in my throat.

NINE

ESME

“Is there somewhere around here where I can get water?” Jasper cleared his throat again.

It was like he’d tried to swallow a frog, and the creature had used its wet webbed toes to lodge itself halfway down. He was being aggressive with his eye contact, too. Weirdly so, almost like he was afraid to look anywhere else.

I pointed to the little open room by the front desk where they kept complimentary toiletries and whatnot for guests. There was fancy bottled water in there, fancy everything.

“Thank you. Excuse me.” Jasper walked off to go deal with his issues, well, with the one issue that had an easy fix.

I dove back into my task and flipped over the cushions on the next two chairs.

“I’m going to find the glasses while you’re fooling around,” I said, unsure if he could even hear me.

There was no good reason for menotto tell Jasper it was Mona Maloney’s glasses that I was hunting down. But being close to him always did something to me. He made me weirdly competitive, and kind of antagonistic. It was uncharacteristic of me. I liked being friendly.

But never with Jasper. Well, not since he betrayed me and ended our friendship. Before that, we’d always been on the same team. All of that was ancient history, though.

And he’d basically just implied he didn’t even consider me a woman. I ran through the conversation again to see if I was misreading it.

He told me that he told Jules he was going out.

Then I’d said,but you didn’t say you’d be hanging out with a woman. You couldn’t have known you’d run into me here. Won’t she be jealous?

And then he’d said,why would she be?

So there was nothing about me that was even slightly threatening. Maybe that was because they were just soooo in love. Nah. That wasn’t it.

Either he considered me to be a little girl, unappealing in my childishness, or when he looked at me he saw something so repulsive he thought no one could ever find me attractive.

Let him think I was a gross baby. It didn’t matter. We were nothing to each other, and therefore I didn’t care what he thought.

When Jasper returned, he slipped right into the task, checking cushions for glasses that belonged to someone he didn’t know, for reasons I didn’t understand. Maybe he was having as much trouble sleeping as I was, and so it didn’t matter what the task was, because doing something was better than lying in bed doing nothing.

Quickly, there was no seating left to check, no lost and found bins left unsearched, no public restroom unturned. We’d dug through them all. Still, we’d found no sign of Mona’s glasses.

“What’s our next lead?” Jasper asked.

“Our?”

“Come on, we’ve been on a hunt together for at least an hour. This is my case now, too.” He smiled his real smile at me, the onethat wrinkled his nose and made his forest-green eyes sparkle like they were made of emeralds.

I hadn’t been on the receiving side of a real Jasper the Disaster Carrington smile in a decade. Fake, placating grins, sure. He was the master of false niceties, which I absolutely hated. His face was full of lies. But this…this was real.

I forced myself to stop staring at his mouth with a hard blink. I didn’t care about his stupid smiles.

In all probability, Mona’s glasses were somewhere in Mona’s room. Either she’d misplaced them herself, or her husband had hidden them. But I wasn’t about to go creeping in someone’s room, let alone while they were in the room, sleeping in the bed.

“Fine, you want to butt yourself into my business? Suit yourself,” I said. “But the next bit is taking this mystery up a level.”

If my snarky tone affected him, he showed no sign of it. If anything, his grin grew. It was a startlingly alluring thing, like the little ball of light dangling on the front of an angler fish. Get mesmerized by that glow, and it would be impossible to escape the teeth.

“I’m game,” he said, all nice and friendly like.

I narrowed my eyes at his open expression. “I haven’t even told you what that level is.”

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