Page 108 of Trapped with the Billionaire

He stopped the car at a light, and I brought up the obvious, the elephant in the room we hadn’t talked about.

“About last night…” I couldn’t bring myself to ask the hard questions.

“Yeah?” he asked without looking over. He wasn’t making this easier.

I slapped his shoulder. “You know what I mean.” Being the woman in this situation put the onus on me to clarify things.

The signal turned green, and he accelerated. “Being a dumb USC guy, I don’t know what you mean if you won’t spit it out.”

“It’s a small company, and people talk. I don’t want them to know we’re…” I wasn’t sure how to finish that.

“We’re what?” he asked.

“I don’t know what we are.”

We hadn’t been on a real date. Were we fuck buddies just boinking, or had last night been a pity fuck because I’d had such an awful night? Or something else…

He pulled the car over and stopped before facing me. “Look, we haven’t had time to talk this out.” He took my hand. “I think you are amazing. If you don’t understand how I feel about you, you’re not as smart as I thought.”

Warmth grew in my chest. He’d eliminated pity fuck and one-night stand as well. “But I don’t know the first thing about your…uh…personal situation.”

Was there a delicate way to ask if he was dating anybody? I’d heard him talking to a Serena on the phone once, and it hadn’t sounded work-related.

“With Serena and all.”

He took in a breath and nodded. “Okay, let’s get that out of the way. You can expect that I won’t see anyone else, and I absolutely won’t share you with anybody either. Same as I told you before, you can expect full honesty from me, and I expect the same from you. I will treat you with utmost respect, and if you ever feel I’m not, you need to say so. If you don’t like to be spoiled, that’s tough shit. Learn to deal with it. Starting now, I’m dating you, and I don’t do it half-assed. And by the way, Serena is my sister.”

The torrent of clarity that had come from his mouth was something I’d never experienced before.

It took a second to process it all. “Don’t I get a say in this?” In a few moments we’d gone from what-the-hell-happened-last-night to you’re mine?

“Sure you do. You’re in or you’re out. Which is it?”

Subtlety was clearly not his strong suit.

“What if I’m not sure?”

He’d said it as if starting today I belonged to him, like he was setting rules for me, for us—caging me in.

He surprised me by leaning over and pulling my face to within an inch of his. His fierce eyes bored into mine as he spoke softly. “Then I spend every day of the next week convincing you to say yes.”

I bit back a laugh. “What if a week isn’t enough?”

His lips turned up. “Then I’m not doing it right.”

In that moment, I couldn’t imagine more romantic words. Being decisive had been his lesson for me, so I laid a soft kiss on him. “Then yes.”

“The kisses are going to have to wait, Nickels.” He released me and put the car back in gear. “We still need to get you to work before the day is over.”

As we pulled back into traffic, I looked over at the protective hunk of a man next to me and decided there were a lot of worse things than being his woman. Daddy would have liked him. Daddy would have liked him a lot. Daddy would have married me off to him in an instant.

Giving myself a mental slap, I decided I couldn’t think like that. We passed a billboard for a new movie. The larger-than-life actress oozed sex appeal.

The bazillionaire driving me to work this morning could be dating her, or some tennis star, or any fucking woman in this town, if he wanted, and yet here we were. How had I gotten so lucky?

Like an idiot, I verbalized my fear without thinking. “Why me?”

“It seemed like a good idea,” he said brusquely.

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