Page 120 of The Grumpy Billionaire

People scream.

Basically, I’m forced to try on pretty much every gown in the store that’s my size, including a few that are too tight and a few that are “all wrong for an autumn,” according to Tabitha, but she sends me out anyway.

It’s the most fun I’ve had in ages, and at the end of the night, I have a loaner dress and shoes in a pretty blue bag, and this thought that I must have sacrificed myself on a burning pyre to save a horde of sad-eyed orphans in a past life.

What else could explain my extreme luck in hooking up with these women?

Kelsey and I share an Uber home, and I look out at the nighttime bustle of Manhattan, so thrilling and glamorous, like an endlessly churning tide of big, bold life, and Charlie’s warnings don’t seem so dire.

ChapterFifty

Hugo

Stella comesout her door in such an outrageously sexy golden gown, I forget how to breathe. The way it hugs her curves, and her skin looks smooth and golden, and her breasts…

I’m a mathematician with zero belief in witchcraft, but the compulsion I feel to kiss her everywhere, to touch her everywhere, to press my face to her breasts that are plumped above the dress, it’s like I’m under a spell.

“Hugo?” I realize that she’s talking. “Are you okay?”

“You…”

“Hugo?”

I force my gaze to her eyes. “You look beautiful.”

Her face lights up. “You’re not so bad yourself, handsome.” She tugs at the corner of my bowtie. “Very double-oh-seven.” She informed me last night about this dress code, and in the morning, Lola had Wulfric’s tailor send over a tuxedo.

“Have fun, kids!” Kelsey calls from somewhere inside the place.

I cannot take my eyes off Stella. Not in the elevator down to their lobby, not on the sidewalk outside her building, and definitely not in the limo.

“Maybe we should stop off at Hotel Luxe,” I suggest.

“If you think that I’m going to skip my first Cinderella-type gala—”

“We’d have so much more fun. And there’d be no people except us. That’s always better.”

She presses her hand to my cheek.

I grasp her wrist and kiss her palm. Her hair is piled up on top of her head except for two long curls. The gold of her dress gives her hair a richness—it really is some kind of magic.

“Or we could just stay in here,” I try.

“I have a data model to predict that,” she jokes. “It’s a giant zero.”

“That’s your model?” I chuckle. “A zero? The numeral zero? How would you present it?”

“It would be a three-dimensional zero that I sculpt out of wire and little bits of debris to show my disdain for the idea of missing this gala.”

“Maybe I’ll bring your data model to the presentation,” I tell her. “It sounds better than the pathetic iteration I’ve managed to develop.”

“Oh poor baby.” She does a fake frown. “Are you saying it’s not the most perfect thing in the world? Are you having to settle for mere excellence?”

I slide a finger under a curl. “My first one was bold and disruptive, but this one is weak.” I can’t get my mind off of that fact.

“What does Brenda think of it?”

“She thinks it’s brilliant.”

---