Page 27 of How to Belong with a Billionaire

Tabs’s head came up. “Oh?”

“Why not? Diversity’s on trend right now.”

“Is it?” I asked, in a smaller voice than I’d have hoped. “Or is it more of a thing that some people just kind of, like, are?”

“Not the cover line we’ll be going with.” Mara’s attention—always erratic—landed on me momentarily, flicked away again, and then returned. “The Hart-Whatshisname piece: Let’s try a romance angle with it.Pretty Womanif one of them wasn’t a hooker. Cinderella except with more dicks.”

I shifted a bit on my chair. “I can try, but we’re still talking about two privileged white guys getting hitched here. It’s not exactly Evelina and Lord Orville, is it?”

“Caspian Hart’s a bajillionaire,” put in Tabs. “That’s almost as good as a nonracist royal or a semi-attractive earl. And he’s marrying the sort of person anyone could be. What a story.”

If I could have climbed into my desk alongside my Diet Coke, I would have. And never come out again.

“That reminds me.” Mara turned on Tabs. “Find me a gay duke. Let’s do a feature on him as well.”

Tabs fiddled with an earring, frowning slightly. “I’m not sure there are any.”

That was met by an impatient snort. Mara tended to get horsey-er when crossed.

“Wait, what about Lord Mountbatten?”

“The younger son of a marquess? Get a grip, Tabitha. You know nobody will care unless it’s a duke.”

“Poshest historical gays?” I suggested. “Then we’d be able to include actual kings.”

Mara gave a sharp nod. “Yes. Good. Get someone on that.”

The conversation moved rapidly, as did most Mara-centric conversation, but I tuned it out. After all, I had a job to do. A horrible job I had brought upon myself through a frankly incoherent combination of bravado and personal masochism. But in those first moments of seeing Caspian again, I would have done almost anything to pretend I wasn’t utterly destroyed. All the power he had over me, I’d given him willingly enough, believing love would make me invincible, but God, it hurt. Sometimes it hurt so fucking much.

Anyway. The interview had been a bluff, and a pretty transparent one at that. A way to get out of the room with some semblance of pride. I couldn’t imagine Caspian actively wanting to take me up on it. So that left me wondering: Why had Nathaniel? What was he trying to prove? And to whom? Because if this was aimed at me, I’d already got the message. Loud and fucking clear.

Although my feelings on the subject were actually more mixed than they probably should have been. I mean, it was a bit of a Lady Catherine de Bourgh–type situation, wasn’t it? You didn’t go around telling people they had no right to marry Mr. Darcy unless there was the teeniest tiniest possibility Mr. Darcy wanted to marry them. By the same token, Nathaniel wouldn’t need to make bigI’m with Caspiangestures if he truly believed he was. And wasn’t that a whiskey sour of an emotional cocktail? Being smug and hopeful and bitter and sad all at the same time. Which so wasn’t me. I was a strawberry daiquiri boy, through and through.

The worst of it was, I didn’t actually want Nathaniel to be insecure or uncertain—even if it meant I was completely out of the picture. I’d spent quite a lot of my relationship with Caspian that way and it hadn’t been a whole lot of fun. I guess I’d just assumed Nathaniel would have been basking in victory, but maybe it didn’t look like victory to him. Maybe it looked like he was second choice. That Caspian had only come back because what he’d tried to have with me hadn’t worked out.

Urrrrrrgh.Having to think about Nathaniel like he was a real person was literally the worst. And now I was pretty much mandated to do it for work. I could probably have claimed personal issues—because I did, actually, have personal issues—and passed the interview to someone else. But this was a big deal. Not career defining, perhaps. But most likely career delaying if I walked away. So fuck it. And fuck Caspian. I chose me.

Did it make it more or less creepy to be Googling your ex-boyfriend’s ex-boyfriend-turned-present-fiancé when it was your job? Well, it didn’t matter either way. I was doing it. Research and shit. I was mildly proud of the fact I’d never e-stalked Nathaniel before—I thought it demonstrated, if not actual sanity, at least some degree of self-preservation. And in the end, the results surprised me. Well, I say surprised. It didn’t turn out he was secretly a stripper or a superhero or already married or anything. He just wasn’t quite what I’d been expecting.

I’d always taken it for granted he was like Caspian: born to wealth and power. But he’d grown up in Manchester. Gone to university in Leeds. His father had his own accounting firm. The sort of place that proclaimed,Forty years of experience working with entrepreneurs based in Manchester and the surrounding areas, as if that was something special. His mother taught in an inner-city school. The Internet being what it is, I even managed to look up their house on Streetview. It was a three-bedroom, redbrick semi with a pointy roof and a bog-standard hatchback parked in the drive.

My mind was honestly blown. Nathaniel was just so polished that I couldn’t imagine him ever having lived such an ordinary a life. Walked to school under grey skies and the shadows of old factories. Slept in a bedroom that probably always felt too small. Carried the burden of his parents’ pride with him all the way to his mid-tier university. It had never occurred to me that he might have worked for anything. That success hadn’t just been brushed over him like gold leaf by a benevolent universe. That he had, in fact,earnedhis place in the world. His identity. His chance at happiness. Same as me.

Or, y’know, probably more so. Because if you got past the wholehaving to run away from my abusive father when I was barely old enough to remembersituation, the most traumatising experience of my life was the first person I’d fallen properly in love with deciding to marry someone else. In any case, creepin’ on Nathaniel, and having slightly uncomfortable realisations about myself, kept me pretty busy until home time. I can’t say it was the best day in the office I’d ever had.

Ellery was there when I got back to the warehouse. She was sitting on the sofa, with her feet pulled up, painting what looked like angry pig faces onto her toenails.

“Hi, honey,” I trilled, “I’m home.”

She glanced up briefly. “Dinner’s on the table.”

“Seriously?”

“No. But there’s Coke in the fridge.”

“The kind you put in your mouth or up your nose?”

“Maybe”—she thought about it—“both?”

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