Page 12 of The Grumpy Billionaire
Oh, those hands. I’d always loved them. I’d studied them for what seemed like hours as a lovesick teenaged girl, running my fingers over the sun-browned skin, so much rougher than mine, admiring the raised veins running across the back and the well-developed muscle between his thumb and pointer finger.
Not to mention what he’d done to me with those hands.
Crapcrapcrap.Get it together, Mara.
He held the items out to me, and I snatched them with a breathless, “Thank you.”
Reid picked up my notebook and rose to his feet. “You’re welcome. As you may have heard, I’m not above getting a little dirty when it’s called for.”
He grinned at the reference to his reputation as a ruthless business competitor.
Several social media sites had tried to compete with StillYours.com, and he’d methodically defeated them, driving them out of the lost-love-reunited business one by one.
Now his site claimed the distinction of having more than a billion registered users around the world. Apparently, reconnecting with former sweethearts was big business.
Reid did not immediately give the notebook back to me but glanced down at what I’d written during the hearing. At what I’d writtenabout him.
“Serious, soft-spoken, reserved.” He handed the pad to me with a quiet huff of a laugh. “You forgot cocky, aloof, and arrogant. Isn’t that what they usually write about me?”
“You’re notthatarrogant,” I offered, eliciting a bigger grin from him. “I mean… sometimes people misunderstand quietness to mean…”
My voice drifted off into awkward silence as I stared at his bemused expression.
“Yes. Well, thank you for the benefit of the doubt, I guess.”
I probably should have offered some sort of glib response, but my mind refused to produce anything other than a sort of confused awe at the reality of being so close to him again.
It was an experience I’d never expected to have. In fact, I had taken great precautions to ensure it would never happen, staying away from Rhode Island entirely, insisting that Mom and Bax and Bowie fly to see me in the various towns and cities where I’d worked instead of my coming here, where there was a slight risk of running into Reid at the airport.
As we stared at each other, the silence lengthened uncomfortably until Sheldon, whose existence I’d completely forgotten in the past three minutes, spoke up.
“Sheldon Santos.” He extended a beefy hand toward Reid. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Mancini.”
“Call me Reid.”
My ex-boyfriend set his food bag on a nearby table and clasped Sheldon’s hand firmly. Then he gave him a cautious smile and glanced warily at the camera slung over Sheldon’s shoulder.
“That thing’s not loaded is it?”
Sheldon’s face took on an affronted frown. “No, man. I wouldn’t do that. No legitimate photog would shoot you when you weren’t aware of it.”
Reid lifted a dark brow. “You’d be surprised what people would do with the right amount of motivation. I hear there’s a pretty good price on my head these days.”
“Forget what I said about not being arrogant,” I said, tilting my chin up to him and arching a brow.
Reid’s face broke out into a real smile, reminiscent of the ones he’d worn almost perpetually when we were younger.
He gave me a deferential nod. “Well, naturally, I wasn’t suggesting thatyouwanted anything from me. I believe you made your position on that quite clear, Miss Neely. It is still Miss, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” I swallowed hard, unaccountably nervous. “And I understand you’re still single as well. How is it that the world’s most successful matchmaker is alone?”
Reid’s refusal to do interviews combined with his immense wealth and celebrity-level good looks had caused the national media to pursue him relentlessly. And the fact that he was famously hard-to-get only fanned the flames—among the press and women of all ages.
My own friends had made lecherous comments about him whenever a long-distance lens had managed to capture his shirtless image on a private beach or his tuxedoed form at some hoity-toity high-dollar charity event.
Reid smirked in response to my question. “Well, as you know, my business is devoted toreunitingtrue loves. And one must havehadone of those to be reunited with one. So, I’m afraid it’s not of much use to me personally.”
He gave a slight head nod and lifted his to-go bag from the table. His voice took on the same formal tone he’d used this morning with the legislators on the finance committee. “Sheldon, nice to have met you. Mara—welcome home. I’m sure we’ll run into each other from time to time professionally.”
