Page 115 of The Thing About My Secret Billionaire
“Only a temporary affliction, I assure you.” Leo takes a sip from his vodka on the rocks.
“Night, guys,” I say, and head for the door.
Jesus Christ, I am so sick of not being able to sleep.
A constant slideshow plays across the inside of my eyelids. Images of a naked Frankie, of looking up at her from between her legs and watching her come undone under my mouth, of the spark that zapped between us when I stumbled back into her in the kitchen that first day, and of waking up on the hay bale to her touch on my leg, are all bad enough.
But also ringing around my head now is what Oliver said earlier.
What are you afraid of?
I almost brushed him off, saying I’m not afraid of anything.
But in the last two hours that I’ve been lying here, staring at the hand-blown glass light fixture in my ceiling, that question has started to bother me. In the extreme.
I snatch my phone from the nightstand and call him.
It rings so many times I’m stunned it’s not gone to voicemail.
“Miller?” Oliver sounds like he’s so barely awake his lips aren’t moving properly yet. “What’s wrong? What’s happened? Why…”
“What did you mean, what am Iafraid of?”
“What?”
“At dinner. You asked me what I’m afraid of. What did you mean?”
“Seriously, mate. It’s, hang on, it’s eleven minutes to four in the morning. I thought it must be a call from the UK. I thought someone must be dead or been caught shagging someone they shouldn’t be shagging or something.”
“Sorry.” The unreasonableness of what I’ve just done suddenly hits me. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have called. Sorry.”
“Well, obviously itdoesmatter.” Oliver sounds more awake now and like he’s pushing himself upright. “You wouldn’t have called me sounding like your house is on fire if it wasn’t important.”
“Yeah, but I’m being a dick, waking you up.”
“It’s hardly like I have to be up early to catch the bus to my day job. If I had a calendar, it would be completely blank tomorrow. Or, rather, today.”
And right now, in the darkness of the bedroom of my penthouse that my architects designed and my interior designer decorated, in a forty-seven-story building I built, it dawns on me that maybe Oliver feels he has nothing to show for his life.
“Tell me,” he says. “What’s up?”
“I don’t know what I’m afraid of.” For some reason, that’s the hardest sentence I’ve ever uttered in my life.
“Are you in therapy?” he asks.
“Nope.”
“Oh, mate, you totally should be. It’s fucking great. I love it. And not only because there’s finally someone on the planet I can be totally sure won’t sell what I tell them to the press. It helps. It really fucking helps.”
“That sounds terrible,” I say. “Not the therapy—thenever being able to trust anyone in case they sell you out. You trust me, Chase and Leo, though, right?”
“As much as it’s possible to trust anyone, yes. But this isn’t about me. You know what I think? I think this is about the donkey woman.”
Oliver makes no attempt to fill the silence that hangs on the line until I summon the courage to say, “Her name’s Frankie.”
“I know. So, what’s the answer to Chase’s question? Do you like her? Like, properly like her?”
“Yup.” I drop my forearm over my eyes. “And I fucked it up.”
