Page 14 of My Fake Billionaire Damaged Boyfriend

“I need to get these out of my lap or I’m going to suffocate,” she grumbles, fumbling with the flowers. “Why did you buy me roses, anyways? What if Alek parked in the garage and wouldn’t have seen your little fake display?”

“Well, the flowers were for you because of my behavior earlier today. That’s it.”

She doesn’t seem convinced, and I can’t blame her for being skeptical of me. I pull over against the curb and into my assigned parking on the street. Thankfully, even with the tower so busy at all hours, I still get my own spot. I open her door, take the flowers, and watch her get out and brush the red loose petals off her lap. She’s covered in pollen from the little pockets of white flowers that are stuffed between roses, and she hardly seems amused.

“I’ll carry these,” I offer, knowing she’s already fed up with this situation. I’m not helping. “Come on, let’s go upstairs. I can order some food and we can play with the code. Okay?”

“Yeah, that does sound fun, I guess.”

I lead the way inside, and we make it up to the top floor and into my penthouse without her taking a breath. She gasps for air as she comes into the living room, her chest heaving like she’s just walked the stairs to get up here, but I know she’s just not happy with the small elevator. I give her time alone to calm down, setting the roses in the sink with some new water from the faucet.

My place is a little messy from the week, a lot of my work files strewn over my coffee table for when I didn’t care to actually go in and use my office desk downtown. Most of the time I’m dealing with HR and needy coding women that flirt far too much for a professional environment.

Besides that, I have no desire to be gawked at like I’m some kind of rich asshole who doesn’t know how to code. Everyonethinks that my father simply gave me his company as a handout. He gave me a multi-million-dollar tech company that he branched off from his work with Alek. When it fell into my lap, everyone saw me as underqualified.

Nepotism, they called it.

I went to the most prestigious tech school, I worked my fingers until they bled against that keyboard every night, and they still underestimated me. Everyone always does—except Izzy.

She picks up a stack of papers and turns them over in her delicate, unpolished fingertips. “This is wild,” she breathes. “How did you manage to get this kind of information? This is the data statistics of impressions put on users through the last decade. I didn’t even know that technology was accessible that far back.”

“It wasn’t, at least not mainstream,” I reply simply. “My father found his way around everything, though.”

She collapses into the couch and pulls her legs to her stomach. She shifts through the data like she’s reading a decent book, something so simple about this woman in a world too complex to handle her. I escape into the bedroom for a bit and change into some loose jeans. I debate wearing a shirt, but I love the expression on her lips when she sees my tattoos.

It’s somewhere between shock and admiration, and I adore it completely.

“Hey, look at this,” her voice calls from the bedroom. Leaving my ensuite closet, I find her bent over the desk looking at the monitor of my computer. Her ass looks so good in her long skirt, and I ignore it for the sake of my cock pressing against my rough jean zipper. “This is interesting,” she adds. “The code is rewriting itself.”

I come beside her, the monitor shifting through pages and pages of numbers that look like they may never end. I grab the mouse to zoom in closer, the numbers filling the page and creating new page after new page… it doesn’t wait for me, and we’re left to watch the back gate disappear before our eyes.

“It’s gone, dammit,” I bite, wanting to send the mouse through the monitor. “Fuck! He knows we were logged in too, I’m sure. He’s going to have some hacking fucker bury it so far in miscellaneous type that we won’t be able to go through the gate again.”

“Relax, will you? I can do this,” she says coolly, pulling out the chair and sliding herself into place. “If you end up ordering food, I like pizza with black olives.”

I can’t help but grin at her determination—and her warranted confidence. “Alright, but can I say one thing about that before you get back to digging?”

“What?”

“Black olives on pizza areweird.”

She sneers over her shoulder at me, her button nose scrunched, and her lips pursed. “You live above an observatory, okay? Don’t tell me I’m weird.”

“This place is a gem, and you know it. You’re just mad that I can see over the whole city any time I want.”

“I can do that too,” she replies.

“Really? And how is that?”

“Because we’re dating now, right?”

I bite back a laugh and surrender with a meek nod. “Yeah, yeah. I guess you’re right.”

“I’m always right. Now, if you get that pizza, I want extra cheese on it too.”

Without the will in me to argue, I abide. “Of course, Kitten. Happy hunting.”

CHAPTER7

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