Page 32 of Interning For A Billionaire

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I may be feeling a bit sick now.”

“Seriously?”

I rushed to the bathroom, closing the door behind me.

Then I looked at myself in the mirror.

Bad girl, I said to my reflection. Bad girl.

But I couldn’t tell him, not yet.

Instead, I told him I needed coffee to settle my stomach. We went down for breakfast and then spent the day seeing the sights like typical tourists, going to see the Golden Gate Bridge and taking a city tour on a bus. In the afternoon, we got ice-cream and went out to look at the ocean.

“How’s your stomach?” I asked him.

“Better,” he said. “Yours?”

I decided to tell him the truth.

“I’m fine. The truth is, I think my feelings have changed for you.”

He looked away and I saw tears in his eyes.

“I knew it,” he said quietly. “I could hear it in your voice when I told you about Muffin having kittens. You didn’t even sound excited at all. It was like I was talking about someone else’s cat.” He sniffed.

To be fair, Muffin was his cat not mine and I could hardly see how me not getting excited about a cat going into labor was a sign that I’d gone off him. I didn’t want to say that I had been trying to end things for a long time and he needed to let me go.

“I hoped this was just a phase and that I could convince you to come back home with me,” he said. “I’d even bought a one-way ticket for you for tomorrow.”

“What?”

I couldn’t believe he’d done that.

“I was so sure you would see how good we were together and that we belonged together,” he said plaintively.

So good that I pretended to be sick rather than sleep with him? I couldn’t say that, of course. Instead, we spent an awkward evening in the hotel room, me listening to him sniveling next to me.

I couldn’t wait for morning to arrive. I went with him to the airport, and he arranged to take an earlier flight home.

“If you change your mind…” he said hopefully, and I had to shake my head. I couldn’t be giving him false hope.

After I’d seen him off, I called my father.

“Hey, honey, how are you?”

“Did you know Sven was hoping to bring me back this weekend?”

He admitted that he did.

“You’re not behind all that, are you?” I told him that Sven said he seemed to be missing me.

My father gave a deep sigh. “Oh, Belle. Yes, I’ve been having a hard time with you gone, but that’s not what has been bugging me. You may as well know that I’d been seeing a woman in town. Darcy Callaghan?”

“The pharmacist?”

My father chuckled. “We’ve been seeing each other secretly for years but I didn’t want you to find out. Then, when you left, I thought we could start seeing each other openly but I hadn’t realized Darcy thought I’d propose marriage and have her installed in the house. That’s moving a bit fast for me. She says four years of courtin’ on the sly is hardly ‘moving a bit fast’. So, we’ve kind of been arguing and I guess, that’s what’s made me a bit grumpy lately.

“Darcy Callaghan! With the red hair?” I was still getting used to the idea of my father, the grieving widower recast as a dashing older boyfriend.

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