Page 42 of Fake Marriage with the Billionaire

He frowned a little, his eyebrows knitting together. “It’s what everyone thinks about me. It’s what you thought.”

She pursed her lips, feeling the sting of guilt at her initial thoughts about him. “You’re not an asshole all the time,” she said. “Like last night. You weren’t an asshole then.”

“I’m just trying to get my father’s money,” he said coldly. “That’s all this is.”

She studied his face for a moment, then rolled her eyes and sat up. “You’re a terrible liar, you know that?”

“I’m a liar?”

“About this. Yes. Richard, you didn’t have to have sex with me to get your dad’s money. That was never in his will. And it wasn’t in your contract.”

His dark eyes studied her as she sat there, looking back at him expectantly. “All right,” he said. “What are you saying?”

“You know what I’m saying.”

They looked at each other in silence for a long time. Then Richard said, “So…so, I guess we shouldn’t pretend like there’s nothing between us, should we?”

She smiled with a little bit of sadness and wanting. “We’d only be fooling ourselves.”

He sat up then and took her hands. “Stella, the last time I felt like this with anyone, she shattered me.”

“Everyone has their heart broken--”

“No, you don’t understand. I was a different person before I was married. I had more on my mind than just…than just money. I felt like the entire world could be mine. And then after…I became a shell of a man.”

He paused as if trying to decide how much to tell her. Finally, he said, “I walked in on her when she was cheating. They were on the couch with the blinds open. If my house was closer to the street, my entire block would have seen her. In that instant that I saw my wife half naked on the couch with another man, it was like my entire life just came undone in a matter of hours. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I just… sleepwalked through the world for months.”

He paused, his eyes off in the distance of his memories. “I think that’s why my Dad did this to me. He had to watch as I disintegrated into nothing. I can’t imagine what it must be like to see your son break piece by piece and not be able to do anything about it.”

Stella leaned her head against his shoulder and she felt him soften under her touch. “One day, I realized that my heartbreak was hurting my father. So…so I just shut everything off inside and I decided that relationships were not for me. It’s like I shut off all the lights and locked the door and threw away the key. I focused on business. And I thought that if I could make my father as much money as possible, then he would forget how I was almost broken…and maybe I could forget too.”

She slid her hand into his, lacing her fingers between his. “You’re worthy of love, Richard,” she said. “We all are. No matter what other people do to us. We’re all worthy.”

He leaned his head on top of hers and they sat in her bed, looking at the sky change outside with the coming dawn.

***

They slept soon after. Stella feeling the comfort of being held in Richard’s arms. When she woke up around noon, she was alone in bed, but she heard Richard outside her door, talking. She got up and walked out to her living room, the smell of coffee heavy in the air. She walked into the kitchen to find him cradling his phone to his ear using his shoulder while cooking eggs on her stove.

“Listen, I know what I said,” he was saying on the phone. “I’m just asking in a theoretical sense, that’s all.” He glanced up and saw Stella standing in the doorway. “Hold on a second.”

He walked over to her and kissed her on her forehead. “Just making us a little something,” he said. “You didn’t have anything but eggs, so, sorry it’s not a lot.”

She walked over to the stove and saw he’d already made two perfectly sunny-side-up eggs and set them aside. She stared in mild disbelief and pleasantly turned to him and said, “I didn’t know you could cook.”

He started to answer her but turned back to the phone. “Yes, I’m still here. Listen, I just want to know how long I have. Like…if I set a date. Will that be enough to switch everything over to me?”

Stella realized that he was talking to his father’s estate lawyer and her heart sank a little. She didn’t really want to return to the reality of their situation.

“Okay,” he said, finally. “Okay, thank you.” He hung up the phone and returned to the stove. “I didn’t know how you liked your eggs.”

“Over medium for me,” she said and he nodded, flipping the eggs in the pan easily. “That was your father’s estate lawyer?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I, uh, I was just wondering how long they would wait that’s all.”

She remembered when she asked him what his end game was when they were in the car on the way to the party. He didn’t have an answer then and it seemed like he still didn’t have one.

“What did they say?” Stella asked. Richard flipped the egg in the pan one more time, then put it on a plate.

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