The Billionaire Dating Game: A Romance Novel Page 6

  “Part and parcel of the job. Don’t worry. Nobody will be crass enough to approach us. This place has a reputation for discretion.”

  I gulped. That wasn’t exactly what I was worried about. As the hostess led us back through the restaurant, though, I breathed easier. We sat in the far back of the restaurant, in a small secluded booth. The back wall of the booth was lined with dusty wine bottles.

  “Buonasera, signor Letocci. Il solito??” our waiter asked. He had appeared out of nowhere, and the Italian rolled off of his tongue. The only word I caught was Piers’ last name.

  “Sì. Grazie,” Piers said.

  The waiter bowed and left.

  “What was that? Did you order me a plate of sardines?” I asked, miffed. “How does the waiter know you?”

  “Are we starting the interview now?” Piers teased. “So many questions.”

  “Do you really speak Italian?”

  “I guess you’ll see when the waiter comes back with your plate of sardines.”

  “For real, though,” I said. “When did you learn Italian?”

  “I’m half English, half Italian,” Piers said. “When you interview someone, do you normally make a point of it not to know anything about them?”

  “Hey, this is my interview,” I said archly. “I’ll ask the questions.”

  The waiter came back with appetizers at that moment, cutting off Piers’ reply.

  It wasn’t a plate of sardines after all. The dish he brought was a wood platter piled high with different meats, cheeses, and an assortment of olives and other pickled dishes. The waiter produced a bottle of red wine, and chatted in Italian with Piers for a few moments before leaving the wine on the table. Piers picked up the bottle and poured a glass for me, twisting the bottle at the last second to avoid a spill.

  “Thank you,” I said, tasting the wine. “This is delicious.”

  It was more than delicious. I wasn’t exactly a wine connoisseur, but this one pricked my taste buds in all the right places. It was smooth, dark like blackberries, but the way it lingered on my tongue after I swallowed made me think of butter. Like a blackberry pie. I closed my eyes as I swallowed, letting the flavors play through my mouth, and when I opened them Piers was looking at me. I pressed my lips together and stared down at the wine glass as the heat moved down my throat.

  “I’m glad you like it,” he said. “It’s one of my favorite vintages.”

  “Is that so?”

  He grinned. I could tell he was pleased to be showing off. And it made me feel strangely proud to have someone who wanted to show off to me. It had been a while since a guy had paid so much attention to what I liked.

  For the next few minutes, we distracted ourselves with sampling all of the different dishes on the platter. Some of the meats were spicy, and some were subtly sweet, and I let Piers help me pair the cheeses to best advantage. One thinly sliced meat seemed to melt on my tongue. I was happily gorging myself on a bowl of olives when I noticed that Piers was staring at my lips. I licked them clean and dabbed at my mouth with a napkin, a faint blush rising to my cheeks. There was a reason I was here, after all.

  “Sorry I didn’t know you were half Italian,” I said. “I’m not normally so unprepared for interviews, but my boss kind of sprung it on me at the last minute.”

  I wanted to get back into the interview questions, but Piers broke my concentration with a teasing smile.

  “Here’s a riddle for you,” he said. “If you’re American when you’re in my bedroom, what are you when you’re in my bathroom?”

  “I know that joke,” I said, taking a sip of the wine. “You’re a-peein’.”

  Eur-o-pean. Hardy har.

  “No, actually.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s not the correct answer to the riddle.”

  “Oh? What would I be when I’m in your bathroom?”

  “You’d be naked.”

  “What?”

  “Do you really think that I’d let a beautiful American girl stroll around my apartment with all of her clothes on?”

  His eyes started to drift downwards, as though imagining me in such a scenario. I snapped my fingers at him and his eyes jerked back up from my cleavage.

  “Listen to me, Senor Medici Copperfield. You and me? Not happening.”

  “It’s a shame you failed my riddle—”

  “I didn’t fail your riddle—”

  “But now that we’re talking about getting you naked—”

  “We are not talking about that!”

  “Really? What were we talking about?”

  “I was interviewing you,” I said. “Ahem. So. Interview question two. What made you come to America?”

  “The women,” he said, not pausing to think.

  I raised an eyebrow at him.

  “Have you seen the BBC lately?” he asked. “We can’t even find attractive women to put on TV. America is where it’s at. To put it in your slang. I love American women.”

  He leaned over the table, his strong fingers interlocking under his chin. I could have lost myself in those green-blue eyes if I let my gaze linger. So I didn’t.

  “I’m glad you like American women,” I said, struggling to remember the other questions on Jessica’s list and giving up. “So tell me more about what you do on TV.”

  Piers bit his lip and raised his eyes to the ceiling.

  “TV,” he murmured. “What do I do on TV?”

  A second passed, and I thought that maybe he shouldn’t have drunk two glasses of wine so quickly. Then he looked back down at me, his eyes hard.

  “TV is all the same,” he said. “It’s selling a fantasy to people so that they don’t think about reality too much.”

  “A fantasy? But you do—”

  “Reality TV? Sure. But it’s not real. There’s nothing real on television. Everything’s scripted. Everything’s fake.”

  He bit his lip again in consternation.

  “Don’t print that, alright? Here, I’ll give you a better answer.”

  “Um, okay.”

  His voice changed, went up a register, as he spoke. It was the same glib charm that he’d used throughout all of the auditions. I recognized it as his stage voice.

  “What do I do on TV? I make people’s wishes come true. Anyone on my show could become famous or rich in the snap of a finger. I’m like a genie in a lamp. Anything is possible.”

  “Genies are mischievous, though,” I pointed out. “Sometimes a wish comes with unintended consequences.”

  “That’s not my problem,” he said, shrugging as the persona slipped. “I do what people want me to do.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a very fulfilling job for you.” I remembered what he had told me the first night we met. “It sounds… superficial? Unsatisfying?”

  Piers stopped mid-sip of his wine.

  “Is that an interview question?” he asked.

  “I’m just curious,” I said. “Why do you do it if you hate it?”

  “I never said I hated it.”

  “Do you hate it?”

  He smiled then, but the smile never reached his eyes.

  “No comment.”

  Our meals came, and I avoided asking Piers anything else about his work. I’d gotten the answers to all of the questions I needed already. Instead, we chatted about New York and America in general, a topic on which he had a few strong opinions.

  “Healthcare,” he said, waving his fork in the air for emphasis. “The American system is so unnecessarily convoluted. I went to a hospital last month for a surgery—”

  “Surgery? For what?”

  He waved away my question.

  “And do you know how many bills came in the mail? Twenty-six different bills. Half of them were from the hospital. Then another handful from my insurance company, one from the studio’s human resources for a premium increase, bills from every specialist that so much as looked at me as I went through the surgery—”

  “But you can afford to p
ay them,” I said.

  “Of course I can! That’s not the point.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “My lawyer told me that he would go through them. After more than twenty-six phone calls, he had gotten half of the bills dropped and most of the rest reduced. It didn’t really make a difference to me, his billable rate ended up about the same. But why? Why go through all that nonsense? And what about people without lawyers? What do they do?”

  “They don’t go to the hospital.”

  “It’s insane. I’m not saying that the European way is perfect. There is no perfect system right now. But if I’m going to spend a lot of money, I want it going to the doctors and nurses giving care, not to pad the pockets of insurance executives.”

  “Why don’t you do a TV show about this?” I asked. “You’re obviously passionate about it—”

  “Ha!” Piers slumped back, and all of the energy in his body seemed to drain out in an instant. “There’s not a network in existence that would approve a show like that. Who would watch it? Who would care?”

  “I bet a lot of people would watch it if you wore a speedo and smeared peanut butter on yourself.”

  Piers gave me a half smile.

  “That guy shows up every week at that coffee shop,” he said.

  “Do you perform every week?”

  At that question, Piers clamped his lips shut. He had opened himself up to me, but now I could see him closing the door as clearly as day.

  “I don’t think I’ll go back there,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Honestly?” He looked at me over the rim of his glass of wine. We were on our second bottle, and while he’d drunk more than I had, he didn’t seem to be the least bit tipsy.

  “Honestly,” I repeated. “You’re really good at playing the piano.”

  He laughed softly and looked down into his glass. When he raised his eyes to mine again, they had darkened to a deep aquamarine. And I realized that he was sitting close to me in the booth, close enough that our knees brushed each other. I was transported back to the night I’d heard him play, and I thought it was that more than the wine that made my skin burn.

  “I can’t go back,” he said. “A journalist knows I play there.”

  “Me?” I put down my glass and placed my hand on his. I meant the gesture reassuringly, but he tensed under my fingers. The air between us was electric. “I would never tell anyone about that.”

  “Just our little secret, eh?”

  “Yes. I can keep a secret.”

  “You can keep a secret until you need the money. Until someone comes up to you and offers ten thousand for the secret. It’s such a little secret, and worth so much.”

  Before I could protest, Piers had turned his hand over. His fingers twined up through mine and he lifted my hand to his lips. Any sentence that was forming in my head was melted by the heat of his lips brushing against the backs of my knuckles.

  “Nobody can keep a secret like that,” he whispered. His lips moved against my skin. “I wouldn’t want to tempt you.”

  I swallowed hard. His eyes were so dark now, dark like a storming sea reflected in the sky. I thought suddenly of one time when I’d been playing in the ocean as a child, when the water was getting rough and stormy. I’d gotten sucked into the current, and gulped a mouthful of salt water. Flailing, I’d looked up just as a wave crested above me, spitting foam. The dark underbelly of a wave coming to crush me—that was what I saw when I looked into his eyes.

  “You asked about Sasha before.”

  The name bounced around my head a few times before it registered. The singer he had been dating. Right.

  “I don’t… I didn’t—”

  “I thought I loved her,” Piers said. I couldn’t read the expression on his face. He had gone cold, blank.

  “And?”

  When he shook his head, his lips brushed against my skin once, again. And this time the storm was inside me, gathering deep inside my core. The rumblings of something dark and frightening.

  “Piers?” I asked. My voice had gone, and it was only a whisper of a question. “What happened?”

  His fingers tightened around mine, and I found that I was holding my breath as I waited for him to answer.

  “She took pictures of me.”

  “Pictures?”

  “When I was sleeping. When we were together. You understand? Naked photos.”

  My lips dropped apart. The image of Piers naked and asleep sent a hot shiver through my nerves, and that was my first instinctive response.

  But the emotion that swept through me after that was revulsion, pure revulsion. My tongue felt thick in my mouth. To be betrayed like that—

  “Why?”

  Piers looked at me, and heat moved through my cheeks.

  “I— I mean, she’s a famous singer, isn’t she?” I stammered. “Surely she didn’t need the money.”

  “She had addictions. It’s possible she needed cash quickly.”

  “You don’t think that was it?”

  Piers shrugged. He looked down and seemed to realize that he was still holding my hand. He let go and ran both of his hands through his hair, staring off a million miles away.

  “If I had to guess, I’d say it was the fame she wanted,” he said. His voice was bitter. “And she got it.”

  I wanted to take his hand again. I wanted to curl up against him and hold him tightly, and stroke him on the back until he let go of whatever tension had strung itself through his body with this betrayal. But I was the wrong person to comfort him.

  I was a journalist. I was the enemy.

  And at that moment, I felt as though I could never close the distance between us, no matter how much I wanted to. I would never understand the kind of position he was in. I couldn’t even come close to understanding. Instead of scrambling back to shore, I was drifting even farther out to sea.

  And the storm was coming closer.

  Chapter Eight

  “I can’t publish this.”

  Clarence waved a copy of my interview with Piers Letocci at me. I crossed my arms and glanced out his open door at the office. Whenever Clarence punished someone, he left his door open. I’d known from the start that this was going to go badly.

  “Well? Aren’t you going to say something?”

  “What’s the matter with it?”

  “The matter? There’s nothing exciting in here! There’s nothing new.” He stared down at the page. “I’m half-English, half-Italian. Everybody knows this!”

  “I didn’t know it.”

  “I knew I shouldn’t have sent you to do this piece. This is up on the front page of our site right now, and it’s total shit.”

  “I thought you said you couldn’t publish it.”

  “I have to publish something! And all I have is this piece of trash that’s supposed to be our lead article for the day!”

  My nostrils flared, but I kept myself from snapping back. Clarence was always moody, but today he was all puffed up like a blowfish. Jessica walked by the open door, making eye contact with me. As she moved out of Clarence’s range of view, her face crinkled into a sympathetic pout. Sorry! she mouthed. I shrugged slightly. I’d known this was coming.

  It was because I’d held back in the details on the interview. Maybe I’d held back too much. After what Piers had told me, though, I was wary of putting in the kind of information I normally do with my interviews. I hesitated to include some of the more emotional comments he made, and I didn’t do my usual speculation about the real answers to some of the harder questions I’d asked.

  I’d spent a lot of time describing his suit jacket, mainly because I’d been wearing it for so long.

  “Do you know how many favors we called in to get this interview?” Clarence was asking. “Do you know how much we paid to get this kind of access? And what do you go and do with it? This! What a fucking waste of an interview. How many shares am I going to get with this? How many retweets?”

 
“More than you deserve,” I muttered.

  “Do you know how much we already poured into the promotions budget for this week? You didn’t even ask him about Sasha Tiernan!”

  “I’m a journalist,” I snapped. “Not a gossip columnist. And if you’d let me write my article on Syria—”

  Clarence exploded from out of his seat, his finger in my face.

  “You are nothing!” he screamed. “Nothing, understand? You are off the writing staff as of today! No new assignments!”

  The blood drained from my face.

  “Wait,” I said. “Listen. I know it wasn’t a great piece, but—”

  “Get your ass back into the office and help Tammy audit payroll once you’re done with the support graphics.”

  “Wait—”

  “No.” Clarence’s voice was boiling with fury. “I waited an extra day for this turd of an article, and look what it got me.”

  “Please,” I said. I leaned forward on Clarence’s desk and picked up the article. I swallowed hard, crumpling the paper in my hand. “I’ll rewrite it. I’ll do a follow up. Please.”

  Writing was all I’d ever wanted to do. Getting kicked back to support would be a huge step backwards.

  “Get out of my office,” he said. He stood up and gestured toward the door, where a couple of people in the office snapped their heads back to their work. I flushed and turned back to Clarence. He couldn’t do this to me. I was the hardest worker in the office.

  “But—”

  “Get out before I decide to fire you.”

  Clarence’s eyes flickered over to the door he was gesturing to. I was about to seal my fate with another protest when I saw his expression change. His rage turned to shock, and his clenched jaw dropped open.

  I turned around and saw Piers Letocci standing in the doorway.

  He leaned casually against the door frame, a bouquet of pink roses in his hand.

  “Have I come at a bad time?” he asked.

  “Piers!”

  I froze, my back against my boss’s desk. Piers Letocci was here, at my work. Holding a bouquet of flowers.

  Why?

  For a brief moment, I knew—knew!—that he had come to rescue me. He was going to sweep me away into his arms, and kiss me in front of everyone, Clarence and Jessica and all of them. And then he’d tell me that he’d gotten me a position at the New York Times, and would I want to do some serious journalism, and I’d say Yes, Piers, yes! And then we would hop on our jet skis and ride away into the sunset.