The Billionaire's Wife (7 page)

And he slipped under the table.

It was so quick, so unexpected,
that I was still staring at the spot where he had been and trying to muster the
presence of mind to react when I felt his large, hot hands on my knees.

My god. He was kneeling under the
table, hidden by the long table cloth. He was going to—
going to—

I wish I could say I put up a
fight. But my thighs parted at the slightest pressure from his hands, and I
opened to him.

He pushed my skirt up, rearranging
the table cloth so that it fell across my lap and hid my sudden indecency from
the rest of the lunch crowd. All around me conversation carried on as usual.
Glasses clinked, knives scraped against forks, someone tittered at an amusing
joke. And Anton Waters gently pushed the crotch of my panties aside, parting
the slick folds there.

I felt the rough tip of one finger
poised at my entrance. Then it slid up, up, up, almost touching my clit, but he
only grazed it before sliding back down, pressing against my waiting channel. I
was biting my lip so hard I could almost taste blood. Up his finger came again,
gently teasing me, then down it went. Up, and down. Up and down. Up, and down
again, each time pressing ever so slightly into me.

It was torture. My cheeks burned. I
wanted to reach down under the table and slam his face against my pussy. I
wanted to leap up and kick him. I didn't dare do either of those things. I knew
I was soaking through my panties and probably staining my skirt, but I couldn't
bring myself to push him away. My whole existence was his finger and my aching
cunt. The restaurant faded around me and I closed my eyes, trying to maneuver
my hips into his finger yet again. I needed him to touch my clit. I was going to
die without it.

But he didn't. Instead, he paused
again at my entrance, and I could feel his gaze on me, staring straight into my
quivering folds. I was exposed to him. All my defenses were stripped away, need
spiraling out of control.

Slowly, surely, one long finger
entered me. I convulsed around him.

“Miss?”

Oh no. No, no, no. Not now. Go
away...

“Miss, is there anything I can
bring you?”

I forced my eyes open to see the
waitress hovering at the side of the table, looking at me curiously. Surely she
knew what was happening. It had to be obvious.

The finger inside me curled, and my
toes curled along with it.

“No!” I said. “Nothing. Thanks!”

She looked at me strangely. “Your
lunch will be out shortly. There's a bit of a backup in the kitchen.”

Don't care!
I wanted to
scream.

I felt Waters move under the table.
Rough cheeks scraped over my tender inner thighs.

Oh god. No, don't, don't you
dare.

“Ma'am?” the waitress said. “You
don't look very well.”

“Just a hangover,” I blurted. “Need
some hair of the dog.” I reached for the wine glass I had rejected, desperate
to hide my cresting need.

Anton Waters sucked my clit into
his mouth, scraped his tongue over it, and I came.

My hand flailed against my wine,
knocking it over, but I barely even noticed. All my determination not to scream
flew out the window, but I had the barest shred of self-control left to bury my
head in my arms and shriek into the table. My whole body shuddered and stars
burst against my eyelids as he suckled on my clit, curling his finger inside me.
My legs curled over his shoulders, pulling him to me as I shook with a pleasure
so acute it was almost pain. The soft, vague roughness of his tongue pulled my
clit further and further into his mouth, and pulled me along with it. I felt as
though I might melt where I sat, might fall into his mouth and be devoured, and
I wouldn't care.

And he didn't stop, even as I came down from the shuddering
heights, dragging moans from my mouth. I felt the eyes of the entire restaurant
on me as I came, and the coarse humiliation slid against the pleasure,
sharpening it like a whetstone, until it cut like a blade.

Waters retreated, and I felt his absence like a bruise. At
last I was able to raise my head. I forced myself to meet my waitress's eyes.

We stared at each other for a long moment. I knew she knew.
And she knew that I knew that she knew.

I did the only thing I could think of. I pressed a hand to my
mouth and clutched my stomach with the other. “I think... Mr. Waters went to
the restroom,” I gasped. “Could you... get him for me?”

Her eyes wide in terror, the waitress nodded frantically and
fled the scene of the crime. I didn't dare look around to see who else had
noticed me just have the most powerful orgasm of my life.

After a moment, Anton Waters popped up on the other side of
the booth, looking cool and unflappable, as though he had just gone to retrieve
an errant fork. The only thing that gave him away was the slickness of his
lips, wet with my juices, and his green eyes, watching me like a tiger. I met
his gaze, still panting, then pulled my skirt down. My thighs rubbed against my
pussy, sending aftershocks through my body.

For a long moment, we stared at
each other. He glanced down at the contract by his elbow and rescued it just in
time from the spreading red wine.

Wordlessly, he pushed it toward me,
then held the pen out to me.

“This is your call,” he said. He
studied me with eyes hooded by desire.

I hesitated one final time. Then I
grabbed the pen and signed my life away.

Chapter Three:

Bartered Bride

“I'm an idiot,” I moaned. “A complete and utter idiot.”

My best friend Sadie cocked an eyebrow and sucked on her
cigarette. “I don't think that's ever been in doubt,” she told me. “You're not
exactly the sharpest marble in the bag, Lis.”

“You're so mean,” I told her. Then her words sank in. “Wait,
marbles aren't sharp.”

She smirked at me and blew a smoke ring.

“That's even meaner,” I complained. “My life is ending and you
don't even care.”

Sadie rolled her eyes. “Your life isn't ending. You're just
marrying some guy for his money.”

I threw a pillow at her, which she dodged. “I am
not.”
I
was marrying him to save my mom. And also because he seemed to have found my
Orgasm Button. I'd told Sadie the first part, but not the second. It was too
humiliating.

Tapping ash into the tray on my table, Sadie shrugged. “There's
nothing wrong with marrying a guy for his money,” she said. “I'd do it.”

“You'd do a lot of things.”

“Shit yeah, I would. Besides, your little noble
I'm so poor!
act
isn't getting you anywhere in your career, is it?” She gestured at the corner
of my apartment where my latest creation languished, half-finished until I
could procure the funds necessary to buy more clay. I'd had several shows, all
at small galleries, and done well, but the bigger stuff required more money
than I had, and more hustle than I was
ever
going to have after working
ten hour days at the bar. I hated to think it, but Sadie might be right:
marrying Waters would be good for my career.

And my sex life.

If only it didn't seem so
tawdry.

“So when's the big day? What do I have to wear as your maid of
honor?”

I wrinkled my nose. “He said it was going to be soon. I don't
actually have a lot of say in it. He's taking me out to a quote-unquote
specialty boutique in like an hour or something to pick out my dress and, uh.
Underwear.”

That
got Sadie's attention. “He's picking out your
underwear?” she said. “What kind of marriage is this going to be?”

I glared at her. “The exact sort of marriage you'd expect from
someone who wanted to
buy
a wife.”

She shook her head. “You can't even cook,” she said. “He could
have gotten a much better wife from Russia.
And
she'd be, like, way
hotter.”

“Yeah, fuck you, too,” I said. “Now you're definitely not going
to be my maid of honor.” If I was even allowed to have one. Waters hadn't
mentioned anything about friends or family yet and it was making me uneasy. I'd
never been the sort of girl to dream about my wedding or pick out my bridal
colors when I was thirteen or whatever, but I would have expected a little more
leeway in the planning. As far as I knew, it was being 'taken care of.' And
since I didn't really feel like a bride, I had to admit that it was kind of a
load off my mind to just let things happen instead of struggling to assert
myself in the face of... well, in the face of Anton Waters.

Sadie stubbed out her cigarette and got up. “Well, just make
sure you don't forget the little people when you're rich and on the cover of
all the tabloids, okay?” Sadie was one of my artsy friends as opposed to one of
my bar friends, though she worked with paint and 'mixed media'—meaning trash
she found in Central Park.

“Sure,” I said. “You wanna be one of my hangers-on? I'll be
taking applications through the honeymoon.”

“I'd love to,” she said. “But you have to promise, or I'm
leaking this to everyone we know.”

Fear drove through me and I sat up. “Sadie!” I said.

She held up her hands and laughed. “I know, I know. This was all
in confidence. I promise. I just have to not get drunk between now and when you
get married.” She appeared to think about this for a moment. “So it had better
be in the next twenty-four hours.”

“Ugggh!” I said. “Out. Go to work.”

“Right,” she said. “Not all of us are lucky enough to marry
money.”

“Out!”

She laughed as she exited my apartment and closed the door
behind her, leaving behind the smell of cigarette smoke and her thick, heavy
perfume.

I sat down on my futon and closed my eyes, trying to relax.
Usually after I saw Sadie, I felt better about things.

This time, it didn't work. I still had that gut clenching fear
crouching inside me. I sat up and took a few deep breaths and thought about
calling my mother. I hadn't spoken to her yet, and I didn't know how to broach
the subject of my pending nuptials. She still hadn't told me she was sick, but
I could hear it in her weary voice whenever we spoke. The distance between us
seemed to have yawned into a chasm almost overnight. Ever since my father
showed up at my door, I hadn't been able to talk to her like I usually did,
even though we had always talked, ever since I was a little girl. My father's
constant betrayals had pushed us together, and she was my dearest confidant—or
at least she had been.

Now she didn't even know I was getting married, and I found I
didn't want her to know until the last second. Anton Waters was a rich jackass,
just like my father. In fact, he was even
more
of a rich jackass. I
couldn't bear the thought of her thinking I was making the same mistake she
had—she was the one who had told me to flee our toxic household and not look
back—and I couldn't even tell her that I was the one paying for her chemo
treatments, since she didn't want me to know about them...

Shit. This was all my father's doing. He had a knack for
screwing everyone else up just by existing. If he hadn't been such a shitty
person none of this would be a problem.

I rubbed my hand over my face and sighed, glancing at my phone.
Only about thirty minutes until I was due out front for the car and I hadn't
even had a shower yet. I knew I should get up, but I couldn't. I sat on my
futon for probably ten more minutes before I finally found the motivation to
stand up, and then I had to rush through a shower and makeup before throwing on
clothes—less theatrical than my prostitute get-up I'd tried over lunch three days
ago—and clomping downstairs to find the car already waiting for me and Zachary
standing by the back seat, looking bored.

“Sorry,” I said. He just smiled and opened the back door for me.

Anton Waters was already inside.

I hadn't seen him since he went down on me in the restaurant
where we'd met to discuss our prenuptial contract. In persuading me to sign it,
he'd ducked under the table and, hidden by the table cloth, fucked me with his
tongue and fingers, wringing an orgasm from me that had been so powerful I'd
screamed in front of everyone, even our waitress. The poor girl had been unable
to look at me for the rest of the lunch, which Waters had insisted on eating
through to the last course while I sat there, humiliated and horny.

Yeah. Horny.

That was the problem. I'd
liked
it just as much as I'd
hated it. Who knew I was such a freak? Not me, and certainly not any of the
boyfriends I'd had. Maybe
they
had been the boring ones.

And now Waters sat in the back seat of the car, reading
something on a tablet and completely ignoring me. Fear and excitement danced
together in my chest, whirling around and around until I couldn't tell one from
the other. Lifting my chin, I clambered inside. Zachary shut the door after me,
and I crammed myself in the corner, half-fearing, half-hoping Waters would slip
across the seat to join me.

He didn't.

In fact, he didn't even speak to me. He was too busy frowning at
the iPad in front of him, and when I dared to peek at it I found it was full of
small type. Some report or other.

Ugh.
Just like my father, though he'd dragged his
briefcase and his stupid Wall Street Journal around with him all the time—when
he'd bothered to be home, that is. Even when he was home with my mother and me,
he wasn't really.

What a douchebag. And here I was, about to marry someone just
like him.

My ardor cooled somewhat and I sighed, settling for looking out
the window, though I didn't really see the buildings pass by until the car
slowed and I found we were somewhere in Manhattan—NoLita, if I had to guess—outside
a little boutique called, simply,
Anna's.
The display in the windows
were tasteful and minimal, meaning I'd probably have to work for a year at the
bar before I could afford to even spit on the sidewalk out front.