Dirty Sweet Wild (Bad Billionaires 2)

As I sat there, thinking and stewing, my phone actually rang. I jumped, but it was my sister, Olivia. I tried to relax my jaw, my neck, which was a way to get the tension out of your voice. “Hey, sis,” I said.

“Hey,” she said. “You okay?”

Her sister ESP was in good shape. “Fine. Just, you know, had to talk to Trent.”

“Ew. Did you disinfect?”

“On it.”

“Good. What are you doing on Friday night?”

I tried not to breathe in relief. I couldn’t talk about the thing with Trent right now. Olivia was supportive, but I knew she hated the fact that I worked as a stripper, and my mother agreed. They both wished I’d quit a long time ago, or never taken the job at all, and I’d always scoffed at their worries. It was humiliating to have to admit they were right.

As for the invitation, I used to go for drinks with my sister, but not since she’d fallen for Devon Wilder, Mr. Ridiculously Hot Billionaire, and moved in to his place in Diablo. “I’m not doing anything Friday night. What’s up?”

“Devon and I want to take you to the theater.”

I blinked. “A play?”

“Macbeth,” she said. “There’s a big production on downtown. Devon is getting a box.”

“He is?” I called up my mental picture of Devon Wilder. I’d met him a couple of times. He had been a criminal before spending two years in prison and inheriting from his unknown grandfather while he was inside. Even now, as suddenly rich as he was, he tended to wear jeans and t-shirts, and he had a tattoo on the back of his hand that said No Time. “I didn’t know Devon was, um, a theater guy.”

“He isn’t,” my sister said cheerfully, “but he’s willing to try. We wanted to do something fun. And we wanted you to come.”

I got it now. Of the two of us, I was the performer while Olivia was the shy one. I’d spent a year in acting school before dropping out. I’d never seriously pursued being an actress, but Olivia knew it was something I was interested in, and she was trying to come up with something I’d like to do.

In short, this was about me. Or, more likely, about me and Devon. Olivia wanted us to be friends. Not that we weren’t. We were strangers, sort of. I was wary of him, because he had the power to utterly break my sister’s heart, and there was nothing I could do about it. He seemed equally wary of me, probably because I had been the closest person in Olivia’s life before he came along.

I sighed. “Liv, you don’t have to do this.”

“What? I’m not doing anything. It’ll be fun.”

“Setting me up with Devon. We’ll be fine. I mean, he can beat me up, so what am I gonna do?”

“Gwen, he offered to sit in a theater box. For three hours. For you.”

No, I almost corrected her, for you. I pinched the bridge of my nose. I shouldn’t argue this. Olivia was happy—amazingly happy. She was my sister, and we were close. If she wanted me to go to Macbeth and be a third wheel while reminding myself how single and miserable I was, I could do it.

Besides, the production would probably be really good.

“Okay,” I said, thinking of my pathetic paycheck. “As long as he’s paying.”

Olivia laughed. “He’s paying.”

“And I want—” I tried to think of something that would make it a little less easy on him. “I want a limo to pick me up.”

“Done.”

“And I want him to take me to hotwire cars, or whatever it is that ex-cons do, some other time so he doesn’t think he has to do this crap all the time to impress me.”

She was laughing again, a truly happy sound that made my stomach twist. “Okay, okay, hotwire cars or something. Got it.”

“Friday night, then.”

I hung up and sat in the silence of my car again. I felt a little bit better, but not a lot. It was going to be a nice evening. But I was going to be alone.

I’d always preferred being alone. I’d dated, but I hadn’t had any long-term relationships, any men who I’d been particularly committed to. It always went a certain way: Man pursued me; I said no; man kept pursuing; I finally relented with conditions; if man met certain conditions I dated him for a while, eventually including sex, until I was tired of him. Then I dumped him. Repeat.