A Billionaire for Christmas

She clutched his hand but kept her other one over her face. “Don’t be nice to me. Don’t encourage this. I’m not a crier. I’m tough. Ranchers don’t cry,” she ground out through clenched teeth.

God, she was even madder at herself for crying.

She couldn’t open her eyes, but she heard Augustine say, “You loved him.”

She nodded and sucked in a gasp. She tried to steady her voice, but it came out as a stupid croak anyway. “I did. I loved him. I was stupid, and I loved him. I told him I loved him every night before we went to sleep. He said it back. I believed him, and I’m an idiot for believing him.”

Augustine’s hand tightened around hers. “It’s not stupid to believe in love.”

“I should have been smarter. I should have looked for the red flags that he was actually a grifter and just trying to get money because he totally blindsided me. I still don’t see anything. I still don’t understand why he did it, other than because he wanted money and he didn’t want me.”

“I know what it’s like not to be wanted and not to understand why.”

She squinted at him through her fingers. “You? No way. Anybody who likes dudes would hand you their panties.”

He smiled a little on one side of his mouth. “Not all of them. Go ahead. Finish telling me your lies about Francis.”

“This is too hard.”

“Then it’s okay. We’ll put it on hold for a while.”

She started talking again because she couldn’t stop. “And then, after all that happened, I didn’t know what to do. There was this police car hanging around outside my apartment, and they told me to get in. I thought they were going to take me to the police station to give my statement or whatever I was supposed to do to report a crime, but they drove me around and asked me a bunch of questions. Finally, at a stoplight, I opened the car door and got out of their car and called a rideshare. Typical useless civil servants, ya know? Show up too late afterward, ask a bunch of stupid questions, and then nothing happens.”

“That’s odd,” Augustine said, frowning. “Is that how your police investigate a crime?”

“I still don’t know what to do,” she said. “I still had one credit card from before I’d met Francis, so I went to where I work, took out five hundred dollars as a cash advance, and got on the plane to Paris, because what the hell. I had a gym bag in my locker with a change or two of clothes, and I had my passport in my purse because I’d wanted to show it off to my friends at work. Most of them had never seen one in real life.”

Augustine rubbed his thumb over her knuckles, and she clutched his hand more tightly.

“I didn’t realize that I’d have to pay the FlyBNB lady a lot of money because my credit card got declined, because now it’s over its limit. So, here I am, broke in Paris and trying not to be an idiot, but somehow, I’m the same old Dree. I wanted to be different, ya know? I wanted to be someone else. But I’m just as stupid as I’ve always been.”

He caressed the back of her hand with his thumb. “You’re not stupid. Don’t stop believing in love. When you do that, you get desperate, and you can’t stop yourself from doing foolish, self-destructive things.”

That sounded like personal experience.

She opened her fingers a little more and peered at him between them. “Do you want to talk about it?”

He chuckled and pulled back a little, looking down. “It was a long time ago.”

“Did someone hold your hand and tell you not to give up on love?”

He glanced at her from the corners of his eyes. “No.”

At the very least, no matter what else was going on in her life, Dree would trip over her own feet trying to be helpful. She was a sucker like that, too.

So, she took her hand off her snotty nose and bleary eyes, wiped it carefully on her shirt a couple of times to make sure it was dry, and held Augustine’s hand. She looked straight into his dark, fathomless eyes. “Don’t give up on love. You’re a great guy. You rescued me from a mob of creepers, and now you’re sitting here and listening to me blather on about how I screwed up my life. There’s someone out there waiting for a guy like you.”

He didn’t look away, but there was something in the slight bow of his lips and creases at the corners of his eyes that looked wounded. He said, “I don’t think anyone is coming for me.”

“You don’t know that.”

He shrugged and broke their eye contact. “It’s just a feeling, but I’ve had it for a long time. But we’re talking about you.”