The Billionaire's Proposal

“Episode six?”

We nodded silently.

“Yeah—me and my girlfriend started fighting around that point too.” He held out the box with a good-natured smile. “Large pepperoni? Extra cheese?”

For a second, the two of us simply stared. Half horrified at the atrocities we’d just witnessed on screen, and half stunned senseless at the man’s automatic assumption.

Girlfriend. Boyfriend. Couple’s television fight.

There was nothing remotely normal about those words when applied to us, and yet somehow, that happened to be exactly what we were doing.

Maybe this was turning out to be a normal day after all?

As I glanced nervously down at the sofa, Nick sprang to his feet to pay for the pizza. He left a rather outrageously large tip, and the guy left with a grin. A grin that I saw mirrored on Nick’s face as he set the pizza on a coffee table and sat back down beside me.

A grin that abruptly made me suspicious.

“Did you pay that guy to say that?” I asked suddenly.

Nick’s head jerked up in surprise. “What?”

“Oh come on.” I folded my arms across my chest with a grin, tossing my dark waves of hair back behind me. “Like it would be a stretch to assume you’d coached the pizza guy? Like you haven’t gleefully manipulated situations before just to fuck with me?”

I expected a triumphant confession, but Nick just threw back his head with a laugh.

“You—Wilder—are entirely too suspicious, you know that?”

My eyes narrowed as he grabbed a slice of pizza. “That isn’t exactly a denial...”

He laughed again and took a bite, before pulling off another piece for me.

“No—alright—I swear. He was just a random pizza guy.”

I studied him for a moment, a very long moment indeed, before taking the slice with a reluctant smile. I had to admit, when the guy first said it, Nick had looked as surprised as I was.

But he certainly didn’t look that way now. In fact, he looked rather pleased.

“What are you grinning about?” I asked as he turned back to the screen.

He flashed me a dimpled smile, before lifting my feet and laying them across his lap. I looked on in shock as he ate his pizza with one hand, and rubbed my ankles with another.

“Oh, nothing.”

Nicholas Hunter was giving me a foot massage. What the fuck was happening?!

“Come on,” I demanded, propping myself up on my elbows. “Tell me.”

He glanced at me again, before leaning back with an innocent shrug.

“This is just nice, you know?”

I followed his gaze around the domestic little scene, before returning with a question.

“What’s nice?”

His lips curved up as he picked up the remote and pressed play.

“...normal.”