The Billionaire Book Club

Thatch nods. “Hell yes! A weekend away! It’s just the ticket.”

Kline’s eyes are kind as he translates everyone else’s gibberish into something I can understand. Something that catches me off guard. “You’re getting through. Pretty soon, Ruby is going to be in love with you.”

Everyone around the table nods, and a knot forms in my stomach.

Love?

I highly doubt that’s the case, but I can’t really blame them for going the l-o-v-e route. I mean, that’s essentially how I roped these sappy bastards into this whole book club shindig in the first place.

Ruby getting naked and falling in lust with me? Hell yes.

But…falling in love? With me?

I shake my head a little to clear my thoughts and rub a hand against my tightening chest. It feels foreign and warm and a little like I can’t breathe.

I’m not sure what Thatch put in the appetizers tonight, but it must cause indigestion.

Surely, though, I’ll be over that soon, and if these fuckers are right, I know what to do.

Weekend getaway, party of two, please.

Ruby

My parents arrived last night in a flourish of glory and fanfare. I was sleeping, as most humans are at three thirty in the morning, when a banging started on the door worthy of a SWAT team with a ramrod.

Knowing my mother, I couldn’t completely eliminate that option, so I rushed out of bed, threw a robe over my shoulders, and ran the fifteen short feet to the door in an attempt to spare its life. My apartment isn’t even close to the Taj Mahal, but littering all three hundred square feet with the shards of my former door didn’t exactly seem like it would do anything to improve the place.

Seeing my mom’s excited face when I opened the door was almost as bad as seeing the actual SWAT team would have been.

Cut to a few hours later, and the three of us are sitting around my coffee table on pillows, eating bagels from the shop below my apartment.

“I just don’t understand,” I say for the twentieth time since they arrived. “Why on earth would you show up unannounced?”

“Unannounced?” my mom shrieks in challenge. “I told you we were coming a month ago.”

“You never got back to me with the actual dates,” I argue back. “I figured you’d tell me the dates before you arrived on my doorstep in the middle of the night.”

“You know what I don’t understand?” my dad interjects. “How I’m supposed to have any privacy for my morning constitutional behind a goddamn shower curtain? What the hell?” he grumbles. “New York City’s never heard of bathroom doors?”

“The landlord is working on it,” I mutter on a lie. My landlord is a skeevy guy named Randy, and he’s way more likely to take doors off than put them on.

Plus, I’m not going to tell my dear old dad this, but that shower curtain serving as the bathroom door has been here since before I moved in.

“I thought you were paying $2,500 a month for a place, for shit’s sake,” my dad grumbles some more as my mom worries her lip before asking, “How strong are the locks?”

Instead of explaining to my dad that I am paying that much in rent for this glorified shithole or getting into an hour-long discussion with my mom about hardware, I sigh heavily and shove a bite of bagel into my mouth.

It tastes like a last meal before my execution.

A horn blares below my window for the fourth time in a row, and I roll my eyes at New York’s display of hospitality.

As if my parents weren’t already disillusioned enough with my life choices, some cabbie on a power trip really wants to drive the point home.

When it honks a sixth time, I get annoyed enough to get up off my pillow, and my mom follows. It’s six o’clock in the morning, for God’s sake, and I got next to no sleep last night because I had to entertain the nosy, paranoid, and very opinionated Rockfords. This isn’t the time to mess with me. I’m liable to lose my shit like Daenerys and burn everything to the ground.

I shove open the window and peek my head out over the fire escape, prepared to give some asshole stranger hell, but when I look down, all I find is an asshole I know.

Cap, dressed in jeans and a blue-and-white flannel shirt, stands in the door of his Range Rover, looking up at me.

His smile is a mile wide, and to be honest, my heart feels like it skips an actual beat.

Freaking traitor heart.

“Come on,” he yells up at me obnoxiously. “Pack a bag, doll. We’re going to the lake.”

“Who’s that?” my mom asks from a startlingly close proximity. I jump as she leans out beside me to take a look. “Is he a sex trafficker?”