Billionaires, Billionaires, Billionaires, and more Billionaires: Billionaire Bundle Page 23

  Leah

  I’m woken by the sound of gulls. At firs this confuses me, but then I remember we’re on the beach. Joshua’s arms are wrapped around me, his hard body pressed against mine to keep me warm. It feels so cozy and tender like this, and a knot forms in my throat. Even though we didn’t have sex, last night seemed almost more intimate, just like when we’ve come together. And now waking up with him beside me, it feels good. Really good. No wonder Sarah always likes to be in a relationship. I feel like I can conquer anything today, it’s so amazing.

  I stretch out my cramped leg a little bit, and Joshua stirs. I turn around to face him and we share a kiss.

  “Morning,” I say softly.

  “Morning,” he replies with a sleepy smile.

  “I didn’t mean to fall asleep like this. I’m sorry if it was uncomfortable.”

  “It wasn’t,” he says, his eyes sharp all of a sudden.

  I feel like he means something different from what he says, but what I can’t tell. There’s a seriousness that makes my heart flutter, that makes me wonder if this feels just as good for him too. But what do I know? I wish I could put how I feel into proper words, but for all of my reading, I can’t seem to find the right ones. Instead I’m just mesmerized, entranced by how smoking hot he looks even after falling asleep on the beach. I can’t seem to think clearly when I’m around him.

  Joshua’s stomach rumbles, and we both laugh, lightening the mood.

  “I guess we should find ourselves some breakfast,” he says. “Arturo doesn’t open in the morning.”

  “I know just the place,” I tell him. “And since it’s Sunday, we shouldn’t bump into any students at all.”

  Together we head back across the beach. The waves are lapping up higher than they were, so it’s probably good that we’re getting out of here now before we get wet. Last night had been incredibly romantic, but this morning, in the light of the sun, I feel almost shy again. It’s only when he grabs my hand to hold that I relax a little.

  The place that I’m thinking of for breakfast is a diner just off the highway. Far enough from campus that it most students wouldn’t make the trek on the weekend mornings, it’s filled with mostly townsfolk, people who wouldn’t care who we are and why we’re together. At least, I hope. I definitely can’t afford to buy out the diner. The place is hopping, filled with people grabbing an early bite before church. Waitresses bustle between tables, hands full of plates and coffee. The hum of activity will definitely let us slip by unnoticed I think. We’re led to a booth in the back, and the waitress tops up the mugs with coffees as we look through the plastic menus. I go for the French toast stack, while Joshua opts for a Southwest omelet.

  “You’re one of those healthy types huh?” I ask as I sip my coffee.

  “How else would I have kept this body?” he says jokingly.

  I have a flash of his body again, those hard pecs, flat abs, and the lines of his hips point straight down towards his cock. I look up and see him smirking and I flush red.

  “I guess I should probably try to do the same, but I can’t resist when it comes to brunch,” I say.

  It’s so strange. For everyone else, I feel like I can’t be myself, that I have to hide my true thoughts and wants, but when it comes to Joshua, I’m never afraid to be just me.

  “Good. I love your curves,” he says directly. “You don’t need to change a thing Leah.”

  We are digging into our food when a shadow falls across our table. We both look up, and I gasp. It’s the dean. There’s just no mistaking that bald head, shiny as a cue ball, the thin lanky frame, the permanent look of disapproval on his face. I have no idea how that guy got put in charge of an institution of learning, because he takes no joy from it that’s for sure. I only met him once, when I was bestowed my scholarship. His eyes flick back and forth between us, and I know that it’s all over. The bite of French toast turns to dust in my mouth.

  “Cullen,” he says crisply. “A word outside.”

  Joshua, to his credit, seems completely unfazed. His expression is neutral as he follows the dean outside, not betraying a thing. But I can see what’s happening outside of the window. The dean isn’t shouting, because he knows what something like this can do to the reputation to his school, but his repeated jabs make it clear he’s more than pissed at Joshua. His back is to me, so I can’t tell what he’s thinking at all. But I can’t take this. I can’t sit here while Joshua gets all the blame. Because what happened here happened because both of us wanted this. I made my choice too, after all.

  Because I only carried my debit card in my clutch, it takes me a little while to pay and head out. I already lost my appetite, and I’m pretty sure Joshua won’t care about his either. The dean is stalking off just as I come up to Joshua.

  “What-”

  “I’ve been fired,” Joshua says simply.

  My hand covers my mouth in shock. The words sink in slowly. Joshua’s fired. As in, he’s going to leave. Forever. Everyone’s going to find out, and when they do…

  “We can fix this,” I tell him. “Let me go talk to the dean.”

  “There’s no need Leah,” he says, holding onto my arm as I try to go to the dean’s car.

  “What do you mean? Of course there is!” I exclaim. “You can’t be fired. You can’t.”

  “The dean told me you were on a scholarship ‘for a student with upstanding morals’. Well this is going to cost you it.”

  I’m stunned. I mean, yeah, I knew that this would definitely go against that, but I guess I just never thought he’d actually go and revoke it, or that he would have the power to do that. It seems like everything is falling to pieces right in front of me. I need to try to hold onto the pieces, what’s left of them anyways.

  “Maybe… Maybe we could break up?” I ask, the words ripping from my heart as I say them. “Then there’ll be nothing there for the dean to get angry about.”

  Joshua gives me a fierce look, one that shakes me with its intensity.

  “Is that what you want Leah?” he asks, his voice almost harsh.

  “I…”

  “Because I don’t,” he says. The words are coming out fast, like a torrent that can’t be contained. “I don’t want to break up with you. It seems crazy, because we’ve known each other less than a week, but it’s been a wonderful week. A week that’s been better than the rest of my life. I want to be with you, I want to wake up with you like I did this morning, and see where all this goes. I think, I think that I’m falling in love with you Leah.”

  My thoughts completely scatter as I hear those words. I try to breathe, try to find what I want to say too, and then it comes to me clear as day.

  “I think I’m falling for you too Joshua.”

  “Good,” he says, and his face breaks out into a smile, the tension gone from his tall frame. “Because you had me worried for a second there.”

  I shake my head.

  “But the dean-”

  “Screw the dean. I only came on as a favor for my old professor, but I’m not letting it mess up your last year of school. I told him I’d go, so that there wouldn’t be any conflict between us having a relationship. And as for your scholarship, which is utter bullshit, I told him that I’m establishing another one, seeing as my name’s plastered on one of the buildings already. For any student, no conditions necessary, who needs it. You’re going to get one of them.”

  I can’t believe it. I can’t believe he’s done all this, for me, for us. I’m so full of emotion that it’s all I can do to lunge forward and kiss him. We collide, our lips hungry, my skin hot under his tough, his stubble grazing against my face as our tongues come together, arms pulling each other closer.

  “Home,” he says thickly as we pull apart at last.

  “Now.”

  Joshua probably went double over the speed limit as we hurry back to his house. It’s a big ranch house in the nicer part of town, where most of the professors probably live. There’s a fountain out front, and gates to
keep out the paparazzi that are sure to show up once news of our relationship hits. The house is probably really grand, but I’m not interested in any of that right now.

  We’re kissing feverishly, his arms holding me around his waist as he carries me through the house. My lips part, letting him do as he wishes, claiming my mouth over and over. My hips rock against the bulge in his pants, desperate to shed the layers between us. Our clothes are dropped, a fabric trail leading to the master bedroom. His hands squeeze my ass, my breasts, everywhere at once. Fingers brush my taut nipples, sending pleasure rolling through my body. Lust makes me pant, my whole body melting underneath Joshua’s hard one. I part my legs, my pussy aching to be taken. He parts my swollen lips, thumb circling my clit, making me moan his name.

  The anticipation burns through me, and I push his hand out of the way, wanting his cock instead. I grip it in my small hand, guide him to me, and let him sink into me at last, all the way to the flared base. I’m gasping as he fills me up at last, right where he should be. It feels so right to have him inside of me. I squeeze my walls around him, and then he’s plunging into me again. He fucks me deep and slow, each time teasing me as he pulls out, swift as he thrusts back in, stretching me apart, taking me, and claiming me again and again. I’m sobbing almost it feels so good, the pleasure sweetened by the fact that he loves me, and I him.

  Our bodies come together forcefully, my legs locked behind him to drive him deeper inside of me. My whole body is shaking, pleasure reaching the very tips of my fingers and toes. It feels amazing as he thrusts, cock hard as a rock, opening me up to him, and even though the build is slow, when the orgasm comes, it obliterates everything but the pleasure coursing through my body, and I surrender to it with a scream. Joshua’s cock is convulsing inside of me, coating me with his seed as I say his name over and over and over. And when we finally collapse together, still connected, all I can think of is how this man is somehow mine.

  All mine.

  Epilogue

  Leah

  One year later…

  “Okay, I think that this is the last box, for real this time,” I say.

  I take a deep breath and heave the box onto Joshua-no our giant king size bed. I still have to correct myself sometimes. He tells me that everything of ours is shared now, but it takes some getting used to. He’s got much, much more than I do, and sometimes I feel as though it doesn’t seem fair. But he’s never given me any indication of that, so I try not to either.

  It’s the end of a lovely weekend for us, and I’m tackling the very last thing on my to-do list: unpacking this box. It’s been sitting at the bottom of our closet now for weeks, reproaching me for not taking care of it.

  When I came to New York, the first thing we did was pick out an apartment together. Joshua’s old place was a bachelor pad, somewhere to crash after going out and partying all night. He needed a change, and a new apartment seemed the right way to start this chapter of our lives together. We picked out a gorgeous penthouse, with lots of crown molding and historical detail. It’s steps from Central Park, which was what sold me on it. The most important thing was that it was ‘close to good schools’, at the insistence of Joshua. It warms me up just to think about this, that he’s already thinking so far ahead in our relationship. That he wants kids. We’ve circled around the topic a while, but I’m not ready to have a baby, not when I have no clue what I want to do with my own life.

  “Books?” he reads from the side. “I would have thought that this box would be opened right away by you.”

  “Yeah well, I’ve been pretty busy lately with all my new classes,” I say. “I still love reading, but I’m also seeing what else I like too.”

  He leans in and kisses me.

  “Good,” he says. “Maybe you could pick up cooking lessons some time?”

  Joshua cooks all of our meals, or at least, the ones when we don’t actually make it out the door. Which is pretty often, when I think about it.

  “Never ever ever,” I tell him. “I’d do anything but that.”

  “Then I guess I better start dinner while you do this.”

  I use the scissors to cut through the packing tape, opening up the contents. There are books alright, but it’s also go a lot of stuff from college. I guess it was my textbooks, which is why I didn’t bother opening it up right away.

  “Thanks,” I say as I pull out some of my pictures. “I’ll probably be a while.”

  I settle down cross-legged on the bed as I flip through the contents. College. Man, I’m glad to be done with it. It’s been a wild year to say the least. At first, people didn’t put it together. The dean only said that Joshua left for personal reasons, and most of the students were pretty confused. The Creative Writing class especially was disappointed, which I don’t blame them for at all. I mean, who better than a real author to help teach people how to write books?

  But then we started to go out together, to make it official, and people connected the dots. To say people were angry is an understatement. I had to shut down my Facebook for a while because the news spread, from our campus and beyond. I guess the whole student teacher thing is still salacious even though Joshua wasn’t officially my teacher, and we announced it after he left. The only refuge I had was with my friends, who were all happy for me. Not one of them got mad at me for withholding the news from them, which is pretty awesome. I feel very lucky to have them as my friends.

  I thought that things would die down, but they didn’t not until winter break. Now that was another whole mess in itself. Joshua wanted to come to meet my parents, but I convinced him that it would be a bad idea for now. Mom had already gotten upset with me multiple times on the phone, convinced that somehow he’d corrupted me and ruined me because I happened to mention that I didn’t want to pursue graduate school anymore. When she threatened to cut me off, Joshua and I decided to move in together, which only made her angrier. And I was right. Christmas dinner was tense, and it didn’t help that all of my cousins thought it was so cool and kept asking me questions about Joshua and his latest Blake Thrasher book. I don’t know how many times I had to tell people that no, Blake’s latest girlfriend wasn’t based off of me.

  At least it seemed like people had moved on after Christmas. I ended up graduating like I planned, and then Joshua and I made plans to move to New York. We’ve been here for almost three, four months now, and I’m loving it. I got a job at a marketing firm as an assistant, which is the least glamorous part of my life right now, but I’ve been taking classes in just about everything. I realized that my life up until now has been too sheltered, that I’ve followed a path set down for my by someone else for too long. So to find what I wanted to do, I’ve been trying out everything. Zumba, meditation, Japanese, singing… Some I’ve stuck with, and some I dropped. I’m still not quite sure what I’m going to do, but at least I’m finding out now.

  I dig through the stacks, pulling out my thumb drive with all of my drafts still on them. The ones that I never finished, because I never knew what love was. When I came back from break, I tried to open one of them up, see if anything happened. I wrote what I thought was a pretty good story, but there were problems, lots of problems. It turns out that reading books is not the same as writing them, and that’s coming from Natasha, who’s always super encouraging. I tried a few more times, but by the end, it was pretty clear: I’m not meant to be a writer.

  It took a hell of a long time to come to terms with it. Joshua tried to help, but I knew the truth deep down in my heart. It hasn’t stopped sucking though. I tuck the thumb drive back under everything else. I keep some of the pictures so I can frame it up, but everything else I decide can just stay in my closet. It’s too much to deal with at the moment.

  Then I get up and head straight for the kitchen. Joshua’s just pulling something out of the oven, setting the pot on the stove to cool. I come up behind him and wrap my arms around him, putting my head on his strong back for comfort. That’s when I look over and notice that there’s a
romantic dinner set out, complete with rose petals across the table.

  “Is there something going on?” I ask, pulling back. “It’s not our anniversary, is it?”

  Joshua turns around, a big smile on his face.

  “It’s not, don’t worry,” he says. “But one year ago, we met. Back then I was so surprised to see someone else in one of my favorite spots in town. It was actually the place where I first came up with Blake Thrasher. That sent me on this path in life, and I didn’t know it then, but seeing you set me on yet another.”

  He holds my hand in both of his. I’m still not getting it, at least, not until he slowly gets down on one knee. And then my eyes widen in surprise.

  “I wanted to wait until after dinner, but it’s killing me not to know. Leah, you’re everything to me. I want to be a part of your life, and you a part of mine. Will you marry me?”

  He pulls out a ring with a gorgeous solitaire. He’s smiling so big, the affection in his eyes so strong, that I fall to my knees too.

  “Oh Joshua, yes! Yes!” I tell him, laughing.

  He pulls out the ring and slides it onto my finger. And in that moment, even though I might have lost my dream, I found another one.

  *****

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