Page 30 of Her New Billionaire Bosshole

“No, ma’am,” he says, eyes going wide and flitting to somewhere behind me, as though he expects Elliot to be standing there with me. “I am very well compensated?—”

I’m already shaking my head, “No, you need a tip?—”

“Ma’am.” He lowers his voice, gesturing with his hands toward my purse like he’s shushing it, pulling receipt from his pocket and showing it to me, the line where the tip is scrawled in what must be Elliot’s handwriting. “Mr. Altman left me avery generoustip. Thank you.”

I glance at the receipt, and the number scrawled there makes me suck in a breath. The server smiles when I meet his eyes, nodding his head like,yeah, I hardly believed it.

“Oh,” I say, just as Elliot approaches, his gaze darting between me and the server, his brow wrinkled.

“Everything okay?” he asks.

“Everything’s fine,” I say, voice still light with surprise, that figure dancing through my head.

“Have a good night,” the server says, and I swear he nearly winks at me as we turn and walk back toward the elevator, giving me a look that says,You are one lucky duck.

Elliot’s room is magnificent.

“Okay,” I say, dropping my purse to the couch and spinning around, feeling way too much like Julia Roberts inPretty Woman. “This is stupid.”

Elliot laughs, loosening his tie and leaning on the doorway. “What’s stupid?”

“This room!” I know I’m being too loud, but it’s like I can’t control it. Elliot doesn’t say a thing, just watches me as I moveto the sliding door, pulling it open and stepping out onto the balcony.

“I’m not doing theTitanicscene with you,” he warns, and I shake my head, hands firmly wrapped around the rail.

“I’m not scared of heights,” I say, meeting his eyes, “but I’m notnotscared of heights, either.”

“Sounds like a good compromise.”

“Really, Elliot, this view is incredible. I thought hotel rooms like this only existed on movie sets.”

“You need to stay in nicer hotels, Sophie.”

I pause, turning to look at him, another comment about him being rich right there on the tip of my tongue, but I hold it back. Elliot might be rich, but he’s clearly not the man I thought he was when I first met him.

“When Olivia and I were little,” I say, staring out at the skyline, “she read so many old books that she would talk like the characters. Like, she might look at this and call itwonderful, orsplendid. Adults always ate that stuff up.”

A beat passes, then Elliot says, “Brandon and I used to have little secret code phrases.”

“Like what?”

“Like… pumpernickel. We’d say that when Dad was in a bad mood, and we wanted to avoid him. Now that I’m thinking about it, a lot of our codes were food.” He laughs, thinks, then says, “But we also had this thing we’d say when we needed the other one to believe what we were saying.Total truth— it was kind of like our version ofstick a needle in my eye.”

“But less gruesome,” I say. “That rhyme always made me feel queasy.”

The conversation stretches on, and after an hour, the temperature drops and we move into the living room of his big hotel suite.

I’m not sure who started it — him or me — but neither of us sits on the couch. I’m on the floor, back on the ground, legs up on the couch, a pillow under my head, thanks to Elliot. My dress pools around my hips, but I’m covered with a blanket that’s twisted around my bottom half.

He’s sitting next to me, his back against the couch, his legs stretched out past my head.

For some reason, seeing his socks when he slipped his shoes off felt like the most intimate thing in the world, and now I can’t stop staring at them, can’t stop following the line of each stripe as it stretches onto his ankle.

Somehow, we’re on the topic of the dumbest things we’ve done.

“In college, I drove to Omaha and back in a single weekend, got lost, and almost had to live the rest of my life in Nebraska.”

“Once, I hired one of those skywriters, but forgot to give him a script, so he just did loopty-loops.”