“Even gossip?”
“Iespeciallydon’t read gossip. Celebrities are people too, you know.”
Rei shook her head at me, sliding her phone from one of her pockets—the jumpsuit had too many to count, and I was seriously reconsidering my black jeans and daycare T-shirt. They were cutting into my waistandhad no added pockets. What a waste.
A few taps on the screen, and she turned the phone to me. Sure enough, I saw a photo of Bryce and me standing outside of Golden Café. My dress looked just as gorgeous as Glamma promised, accentuating my full chest and giving my long legs amoment. And Bryce? His eyes were on me like Glamma on a shoe sale. He didn’t look at me like an acquaintance or even a friend. His gaze was pure molten fire as he took me in.
My stomach swooped with desire before Rei turned the phone back to her, examining the screen, and said, “It’s a great pic of you. We should crop him out.”
I rolled the coffee between my hands again, feeling the cardboard sleeve creases under my palms. “Are you sure it’s him?”
“Like ninety-nine percent,” she said with a sigh.
And here I was, stupidly hanging on to the one percent chance that Bryce Madigan could be who I thought he was.
20.Bryce
Jude closedthe door to the conference room, coming to join the rest of the founders. All our assistants were out of the room, as this meeting was top secret. “What’s going on?” he demanded, tugging up his sleeve to check his watch. “I’m due for a meet and greet in an hour.”
My hands felt shaky, so I curled them into fists under the table. “Jasper is not going to budge, which means...”
I left my sentence hanging in the air, but Quentin finished it for me. “It means he’s not selling to us and neither is Aleyna. So what are we going to do?”
Aaric tucked his long blond hair behind his ears and said, “What choice do we have? Maybe it’s the universe telling us it’s time to settle down.”
Cruz rolled his eyes. “His name is Simon, not the universe.” His eyebrows lifted. “Hey, it’s just a game of Simon Says.Simon says get married.”
Jude scowled at the lot of us. “So you’re all just giving up?”
“What are we supposed to do?” I countered. “We could sell our shares and try building something new. We could wait until they get in and vote them out one by one, but we can only have avote every year. That’s at least three years of them having access to proprietary information. Forget ever going public with them in the picture. Investors wouldn’t trust us.”
Now Jude turned his frustration on me. “We’ve spent over a decade building this business, and now you want us to walk away?” Rei’s violin string assumption rang through my mind.
I pushed back from the desk and started pacing. “Of course I don’t want to walk away. It’s my life’s work.” Who was I without MyHome?
“We could become silent partners,” Aaric suggested. “Keep our shares and release our positions. Profit off the name we’ve built.”
But Quentin frowned. “Keeping our shares wouldn’t do us any financial favors long-term. And selling them before we step down would invite lawsuits, or even criminal charges, for insider trading.”
The five of us looked at each other for a long moment.
Jude folded his arms across his chest. “Five billionaires getting married within a year will look suspicious too.”
Cruz seemed confident as he said, “We just have to spin the right story and time it correctly. If we all married at the end of the year? Yes, that would seem off. If we got married throughout the year… it’s within the realm of possibility.”
“Marriage by a calendar?” I asked, skeptical. If my dad were here, a vein would be popping on his forehead, and he’d have more than a few choice words to say. But he wasn’t here. “How would we even decide who goes first?” I asked. “Draw straws?” The concept seemed as ridiculous as Simon’s demand we get married.
“We need to be strategic.” Cruz stood up, going to the whiteboard at the front of the conference room and grabbing a marker. “If we want to craft a story, it needs to be believable.Jude will be the last—he’s known as a playboy. It will take a while for him to settle down.
The marker screeched as he uncapped it, then wrote a timeline on the board, crosshatched by months. After writing December, he added, “If Simon has eighteen months to live, this needs to be handled in a year to ensure he’s of sound mind to fulfill his promise, right?”
I watched as my co-founders nodded in agreement. A wave of surrealism washed over me. We were really doing this, weren’t we?
He marked a timeline, months one through twelve at the bottom.
“I travel so much for work that building a believable relationship will be a challenge. That puts me right before Jude.”
Aaric, Quentin and I looked at each other. That meant we were up first.
