Before Her Billionaires Read online

  What if he just...submitted it? Mike wouldn’t need to know unless someone contacted him, right? Checking out the online dating site’s settings, he realized he could configure the ad so Mike never got an email. All his contact would be through the online dating site, via private message.

  Dylan had to do something. Mike was suffering. No amount of meditation or running was going to drag Mike out of this dark place. And, since Dylan was his partner and along for the ride for life, whatever emotional dungeon Mike lived in, Dylan visited heavily, too.

  He wasn’t being selfish trying to get them back into the dating game, to find their third partner. He was being realistic. Life couldn’t go on like this.

  No matter how much they both missed Jill.

  * * *

  Oh, God, her mouth was like fire and ice, warm heat and slickness as it left his eager lips, kissing down the hollows of his neck, sucking each nipple with a teasing intensity. Her hands skimmed the contours of his arms, muscles swollen from need. As she left a wet trail that journeyed down, down, down she blew lightly in his wet, used skin, making him groan.

  Her long, curly hair was like an afterthought, trailing behind her as she lavished luxurious attention on his skin. It caught in the wetness, slipped between his torso and arms, tickled his cock as finally, mercifully, her mouth took him in, half-hard and in full need of her.

  Her.

  She didn’t have a name, but oh, did she have a grin. A touch. A taste about her that made Dylan sure this wasn’t just a dream. He swallowed, the tight keening of his cock alleviated by her singular attention. She moved like beauty in pure form, her hand grasping the base of him, pulling up and stroking, lubing the shaft as needed. Engulfing him with her soul—via her mouth and throat—she ministered to his every wish.

  The sex was infused with a wholeness, a gentle, tender feeling of being loved. This was what he craved, and before he could come from her mouth he pulled her off, flipping her with a commanding movement, mouth raking over her lips, sucking and biting as she widened her legs for him, the tip of his entire self resting at the entrance of her.

  “I love this. I love you,” she whispered as he drove inside her, the warm, soft place making him groan. She was his love, his life, his erotic end to what felt like an eternal journey, and as he rode her, twisting her hair in his fists, watching her mouth open in ecstasy, he rippled with pleasure, pouring his seed into her as she clenched around him, milking him, urging him on.

  She touched herself, gentle circles of movement that elicited aftershocks in her, the rhythmic pulse of her mini-climaxes like a heartbeat they shared. As they waned, she moved her arms around him, hands splayed on the expanse of his back, short fingernails digging in slightly.

  He rolled off and she snuggled against him, both breathing hard into the air, a warm flush covering him from head to toe.

  And then, blissful sleep took over, a slumber within a dream, as Dylan experienced the first good night’s sleep in eighteen months, completely unaware that the woman he’d just made love with had never been in his bed.

  Only in his head.

  Mike

  Running a 10K was a lot like just ordering an appetizer plate for lunch. It was enough to make the gnawing need inside you stop, but not nearly satisfying. He’d entered this race to please one of his coworkers, whose daughter had the disease that this charity was raising money for, and Mike felt bad. Plus, it was the off season. Might as well meet up with his running friends and have a quickie.

  The only quickie he’d had in forever...

  A smattering of texts later and he found his running club, a group of guys all lean and lanky like him who were less a “club” and more just a bunch of individuals too socially stunted to do more than run together and—on rare occasions, now that more of the guys had kids—grab a smoothie after. No beer for this crowd. Everyone ate clean, lived clean, and focused on purifying the soul by keeping the body as whole and energized as possible.

  They were kind of boring, now that he thought about it.

  So are you, Dylan’s voice whispered in his head as the race began and the throng of runners shuffled out of the starting line. Being part of a mega-organism made up of individuals was exactly what Mike needed right now. No thoughts. No feelings. No decisions. No deliberations.

  Just the thump-thump, thump-thump of rubber soles on concrete and the unremitting thousand-mile stare of the six-plus miles ahead of him that he could whip off in under half an hour.

  Blissfully not thinking.

  Or feeling.

  Or so he told himself. Jill used to run with him, more often than not. It was how they bonded without talking, without the endless babble of words that never seemed to come close to explaining how his soul screamed into the void of the world. Mike wasn’t good with words. He expressed himself in movement. Acts of kindness and love. In deliberation and in being a presence, someone who was just there when you needed them.

  For most people, that wasn’t enough. Being there was inadequate. Then again, most people were never fully present. In the rush rush rush of daily life, where being busy was like a badge to shine every day, Mike’s friends and acquaintances seemed to consider his silence to be a deficit, as if he were somehow lesser because he didn’t express himself the same way they did.

  On the slopes, in a race, though—and he sang. Motion was his language, and as the runners thinned out, each taking the pace they had decided for themselves, he pulled away from the pack. In any given race he would start out strong, trying to meter out his body’s reserves but failing. Impulse control with the blood pounding through him and the heady rush of endorphins was damn near impossible.

  He’d pull back only later, when it was clear he needed to, and even then it would be a grudging acknowledgement that being the size of a small telephone pole meant other runners were faster. Built for this. He wasn’t.

  In body, at least. In spirit, he was the king.

  Intrusive thoughts slammed through his mind as he ran, images of Jill as she sat in the oncologist’s office, flanked by him and Dylan, the news indescribably bad. How she’d sobbed into his chest until his t-shirt was so soaked a tiny cut on his chest had burned from the salt of her tears. Her call to her parents, gut-wrenchingly real, and their desire that she fly home and let them find the best specialists in the world. The moment her hair began to fall out and how she’d shaved it, laughing as long strands of hair had fallen to the floor like autumn leaves.

  How he’d shaved his head in solidarity, Dylan unable to join him because of a modeling contract. How Mike had felt a bond there with Jill, his head a big fucking dare to the world.

  Don’t say a word.

  Not one fucking word.

  Something close to tears threatened to pour out of the back of his throat, thick and viscous, not quite salty. Like vinegar, it left a bitter taste, like words he’d swallowed over the years coming back to life, tickling and teasing, tormenting and taking over.

  “You okay?” a runner to his right grunted, not breaking pace. “Get an orange.” Shelly. That was Shelly from work, one of the young women who worked at the resort’s offices. He’d forgotten she said she was running here. A sprinkling of people from the ski resort where he worked as a ski instructor were here, unidentifiable right now in the mass of the crowd.

  Orange. His stomach growled at the thought, steady and solid. Food. Calories. Liquids. Hydration. The body was an amazing thing, really. While his mind was damn near impossible to tame, wild and wry, wily and weird, his body was a haven. Try as he may, he couldn’t fool it. Wiser than the mind, the body knew exactly when to complain, when to boycott, when to insist.

  A volunteer stepped forward with a quarter of an orange in a wax-covered cup, his hands grasping it hard, other hand waved in a lame attempt at a “thank you.” He shoved the flesh of the juicy citrus against his parched tongue, reveling in the sinfully sweet burst of flavor, the sheer fact that something so tasty even existed like rocket fuel for his legs.
>
  He’d finish the race in a half hour or so, the run so fast he couldn’t even go into the alternate mind. That was a place he journeyed to only through the numbing of everything, the shutting out of the painful world.

  “Hey, you okay?” The breathless words cut through him like a razor blade as he jerked his head to the left, following the sound. Shelly, the red-headed girl from the office again. He used “girl” in the most appropriate way; if she was eighteen he’d be surprised, and she acted like a tomboy.

  “Why?” he asked, confused and suddenly self-conscious. The feeling was all wrong. When he ran, he blended into the world, becoming part of it for once. Feeling like an outsider every waking minute was exhausting. Meeting Jill and Dylan had put an end to some of that, and Jill’s death brought so much of it back.

  “You’re crying,” she said with a shrug, pulling back slightly as she struggled to match his pace.

  He reached up and felt the tears, though he didn’t understand why Shelly assumed he was crying. Sweat mingled with the tears to make all the wetness seem the same.

  “And who’s Jill?” she grunted, making Mike stumble slightly, his calf muscles screaming as he righted himself, finding balance once more. His center of gravity felt so out of kilter that his vision swam slightly.

  “Jill? Why?”

  “You’re repeating her name over and over,” Shelly called forward as Mike’s legs turned into rubber, his mind going completely still as her statement sank in. The echo of Jill’s name had, indeed, become a sonorous loop in his mind, but had his obsession and grief gone so far as to manifest it as a chant he said aloud as he ran in a gigantic group?

  Legs stretching, he swallowed the ground whole with strides that were three times the length of Shelly’s as he pulled away and finished the course with a completely empty mind. Barren. Desolate. As wiped clear of any semblance of the person “Mike” who inhabited his body as Jill’s corporeal form had been wiped of her soul the day she died.

  Spectators cheered on the tunnel-like sidelines as he reached the finish line, and then Mike just kept running, four more miles through the city, all the way to the parking garage where his Jeep sat waiting for him.

  By the time he got there, he had no more tears.

  * * *

  “I’m only here because Dylan insisted,” Mike ground out, sitting on the red velour chair surrounded by tiny throw pillows that made up the rainbow if he sorted them in order.

  He did not.

  Never had.

  Dr. Harr was a kindly looking woman who looked a bit like Michelle Obama, though her hair, pulled back in a fierce and always-tidy bun, was streaked with white. Her face was impassive, with a high forehead and strong cheekbones. Eyes that flickered with strength and intelligence peered at him through fashionable glasses.

  Her office was primary colors and light, all glass and spider plants. His fingers picked at the quilted pillow next to him. He’d cried into this very pillow.

  Dr. Harr was the psychotherapist Jill’s oncology nurse had referred him to as Jill’s death became imminent. He’d seen the psychologist for twelve sessions, declared himself cured, and had carefully avoided all thoughts of being in this room, an expansive office at the top of an old mansion in Harvard Square, her view of the Charles River both breathtaking and daunting.

  Just like Dr. Harr.

  “Is it important that I know that?” Dr. Harr asked, eyes blinking slowly, like an owl’s.

  “What?”

  “I am assuming that you find that detail important. Is it important?”

  Mike was nonplussed, but scrambled internally not to show it. “No.”

  “Then why lead with it?”

  “I don’t know.” Those three words bedeviled him, because while they were absolutely correct—his internal emotional state was one he simply could not understand, no matter how hard he tried—he knew they were inadequate. Unfair, even. People had asked him his entire life to describe what he felt, and when he tried, it was like trying to explain how it felt to watch a beautiful sunrise, or to have a knife slice through your thumb, or to watch your best friend score a touchdown.

  Describing a feeling seemed as stupid as asking Mike to give birth to a baby.

  It defied nature.

  His nature.

  She smiled, a crooked grin with arched eyebrows that he could not help but match. He had four sessions approved by his insurance company and he’d spent fifteen minutes of this one just staring out the window over her shoulder.

  What a waste of—

  Money.

  His flat palm curled into a fist full of yellow cloth, the pillow becoming the size of a cantaloupe in his hand.

  Dr. Harr’s smile faded, her face impassive as she looked at it. “Tell me what that hand is doing,” she said, a gentle nod added for emphasis.

  He dropped his head and stared at his own fingers as if they were on another person’s body.

  Jill Jill Jill. Her name whipped through his mind like a ceiling fan set to triple time, whirring and spinning around and around and around, the grief so intense he thought it would break away and carry him off on the wind.

  “Grief,” he said, his voice a croak. He had to say something, right? That’s why he was here, in a therapist’s office. To talk. To mourn.

  Supposedly, to heal.

  “Your hand is expressing grief.” She often did this, repeating what he’d said, confirming. It was probably some psychologist’s trick. Most of the time, it worked, cracking him open just enough to see what was inside. Hiding from her was never his goal. Mike wouldn’t be here if he didn’t want to be, and his earlier statement that he was only there because of Dylan wasn’t really true.

  Dr. Harr was right. It wasn’t important, what he’d said when he walked in. Because it wasn’t true.

  His fingertips were going cold from the iron vise grip he had on the pillow.

  He blinked, his face a mask, but the emotion infused his voice. “Anger. Anger, too.”

  More like rage. He couldn’t bring himself to say that word, though. That word was a betrayal.

  Dr. Harr nodded, the skin under her eyes tucking up a bit, compassion radiating back at him. “We’ve talked about the anger before, Mike. You know it’s perfectly normal. When you lose a life partner, all of the feelings are yours.”

  “Dylan’s not angry.”

  “Are you still comparing yourself to Dylan?” Three entire sessions last year had been devoted to Mike’s reactions to Dylan’s reactions, most involving jealousy that Dylan seemed to function like a normal, grief-stricken human being should. Neither of them had been open with anyone in their lives except their families about the threesome. Mike’s family had rejected him—quite violently—while Dylan’s family had chosen a path that involved pretending Dylan hadn’t said what he said. Mike was treated like a roommate, Jill like Dylan’s girlfriend, and their triad—poof!—just didn’t exist.

  Like Jill now.

  How convenient.

  Lately, Dylan had begun looking at women again. Dated one or two. Whether he had sex with them or not was none of Mike’s business, and Dylan hadn’t brought anyone home to their apartment. Thank God.

  Mike wasn’t sure his anger would handle that.

  “You’re angry Jill died.”

  “Yes.”

  “When the word money came up earlier—”

  Clench. His hand squashed the pillow. Dr. Harr’s eyes were on it, then looked at Mike.

  “Money. What is it about money and your fist?” she asked, a faint look of puzzlement clouding her eyes.

  Damn it. Should he tell her? Neither he nor Dylan had said a word to anyone, had only talked about the money with Jill’s family lawyer. The topic was more taboo than anything he’d ever experienced, more radioactive, even, than...

  Being in a permanent threesome.

  Two billion dollars. The words stuck in his throat, a mixture of excitement, horror, pressure, anger, and—rage. All wrapped up in twenty million one-
hundred-dollar bills.

  “I—”

  “Are you having financial problems?” Dr. Harr asked, jumping to the obvious conclusion. “Many partners do after losing a loved one. We create dynamics in our financial lives where we intertwine—”

  He snorted, tossing the pillow onto the small chair across from him. “Intertwined? Jill kept everything separate. A little too separate,” he said with a near growl.

  A lot too separate.

  Two deep lines formed in the space between the doctor’s eyes as she frowned, clearly struggling to understand. Join the club, lady, he thought. Join the fucking club.

  “When you say ‘separate,’ what do you mean?”

  Mike looked around the room, eyes pausing on ten or twelve items, taking them in, as if in a meditative state. A small, brass elephant. A spider plant that carried across a fifteen-foot archway in the middle of the room. A stained glass panel at the top of the large picture window, hues of purple and adobe giving the room’s light an ethereal appearance. As he stopped and observed, paused and noted, he found the whirling dervish inside himself calming just enough to say:

  “She turns out to be something we didn’t know.”

  “What was that?”

  He shook his head quickly, like making a fly move away. The words caught in his throat, stuck there forever, a seed that could never crack open enough for a small tendril to make its way to the light.

  His long, runner’s legs bent before him, knees high, legs splayed out, hands now planted on his knees as if he were about to stand and walk out the door, run run run and stop thinking about Jill Jill Jill.

  Damn it.

  She would follow him, wouldn’t she? Can’t run away from her. Can never run away from the fact that she lied.

  Lied.

  “She lied,” he hissed, the words like air from an over-inflated balloon.

  Dr. Harr just nodded, as if she understood. Did she? Did she know how it felt to waken with a gaping, sucking chest wound where your heart was supposed to be? How many holes he’d poked in the wall by slamming his fist against his headboard so many times that the thick wood itself sported a hairline crack, right down the middle? How Dylan slept in his own bedroom now because Mike’s dreams were always of combat, of fighting an evil that tried to kill Jill, and that Dylan had woken more than once to find Mike staring at him with a look of murderous rage?