Because He Owns Me (Because He Owns Me, Book One) (An Alpha Billionaire Romance) (5 page)

“No!” I said a little too quickly.
 
I took a sip of my coffee to stall for
time, rolling the sweet dark liquid over my tongue and swallowing it slowly.
 
“It was just different from what I
expected.”

“Why are you blushing?” Nessa asked
immediately.

“I’m not!”
 
Damn my fair skin for betraying me.

“Yes, you are.”
 
She pushed her mirror away and studied
my face.
 
“Did you end up meeting
someone?”

“No,” the lie slipped out of my mouth before I
could stop it.

“Adriana O’Connor, you are a horrible liar,”
Nessa squealed.
 
She sprung up from
her chair and clapped her hands together in delight.
 
“Tell me all about him.”

“It was nothing,” I said.
 
“He was just a guy, we chatted for a bit
and that was it.”

“Did he ask for your number?”

“No.”
 
I shook my head.
 
“He
didn’t.”
 
The words sent a crushing
realization tumbling through me.
 
Callum hadn’t asked for my number.
 
In fact, it was almost completely the opposite.
 
He hadn’t even tried that hard to stop
me from leaving.
 
If he’d really
wanted to see me again, wouldn’t he have made sure he had a way to contact me?

But he doesn’t want to see you again.
 
He wasn’t acting like a man who wanted
to see you again.
 
He was acting
like
like
a man who wanted to use you for one night.

One night would have been fine with me.

I shook the thoughts from my head.
 

I needed to forget about Callum.
 
I had come to New York to start my
life.
 
Not to get caught up with
some billionaire jackass who spent his nights trolling BDSM clubs.
 
He probably hadn’t even really been
there to buy it.
 
That was probably
a lie.

“Well,” Nessa said.
 
“Maybe he was too shy to ask for your
number.”

I almost laughed out loud.
 
The thought of Callum Wilder being shy
about anything was ludicrous.

 
“Or
maybe – ” Nessa started.

Her voice got cut off by a sharp knock on the
apartment door
.
 

“Special delivery!” a male voice called cheerily
from the hallway.

“Oh my God,” Nessa said, her eyes widening.
 
“Oh my God.”

“What?” I asked, confused, as Nessa pulled her
hair down from its messy ponytail and began frantically smoothing it down.
 
Wispy strands framed her face and the
rest of her hair had a slight sheen of grease, like perhaps she hadn’t washed
it in a while.
 
She readjusted the
violet tank top she was wearing, then walked to the door and opened it.

“Isaac!” she said with a smile.

“Hey,” a male voice said.
 
“You got a delivery but they dropped it
at my apartment by accident.
 
It’s
for someone named Adriana?
 
Your new
roommate, I presume?”

I jumped out of my chair and ran to the
door.
 

There was a guy standing on the other side of
the threshold, in the hallway.
 
He
had blond hair and blue eyes.
 
His
face was tan with a sprinkle of freckles across his nose, like he’d spent his
summer doing something outdoors.
 
He
was wearing a pair of loose jeans, shiny white sneakers, and a t-shirt that
said “YOU READ MY TSHIRT.
 
THAT’S
ENOUGH SOCIAL INTERACTION FOR ONE DAY.”

“Oh,” he said when he saw me.
 
“Hi! You must be Adriana.”
 

“Yup, this is Adriana,” Nessa said.
 
“Adriana, this is Isaac.
 
He lives upstairs.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said politely.

“Nice to meet you, too.
  
Oh, uh, these came for you.”
 
He was holding a large glass vase filled
with lemons and yellow wildflowers and he held it out to me.

My heart jumped into my throat as I took them.

Lemons.

“Thanks,” I said.

I walked back into the kitchen with the vase,
while Nessa stood in the doorway, babbling away to Isaac about how her sliding
glass door needed fixing and how the maintenance guys still hadn’t gotten
around to it.

I set the vase down on the counter and stared
at it.

The bottom was square and filled with water and
sliced lemons, the two sides narrowing before separating again, giving the vase
a beautiful asymmetrical look.
 
Yellow wildflowers mixed with bursts of sunflowers were arranged
perfectly in the vase.

A tiny card was taped to the front, my name
written on it.

I took a deep breath and opened it.

Be ready at noon.

That’s it.

That’s all it said.
 

No signature.

No more information.

Just ‘be ready at noon.’

My breathing deepened as the scent of lemons filled
the kitchen.
 

I turned the card over, looking for any clues
as to where it had come from – a florist, perhaps, or a phone number.

But there was nothing.

Be ready at noon.

Even when Callum was writing a card he was
being bossy and demanding.
 
I ran my
finger over the sharp script, wondering if he’d written the words himself.
 
I knew billionaire businessmen had much
better things to do then write their own cards, or go to the florist
themselves.

Probably his assistant had done it, or an
employee of the flower shop.
 
And
yet somehow I thought maybe he
had
written it.

Something about the handwriting.
 
It
was so masculine, so commanding, the period he’d put at the end making it clear
that nothing was up for discussion.

“What’s that?” Nessa piped in from behind me,
and I jumped.

“Oh,” I said.
 
“You scared me.”

She reached over and plucked the white card
from my hand.

“Be ready at noon,” he recited,
then
frowned.
 
“Who sent this?”

“Oh, um… just…some guy.”

Understanding dawned on her face.
 
“The boy you met last night?”

He was definitely not a boy.
 
Callum Wilder was all man.
 
I thought about his shirtless body and
shivered.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Yay!” Nessa said.
 
“What does the card say?”

“He wants to meet me for lunch,” I said, leaving
it at that.

Nessa crossed the room to the refrigerator and pulled
out a bottle of ginger iced tea, popped the top and took a long drink.
 
“Are you going to go?”

“Yes,” I said.

She nodded.
 
“Okay.
 
Just be careful.”

“I will.”

“So what did you think of Isaac?”
 
She leaned back against the
refrigerator, practically swooning.
 
“He’s so hot, right?”

“Yeah, sure.”
 
If you liked that
type.
 
It was strange, but I
had the feeling that before last night, I would have thought Isaac was just as
hot as Nessa seemed to think he was – but now that I’d spent time with
Callum, no one else could even come close to being as sexy or as gorgeous.
 

Callum was a man.

Isaac was a boy.

“He’s really sweet, too.
 
He comes and fixes things at the
apartment all the time, like if the toilet is broken and maintenance can’t get
to it.”
 
She sighed again in delight,
then
capped her bottle of ginger tea.
 
“I have to finish getting ready for
work.”
 
Her chin was raw and angry
where she’d scraped her skin, and a small spot of blood was sitting in the middle
of her zit.
 
I wondered how,
exactly, she was going to hide it.
  
“Are you going to be okay here?”

“Yes,” I said, waving my hand at her.
 
“I’m just going to finish my coffee and
fill out some applications.
 
Maybe
stop at the store later.”

“Great,” she said, calling over her shoulder on
her way back to her room.
 
“Pick up
some sesame bagels.
 
I’m craving
junk carbs.”

***

After Nessa left for work, I spent the next two
hours filling out online applications.
 
My dream was to work in publishing, at a magazine or a publishing
house.
 
But those jobs were hard to
get, and the other options were limited for an English major.
 
But I filled applications for anything being
offered in publishing, along with anything else that looked even remotely
interesting.

Be ready at noon.

Ready for what?
I wondered as I looked through my closet for
something to wear.
 
I had no idea
what Callum had in store for me. Lunch was my best guess, but what kind of
lunch?
 
He didn’t seem like the
picnic in the park type, but it was also slightly presumptuous to think he was
going to take me to some fancy restaurant just because he was rich.

My phone rang, the caller ID flashing a 212
number I didn’t recognize.

I answered it, wondering if it
was
a call back from one of the countless places I’d put
applications in.

“Hello?”

“Lemon,” the deep male voice on the other end
of the line said.

“Oh,” I said, so surprised I almost dropped the
phone.

“Will you be ready at twelve?”

“Oh,” I said again, groping around in my brain
for something to say.
 
“Um, yes, I
will be ready at twelve.
 
But what
should I be ready for?”
 
I cringed
at the way my voice sounded.
 
“I
mean, what should I… is this a lunch date?”

I threw myself down on my bed.

“It’s just lunch, Lemon,” Callum said, sounding
amused at the effect he was having on me.

“What kind of lunch?”

“The kind of lunch you eat.”

“What should I wear?”

“Something sexy.”

That didn’t narrow it down, and I had no idea
how to dress sexy, as evidenced by the disaster that was last night’s fashion
choices, but what was I supposed to say?
  
“Okay.”

“You haven’t thanked me for the flowers.”

“Oh!
 
Thank you for the flowers, they were beautiful,” I said honestly.

“You liked them, then.”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“Good.”

“See you at twelve, Lemon.”

And then the line went dead.

It was a couple minutes later before it dawned
on me that I hadn’t given him my phone number.
 
Or my address.

***

I was standing outside my apartment at noon
sharp before I realized it might make me seem too eager.

Weren’t you supposed to wait inside when a man
came to get you?
 
Make him wait
while you finished dressing upstairs, letting him wander around awkwardly while
he made uncomfortable small talk with your roommate?
 

Something told me Callum wasn’t the small talk
type.
 
I also had the nagging fear
that if I didn’t follow his instructions, if I wasn’t ready at noon like he’d
said to be, that he might just leave.

But then I realized if he was going to leave,
then that was his problem.
Too bad for him.
 

I turned to go back into the building, to force
him to make a little bit of effort, when a slick silver Audi pulled up to the
curb.

The windows were tinted, the rims so shiny I
could see my apartment building reflected in them.

I waited for him to step out of the car or even
just to honk the horn and let me know it was
him
.
 
But he didn’t.