Chapter 5
Chapter Five
KELSEY
There’s a knock at the door.
“Come,” Bruno says because apparently when you’re a billionaire, you don’t have to add excess words like in.
Three employees materialize in matching charcoal uniforms: two women and a man.
The taller woman clasps her hands. “Mr. Blackwood. Ms. Winters. May we offer you complimentary cocktails and hors d’oeuvres on the palace balcony while we oversee your relocation to the Ocean Crown Suite?”
Bruno exhales through his nose like a man condemned to suffer an unbearable inconvenience. “Will we have the palace balcony to ourselves?”
“We’ve cordoned it off for you,” she says.
“Wait,” I say. “We’re doing this now? I’m going to need another practice session with the kids before their dance.”
“We’ll have you moved in a jiffy.” The younger woman starts gathering my clothes from the bed with the sort of careful handling they definitely don’t deserve while the man goes into the bathroom.
I cringe, trying to think if there are weird wads of tissue anywhere or Q-tips that didn’t make the flight to the trash can. “Umm...excuse me?”
He pops his head out. “Miss?”
“I can pack the bathroom myself. It’s a bit chaotic in there.”
“They don’t mind,” Bruno says. “Let’s go.”
The woman holding my clothes gives me a sunny smile. “We’ll be very thorough and discreet.”
“No, it’s just that...okay.” I grab my phone, my favorite muumuu beach cover-up, and a bright pink shawl. “Sorry in advance. Regarding the bathroom.”
“Shouldn’t you be wearing your wedding guest attire for the veranda photos?”
“This is my wedding guest attire.”
Something flickers across his expression.
“What? I put this pink shawl over the dress and it’s basically a whole new look.”
He does not appear impressed.
I grab the cover-up. “And this is my beach cover-up. I could wear this, too. You’re allowed to go a little wild with a beach cover-up. This one is from my actual closet. The other stuff is more to please the family.”
Bruno stares at the cover-up.
“Yesteryear couture, baby. It’s fun and wild!”
“What size are you?”
“Size? Basically a medium. Or large.”
He’s texting furiously.
“What’s going on?”
“We’re upgrading your wardrobe.”
“What? I’m not a giant doll for you to dress.”
“If only.”
“My dresses are fine.”
“Fine for your charade, maybe. Not for mine.”
“Okay, yes, some of this stuff is me trying to be something I’m not. And failing. Most of it. But this cover-up? It belongs on the French Riviera.”
“Perhaps the bottom of it.”
“My clothes are fine.”
He gives me this look with just his left eyebrow raised. What does it mean?
“I’m the sister who marches to her own fashion drum.”
The eyebrow goes higher. Okay, it’s a skeptical look.
“You can’t just upgrade everything, including me.”
“You invited a billionaire, and now you’re getting a billionaire. This is the billionaire experience.”
“I think I’d rather have the axe murderer experience.”
“The night is young,” Bruno says.
I try not to smile. I hate that he’s funny. You don’t get to be hot and rich and funny.
Yet here we are.
Apparently unfair advantages are also part of the billionaire experience.
Here’s the thing about being managed by a billionaire: it happens so smoothly you don’t notice until you’re already on the veranda, which turns out to be a lush and stunningly gorgeous paradise of flowers and lounge chairs, and it’s cordoned off just for you so that the riffraff can’t bother you, and there’s a bottle of champagne and a cheese plate sitting on the table.
“So all this is just for us?” I ask.
Bruno waves. “If you want it.” Like it’s a plate of live eels or something.
I taste every different kind of cheese. “This one has caramelized onions in it!”
Color Bruno uninterested.
I finish my tour of the most exquisite cheeses known to humankind while he pays attention to his phone and endures the displeasure of being here, which he seems to express through his eyebrows, and most specifically his left eyebrow, which he raises a lot as if to assess or inspect, but even when he’s not raising it, it never quite settles level with the other, like his brows are just slightly uneven, adding to the sense that he’s always in scrutiny mode.
I re-apply my lipstick. “Okay, let’s do this. Grab a glass and we’ll do a face-only selfie shot.”
We decide on the ocean as our background and I take a few pictures.
“Some of these turned out cute! Should I text them to you?”
“Text them to my assistant, Sadie.”
I give him a jaded look. “You don’t want to give me your number, do you?”
“No.”
Unbelievable!
“Well, just so you know, I’ll be routing this through several fake IP addresses, so when you fall in love with me and try to find me next week, good luck.”
“I’ll just show up at your stage door.”
I give him a big smile-frown. “I suppose this is a good time to inform you that after the third time you showed up there trying to get in, we had to electrify the doorknob.”
His expression is unreadable.
“But at least we’ll have these fantastic photos to remember each other by.” Right then, I get a fun new idea: I put on the pink shawl over my dress and arrange myself on one of the couches lifting my glass and making a kiss-face. “Grab your phone.”
“I don’t take pictures.”
“What do you mean, you don’t take pictures?”
“It’s a known thing. I do not take pictures.”
“Who doesn’t take pictures? How do you document your life?”
He points to his head.
“But what about fun events in your life that you want to remember forever and ever, and show your family and friends and all that?”
“I don’t have events like that.”
“I feel like that’s an axe murderer thing to say.”
He shrugs, and it’s only here that I remember the whole hermit-living-on-a-yacht thing, and I feel a little bit bad for him suddenly.
This guy literally lives alone on a yacht.
That article about him never explained why, exactly.
In any case, what would he photograph? Some seaweed? An incoming squall?
“Anyhow, we’re doing your alibi right now, so if I really were your girlfriend and you’re here meeting my family at a family wedding, you’d surely take pictures then.”
“I don’t take pictures. Other people take the pictures.”
It’s here I’m really getting what I’m dealing with.
Yes, he’s hot and a little bit funny, but is he just another kid I need to manage?
I use the timer to do the kiss face picture, and we take some cocktail party shots with me with my pink shawl over my sad blue dress, so yay for one more costume change.
I partake of more of the cheese plate while Bruno does something on his phone and then a pair of hotel workers appear to lead us to our new room, which turns out to be on the top floor of the hotel.
Scratch that: it is the top floor.
The room is all silk curtains and ocean views and a marble bathroom like something out of a magazine. I wander through it in a daze, half expecting an angelic choir to descend from the ceiling.
Bruno surveys the whole thing with a faint sigh. Oh, the life of an antisocial billionaire.
“When they put me downstairs, they said nothing else was available.”
“You didn’t expect them to put you up here, did you?”
“Maybe they would’ve put Danielle and Tyler up here, since they are the ones getting married.”
“Not in this suite. Anyway, it sounds like this suite was booked for one of the three days.”
“But now it’s not?”
“Sadie took care of it.”
“What does that mean? Did she make them an offer they couldn’t refuse?”
“More or less.”
“You think everything is for sale.”
He gives a little shrug, oh-so-amused. “Anything worth having.”
I narrow my eyes. “And it is my most fervent wish that I hope someday you find the one thing you want more than anything in the world, and it’s the one thing your money can’t touch. And it’s excruciating.”
“That’s a lovely sentiment, darling. Maybe we could work that into our wedding vows.”
He’s insufferable. Though admittedly, that was a good one.
I explore the place. It has two palatial bedrooms and a spa-like bathroom that’s all inlaid with beautiful blue mosaic tile, and there are plants and a sunken tub and a sauna and, much to my delight, a closet with the fluffiest robes I’ve ever seen.
I smile. It’s hard to be mad when there are fluffy robes like this in my closet.
I put one on and bring the other one out to toss at Bruno. “Costume change! We are nailing this!”
He inspects it and puts it on.
I go over and tuck his collar into the fabric, my knuckles catching his neck, connecting with warm skin, just for a second. He doesn’t move. I keep going.
“This is our just-bathed, had-wild-sex selfie,” I say, snapping a picture. “You are so eager to please me. So very eager.” Snap snap. “I have to say you don’t do badly. There’s room for improvement for sure, but we’re working on your skills.”
“My skills in that area do not need work.”
“You get a little chin dimple when you scowl and I love it.” I tip the phone toward him. “And when you’re pleasuring me, your brow furrows, because you are really concentrating. It is so cute. You are so into me.”
He scowls harder. I smile wider and take another selfie.
I already know it’s hilarious, but I have to see. I hold it up. There we are: me, luminous and delighted in my fluffy robe, and Bruno in his billionaire grump mode. “This is our couple dynamic. I am unbelievably delightful and you are thrillingly scowly.”
He moves from scowl to growl.
I grin. “Seriously, you are so lucky. Of all the fake girlfriends you could have had, you got me. I have stage skills. And it takes a lot to get me down.” I tip my head against his shoulder and snap one from above, cheek to cheek.
“The fact that it takes a lot to get you down just shows you have no discernment.”
“Hashtag no discernment!” I take another one.
His lip quirks. For a split second I think he found that funny. Then I decide it’s probably a grimace. I remind myself that I want to be here, but he doesn’t. He just likes being all alone on a boat.
I suddenly feel bad for him again and stop joking around.
“Seriously, Bruno, I am grateful for you playing along. The fact that I’ve been invited here to this wedding is huge for me.
There were some major family misunderstandings that have kept me apart from my family for a while.
But the air is clearing now, and it means everything to me.
And I’m really glad that you’re getting something out of it. ”
“And your sister gets a present from a billionaire.”
“What is the present, anyway?”
“No idea,” he says. “But it’ll be expensive. Isn’t that what’s important?”
“I never cared about the present. I just wanted Danielle to have this...I don’t know, this moment of surprise and delight.
It was a total whim. I’d flubbed the calligraphy on a few of the extra invites, and I didn’t want Danielle to think I was being careless, and then I remembered these reels I saw where you invite famous people to your wedding.
You had just that profile in The Sunday Ledger, and everybody’s been obsessed with you ever since, so I invited you, Ryan Gosling, and Harry Styles. ”
He frowns, unamused, and glances at his watch.
“I know. I thought it would be funny. I imagined Danielle telling wedding stories—the flowers, the light, how beautiful everything was—and then she’d get to say, ‘and Ryan Gosling sent a crystal fruit bowl!’ It would be this fun thing between us.
A reminder of how we used to be. I was the little sister who did wild, spontaneous things and she’d get swept up in them with me, and she’d grab my hands and laugh and look at me like she used to... ”
I stare out at the ocean. Why am I telling him all this? This whole story is just making me sad.
“When I hear myself spelling it all out, the plan was clearly flawed.”
Bruno snorts. “Ryan Gosling sending a crystal fruit bowl?”