What Matters Most: The Billionaire Bargains, Book 2 (22 page)

So the giving-up-easily thing hadn’t happened with him. Which, unfortunately, made him even more appealing to her.

“No one can make me do anything I don’t want to do,” she finally said in response to Holly’s comment.

Her friend laughed. “Okay. But I’m thinking Mr. Steele can make you
want
to do all of it.”

It was that obvious, huh? Holly hadn’t even seen them together.

“You like him?” Reese asked.

She also didn’t worry much about other people’s opinions. But Tony was an anomaly in her life in a number of ways.

“I like how much he likes you,” Holly said. “And I like that you like him.”

“How can you tell I like him?” Reese asked, honestly curious.

“Because you married him,” Holly said with a definite
duh
in her tone.

“There was…alcohol involved. And bright lights and a cheating ex-fiance and sex,” Reese confessed.

Holly laughed. “Keep going.”

“What do you mean?”

“What else was involved? Because none of that is enough to make you do something spontaneous like this unless you really, really liked him.”

Reese wasn’t so sure about that, but she liked that her friend thought so. “He’s very…addicting,” she said, not sure how else to describe it. “He has this way of wrapping me up in this fantasy fairytale where all of this makes complete sense.”

“Good,” Holly said with feeling.

“Good? The guy could probably talk me into anything.” And that definitely worried her. Tony had already talked her into crazy stuff that no one else ever could have.

“Yes,
good
,” Holly said. “You need some crazy in your life. You need some things that don’t make sense. And you need someone who doesn’t listen to everything you say.”

“Hey.” Reese frowned. “I’m
not
so sure about that.”

“I am. Tony Steele is a handful,” Holly said. “I can tell. But, honey, so are you. And you need someone in your life who can and will handle you.”

Reese shifted on the chair in the waiting area for her gate in the airport. The idea of having Tony handle her made her warmer than she had been a moment ago.

“I don’t know what that means,” she told Holly. She knew what her libido thought it meant, but she didn’t think Holly was referring to the bedroom.

Speaking of easy…she was so distracted by the memories of Tony and his hands that she almost missed what Holly was saying.

“You make people listen to you. You persuade people that you’re right. You convince people to do things your way. I get the impression that it’s
not
that easy with Tony.”

Reese swallowed. Holly was right, that was one thing that hadn’t been easy with Tony. Tony was pretty used to getting his way too. But a lot of Tony’s way involved parties and crowds and him throwing money around.

Getting his way with Reese was going to take more than that.

Did part of her want to party the night away, forget all her responsibilities for a weekend, get lost in the crowd of people living for the moment? Sure. But she attracted people who needed tough love. Holly would have never finished nursing school if Reese hadn’t told her to stop coming up with excuses and to just do it. Vincent would have never left the job where he’d caught his boss embezzling. Sylvia would have never forgiven Connie for the two-decade-old feud that had kept the sisters from talking even after Connie’s husband had died.

She wondered what Tony thought about the information about her family. Did he think that because of her poor background she’d been attracted to his money? Did he think she was a hardass like her brother or a cold bitch like her sister did? Did he think she was a hypocrite like her parents believed? They were going to have a heyday with the perceived hypocrisy of her marrying a man worth billions of dollars.

Reese knew her family felt like she was cold and unfeeling because she refused to be pulled into their drama anymore and because she made life choices that were completely opposite of theirs. She’d gone to college on her own dime and could have taught many of her social work classes herself. Reese knew the Worker’s Compensation program backward and forward. She knew about every available mental health service and benefit. She knew about assistance programs that many social workers had to research. Because until she was about sixteen, she’d believed that her family needed and deserved those benefits.

Then she’d found out that her father had been lying about his back injury from the beginning and that her mother’s bipolar disorder that kept her from holding a steady job was also entirely fabricated.

Reese no longer loaned anyone in her family money. She didn’t give them job references. She didn’t let them so much as sleep on her couch. Maybe it was cold, but it was not hypocritical and there was nothing easy about any of it.

“So did Tony say anything specific?” Reese finally asked. “About me or our situation or anything?”

“Yes,” Holly said enthusiastically. “He said that he’s been crazy about you for a long time and that he’d had to jump at the chance to spend his life with you.”

Reese’s heart tripped at that. She could picture exactly how he’d looked and could hear how he’d sounded saying that. It was one thing for him to tell her those things, especially when she was naked, but for him to say it to the people she was closest to really made her wish she was there. And strangely, she didn’t just want to rip his clothes off. She wanted to hug him.

“Do you think he means it?” Reese asked, feeling silly as soon as she said it.

Holly’s voice was gentle when she said, “I do.”

“But I’m not sure he takes anything really seriously. I mean, he doesn’t worry about things going bad or not working out. He just shrugs and moves on.” She felt better having voiced what had been nagging her about the whole situation during her time away from Tony. Outside of his immediate vicinity, she found it much easier to think clearly.

Holly was quiet for a long moment. “Maybe that’s not all bad.”

“What?”

“I’m just saying maybe more of us need to do that.”

“Are you being serious?” Reese asked. “We should approach relationships and
marriage
like something we just say oh well about if it doesn’t work?”

“The other options are to never take a risk because it might not turn out or to be devastated every time something doesn’t go right. And that’s a lot of devastation,” Holly said.

Reese heard the sadness in her friend’s voice. She knew that Holly had, in fact, been devastated when the kids’ dad had left her. She still wasn’t over it.

For a brief flash of a moment, Reese thought that she might like to be
that
important to Tony. Capable of devastating him. Which definitely sounded cold and bitchy.

But she wasn’t sure she’d ever been that important to anyone. Certainly not her parents. Except as far as qualifying for more government aid. As long as the kids were easy—not sick, not whiny, not in trouble, not in need of anything—things were okay. But anything challenging and her dad would go out to his shop, her mother would turn on the television and everything would go unresolved unless Reese did something about it.

Social work had given her an outlet for the desire to help people who
wanted
help. She liked feeling important, she liked being wanted and she liked thinking that her opinion mattered at least to a few people. And that was the biggest risk with Tony. He said he wanted her, that she was important to him. He said he was willing to turn his life upside down.

And damn if she wasn’t getting pulled into it all, getting her hopes up, letting her heart get involved.

“Maybe we should all approach things like Tony,” Holly said. “You have a great time while it lasts and then you move on to a new great time. Maybe we should quit expecting people to be more than that for us.”

Reese swallowed. She didn’t like how that sounded, but she wasn’t going to argue with her heartbroken friend over the phone while Reese’s husband went on and on about how in love he was with her. Even if Tony’s idea of in love was only some weird combination of chemistry and the fact that she was different from most of the women he spent time with.

There was no question that it
would
be fun while it lasted.

Maybe she did need to relax a little and just enjoy it.

The option was to divorce him right now before they got in any deeper.

And where was the fun in that?

“If you were the one who had married your fiancé’s best friend in Vegas on the eve of your own broken-up wedding, what would I say to you?” Reese asked Holly.

“You’d tell me that tequila and bright lights and a bruised ego were crappy reasons to marry someone,” Holly replied.

Reese nodded even though Holly couldn’t see her. “Yeah, I would.”

“But,” Holly went on.

Reese perked up. There was a but? She was all ears.

And that should have concerned her.

“There is a scenario in which you would say go for it, where you would say quit being scared and giving me all these what ifs and go get what you want.”

Reese had trouble breathing for a second after that. That sounded exactly like something she would say. She hated excuses. She hated when people talked themselves out of things they wanted because they were unsure of themselves or because it might be hard or it might not work out. She forced her lungs to expand and asked, “What scenario?”

“If I was in love with him.”

The air whooshed out of her lungs.

“Maybe it was just subconscious when you first said yes to the Vegas wedding idea,” Holly went on. “But some part of you wanted it. Part of you wanted him.”

A big part actually. Hell, she’d been thinking about him while standing in front of the minister with another man.

“Yeah,” she said softly.

“And the tequila and the bright lights and the bruised ego were all there, but I can guarantee that you wouldn’t have said yes to marrying Vincent if he’d been there instead, or some random guy off the street,” Holly said. “So your courtship with Tony wasn’t perfect, but heck, honey, neither was your courtship with Jeff, evidently.”

Reese winced at that. But Holly had a point. If things had been perfect, he wouldn’t have been screwing another woman.

“You, Reese Chaplin, are always upfront and honest. Even with yourself. If you said yes to marrying Tony Steel, then you meant it.”

And she had. She remembered him asking, begging even.

And suddenly she really wanted to talk to Tony.

“I’ll be home soon,” she told Holly. “Thanks for the talk.”

Holly chuckled. “Sweetie, I owe you about a thousand more.”

Reese smiled. She did love her little third-floor family. They had filled in a hole that was far bigger than Reese had even realized.

“Love you,” Reese said.

“Love you too.”

Reese remembered the first day Holly had said that to her. She’d been completely struck dumb. She simply hadn’t heard it enough in her life. Now she and the rest of the third floor were very used to hearing and saying it.

And then it hit her—that was part of her attraction to Tony too. He said it. Easily, confidently, looking straight into her eyes, no hesitation just because she hesitated.

She really liked that about him.

She dialed his number. What she was about to do was childish probably, but she needed to talk to him and, even though she wasn’t particularly proud of it, she wanted to test him a little.

It was normal, considering she was coming from a shaky background as far as love and support went. In anyone else, she would have expected some of this behavior. She wasn’t thrilled that she wasn’t above it, but she gave in, this once.

Chapter Eight

He answered on the second ring and her heart thumped hearing his low voice say, “I miss you,” before he said anything else.

“I miss you too,” she said honestly. What was the harm in letting him know that? “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“I love that,” he said. “And I’m happy to let you hear my voice anytime.”

She could hear the sincerity in his tone and that filled her with warmth. “Three a.m. when you’ve been gone on a business trip?” she asked.

“I’ll be dying to hear your voice.”

She grinned and was sure she looked like a giddy teenager talking to her boyfriend.

“What if you’re in the
middle
of a business meeting?”

“Absolutely.”

“You would answer?”

“I would tell the others in the meeting that my beautiful, amazing wife needed me and I’d be back in an hour.”

“We would talk for an hour in the middle of your business meeting?” she asked.

“It would take me at least that long to tell you all of the things that I missed about you and that I love.”