Shopping for a Billionaire 4 by Julia Kent Page A

million questions race through my mind but I can’t capture any of them long enough to read them and translate into coherent speech.
    A man’s shout from near the front door cuts through the air.
    “Jesus Christ! Get it out of here!” It’s Andrew, backing away toward the elevator.
    “It” turns out to be what looks like a fly, but I know it’s not.
    It’s so much more.
    Declan’s face goes slack again.
    “I’m sorry,” he says. “I wish this could be different, but my father is right.”
    And with that, he grips my hand hard, his face filled with regret, then lets go, the hard clap of his shoes on marble like gunshots.

Chapter Twelve
    Limping up the steps to my Soviet-bloc business building makes me feel like one of those over-muscled women on the weightlifting team for Belarus. Except I’m limping and whimpering, and I feel like my pectoral and gluteal muscles have been sent to Siberia for re-education.
    For the past three weeks—since right after I saw Declan—my life has been a series of gym shops. Forty-seven of them in twenty days, to be exact. That is more than two per day, which equates to screaming quads and exposing more cellulite per hour than you see on a Cape Cod beach in August.
    Rumors of ongoing and persistent underperformance by personal trainers at a particular chain of gyms in the area mean I have to pretend to be a new customer who wants to try the “first hour free” promotion. The gyms generally send the least-senior personal trainer to do these jobs, though the one I just left was quite different. I got a seventy-eight-year-old professional female body builder who had more muscle than my dad, Steve, and possibly Declan combined, and whose skin was the color of the old leather armchair in dad’s Man Cave. 
    Smelled like it, too.
    Her teeth had gleamed like polished Chiclets gum and her eyes were remarkably alert and bright for someone born before WWII. No loose skin under the eyes, no bags at all. Her jaw was so muscled she looked like an aging bulldog.
    That woman worked me like Jillian Michaels with a group of mouthy teens sent to some Christian re-education camp in Utah. I haven’t had my inner thighs quiver like this since…
    Declan.
    Damn it. I was trying so hard not to think about him, but leave it to my overactive adductor muscles to make him float into my mind. Three weeks have passed without seeing him, hearing from him—and yet he’s in my mind, embedded in my skin, deep in my heart.
    Still.
    I use both hands to physically lift my right leg up the first cement stair. There are nine of them. Nine. As in my legs are screaming “ nein! ” Pain makes me bilingual. 
    I’m on stair number four when Josh appears next to me. His legs function. He can hop up those stairs like Richard Simmons after drinking five Red Bulls.
    “What’s wrong?” he asks with glee, knowing damn well why I am limping. We can’t pawn any of these gym shops off on him because the assignment requires female guests.
    “Not enough fiber in my diet,” I mutter.
    His face goes blank. “I thought it was all the gym shops you’re doing.” He snorts. “I know it’s not from really good sex.”
    “At staff meeting today I’m telling Greg he needs to give you the role of supportive father-to-be on all those cord blood bank shops that are coming up.” 
    His pale face makes me grin inside, because Josh can’t stand hospitals. “You wouldn’t!”
    Before I can reply, he puts up a palm and shakes his head sadly, “Actually, you would,” he says, leaping up the remaining stairs like Peter Pan and holding the heavy door open for me.
    “Thank you. Just stand there for about thirty-seven more minutes and I’ll get there.”
    A strange scuffling sound from behind us makes us both turn. It’s Amanda, kicking a box the size of a small ottoman across the parking lot.
    “What are you doing?” Josh calls out.
    “I no longer have arms,” she whines. “Just shredded, noodly appendages.”
    “Gym