Free The Bad Boy Billionaire's Girl Gone Wild by Maya Rodale Page B

to satiate my desire for him.
    My lust for Duke had a way destroying my best intentions and annihilating my better intentions.
    If I went home with him now . . .
    Then I’d be breaking all our rules.
    Why, why, why did that have to make everything so much more appealing? The good girl thing to do would be to disentangle myself immediately and put myself in a cab.
    “What if I do this?” Duke whispered as his hands slid under my silk camisole to caress my bare skin.
    “Then I’d find it harder to say no,” I moaned.
    “What if I do this?”
    “You’d cause a scene,” I murmured. “We are causing a scene.”
    “Shhh. So what if we did?” He gazed into my eyes. Our faces were just inches away. Our lips were so, so close.
    “I would sell more books and get rich and more successful at your expense. You would piss off Augustus. You might lose everything you ever worked for.”
    “What if I don’t want it like I used to?”
    “If that were true, then I’d say take me home. Because I—” Oh my God, I almost said because I love you. “I don’t think you really mean it. I can’t let you mean it.”
    “Just one last kiss until we IPO.”
    His mouth claimed mine and for one exquisite moment I didn’t say no. I said yes.
    And that’s when the crowd erupted in cheers. I turned around to see everyone at the party applauding, cheering and watching us. I gazed up only to see that the camera had been projecting Duke and I up onto the wall. Everyone at the party saw. Everyone on the street could see it, too. One glance at the wall broadcasting the tweets confirmed it: dozens and dozens of tweets were being posted, along with twit.pic links and vines. All of them include hashtags like #GetARoom, #SuckingFace or #KissMeBabyOneMoreTime.
    This was a disaster. In real time.

 
    Chapter Eight
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    The next day
    F ROM THE MOMENT I opened my eyes and realized that I had slept through my alarm, I knew it was going to be one of those days. I had lost my mind last night. Blame it on the wine, blame it on the vodka, blame it on pheromones, an insane and potent attraction, or whatever. I had acted recklessly.
    It’d been late when I got home. Even later when I finally drifted off to sleep.
    Thus, I slept through my alarm. I quickly jumped out of bed, and stumbled into the kitchen. It seemed Roxanna hadn’t come home, so I started a pot of coffee and got into the shower and rushed through my morning routine in an effort to get to work on time.
    So I didn’t see Page Six of the New York Post until I was waiting for the subway. The businessman next to me had the page open to my favorite gossip column and the headline caught my eye:
    Silicon Alley’s Bad Boy Billionaire Makes a Scene with His “Fiancée”
    One day I would like to be his fiancée, not his “fiancée.”
    A girl could dream.
    A girl could also, as surreptitiously as possible, lean over the shoulder of this businessman and try to read the rest of the column.
Proving he still puts the “bad boy” in billionaire, Duke Austen caused a stir at a party on the Gawker Roof last night when he was caught on camera making out with Jane Sparks, librarian by day, published romance novelist under the pseudonym Maya Rodale and “it’s complicated” fiancée of tech’s newest titan in the making.
“It didn’t look complicated,” said a source. “They kept running into each other all night and eventually they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.”
The couple broke up after Sparks’s publication of The Wicked Wallflower , which many took to be a confession that she and Austen faked their relationship in order to secure funding for his company, Project-TK. Many assumed art imitated life and that their relationship was fake. Until last night.
    There was another paragraph left in the article when the businessman’s subway arrived. He snapped the paper shut and boarded the train. I stood on the platform tapping my high heels until my own train rolled into the