Free The Billionaire’s Handler by Jennifer Greene Page B

hard to find out ahead of time.
    He sprang up when he heard the first knock on the door, and then the parade began. Almost all the vendors were men, carrying boxes and carts, with labels like JP Tod, Miu Miu, Fendi, Versace, Casadei.
    Carolina—the precariously fragile woman he’d found curled in a hospital bed in a fetal position—started shrieking like a child on a playground.
    The scene deteriorated from awful to worse. Maguire hiked to the bar, grabbed a malt liquor and hastily retreated to a corner, out of harm’s way. It only took minutes for their serene living space to turn into Armageddon. Boxes were opened, splayed. Carolina was fitted, argued over, and encouraged to walk up and down the room in various shoes.
    He had no idea that shoes had their own language, but he kept hearing terms he’d never heard before, like “Dorsay pumps” and “kidskin with a Swarovski buckle” and “burgundy strapper.” One Miu Miu was defined as a “feather shoe,” which is exactly what it looked like—a bunch of silly feathers—so Maguire was confounded how the pair could cost five thousand bucks. A lavender sandal from Versace almost made Carolina drool—she was groaning like a woman in the throes of orgasm—and then came something identified as a red patent-leather lace-up. One look at that pair and she started giggling. And dancing around the room with the swagger of a goofy drunk.
    En route, he accidentally noticed that he’d vastly underestimated her legs before. Maybe she was generally built on the scrappy side, but her ankles and calves and thighs…. there was nothing wrong with those legs. They were toned, shaped perfectly, an erotic dream for a guy who had a leg fetish.
    When his thoughts strayed in that direction, Maguire pulled those reins tight. This wasn’t about him.In fact, Carolina acting like a giddy, happy schoolgirl highlighted exactly what the real issues were about. She had a serious character flaw. That flaw was that she was a serious, hard-core, possibly unfixable softie. As far as he could tell, she was forever giving, always thinking of others, always looking to help others.
    The world was going to kill her—particularly now that she had money—unless Maguire found ways to toughen her up. Her guileless warning that she could fall in love with him only echoed his own conscience. She had no defenses, not against feelings of the heart.
    Only a manipulative user of a man would take advantage of that. He had to keep his hands off her.
    Which was, temporarily, relatively easy.
    â€œMaguire!” she shrieked. “What do you think?”
    She paraded closer, lifting her robe to knee length so he had a better view of her right foot—in a purple crocodile heel—and her left foot, in a shiny red sandal thing.
    â€œI think you’re gonna kill yourself,” he said gruffly. Both heels were four inches high or more. No one could walk in those things and live.
    â€œDon’t you think they’re beautiful?”
    â€œOh, yeah.” Maybe he hadn’t seen it in the beginning, but now it was so obvious. When she smiled, she had an aura that lit up a whole room, a radiance that glowed from the inside out. He kept gettingglimpses of how Carolina had been before the crippling inheritance—a happy-on-the-inside woman, a giggler, a joyful, uninhibited fun lover. He’d bet the bank she sang at the top of her lungs when she was alone in a car.
    She teetered back to the shoe gurus, and tried on another pair…when something abruptly went wrong. He couldn’t hear what was said over the commotion, but she abruptly put down a shoe and her face went blank. He crossed the room at a breakneck pace, asked casually, “Did some kind of problem come up?”
    Her eyes shot to his. “That pair of suede pumps…” She motioned.
    â€œThe purple ones?”
    â€œYeah. Maguire.” She put a hand