The Billionaire’s Wake-up-call Girl (Billionaires of Manhattan, #2)

by Annika Martin

She wraps herself up in my shirt and wanders over to the window. The sunrise lights the mussed edges of her pale brown hair, a goddess tipped in flame. She stands there a long time, gazing out over the park, and I have this sense that she belongs here, that she’s always been here in some impossible way. As if her being here stretches beyond time. I want to tell her that, but I don’t. One strong shift in the breeze and she’ll disappear like a wisp of fog.

My race for the formula used to be the only thing on the landscape of my life. Now it exists alongside kitchen things and ironic cookies and hotel trysts and long afternoon walks when I should be working. It lives in a world where conflicted emotions can be contained in one simple, fierce word over the phone. Where beauty is an asymmetrical freckle. Where baby goats play. Where I can wake up and Lizzie is the first thing I see. And I lie there loving everything about her so hard that it wakes her up.