Lie to Me: A Contemporary Billionaire BWWM Romance by Mia Caldwell Page A

hard? There’s something you’d rather work on? How you chew gum could be improved. If you insist on chewing it. Which, actually, Vanessa wouldn’t chew gum. So improve on it by not chewing it—how’s that.”
    “No, no,” continued Zoe – she felt her stomach tightening as she reached the crux of the point. “I need a break.”
    “A break?!” For someone who had spent his adult life drawing a salary from a company for which he did nothing, Nick seemed surprisingly unfamiliar with the concept of ‘time off’. “What do you need a break for?!”
    “It’s my Mom’s birthday this weekend…”
    “She’ll have another one next year. Just send her a card.”
    “I’d really like to be there. There’s a family barbeque…”
    “Sounds horrifying. You should be thanking me for giving you a good excuse not to be there.”
    “I enjoy it,” said Zoe pointedly.
    “No,” said Nick firmly. “You don’t enjoy barbeque. Sabrina… I mean, Vanessa wouldn’t enjoy barbeque.”
    “I’m not Vanessa,” Zoe reminded him. “And I don’t have to be her for a little while yet. For now I still get to be myself. Zoe. Remember her? And, I gotta tell you – Zoe likes barbeques.”
    But Nick still shook his head. “There’s far too much work to do. There’s the walk, the whole gum thing, dining out, not talking with your mouth full…”
    “Aren’t we ahead of schedule anyway?”
    Nick tried to avoid her gaze, his own well-prepared schedule was suddenly his undoing. Days had been set aside at the start of this project for Zoe to be taught good business practice, but that had proved unnecessary when it turned out that Zoe knew what she was doing on the business front. Since then they had been working a few days ahead in the schedule, which meant, logically, that a weekend off would not make them behind, it would merely put them back on schedule.
    “I still…” Nick began to object, although now rather half-heartedly.
    “I’m going,” Zoe interrupted – time to cut to the chase. “If you choose to fire me because of it then that’s your call. But I am going. I need time to be myself.” That, if she was honest, was the real reason, the reason she could not tell Nick.
    This past week she had felt as if she was losing track of who she was, losing the real Zoe behind the façade of the Zoe-Vanessa hybrid which Nick was creating. She had never even considered that a possibility, after all; who would want to be Vanessa? Who would be that big of a bitch by choice? But it was not as simple as that – while she still had no desire to be Vanessa per se , to be like Vanessa but not Vanessa was different. There were aspects of Vanessa’s lifestyle that were seductive and tempting: the clothes, the food, the glamour, the attitude. It drew Zoe in a way that she had not anticipated that it would.
    She wanted – she needed – to put it aside for a few days and remind herself of who she really was before she allowed herself to be subsumed totally into this exciting new world into which Nick was indoctrinating her. And where better to get in touch with your old self than with family? If you want to be brought back down to earth, to get a taste of reality, then family will do it every time. Well, maybe not every time; a lot depends on the type of family that you have.
    Nick frowned from behind his desk. “You really want to spend time with your family?”
    “Yes.”
    Nick nodded to himself. He seemed to be wondering: why would anyone want to spend time with family?
    “Well, okay,” he finally accepted. “If it’s really that important to you. There’s certainly stuff here I can be getting on with while you’re gone.”
    There was something about the way he said the word ‘certainly’ that made Zoe think that this ‘stuff’ he would be getting on with was the same stuff about which he and Adam had had their recent heated discussion. Something was wrong in Nick’s world, and while Nick’s world was a world in