Mysterious Billionaire is My Stepbrother

A small frown formed on Furina Dunne's forehead as sunlight cascaded across her face. She stirred, blinked her eyes open for a split second, and shut them again. Her head felt as heavy as a sack of wet sand, and her whole body ached in places she didn't want to think about. Though her brain was still fuzzy, she soon registered that the ceiling above her was far too high and far too ornate to belong to the cheap hostel she and her friends had booked.

This was a hotel room. A very expensive hotel room.

Panic began to build inside her. Despite her body's protests, she propped herself up on her elbows — and froze. A groan came from her right. If it had been a female groan, she might have assumed the other occupant of the bed was Tiffany or Lizzy. But this groan was deep, and it was unmistakably male.

Her mind, still soaked in last night's drinks, scrambled to piece together how she'd ended up in a hotel bed with a man asleep beside her.

Images surfaced in fragments. A dim corridor at the club. Rushing to the loo and colliding with a wall that turned out to be a chest. A pair of hands catching her before she plowed face-first into the floor. A laugh, low and amused, and an accent that made her knees forget their job. Dancing. Him leaning down to ask her name, and her saying, "Let's keep it anonymous," because it was Paris and she was twenty-two and, for one week, she didn't want to be anyone at all.

"Then I'll call you Belle," he'd said.

She remembered the lift doors sliding shut and his mouth finding hers. She remembered a flicker of panic when his hands found the hem of her top, a brief spasm of sanity telling her to wake up and run. And she remembered that it hadn't lasted, because he'd stopped. He'd looked at her and waited, until she pulled him back down herself.

She had always thought she was too small and too plain to be anyone's fantasy. Evidently, he hadn't agreed.

Furina shook her head as if the motion alone could wash the rest of the memories away. She looked down at herself, at her complete and total lack of clothing, and stared in pure terror. She couldn't bring herself to look at the man beside her.

They said Paris was the city of love. Nobody had warned her it was also the city of pure madness, because madness was the only excuse she could come up with. This was so far out of character that her character had left the country.

It was karma, that was what it was. She'd been drinking away the fact that her own mother had walked out on her and her dad to marry a billionaire, and the universe had decided to make a point. One trip to Paris with her best friends to celebrate their graduation. One week of happiness and freedom before she had to go back to Ireland and the bitter reality waiting there. Last night had been the second-to-last night of the trip; tomorrow they were flying home to Dublin. Tiffany, Lizzy, Tommaso and Harrod must be out of their minds with worry.

Once more she glanced around the bedroom. Her bra was draped over a standing lamp beside the sofa like a trophy. Without a sound, she inched off the bed and tiptoed across the carpet. She found her knickers by the bed and wriggled into them, then hugged her arms over her chest and crept over to rescue her bra — taking the duvet would have meant waking him. In the living area of the enormous suite, her top and long skirt lay in a trail by the door, as if they'd tried to escape without her.

Once she was dressed, she only needed her purse. It had to be somewhere in the suite. There was no way she'd been careless enough to lose her purse, right?

Right?

Twenty freaking minutes later, she still couldn't find her damn purse.

In frustration and lingering tipsiness, she knocked a glass off the end of the kitchen counter. Luckily, it landed on thick carpet with a dull thud instead of shattering. Unluckily, the thud was enough to wake the man in the bedroom.

"Qui est là?"

Furina swore inwardly. She'd meant to slip away without waking him. Since that ship had sailed, she tried, "Sorry."

A pause. Then the rustle of sheets, and a voice gone flat and cold, in English now. "You should leave."

She heard him getting up. Coming this way.

She was ashamed of what she'd done, but that didn't give him the right to throw her out like rubbish after a night like that. "You get to fuck me and then kick me out?"

A short sound came from the bedroom, almost as if he were stifling a laugh. "What else do you want? A tip?"

It took everything she had not to march in there and brain him with the standing lamp. She didn't remember every detail of last night, but she knew he hadn't been this much of a dickhead then. No way would she have gone anywhere with him if he had.

"You know what? Fuck you!"

Her eyes landed on two keycards tossed on the little table by the door, beside a leather wallet. For half a second she considered taking a note out of it for a taxi. Then she heard footsteps, snatched up one of the keycards, and fled. By the time he reached the doorway, she was already down the corridor and inside an open lift, keycard in one hand and shoes in the other. 

Instead of leaving straight away, she showed the receptionist her keycard and asked to borrow a phone. She knew all her friends' numbers by heart, and she knew only one of them would pick up on the first ring.

"Hello?"

"Tiffany?"

"Oh my God. Furina?" There was a split second of shock before Tiffany's voice went muffled. "Shh, guys, stop, stop — it's Furina!" Then, clear again: "You're on speaker. Where on earth are you? Are you all right? We've been frantic."

"I'm all right." Furina bit her lip, because that wasn't entirely honest. Last night, her patchy memories and that man's parting words were a lot for one girl to carry before breakfast. "I think I've lost my purse. And my phone."

"Yeah, we know. We found it at the club. The bartender said you left it on the bar when you went to the loo and never came back, so he kept it for you."

The loo. The corridor. The wall that was a chest. She still couldn't picture his face properly, but she remembered the arms that had caught her.

"F*e? You still there?"

"Yeah. Sorry. Where are you? I'll meet you."

"Or we come and get you, seeing as you've no purse or phone," said Harrod, always the sensible one.

It was the most sensible suggestion, and the most mortifying. She wasn't sure how the lads would react if they knew where she was. And she must have been with someone, because how else would she have ended up in a room like this without so much as an ID or a credit card?

"Um, can I talk to Tiffany and Lizzy?"

"Huh?" Tommaso sounded baffled, but the girls understood the cue. Girl business.

"Right, lads, go and tell that police officer we've found her," said Tiffany in her usual bossy tone. The boys grumbled but obeyed. "Okay, F*e, it's just me and Liz. What's going on?"

"I'm in a hotel." Before either of them could react, she added, "I know, I know. Scandalous and stupid. I drank too much and didn't think."

"Hey, it's all right, as long as you're okay," said Lizzy.

"You are okay?" Tiffany checked.

"Yes and no. God, I want to see you both so I can tell you."

"Then we're coming to you. We'll ditch the boys and bring your stuff."

"Thank you, loves." Just knowing they were coming made her feel lighter. She gave them the name of the hotel — the Hôtel Marivaux, which got a long whistle from Tiffany.

Less than fifteen minutes later, the three of them were installed in the hotel's dining room.

"That bloody bastard!" Tiffany said, not bothering to lower her voice once Furina had told them everything she could remember. "Tell me which one he is and I'll smack his head in."

"Calm down." Lizzy laid a hand over Tiffany's on the table. "She said she can't remember."

"Still! He doesn't get to do that and then talk to her like that. Is he a man or an arsehole?" Tiffany huffed and stabbed the strawberry shortcake she'd ordered with her coffee, rather violently.

Furina looked at the poor cake, and an idea bloomed. "You know what? I think I know how to get back at him." She looked up at her friends, and a slow smile spread across her lips.

The revenge began with spending. A lot of spending. Every charge on the keycard went straight onto his bill. The three of them had a long, lavish lunch, then the full spa menu, then a thorough tour of the hotel's boutiques. At three in the afternoon, Furina slipped the keycard into a small envelope with a Post-it note that read That's for being a dickhead, and asked the receptionist to have it sent up to the suite.

"Payback never tasted this good," Lizzy sighed, stretching as they stepped out of the enormous lobby. "I think my masseuse just got me pregnant."

There was a moment of utter silence before Tiffany broke it. "Speaking of which. Pharmacy, F*e. Morning-after pill. Now."

Furina nodded and swallowed the panic rising in her throat. She was also praying he hadn't given her anything. God only knew how many women that French man had been with.