All Chapters of Loving the Billionaire I hate: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

"If you don't have the full payment by the end of the month, Miss Villanueva, we will have no choice but to proceed with the seizure." I held the phone against my ear for a few seconds after the banker finished talking, even though there was nothing left to say. Then I put it face down on the counter and stood very still in the middle of my mother's bakery, listening to the sound of the refrigerator humming and the distant noise of traffic outside and absolutely nothing else. It was a Tuesday morning. I had three customers all day. I sat down at the small table near the window, the one my mother used to sit at when she wanted to watch people walk past, and I pulled out every piece of paper I had been avoiding for two weeks. Bank statements, overdue invoices. A final utility notice I had tucked under the register and pretended I hadn't seen. I spread them all out in front of me and looked at the number at the bottom of the bank letter one more time, as if looking at it again would s

He was there at six exactly.I hadn't even finished setting up when I heard the knock at the back door, which threw me off because I hadn't told him to use the back door. I hadn't told him there was a back door. I opened it and found him standing there in a dark coat, hands in his pockets, looking completely unbothered by the early hour and the cold and the fact that he was standing in an alley behind a bakery instead of wherever billionaires normally were at six in the morning."How did you know about this entrance," I said."I've been here before," he said.I stepped back to let him in before I could think too hard about what that meant.I put coffee in front of him without asking how he took it because I didn't care how he took it and he could say something if he had a problem. He didn't say anything. He wrapped both hands around the mug and looked around the back room slowly, taking in the shelving and the proofing racks and the framed photograph of my mother near the door, the on

I gave the contract to the only lawyer I trusted, which was Jess's cousin Raymond, who worked at a small firm downtown. I dropped it off at his office on Wednesday morning and he called me Thursday evening and told me it was the most airtight document he had read in a long time and that whoever drafted it was very good at making sure there were no exits that hadn't been accounted for."Is it fair," I asked."It's fair to you," he said. "Everything you told me you wanted is in there. The building suspension is filed and registered. I checked it myself. It went through the city planning office yesterday morning."I sat down on the floor of my apartment when he said that. Not dramatically. My legs just decided they were done.The building was protected. In writing. Filed with the city before I had signed a single thing. He had done it before the contract was even agreed to, before he had any guarantee I would sign. I didn't know what to do with that information so I just sat on the floor

The first morning I woke up in Dominic Ashford's penthouse, he was already gone.There was coffee made. Not just started — made, poured into a thermal carafe with a mug set beside it. No note. No explanation. Just the quiet fact of it, like he had thought about me before he left and didn't want me to know.I stood in the kitchen in my socks and drank the coffee and looked at the city and thought about how strange it was to be considered inside someone's life when you were still entirely outside of them.He came back at seven-thirty in the evening. I was in the kitchen by then, which probably surprised him. I had gone to the bakery in the afternoon, done inventory, checked on Rosa, and come back with ingredients because the alternative was ordering food in a stranger's apartment and that felt worse somehow.He stopped in the entryway and looked at me."You're cooking," he said."Observation skills. Very impressive.""In my kitchen.""You have one pan," I said. "It felt like a cry for h

I picked the second biggest ring. It was a simple oval diamond on a thin gold band, elegant without being aggressive about it, the kind of ring that looked like a decision rather than a statement. I put it on in the study alone and stood there for a moment looking at my hand and feeling something I refused to name. When I came out Dominic was on the couch with his laptop and he looked up and his eyes went to my hand and stayed there for exactly two seconds before returning to my face. "Good choice," he said. "Don't say I told you so." "I didn't." "You were about to." The corner of his mouth moved. "Go to bed, Mara." I went to bed. I lay there for twenty minutes thinking about the way he had said *you don't have to* earlier in the kitchen and how it had hit me somewhere unguarded and how I was going to need to be significantly more guarded going forward because six weeks was not very long but it was long enough to do real damage if I wasn't careful. I was already not b