Alpha Billionaire’s Bride, Part Two (BWWM Romance Serial) by Mia Caldwell Page A

excellent idea.”
    As they chatted, Jada was surprised to discover that thanks
to television and movies, pop culture in general, they shared more history than
she would have guessed. Ian, raised with every luxury, a world traveler before
he was a teenager, had watched the same TV shows and listened to much of the
same music as Jada, a middle-class girl raised by parents who saved up all year
for a few camping trips during their meager vacation time.
    She learned Ian’s parents weren’t interested in business
endeavors. His father was a well-known plastic surgeon who specialized in reconstructive
surgery, the money he’d inherited from Ian’s grandfather allowing him to do
charitable work for children from low-income families in America and abroad.
For all his fine qualities, Jada understood him to be a driven, loner type,
whose vision was focused more on the wider world than on the narrower,
childhood needs of his only son.
    Ian’s mother hadn’t spent much time with him either when he
was young. She’d divorced his father before Ian turned five and used the
settlement to travel to Europe where she chased after minor royalty and the
fast-living social scene. While Ian’s father had never remarried, his mother
was currently on her seventh husband.
    Ian had been left with his grandfather, who hired staff to
help care for the young boy. Ian was sent off to boarding school by the age of
ten, and only saw family during school holidays and special occasions.
    Ian told his story as if there was nothing to be sorry about
having absent parents and a grandfather who could spare scant time for him. He
never intimated that his childhood was lonely, or in any way damaged by adult
family members who left most of his upbringing to paid staff and teachers.
    Perhaps, Jada thought, that’s how it was for a certain class
of people, for Ian’s class. As for Jada, hiring others to raise your children
for you was an unthinkable concept.
    She realized she’d have to rethink everything she thought
she knew about this man, that there was a gulf between the two of them which
ebbed and flowed, widening and narrowing as it passed through different aspects
of their lives.
    The more she got to know him, the more she wanted to know.
Plus, it didn’t hurt that Ian was the finest looking man she’d ever seen, and
he made her feel tingly without even touching her.
    They ate their fill of Mrs. Best’s delicious food and still
wound up packing away nearly as much as they’d unpacked. For dessert, Ian
opened a small container of strawberries and with a flourish, pulled a bottle
of icy cold champagne out of one of the silver buckets.
    “I shouldn’t have any,” Jada said as Ian dropped a perfect
strawberry into a champagne flute then filled the glass with bubbly. “You may
not believe this, but I’ve drunk more in my short time here than I have in
months and months.”
    He handed her the glass and poured one of his own. “You’re
not much of a party girl then.”
    “What do you think?”
    He took a sip of his drink, watching her lips as she tasted
the champagne and ran the tip of her tongue over the glass brim to gather up an
escaping drop of sparkling liquid.
    “I think not,” he said. “I also think I’ve been so taken
with you that I never asked if you have a boyfriend, or a lover. Do you have a
lover, Jada?”
    Something about the way he said “lover” set off tremors
inside her. She swallowed hard. “No.”
    His eyelids lowered. Bedroom eyes. There they were, bright
blue and sexy as hell, focused entirely on her. What a rush.
    “I can’t imagine you spend much time alone,” he said, “as
beautiful as you are.”
    Gulp. She kept it together. “I work a lot. Late. It’s hard
to meet men when you’re too tired to go out.”
    “Their loss is my gain then. At least, I hope it’s my gain.”
He drained the last of his champagne, catching the strawberry between his
perfect white teeth and biting it in half. He took the