The Billionaire's Hired Bride (BWWM Billionaire Romance Book 1) by Sherie Keys

managed to convince James to stick a hand in the water. (Privately, she was starting to get the idea that he was afraid of sharks, from how he pulled his hand back from anything but the rays.)
     
    Then they started working their way up, around the dimly lit central tank on the wide ramp. On the third floor, Minnie spent some time watching the octopus, which was actually swimming around fairly actively, compared to most of the octopuses she had seen in other aquariums in the past that were content to kind of hide in a corner of their tanks. When she put her hand up against the glass, the octopus put a sucker-lined tentacle against the other side, watching her with weird-looking horizontal pupils.
     
    The top floor was a coral reef exhibit, along with a platform overlooking the tall central tank that let you look straight down into it. Minnie only looked down it briefly before going back to footing that made her feel a bit less unsteady. She dropped back from the edge and decided that she preferred to watch the sea turtles swimming lazily around the massive tank from the side.
     
    The exhibits on this floor were mostly empty, and like the rest of the aquarium, were somewhat dim, putting the tanks in better light without bothering the animals inside. It wasn’t exactly romantic lighting, but Minnie felt a little inspired by it anyway. She went off towards a corner tank, feigning interest in the eels inside of it that looked more like sea grass than they did animals.
     
    (Okay, so the eels were interesting, they just weren’t that interesting.)
     
    James, as usual, followed her over; he’d let her lead most of the way around the aquarium, although he’d been quite happy to tell her about how the electric eel wasn’t actually an eel at all, and how its electricity worked, in more detail than the little sign attached to the tank had. When she turned to face him, instead of looking into the tank as she had been doing, he just looked back at her, a little confused.
     
    “Can I talk to you about something?” she asked hesitantly, immediately kicking herself for the phrasing. That question was one of the one that had always made her practically vibrate with nerves, because she knew that very few discussions of good things started with that question.
     
    If it made James nervous, though, he was very good at hiding it. With all the business meetings he had been going to that might make or break his company’s future, Minnie figured that he probably had to be. She couldn’t imagine a job where she had to go up and speak in front of people regularly like that, with basically her entire job hanging in the balance. “What is it?”
     
    She hesitated, not quite sure how to begin. Best to start at the beginning, right? “You remember that pool party we went to over spring break?”
     
    “At Liz’s? Yeah, of course.” She could tell from the look on his face that he did remember, and was wondering where she was going with this. His eyes were showing just a bit of worry.
     
    “I accidentally overheard you and Liz – I didn’t intend to, I swear – talking about sex. About how you turned her down, because you were willing to try waiting for me.” He didn’t respond, so she continued, the words she’d been thinking about too much but never really planning to say just spilling out. “I didn’t think too much of it at the time – I figured it was just a stunt for the rumors, you know? Because there were rumors after that, the kind that could only make this whole relationship thing seem more real, and so I figured that’s what you were doing.”
     
    “But lately…” She hesitated. “I woke up on the plane, and you were holding my hand, even though there was no reason for you to be acting the part of a good boyfriend there. And I do think of you as a friend – a really good friend! – and I don’t want to lose that. But it’s been bothering me, and I have to know – is there anything deeper going on there?