Page 71 of Triplet Babies for my Ex's Best Friend

Then slowly pick it up.

“Okay,” I say, wrapping my fingers around it. “I’ll use it responsibly.”

“I assumed you would.”

“Don’t sound so confident,” I mutter. “I could buy Oliver six hundred dollars’ worth of novelty fruit snacks.”

“If you can justify the purchase.”

I look up sharply. He’s absolutely serious, and somehow that’s the funniest part.

I laugh, and this time, he actually smiles. Suddenly, he doesn’t look like my terrifying, controlled, billionaire boss anymore.

He just looks like a man.

A tired one. A warm one, underneath all that steel, and that’s dangerous in ways I don't have the emotional infrastructure to manage.

“Right,” I say briskly. “Well. Great. Budget crisis averted. Love that for us.”

His smile fades into quietness, but he doesn’t look away. “Was there anything else?”

I look away first, busying myself with the entirely unnecessary task of straightening a napkin on the island.

“I was going to make dinner,” I say.

“You were?”

“Yes.”

“With what?”

I gesture helplessly toward the fridge. “That was going to be the adventure.”

He considers this for exactly one second. “No.”

I blink. “No?”

“No,” he repeats. “You’ve had a long day. I’ve had a long day. We’re not forcing a dinner experiment out of principle.”

There’s something absurdly intimate about thewein that sentence. I pretend not to notice.

“So what’s the alternative?” I ask.

He pulls out his phone. “Takeout.”

I laugh. “That was fast.”

“It’s efficient.”

“Sure. Not at all because you don’t trust me in your kitchen unsupervised.”

He doesn’t even look up from the screen. “That too.”

I narrow my eyes. “Rude.”

He glances up briefly. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

I open my mouth.