I Knew He Was A Billionaire, I Let Him Pretend To Be Poor Chapter 01

I Knew He Was A Billionaire, I Let Him Pretend To Be Poor Chapter 01

The day Nolan Whitaker told me he liked me, I already knew he was a rich kid playing poor.

I played dumb and said yes anyway.

Life was too hard.

When someone bothered to show up for me, even a liar, I wasn’t going to turn that away.

We played house like two broke kids in love.

That lasted until one of his friends assumed I was out and walked straight into our apartment.

“Nolan, have you lost your mind? You’re blowing off a multimillion-dollar deal to work a two-grand-a-month job for HER?”

Nolan couldn’t shut him up in time. His panicked eyes shot toward the bedroom.

I wasn’t fast enough to fake being asleep. All I could do was hold my breath in the silence.

I thought I’d get to keep this illusion a little longer.

I didn’t think we’d be over this fast.

…

I knew Nolan was full of it the second I laid eyes on him.

A few days before, I’d spilled something on his friend’s clothes while waiting tables.

The guy knew I couldn’t pay for it, so he cussed me out.

Told me to get lost, then chalked it up to his own bad luck.

Nolan probably figured he’d have a little fun at my expense too.

So he threw on a delivery uniform and showed up at my door, eyes wide, playing clueless.

I stared at him and said nothing.

I wanted to tell him to drop the act.

A year ago, he and that same friend had eaten at the restaurant where I worked.

They’d brought in a fifty-year-old bottle of scotch that cost over four hundred thousand dollars.

But I was too exhausted to even call him out.

I’d worked twenty-six days straight at the restaurant that month.

The other four, I spent scrubbing strangers’ houses.

Every time I stood up, my vision went black.

His mouth kept moving. I couldn’t hear the lies clearly, and I didn’t care to.

I stepped past him and cut into the alley where I’d left my scooter.

It was on the ground.

The kickstand was probably busted again.

I crouched down and tried to lift it.

It wouldn’t budge.

I was using everything I had.

But the scooter was like everything else in my life. Too heavy to move, with no end in sight.

It just lay there.

A pair of hands reached down and pulled the scooter upright.

Nolan.

I gave him a nod and pushed the scooter out of the alley.

Two steps later, the tears hit. No warning, no reason I could name. They just came.

Nolan scrambled to catch up, dug a pack of tissues out of his pocket, and held it out to me.

“Hey, hey. What’s wrong? What happened?”

I pressed the tissue hard against my eyes and swallowed the sob before it got out.

I turned twenty-two that day. And on my birthday, a stranger helped me pick up something I couldn’t lift on my own.

He gave me a clean tissue and asked if I was okay.

Maybe all he wanted was a laugh at my expense.

But it still mattered.

I decided to forget about that four-hundred-thousand-dollar scotch.

I played dumb and gave him my number.