Shopping for a Billionaire 1 Read Online Free PDF

of a Farmington Country Club wedding.
    Mom’s phone rings. “You Sexy Thing” fills the room and Chuckles makes a disapproving sound eerily similar to my mother’s. I seize my chance.
    “Gotta wash the toilet water off my arm!” I call back as I pad to the bathroom and turn on the shower, drowning out whatever comments she peppers me with. Stripping out of the pajamas I’ve been wearing for far longer than their shelf life feels like shedding a skin.
    The tiny, hot pinpricks of escapism give me ten minutes to cleanse myself and to think. Or not think. Mom chats on the other side of the bathroom door, blissfully unaware that I am not listening. Or commenting. Or responding in any way, shape, or form.
    That doesn’t stop her.
    I turn off the shower spray and hear her shout, “And so that’s how Janice’s daughter found out her and her husband’s toothbrushes had been shoved up the robbers’ butts.”
    Whoa. As I towel off, my reflection opens its mouth and closes it a few times, wondering how I am expected to respond to that.
    Some things are best left to the unknown.
    As I open the door, a plume of steam hits Mom. “My hair! My hair!” she shouts. I inherited her limp hair and Dad’s eyes, which is so totally backwards. Dad has lush hair that my sister, Amy, got—perfect spiral curls that rest elegantly in auburn tendrils against her back. And Mom has those blue eyes.
    I look in the mirror and Declan’s name runs through my mind, planted there by my subconscious. If I say a word about him to Mom then she’ll be planning the wedding and have him in a headlock, demanding a two-carat ring before he can say “Hello.”
    I walk into my bedroom wearing a towel, and stop short. Clothes are laid out on my bed for me.
    “What am I? Four?” I mumble. Then I grudgingly put them on, because Mom does have good taste. The adobe shirt she pairs with navy pants and a scarf I never use looks more stylish than I want to admit.
    “I can color code your wardrobe for you, Shannon,” she shouts from the hallway as I dress.
    “You should start a clothing line. Garanimals for Adults. It would be very popular!”
    She takes my comment at face value. “What a great idea! I’ll ask Amy what she thinks. Maybe we can do one of those crowd-funding things to raise money for it like Amy does.”
    Amy is an intern at a venture capital company. So not the same thing as Kickstarter or Indiegogo. I don’t correct Mom, because it’s about as useful as correcting Vladimir Putin about the Ukrainian/Russian border.
    “Who was on the phone?” I ask.
    “Amanda. She wants you to call her. What’s wrong with your phone?”
    “I dropped it in a toilet on a shop this morning.”
    Mom’s face freezes in an outrageous O. “You didn’t… retrieve it?” The only thing Mom fears more than never marrying off a kid at the Farmington Country Club is germs.
    “I stuck my hand in the toilet in the men’s room and saved it, even as I flushed!” I say with glee.
    She glares at me. Chuckles leaves the room, clearly outclassed. “Men’s room?”
    I smile. “Where do you think I’m meeting men?”
    “Oh, Shannon,” she groans, reaching for the espresso I made for her before the shower. It’s likely tepid by now, but that’s how she likes it. “Have you become so desperate?”
    “I know the men’s room is a bit—“
    “No—the men’s room is ingenious, actually. No competition, except with the gay ones.” She drinks the entire espresso in one gulp and slams the cup down like it’s a shot competition during Spring Break in New Orleans. “I mean, really? On a mystery shop ?” She says the last two words like Gwyneth Paltrow says the word divorce .
    “So let me understand, Mom. Trolling the men’s room is a clever way to meet a man, but doing so during a mystery shop is debasing?” She quickly pulls my unruly hair into an updo and bobbypins appear in her mouth like she had them shoved up her nose the entire time, waiting for the