The Billionaire's Bridal Bid Read Online Free PDF

date.”
    Too bad he wasn’t going to give it to her. He’d had enough of her calling the shots. He didn’t know what kind of men she was used to dating here in Palo Verde, but he didn’t take dictates from anyone.
    Now that he had her list of do’s and don’ts, he knew exactly how to piss her off. She was in for the most romantic night of her life.

Three
    “I heard he chartered a jet and is going to whisk you off to some exotic, foreign locale,” Olga said, her eyes lit with fervor.
    Molly sighed. “So romantic!”
    Claire barely suppressed her snort of derision. Molly and Olga, her two college-aged waitresses, were just so…young. So blissfully ignorant of the workings of the human male. Had she ever been this innocent? She didn’t think so, not even when she was a teenager, constantly under the thumb of her grandparents, struggling with bitter resentment.
    But of course, she had been this young. Briefly. When she’d been with Matt. It had been the one time in her life when she’d been filled with hope and optimism. A time when she’d believed she could have everything she’d yearned for but never thought she was worthy of. For that brief blip of time she’d imagined anything waspossible. And it was the one time she’d felt as young as they seemed to her right now.
    They stood huddled together, elbows propped on the counter, eyes gleaming as they talked.
    “You know he’s probably just bringing me to Palo Alto for dinner.”
    “Oh.” Olga’s gaze remained dreamy.
    “Huh?” asked Molly. “Where?”
    Olga answered before Claire had a chance. “Palo Alto. It’s near San Francisco, where Stanford University is located. It’s like the intellectual epicenter of California.”
    “I’m sure all the people at Berkeley disagree,” Claire muttered, giving the counter a fierce swipe with her dishcloth.
    Olga ignored her. “And it’s where FMJ’s headquarters are located.”
    Molly crossed her arms over her chest, clearly annoyed at being lectured to by Olga. “Sounds kind of boring.”
    “It’s not,” Olga assured her. “As far as Palos go, it’s way better than Palo Verde.”
    Both the girls laughed, since everyone knew Palo Verde was just…unexciting. A smallish farming community halfway between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe, Palo Verde had little to distinguish itself other than the fact that it was the county seat and had some charming turn-of-the-century architecture. Molly and Olga were both attending the community college located on the outskirts of town. Though Palo Verde was slightly bigger than the nearby small towns they were from, it still offered few enticements for young women.
    Which was probably why she didn’t put an end to their musings. She knew better than anyone the frustrationsof being young and trapped in a town smaller than your dreams.
    So instead of reminding them that they were supposed to be rolling silverware, she took out a stack of bright pink cloth napkins and grabbed the tray of flatware herself.
    “I bet he takes her to L.A. for dinner.”
    “Or Mexico!”
    “Remember that episode of Friends when Pete took Monica to Italy for pizza? I bet he does that!”
    “He can’t do that,” Molly said. “She’d need her passport, right?”
    “Duh, she’d need her passport for Mexico, too,” Olga pointed out.
    They both looked at her. “Did he ask you to bring your passport?”
    “No. He hasn’t told me anything about the date.”
    In the week and a half since the bachelorette auction, she hadn’t had any contact from Matt at all. Yesterday, she’d gotten a call from Wendy somebody at FMJ to inform her that a limo would be picking her up for her date at six that Saturday evening and that a hotel room had been booked for her, so she should pack an overnight bag. Claire wanted to tell Matt exactly what he could do with her overnight bag. However, the helpful Wendy had refused to connect the call. Claire had hung up, called information, gotten the number for FMJ