Irresistible Billionaires by Summer Brooks
Logan
Things hadn’t exactly gone to plan when I'd attempted to allude to the possibility of a relationship with Bella.
But, seeing as there was no plan in the first place, I couldn’t be all that angry with myself. In fact, I’d sort of jumped the gun, in my opinion. But we’d made up, and everything had mostly gone back to normal.
There was still something there, though, underneath it all. Something heated and heavy, and I could tell that we both felt it. I’d catch Bella throwing me furtive glances every so often while we were rearranging my new condo, or even over dinner and video games.
We were still doing all of the things we normally did, but there was now this added layer of intensity that I knew we both felt.
And Zach wasn’t exactly helping figure out how to step back, either. In fact, I hadn’t even been able to get the thought of what he’d said to me out of my head.
It’s completely possible to make a woman fall for you. You just need a plan.
I knew precisely what he’d been driving at, but, being the insistent and meddlesome older brother that he was, Zach had insisted on explaining it to me the other day.
That was what had set my mind into motion. Ever since he’d sat me down for one of his usual lectures, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about what he’d said.
Normally, I brushed him off. What did he know about making women fall in love with him? He and Clara had basically glued themselves at the hip when he’d lied to my dad about her being his fiancé, and from that point forward, their love story was almost inevitable.
But with Bella, it was totally different. There was nothing inevitable about us. It wouldn’t upset Dad if we suddenly stopped speaking to each other. Hell, I wasn’t even sure if he knew she existed half of the time, anyways.
Still, I’d taken Zach’s words to heart. Not that I'd ever tell him that. Despite the fact that the guy had good advice most of the time, I still kept it a secret from him. I was the little brother. It was like my job.
Zach had said it was totally possible to make a woman fall in love with me. That was something I'd never even tried before. I was so used to having women glue themselves to me quicker than I could blink that it had never occurred to me that I might be forced to entice one of them into returning my feelings.
Then again, I wasn’t usually so attached to the women I dated, so when they just wanted sex, I thought nothing of it.
“You just need to make them look at you in a different way,” Zach’s words echoed in my brain. “Do things that you haven’t done before. Come up with a plan. Women feel with their minds, not their bodies. Make her feel.”
Make her feel.
Who was better than me to make Bella feel something? I knew her better than anybody else did.
And that was how I ended up with my plan. I’d dubbed it: the best friend to boyfriend plan.
The name was cheesy. And that was why no one else on earth would ever see it. But the action steps were far less cheesy. In fact, by the time I was completely finished coming up with h entire brilliant plan, I had an entire paper’s worth of scribbles.
I managed to narrow it all down into a few actionable steps.
Step one on the list? Get Bella to kiss me. Then, her body would respond to me, and she’d have to at least admit that she felt something.
So, the steps went like this:
1.) Kiss her for the first time ever.
2.) Win over her friends. (That should be easy, seeing as one of them was my sister in law.)
3.) Get along with her family. Who I’d never met before.
4.) Help her solve a career problem. (I wasn’t sure how to do this just yet, but I figured I'd know what to do when the time came.)
And lastly, number 5: Make sure she knows that, from now on, friendship is totally off the table.
That last step scared the daylights out of me when I’d first written it down. Did I really want to risk losing Bella altogether if this didn’t work?
Yes.
I realized I did. And I knew that sounded all macho male, which, admittedly, a lot of it was.
But I also didn’t think I could live any longer knowing she wasn’t mine. If I kept having to look at her every day and watch her emerald eyes sparkle, only to remember that, one day, she’d go home to another man. He’d get to appreciate their glimmer when they went to bed at night, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to stand it.
It was all or nothing. I couldn’t quite pinpoint just what I felt for Bella, but I knew it was too deep for friendship.
or, maybe I could have pinpointed it if I was willing to dig a bit deeper into myself. but that unknown territory was too dark and full of far too many secrets for my comfort right then.
I had my list, and now I just needed to act on it. the first step wouldn’t be easy, I knew, and it would take the perfect circumstances.
Bella needed to be completely comfortable and in her happy place, and there was only one space where that existed.
The home goods store.
She’d already made multiple subtle-yet-obvious complaints about the clear lack of taste I'd shown in my interior decorating, so I knew she’d jump on the chance like a cat jumps on a bug.