Marrying Her Older Billionaire

*****

Angie was getting ready for the dinner. She wanted to look as sexy as possible, and no matter how many times she told herself that she was not doing it for Richard she had to admit in the end that it was all for him. She wanted to look good for him, she wanted to look like she was the kind of woman that he would be attracted to. She wanted him to look at her and not be able to control himself. She wanted him to act on his attraction towards her.

This was a rather odd thing for her to want, because she did not want him to feel like he could act on those feelings. They simply couldn’t be attracted to each other, anything that could happen between them would be a betrayal of trust as far as her father was concerned. She could not do that to her dad.

But at the same time, she couldn’t help but feel like she was being unfair to herself. Why should she care about what her father would think? He didn’t own her. She was almost thirty years old. Why should he still be protective of his daughter? It was true that he had last properly seen her ten years ago when she had been nineteen, but she was not nineteen anymore. She was not the kind of person that allowed men to dictate what she did with her life, why should she change her mind set for her father?

She thought about it for a long moment. It was all about being respectful at the end, but shouldn’t her father respect her wishes? She had never even thought to talk to him about it. What if she talked to him and he indicated that he would be okay with it? She thought that this was a long shot so she decided against it. How could she think this way when everything that was going on indicated that her father was very much interested in taking care of her and still thought of her in many ways as the same little girl that he had once known?

She sighed. This was such a mess. It was a lot more complicated than it needed to be. She wished that things would be simpler. She wished that everything that was going on was easier to understand. There was so much tumult in her brain that she felt surprised that she was able to think straight about anything at all.

What with everything that was going through her head about her mother, all of the things that she couldn’t help but think about Richard, and all of the things she was feeling about her father deciding to retire, she couldn’t help but feel like she was going to go crazy soon. She needed to let loose. She needed to let her hair down. She decided that tonight she would party hard. There would be free booze, and everyone that was there was going to want a piece of her because she was looking so hot. She would get herself a hot young man and she would take him in her bedroom, and woe betide anyone that told her that she couldn’t do it.

She looked at herself in the mirror. She was absolutely stunning. Her skin was chocolate dark and flawless, her braids hung link curtains around her, and her legs seemed to stretch on for miles. She was a vision and a half, and she was sure that she would be able to enjoy her night. She regretted thinking about making Richard feel attracted to her. She felt like it would complicate things. At the same time, she wanted to stop caring about it.

She stepped out of her bedroom. Her father looked at her and smiled. “You look absolutely beautiful, Angie!”

“Thank you!” she said. “I tried to look my best. Has no one arrived yet?”

“No one important if you know what I mean,” said Matthew. “There are a few guests but they’re in the living room having a few drinks. I think that they are having a good time. I’m just setting up a few things for them, some snacks and whatnot. I don’t want to start dinner before Richard arrives.”

“When is he getting here?” asked Angie nonchalantly. She wanted to be a bit more forthcoming but she couldn’t. She couldn’t tell her dad that she was dying to see his best friend. He would get the wrong impression, and in this case the wrong impression was actually the right impression.

“He’ll be here in about twenty minutes,” said Matthew. “He’s bringing a date. Isn’t that great? I mean, he says that it’s not serious but I think we’re all hoping that he’s just downplaying it. That man seriously needs a woman in his life. How does he expect to function without… you know… well you probably don’t want to hear about that.”

Angie tried to act as calm as possible. Richard was bringing a date? She had no right to, but she was feeling jealous anyway. She was feeling like Richard was betraying her. She really shouldn’t be feeling this way. After all, Richard did not owe her anything. He was not bound to her in any way. He was not the kind of person that would do something like that if he knew that Angie would be upset about it. But, then again, how was he supposed to know that she would be upset about it? How was he supposed to know that Angie would be so distraught by the fact that he was bringing somebody?

Her father said that Richard had said that it was nothing serious. Could he be downplaying it? He had told her at the coffee shop a week ago that he was not looking for anything serious, that if it found him he would be more than happy to accept it and to settle down but until then he was going to make no active effort to find someone for himself. Could this someone be someone that he found by chance? Could this be the soul mate that he had not been looking for but had found anyway? It couldn’t be. It had only been a week since Angie and he had hung out and gone shopping together. He couldn’t have found somebody in such a short period of time. They had not spoken in a week, but that did not mean that he had found somebody else. They had not really exchanged numbers, and although it was possible for them to acquire each other’s numbers without asking each other, this was the kind of thing that they would avoid doing because it would be rather creepy.

She didn’t know how to feel about this. Everything that was going on was chaotic to say the least. It was more than she could bear. How was she supposed to deal with so many conflicting thoughts? How would she be able to be normal around Richard while he was with another woman?

She decided that she would try to be as adult about this as possible. She had no right to expect him to come to the dinner alone simply because they were attracted to each other. If she had wanted that level of commitment, she should have talked to him about it and told him that she expected that from him. She should have told him that she wanted him to think about the two of them being together, because that was what adults did. She felt like she had been transported back into her nineteen year old form, and that everything she was doing or thinking or saying was the result of her thinking this way.