Billionaire Romance14 min read
He Told Me Not to Like Him — So I Did Anyway
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“Get in,” he said.
I slid into the passenger seat before I knew why. The car smelled like cold leather and lemon. Rain tapped the glass. My heart still thudded from the exam I’d just finished and the stupid little lie I’d told to help a friend that morning.
“You okay?” he asked after a long beat.
“Fine.” I wrapped my hands around my bag. “Thank you for the lift.”
He looked at me for a second, then back at the road. Wesley Daley had that way of making everything feel a degree cleaner, like clothes pressed on an iron. He was the kind of man I used to only read about in magazines. CEO, founder, rumored to be worth more money than my entire city. He had a face made for billboards and a posture that said he’d been taught how to cross rooms since childhood.
“You saw me at Professor Henrik’s place that morning,” I said. “You were the one who left the room first.”
“You were the one who kept staring,” he said, mild. “I pretended not to see.”
I blinked. “You pretended?”
“Yeah.” He grinned. “You’re good at looking very small and very visible at the same time.”
I pretended not to be pleased.
My name is Annabelle Russell. I study finance — a safe, sensible choice, my parents liked to remind me — but I am happiest in the library. I like the quiet. I like the way books line shelves like patient people. I write when I can; short essays, a few stories, some odd articles that earn me a little money and nothing more. I never expected to become someone’s girlfriend, least of all Wesley Daley’s.
“You still don’t have a job yet?” he asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “I want to try the finance office here first. They posted a job.”
“Try broadening your aim.” He flicked the corner of his mouth. “Come to my office next week. I’ll show you the city from my side.”
“Why would you do that?” I asked.
“Because I asked you here,” he said.
The voice in my head that had always measured things — risk, cost, comfort — screamed that I was making a mistake. But there are stupid, soft kinds of risks and I liked them. I liked his quiet jokes. I liked the way he asked for the seatbelt with an old-fashioned, polite tone. I liked the way he said my name like it fit.
That first month was a slow burn. We met at the university events, bumped into each other in the library, and had a staged scene in a restaurant where I pretended to be his girlfriend. He’d been forced to sit through an awkward, arranged meeting; I had been in the bathroom and came out to save him with a ridiculous, spur-of-the-moment performance. I slammed a glass of water, I shouted “scandal,” I made him flinch. We both laughed. He saved me the trouble of pretending.
“You owe me a dinner,” he said later.
“Deal,” I replied, and then we both said nothing for a while, which was a comfortable silence.
Kori Popov — my roommate and loud cheerleader — called him “that cold, perfect person who looks bad at gossip but good at everything else.” Ariel James, my best friend from college who had already moved into the city and worked at a marketing firm, said, “Annabelle, don’t be stupid. Men like that don’t do normal things.”
“You’re jealous,” I told Ariel the night I came home to a delivery of food from Wesley. The card read: “Eat more. -W.”
“I’m not jealous,” she said, but then her smile got crooked. “Okay, fine. I’m a little jealous.”
He asked, once, in the middle of a late-night walk by the library lake, “Don’t like me.”
“Why not?” I laughed. “Because you told me not to?”
“I’m not…good,” he said, simple as a fact. “I don’t do soft things well.”
“I don’t want soft,” I said. “I want…what I have right now.”
The first time he touched me — truly touched me — it was at the edge of a parking lot after a terrible evening at a noisy bar. My roommate had been drunk and melodramatic; I had been tired of the world. Some man at the bar decided I was alone. Wesley’s hand circled my waist and pulled me close as if that were a bandage he could apply then and there.
“Move,” he said to the man.
He smelled like lemon and cigarettes, and when he kissed me in the shadow of that parking garage, I understood the word “danger” as a soft thing that made my breath quicken.
“Don’t like me,” he said later, after I had surrendered to the night and to him. “You will get hurt.”
“I’ll risk it,” I said. “I’ll risk getting hurt for a good story.”
He did not laugh. He only looked heavy with something like regret and need mixed into one.
Weeks turned into messy, bright days. He took me to dinner at restaurants I scribbled notes about so I could bring friends later. He taught me to drive in a way that felt less like lessons and more like a sharing of small power. He came to my small job interview when I tried out for a part-time post at the college finance desk. “You’ll show me around?” he had offered in his quiet way.
“Show you around?” I had replied. “Are you jobless?”
He snorted softly. “I’ll tour your library.”
The job interview went well. The job, if I got it, would mean I could stay nearby, keep my writing alive, sleep in the city where the library smelled like old paper and coffee. I wanted that life. I wanted the ordinary parts of it. When I told Wesley I had passed the written test and was invited to the interview, he drove me home afterward and then went on a business trip.
When he was away, Kori brought me a bowl of noodles and a handful of theories about why rich men left their girlfriends with good manners and too many promises. Ariel asked if I was happy. I said I was mostly happy, and that felt like the truth.
Two weeks later he called. “I’m back,” he said. The tone made me feel small and lucky at once.
“You sound exhausted,” I said.
“Come over. I want to show you a dog.”
He had more to his life than his company — a little white Samoyed named Uchi and a blue-eyed cat named Mabu, two elderly people who called Wesley every day and asked him to bring vegetables and ask his sister to visit. He had a grandmother who wrote recipes on paper and kept jars of jam like treasure.
“You’ll be an odd kind of wife for them,” he said once, as if speaking to a private corner. “If we keep going.”
“I’m not planning to write a list,” I said. “I just want to see how things go.”
He took me home that night, and I fell asleep on the ride. When I woke, I was in his bed. The marks left by that first night stayed like faint rose petals on my skin for a long time. The truth was messy: I had agreed to go home with him; I had not agreed to the intensity or the depth that came with it. But we belonged together in that odd, private way.
“You’ll tell me if you don’t want this,” he said one morning as I sipped milk at his kitchen table.
“I will,” I promised. And I meant it.
He expected me to leave when I graduated. He had said as much. He had reasons. He was used to other people’s timelines. But when June came, and my thesis was signed off, and the sun hit the city like a promise, I found myself wanting to stay.
“You know I’m offering you a job,” Wesley had told me the first time he showed me his office — high windows and an orderly desk he never seemed to sit at. “You can work at my company. You’ll be safe.”
“Safe?” I echoed. “Your company eats startups the way some people eat breakfast.”
“I’ll teach you to swim with sharks,” he said, and I wanted to laugh and also to step forward.
We moved in together, if moving in means my boxes arrived at his house and the Samoyed accepted me after one slow, suspicious sniff. His mother loved me, an easy, maternal smile and so many folded scarves; his grandmother gave me jars of jam and a list of things to avoid when making coffee.
The first time I met one of his friends who knew him from youth, it felt like meeting another planet. There was a woman named Irina Daniel who had been a headline and a name in Wesley’s past. She was the kind of woman who seemed to have been photoshopped into reality — tall, dangerous, used to attention. People around the city seemed to stop when she was near. She’d been his first real love, the kind of early thing that breaks and burns and leaves a mark.
“Annabelle,” Irina said quietly when we met at a group dinner. “I’ve heard a little about you.”
“You have?” My mouth made the word sound small.
“We grew up with Wesley,” she said. “He’s always been a hard person to forget.”
Later that week, at a restaurant crowded with the wrong kind of people — people who drink to be seen — Irina arrived late. She walked into the room like she’d drilled every person there with a camera that never blinked. My cheeks burned when she sat at the table. People expected fireworks.
But Wesley was calm. He poured me water and told me a story about a town in his grandmother’s memory, and his calmness felt like a shield I wanted to live behind.
Irina left that night with dramatic words, and people whispered about whether old flames would burn again. I tried to ignore my chest tightening the way a dog tucks its tail when thunder comes.
Then the call came. Wesley’s phone buzzed with a message: “If you keep ignoring me, I’ll bother Annabelle.”
I nearly threw my phone. I told myself I was not a jealous person, and yet there it was: a cold spike, a small panic, the way the city can feel suddenly hollow. Wesley looked at his watch, and I saw something move in his face like a fisherman reeling in a fish.
“Go,” he said, and I went.
Irina had come back. She looked at him with a lambent hunger that felt as if it could swallow him whole. The bar was loud, and Irina’s laugh cut through it like a blade.
“Wesley, you look…different,” she said. She tried to place a hand on his shoulder.
He slipped out of reach and across the room. “I’m not here to talk to you,” he told her quietly.
“You don’t have to be,” she said.
I sat stilled by his decision to protect me then, small and absurd and fierce. When the rest spilled into the night, the truth was uglier than my fear. Irina tried to pull him away in the hallway. She kissed him like she was claiming a debt. He pushed back.
“Get away,” he said.
Her face changed. Pride flared into something sharp. She left a call on his phone that night. It came as a threat and as a dare.
“Talk to me,” I said later that week. I found him in his study, working on papers with the patient, distracted focus of someone used to managing people.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me you choose me.”
He set down his pen and it looked like a small ceremony. “I chose you the night you pretended to be my girlfriend at that restaurant,” he said. “I chose you because you were brave enough to keep the joke going. I chose you because you made me feel like life could be ordinary and still be good.”
It felt like he had offered me the moon and also told me I could keep living on the earth below.
Irina did not stop. She came back to the city. She started showing up at events that Wesley’s world touched: art openings, charity dinners, conferences. People saw them together and started to whisper. An old wound — years of first love — had been opened and scrubbed by time. She said she’d come back for him. She said she would fight.
I went to see her. “What do you want?” I asked in a café that smelled like toast and lemon.
“I want what I always wanted,” she said plainly. “I want him.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because we grew up together,” she said. “We loved each other. That matters.”
“So does his choice now.”
Her eyes flashed as if a match had been lit. “I will win,” she said. “You’re young, Annabelle. You will be tired.”
I went home shaking. I told Wesley. He made coffee and sat with his hands around the cup like he was keeping something small warm.
“If she tries anything,” he said, “tell me.”
One night a message came to me: “Meet me. Hotel Vanche, Room 2208, nine.” I knew the sender was Irina. The number was hers.
“Don’t go,” Wesley said when I told him.
“Why not?” I asked. “I should hear her out.”
“If she wants you, she wants to hurt me.” The words were soft and fierce both. I could see that he was afraid of a loss that used to be a wound in his chest.
I still went. The hotel smelled of flowers and fake wood polish. The city spread out below like tiny lights. She looked at me the way stars look cold and distant.
“You’re in my way,” she said simply.
“In whose way?” I asked.
“In everything,” she said. She reached for me. “I can give him the life you can’t.”
“You don’t get to buy people,” I said. “If he loves you, fine. If he doesn’t, you don’t get to make him.”
She laughed. “You’re naive.”
That night, she tried to show me images — old photos, messages. She tried to paint me as the interloper. She offered me money. She asked me to leave quietly, to be kind, to break so she could have her story back.
I left with my head high and a burning in my throat that was half shame, half anger. On the way back, I called Wesley. “She tried to buy me,” I said.
“Come home,” he said. “I’ll be waiting.”
At home, we did not speak of the hotel again at first. We made dinner. We fought a little about small things. We lazed in that same comfortable way. But life is a thin glass; everything cracks eventually.
One evening we went to a party thrown by a man named Li X, a friend of Wesley’s. Irina was there. She arrived like a set piece. She moved through the room with a grace that had been trained to make people listen.
“You look tired,” she said to me when we found ourselves face to face. Her voice was sugar over steel.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You don’t understand him,” she said. “Do you know all of him? Do you know what he’s done? The life you're stepping into?”
“What makes you think I don’t?” I replied.
She laughed loudly. “No one here is as naive as you,” she said, loud enough for people to look. “You use his money and his name. You are fabric. If you think this is about love, you are wrong.”
A few jokes, a few eyes. Then the scene started: her words like little hammers. She wanted me to look small. I felt something in my chest — outrage, and a fierce need to be heard.
“You will stop,” I said quietly, too quietly at first.
“Stop?” she repeated. “Why would I stop? This is my home.”
“That is his choice,” I said. “And he chose me.”
“Did he?” Her face changed. For a second she looked like someone remembering pain. “Did he choose you when he left me? When he stayed because I begged him not to?”
I should have left then. But I did not. I told her the truth: “He is here with me. He is with me because he wants to be. He doesn’t owe you any more of his life.”
She snapped. The words flew sharp. She lunged at me, shoved me — a quick hand, a shove. The world turned into porcelain and light and sound. Someone screamed. A vase dropped and shattered on the floor, white ceramic like bone.
“You pushed her!” people shouted. Eyes turned into a knife of suspicion.
“I didn’t,” I said. “I was right here. I didn’t touch her.”
“I saw you,” someone said. “The cameras will show.”
“What do you mean?” Wesley pushed to the forefront. His voice cut through the crowd like a blade.
“Check the cameras,” Irina said, triumphant. “She’s a liar.”
Wesley’s face went hard and cold. He reached for my hand like I was a thing he needed to protect. He spoke like a man used to being obeyed, but the words were for everyone. “Stop,” he said to the room. “If anyone lied tonight, I will find out.”
They checked. The footage showed what had happened in slow, honest frames. It showed Irina stepping back, losing her balance, the vase tipping as a result of her own step. It showed me reach out to catch its fall. It showed me stepping back in surprise, not aggression.
There was a silence like a held breath. Then faces shuffled. A few whispered apologies. Irina’s smile faltered and then dropped like a curtain.
“Why would you do that?” she screamed at me, raw now.
“Because I’m real,” I said. “Because this is my life now. Because I love him.”
“What about me?” she asked. “What happens to me?”
“You make your choice,” Wesley said. “You can leave us alone, or you can take the consequences. But not here, not in my house, not in front of my family.”
The crowd reacted. People started nodding against the tide. Someone applauded, soft at first, then louder. Irina stood there, a profile like a carved statue, stunned.
The next day the city had talk. People called her what they wanted. She lost invitations. A client she’d been pitching left the same night. The press smelled a story, and the story people liked was one of scandal and revenge and the world’s appetite for old flames. She tried to win people back with tears and with calls and with promises. Wesley answered none of them.
That night he turned to me on the sofa and said, quietly and both oddly relieved and afraid, “You did good.”
“What did I do?” I asked.
“You stood there,” he said. “You did not flinch. You didn’t pretend to be someone else.”
There are easier ways to win a man like Wesley, people told me afterwards. Walk circles and let the world see you, be soft and small. But I had never believed in easy things. I believed in honesty at the right time. That’s how the world shifted.
Irina left the city two weeks later. She called me once, spoke like a woman who had lost something and not yet found a map to reclaim it.
“I was wrong about you,” she said. “You are strong.”
“Goodbye,” I said.
After that, the city’s gossip moved on to a new headline. Wesley closed a big deal and left the office for two weeks to spend time with family and with me. He was careful in a new way that made me want to laugh. He folded laundry and read the same book out loud to me and tried, badly, to learn to cook. We fought over small things like who left the window open and who had taken the last piece of bread. We made up over too much coffee and too many kisses.
“I told you not to like me,” he said once, back to that old phrase.
“You told me not to like you,” I replied. “I like you anyway.”
“That makes me selfish,” he said.
“You knew that when you kissed me first,” I said.
We had storms ahead — there are always storms when family histories and ex-lovers and power intersect. Irina returned in whispers and then in a more public way, but the city had seen us standing together, had seen the footage, had seen him refuse to move when she tried. What she couldn’t buy was the way his mother had spoken for me in the jewelry store that afternoon. What she couldn’t buy was the way his grandmother had laughed when I sat with hers on the porch and learned how to make jam.
“What did my grandfather call the tree we planted?” I asked Wesley once, as if asking a test question.
“The tree?” He stroked my hair. “He said it would grow as we did.”
“Grow,” I said. “I want to grow.”
“You will,” he said. “With me.”
He started to do small, dangerous things like letting me make important choices. He let me accept a little apartment near the library — the city’s kindness — while he let me still sleep at his place more than anywhere else. He let me keep my part-time work at the university. He let me breathe.
Irina’s return was complicated — a campaign, an offer, an attempt. She made one last attempt to unsettle him on a night at a fundraiser where I stood beside him and watched her approach. She tried to paint me as the wrong choice, to show me as a stepping stone for his boredom. But this time, people watched the way he stood up for me. He spoke honestly, with a voice that did not try to be polished, and he told a small crowd the facts: who he had been, who he’d chosen, and why.
“You don’t have to be angry at her,” he told me later, taking my hands in his. “Only at the things that hurt you.”
“I’m not angry,” I said.
He laughed. “You are sometimes,” he said. “It’s one of the million things I like about you.”
Petty things still happened. Friends made jokes. Kori called me and said, “You know you’ve won when you can match her on a public stage and not lose your hair over it.”
A year later we stood in front of his grandmother and his parents and a small, private circle. The city had weathered us. Irina had moved on to a different life. People told us we were foolish. People told us we were perfect. There were articles; there were birthdays and jam and cold winter nights when the house smelled like toast and wax and cinnamon.
When he finally asked me to marry him, he did not do it in a grand public way. He brought me to the little garden he and his grandfather had built. We sat on the bench, the sun was low, and he took my hand. “Annabelle,” he said, and for the first time I heard the little way he said my name as if it were a promise. “Would you marry me? Would you be mine, messy and loud and real?”
“I will,” I said.
He nodded like he had made a plan and then decided to follow it because we both wanted it. He slid a simple ring on my finger. It fit like the last piece of a puzzle.
But the end of this story is not a neat tidy line. It is the small, imperfect thing that follows meetings, arguments, nights of fear and mornings of comfort. It is the dish we fight over and later laugh about. It is the jam we jar together and the trees we plant.
Months later, when the city’s leaves turned golden, I found an old postcard from the friend in England who had once written me stupid, loving notes. It said: “You always did deserve a life that felt like a secret kept inside a small, bright box.”
I am not that small box. I am messy. I am loud. I eat too many carrots. I sometimes make him late. But he knows how to make my tea when I can’t. He brings me roses when the world is grey. He tells me I am enough.
Once, late, when we had argued about something silly — tea versus coffee — I walked downstairs and found him waiting with the Samoyed, who had fallen asleep with a paw on one of my slippers. Wesley looked up and, with a simple, almost shy expression, said, “I told you not to like me.”
“I like you anyway,” I said, smiling.
He bent and kissed me then, soft and a little fierce, and I felt the heft of the years and the smallness of all the things that had tried to break us.
Outside, the city glittered. Inside, we learned to be ordinary together.
“Stay,” he said later, in the dark, fingers laced.
“I will,” I whispered. “If you promise to keep me.”
“I promise,” he said.
We laughed then, a sound like a ribbon snapping. It was not perfect. It was ours. It was better.
The End
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