Billionaire Romance12 min read
Signed, Paid, and the Piano Between Us
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"I stubbed it out."
I pressed the cigarette into the ashtray like I could press the whole mess away.
"You did that fast," Cillian said from the doorway. He stood there in a towel, water beading at his hairline, looking nothing like the man who had left at dawn. He looked like trouble that could afford a suit.
"Fast is cheaper," I said. "And cleaner."
He watched the smoke curl. "You should stop."
"I stopped when you said 'stop' once," I said. "You don't get to order me like a butler."
He smiled a little, then frowned. "You always take the payment code out."
"Every time," I said. "Every time."
He did not touch the bill on my phone. He watched my fingers close the app like a judge watching evidence disappear.
"You can change," he said finally.
I laughed, not a warm laugh. "Change what? My bank balance? Your tastes?"
"You know what I mean." Cillian's voice was soft but it had weight. "You can stop this."
"I can stop starving, too," I said. "Which one do you want me to do?"
He did not answer. He never answered that honestly.
We had a paper we both signed. A weird kind of marriage, a strange kind of deal. It said we were husband and wife. It also said he paid for what I came for. He called it "protection." I called it rent and a wage. I called it a life, because it bought me food and kept my rent paid and my student loans waiting.
I am June Dunn. I play piano in a small restaurant to sell one more hour to some better life. I am count-me-in on the ledger of someone who says he will never love me but will keep paying.
"Change," he repeated. "Come with me. I can make it better."
"You can make it more expensive," I said. "I don't want 'better.' I want something that lasts."
Cillian's gaze flickered like a bad light. He stepped closer. "You could move into the penthouse."
"No," I said. "I have a life."
"You could have both." He smiled. "And a key."
He left a key by the door the same week he left a transfer. He is generous that way. "Here," he said. "$30,000. From now on, $10,000 per visit."
"I'll send you the receipt," I said, with a small, practiced gratitude.
"Don't make me regret it." His eyes told me he'd already partly regretted giving a number.
I coyly asked him for health tips instead of thanks. We pretended our arrangement was not poisonous.
That weekend, I was in the dorm, headphones on, rehearsing scales. The phone buzzed. Unknown number.
I picked it up because it buzzed too much. "What do you want?"
"June? Can you come to CQ? Byron's drunk."
My skin crawled. Byron Daniels—my ex—the man who loved attention more than anyone. He had been a lesson on how quickly a man could make himself worthless.
"Is he still breathing?" I asked.
There was a silence, then, "What?"
"Call me when he's dead," I said, and hung up.
They kept calling. I ignored them until his boys found me outside the dorm and called me "sister-in-law" like I was a joke.
"Don't call me that," I snapped. "We split six months ago. I'm not your family's furniture."
"She still has feelings," one of them said, like they had receipts for my heart.
I turned away. I had enough wounds.
Cillian called then. Calm in voice, the way a storm sounds right before smashing a tree. "I'm back," he said. "I'll send Luca. Stay put."
Luca Said was Cillian's assistant. A best kind of good man—efficient, discreet.
I changed into a red strap dress that looked like trouble. I wanted to be unseen and seen both. I wanted him to notice, to bite, to call it owning.
"June," Luca said when he picked me up. "Sir's mood is off today."
"You don't say," I said.
At the house he was waiting in the second floor, patient and unreadable. When I knocked, the door opened.
"You dressed for war," Cillian said, eyes sharp. "Or surrender."
"Depends who asks," I said, and then he took me, with the slow possessive hunger that made it hard to remember I was bargaining.
After, I paused for the transfer. Every time I ended a night, I logged payment as if it were a job. He sent me ten thousand—then thirty. "More profit than I thought," he said with a lazy, dangerous humor.
"You cheapen me, Cillian," I said, twisting his tie while he smirked. "I am a pianist."
"You're good at your work," he said. "Good at other things, too."
I spent my days playing at the Elm & Echo. The restaurant needed music; I needed money. People who could have changed everything once sat in the front row and called it charity.
One night, a man in glasses called Edric Goto found me after my set and offered a job for a private performance. He was sweet—he said his girlfriend missed live music. He left a card.
Cillian watched me accept the job at dinner. He did not like it. He left.
Later, in the elevator, I told him, "You don't own me."
He inhaled, slow. "You have never owned me."
"Then why does it bother you?" I asked.
He looked at me like a man who was afraid to admit a private tax: jealousy. He turned it into something else—possession.
"When you get paid by other men," he said, "I want to be the one who pays."
"You already are," I said. "You always will be."
He pressed me against the wall and told me we would finish this in a way that made sense only to him. He meant to show me who had the power to end things. I meant to keep my voice.
Afterward, I learned about my brother.
The police called. "June, it's the station." They had a photo—a family taking a picture near the creek seven years ago. A small figure in orange sitting by the water. The clothes were wrong for an accident, they said, but when they send you the image, they say the words anyway: likely drowned.
"No," I said. "He wouldn't go to the creek."
They asked me to look, and I did. The photo fit like a missing tooth. I called every name I had and prayed to nothing.
I told Cillian. He made his face blank and told me he would look into it. He sent men to the old town, he had people who could find files like they were shells in the sand. He called it "looking."
I had Byron still trying to buy me back with flowers and a promise. He offered roses, like money. I tossed them in a trash can and told him I didn't take charity.
Byron answered with threats about my past. He said my family came with price tags. I told him I could sell a piano for what he thought he owned me with.
He came at me in the market once, angry, bruised. Luca appeared and put him in the station. Byron left with a swollen lip and a bet lost: someone had given Cillian reason to remind him he was nothing.
Cillian watched my performance at the Elm & Echo that night. His face was distant. After, someone in the audience—one of the clinic's staff—called me to play for a reunion. When I accepted, his eyes darkened. When I refused, he brushed my cheek and told me I was mine to worry over.
"Why do you keep doing this?" I asked one night. "Why do you care? We signed a paper. You said you would never make me public."
"That paper keeps you safe inside the lines," he said. "But lines are for maps. I don't want maps."
"This is not love." I sounded like a child.
"Then what is it?" he asked, surprised. "Isn't it easier to let me do the heavy things?"
"You mean scare men away?" I said. "Threaten them? Arrest them?"
He kissed me, and the city went quiet.
Later, at a charity night, I came on to play and saw him in the first row with another woman—an arranged date for an arrangement. He watched me as if I were a melody he could not name. After, a scene: the date called me "auditioning for her position" and the polite man at the table told me to leave. I told him to leave. We fought so that the woman would go home and the man would be left embarrassed.
I did not win the fight with words. I paid with a pain in my throat and a bill for my time. I asked Edric for his money and he paid. I walked out rich and breathing.
"You're making a spectacle," Cillian said when he found me outside.
"It pays my rent," I said. "That's why."
He slid a card to me then. "You could be bigger," he said. "If you let me."
"Let you what?" I asked.
"Let me fight the world for you," he said. The words were not romantic. They were command.
I wanted to be free. I wanted it without buying my freedom with a body or with a name.
I moved out of the dorm into a small apartment because I could not stand the rumor-mill and the men who knocked. I said nothing to anyone. I packed slowly, with the quiet of someone who knows what will be lost. Brielle Mathieu came by with a cake and a hug.
"You're not alone," she said. "Call me."
"I will," I promised.
Cillian found me with two suitcases outside the building.
"You took the gift," I said. He had given me an apartment earlier, a place fully fixed up like a handlaid gift. I had said "It's a compensation" and he had said "I meant it."
"You need a place," he said. "I don't want them in your halls."
"Thank you," I said, laying my head on this man I had called my benefactor. "I'm not for sale, Cillian."
"You're not," he said. "You're mine."
A week passed. The police sent a file. The creek photo was better. I stared and let my hands tremble. They had matched a shoe print near the bank to a brand used by a local garage. Cillian's men took over. He told me he would not rest.
"I will find out what that night hid," he promised, and his voice had a hunger I could not feed.
I played at a private event one night—Edric's girlfriend came, moreover someone called Giuliana Bryant who acted like a rival. A woman made a scene. I shut it down by being direct and asking for my fee.
In the parking lot after, Byron found me. He hissed, "You were mine once."
"I was yours only when you wanted something," I answered. "Now I'm mine."
He responded like any loose animal—threatening. Cillian appeared suddenly in a black car and the men around Byron left like the tide going out. Byron disappeared into the station for the time being. Cillian did not gloat. He took care.
"Why do you keep him around?" I asked later, hurt, as if the only measure of love I had ever seen was protection.
"Because he earned misfortune," Cillian said. "And because he makes me prove I can save you."
"That's not love," I said.
He pressed a kiss to my forehead. "Maybe it is the start."
The case opened different doors. The police found a witness who had been paid to leave. Byron had been part of an old group who had been at the creek the night my brother vanished. They had been young and stupid and cruel.
"Are you going to tell them?" I asked when a file landed on my lap. It contained a receipt from the night—a beer can labeled with a brand Byron's crew used.
Cillian folded it. "You want them to pay in court or to vanish?"
"Make them pay," I said. "I don't want blood. I want their truth in sunlight."
We arranged a meeting. The men who had been Byron's cronies came to a bar to laugh. I let Cillian handle it. He asked questions that were simple and sharp.
"You were at the creek seven years ago," he said. "Who hired you to distract witnesses?"
They named names, and one of the names was not Byron's. It was a man with a car who had sold a lie for money. The man had a mark everyone knew: a watch. Cillian's team showed him a photo. He broke.
"He admitted to moving the body," Cillian told me later. He used the law as a tool, not a fist. "They panicked. The real crime was a cover-up."
I wanted him to leave. I wanted to run to the sea and scream. Instead I sat at the piano and played for hours until the board blurred and my hands remembered only the keys.
At the trial, I sat with Brielle and Edric in the gallery. Byron sat in the other room, small and angry. Cillian took the stand in a way he never had to—he testified about a note found linked to the man who had paid to hide the truth.
"June," he said later, quietly in the courthouse hallway, "I wanted to shield you from this. But you deserve the truth."
I looked at him. "I did not ask you to be a detective."
"You never asked me for anything," he said, and finally he sounded tired. "You asked for money and shelter and a song. I kept wanting to give everything."
"Why?" I breathed.
He stepped closer. "Because you're not a bargain, June. You're not a job. You are the only person I want when the world is loud."
I had learned to be suspicious of compliments. I had learned to convert them into receipts that explained what their price had been. This one tasted different—less a note and more a chord.
They found evidence. The man who had ordered the cover-up paid back a debt in court and in humiliation. Byron's role was exposed—not as a murderer, but as a coward who had been paid to keep quiet. He lost his money and his pride and was gone.
At the post-trial gala, Cillian pulled me into the light.
"You belong on a stage," he announced suddenly, loud enough for people to turn. "June Dunn plays like the world will stop if she forgets."
Heads turned. I felt hot and exposed. Then he stepped closer. "I am tired of pretending the world cannot see what is right in front of it."
A gasp moved through the room. "We are married," he said.
It was not new. The paper we had signed had already said so. But he took a different step: he walked to the podium, and in front of everyone, in the flash of cameras, he said, "She is my wife. This is my woman. Anyone who touches her will do so with consequence."
People whispered. His voice left no room for debate. He'd been my secret protector; now he had made me public.
I had wanted privacy. Now I had his shield. I did not know if I wanted the armor.
After that, things changed. He paid my debts without drama. He did not watch my schedule anymore like a banker watching ledgers; he simply knew it. He would arrive at my gigs and stand in the back, eyes fixed on my hands. He would bring takeout and complex questions about my low-fat diet.
"Do you want me to stop paying after this?" he teased one night as he sat beside me on my new couch.
"No," I said. "But I want you to stop saying you own me."
He smirked. "I never wanted to own you. I wanted you to stay."
"Is that the same thing?"
"Not in my head," he said. "In my head, you're the only bill I never mind paying."
We learned to bargain less. He asked me to live in the penthouse sometimes, to pick my music for a charity event, to teach classes in a conservatory he sponsored. I taught. I played. I took small gifts of groceries and big ones of silence.
One night I found my garbage bag with papers in it—old letters from my mother I thought were lost. I cried and he sat with me, not talking.
"Are you happy?" he asked finally.
"Happy is messy," I said. "But less hungry."
He laughed like forgiveness.
Then a different test: Giuliana Bryant—who had once mocked me—came to my door with an apology over a stolen score. We fought once; she was no longer a problem.
Edric saved me in a small way: he secured a scholarship for music training. Brielle opened her shop again, with my help. The work of building a life looked like many small acts sewn into one larger seam.
One afternoon I found a small wooden boat on my piano. It was old, painted blue, and a ribbon tied to it had a note.
"For June. For the brother you lost. For the small boat he loved."
Cillian watched me lift it. "I could not find him again," he said softly. "But I could find his things. They belonged to someone. He belonged to someone."
"You did this," I said.
"I hired someone to search a market. They found the toy at a flea stall. It had his name on the bottom in a child handwriting. I paid for it. It is not much. But it's yours."
I pressed the boat to my chest and let the memory come. The boy had laughed at cotton candy and called me "sister" with a voice like sunshine. I had been twelve when he went missing. I had been told to move on. I refused to.
"Thank you," I whispered.
The ending came not as a ceremony but as a small private scene: Cillian and I, in my apartment, the piano in front of a window looking out at the city. He opened his hand; there was a small ring. It was a simple band, not the gaudy thing of money. He slid it onto my finger.
"Do you want this?" he asked.
"I never asked for a ring," I said.
"You never asked for me either," he said, smile soft. "I want both."
I thought of contracts and transfers, of $10,000 and $30,000, of nights and signatures, of a paper that made us legal but not loved. I thought of the policeman's photo and the creek and my brother's small shoes. I thought of Brigelle's cake and Edric's awkward confidence and Luca's steady hands.
"I said once we should be 'a one-night arrangement,'" I teased.
He wrapped my hands in his. "Make it forever."
"Is it that easy?" I asked.
"Nothing easy about love," he said, "but it's simpler than the deal."
I put my hand against his chest and felt the slow clock of a man who had learned to keep promises.
Outside, the city pressed its noise into the glass. Inside, I played a slow song—my brother's favorite lullaby—while Cillian listened.
"Play it again," he said.
I smiled. I played.
At the last note, he stood and kissed the hush that followed. Then he looked into my eyes and said one small thing that belonged only to us.
"You keep me human," he said.
I kept his hand. "You keep me safe," I answered.
We did not promise a movie ending. We promised a living one: public at times, private at others, messy and loud and paid for not by cash but by presence.
When the case closed fully, the men who had covered up were made to face what they had done. Byron vanished with nothing but a ledger shortened by guilt and court fees.
The photo of a small boy by the water hangs now in my kitchen, in a cheap frame I bought with money that had no strings. The wooden boat sits on the piano. Cillian sometimes polishes it, sometimes argues with me over coffee. We keep receipts. We keep each other.
"Are you still going to do the shows?" he asked one evening.
"Of course," I said. "Piano is what I love."
"Good," he murmured. "Because I love listening."
I struck a key. The note lingered.
"Stay," he said. "Stay out of danger. Stay at the concerts. Stay with me."
"I will," I said. "But if danger comes, I'll handle it and bill you."
He laughed, a real laugh this time. "Deal."
The house felt like a small, warm war. We traded suits for pajamas and threats for apologies. We learned to use one another's strengths and to forgive the past.
The last scene isn't grand. It's me at the piano at dawn with a small boat on the ledge and Cillian asleep on the sofa. The city blurs, and my fingers paint the air with a tune that is mine and his.
"Wake up," I whisper, and he stirs.
He opens his eyes, looks at me, and for once he says nothing complicated. He says, simply, "Play."
I do. The melody fills the room, and in the window the new day is a promise of small things done every day.
The End
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