Mr. Billionaire **ReVamped**

Chapter One

From the very first moment that I understood that there was a different kind of love—love different than the love given to me by my parents or my brother—I knew that I wanted it. From that day on, I was a hopeless romantic, pretending to marry my friend Simon in our parent's backyard while our other friends, Kayleen and Kate watched on. Our mothers often laughed at that and told Simon to take good care of me since he was my husband, after all. Simon's mother—a beautiful Korean woman who didn't look a day over her early twenties even though she was approaching her late thirties—laughing implored me to make sure he didn't get into anything stupid.

"Make sure he keeps a good head on his shoulders, Yvonne," she'd said to me, patting my head indulgently as she laughed.

All throughout my life, I knew what I wanted. A love to rival the ages and a family to come from that love. It was somewhere during my teen years that I realized the world didn't share my idealism. It seemed like I was the only person in the world who wanted a love that was unselfish. I didn't merely want to be loved, I wanted to love someone back. But in this world, I grew to realize that everyone wanted to be loved, but they made it seem like the idea of loving someone back was a complete chore. That became especially true during college when my boyfriend of two years dumped me for a woman who "measured up to his family's standards" better than I could.

Apparently, bringing home a woman who hadn't graduated from Harvard Law would hurt his father's campaign for mayor.

I remember that I cried a lot the night he broke up with me. It had been my first real breakup, after all. During that time, I couldn't imagine that I would ever fall in love with anyone ever again. All of my friends had done their very best to comfort me. Levi—one of my very best friends—had taken me to every party on campus and had introduced me to every straight guy he knew. He'd said the best way to get over my heartbreak was to get under someone else. Kayleen baked for me every day for a month; there was a saying among all of us that Kayleen's cookies could cure the most severe of heartbreaks. They didn't necessarily cure my heartbreak, but they did soften the blow. Her sister—and my best friend in the entire universe—Kate did the only thing she could, she stayed beside me. She stood at my side and she didn't leave. She had been the first person to make me laugh during that time. It felt like Kate was always going to be the only person who ever truly understood me. Her slender arms were always around my shoulders, comforting me and holding me up.

And Simon, well, he and I had gotten close during that time. Even though we were virtually penniless college students, he took me out to my favorite restaurant every week to help improve my mood. He didn't do anything that anyone would consider particularly special, he just listened. He let me cry on his shoulder, he let me complain about how bad the sex had been, anyway. He told me that my ex had been stupid to dump me over something so small. If you loved someone, why should something like someone else's political career matter? Shouldn't you fight for that person? Somewhere during that time—during crying over a guy who I knew was never going to love me again—I started to see Simon through new eyes.

He was hot.

I'd never noticed it before because he was my friend. We had been friends since we were both fresh out of the womb. Before, the most I had noticed was that he must have inherited his skin from his mother because it was unblemished. I'd noticed that he got his hair—blond and lustrous—from his father. But after that incident, after he was there for me, I found myself noticing other things. He had a nice jawline and when he smiled, his dimples really drew attention, giving him a dash of cuteness. He had K-Pop star good looks, I realized. He had taken all the good parts of his Korean mother and his All-American boy father and combined them. His body wasn't underwear model sexy, but it had a charm of its own. He was slender and sinewy with hard pecks and defined arms and a six-pack that was just barely coming in since he had started seriously working out a few months prior.