The Billionaire's Heart (The Silver Cross Club Book 4) (23 page)

“I don’t think you would,” I said. “Even if you could. I don’t think you would call him.”

“Well,” he said. He turned his head to look up at the ceiling, and sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”

Bad move. I didn’t want him getting all depressed about his father, who sounded like a major jerk anyway. We were supposed to be relaxing and enjoying ourselves. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have brought it up,” I said. “Look, I’m going to take a shower, and then maybe we can order some food.” I would have been happy to stay in and cook, but Elliott’s apartment was so small that he didn’t even have a proper kitchen, just a mini-fridge and hotplate in one corner. I didn’t know for sure why he was living in a shoebox, but I would have bet it had something to do with his father.

The shower had good water pressure, though, and so I was a happy camper. I scrubbed myself until my skin tingled, and used his conditioner on my hair. It smelled like almonds. The scent was so familiar to me now, but somehow it smelled even better on Elliott.

Thinking about it made me shiver. Food first, and then I was taking him back to bed.

Casual sex agreed with me, I decided. At least in this context. It wasn’t like I was sleeping with some random stranger: I
knew
Elliott, and I felt safe with him. Well, less safe when he gave me that heavy-lidded look like he wanted to devour me whole. But mostly safe. It was nice to be able to relax and have a good time without worrying about whether I’d shaved my armpits well enough or if he would call me in the morning. I liked it. I liked doing this with him. I wanted to keep doing it.

I got out of the shower and went back into the main room, using Elliott’s towel to gently squeeze the water out of my braids. “I used your soap,” I said. “Sorry.”

He rolled toward me and gave me a stern look. “That soap cost me a lot of money,” he said. “It’s handmade by French virgins out of the milk of sheep born under the light of the full moon.”

I laughed at him. “Oh, stop. You bought it at the bodega. It’s Irish Spring.”

He shrugged, totally unashamed. “Busted. You said you wanted food?”

“I’m starving,” I said. “Sex makes me hungry. Can we order something? What’s good around here? Maybe we should go out, so we don’t just spend the entire day inside your tiny apartment.”

“I like my tiny apartment,” he said. “It’s cheap. I like saving money.”

“Are all rich people as stingy as you are?” I asked. “You’re the cheapest billionaire I know.”

“I’m not a billionaire,” he said.

“You basically are,” I said. “You would be if you went to work for your father.”

“Exactly,” he said, and pressed his lips together. “Let’s just order some food.”

Okay. I could take a hint. I sat on the edge of the bed and said, “What do you want?”

He scooted closer to me and pushed his face against my hip. “There’s a place down the street that does good sandwiches. And they deliver.”

“Okay,” I said, and tentatively stroked his hair. “I could do a grilled cheese with tomato soup. You think they have that on the menu?”

“Worth a shot,” he said.

I looked up the sandwich place on my phone and called in an order, one hand buried in his hair. “Half an hour,” I said, after I hung up.

“Great,” he said. “I’m hungry.” He kissed my hip. “Do you want me to oil your hair?”

I glanced down at him, a little surprised. “Really?”

“Sure,” he said. “It’s still wet, right? I’ve got some olive oil. I’ll give you a scalp massage.”

“Only an idiot would say no to an offer like that,” I said.

I sat on the floor, leaning back against the bed, while Elliott sat on the mattress behind me and rubbed olive oil into my roots. It felt incredible. Nobody had done this for me since I was still a kid and my mother sat me down once a week to oil my hair. Elliott scratched gently at my scalp and I felt my eyelids sinking closed. If I were a cat, I would have purred.

“Did you do this for your Kenyan girlfriend?” I asked.

“Haiba,” he said. “Yes.”

“Are you still in touch with her?” I asked.

“Some,” he said. “Sometimes. We email a little. Her husband doesn’t approve of her contacting me, but she’s never cared too much about what men think.”

“A woman after my own heart,” I said. “Tell her thank you from me. She did all the hard work. It’s nice that you’re pre-trained. My fiancé was white, and he didn’t know about any of this stuff. One time he told me that my hair looked like a Brillo pad.”

“That wasn’t very nice of him,” Elliott said, so carefully neutral that I knew he was diplomatically withholding judgment.

“He didn’t always think before he spoke,” I said. “But the good parts made up for it. You know how it is. Nobody’s perfect.”

“Didn’t you accuse me of having a fetish?” he asked. “It sounds like you have some sort of fetish for white men.”

I laughed. “I don’t! I even promised myself I was done fooling around with white boys. So you should count yourself lucky.”

“I have to wonder why you would decide something like that,” he said.

I shrugged. I didn’t want to get into it, not now. “It’s a long story.”

“Right,” he said. “It usually is.” He took his hands out of my braids and bent down to kiss my neck. “How does your hair feel now? Moisturized?”

“For some reason, that question strikes me as being really creepy,” I said.

“Moisturized,” he said, and kissed my cheek. “Moist. Mmm. Get back up here.”

“You’re gross,” I said, laughing, but I went, and then we didn’t say anything for a while until the doorbell rang and Elliott had to put on some pants to go get our sandwiches.

TWENTY-ONE

Elliott

I did my best to convince Sadie to stay the night, but she insisted she needed to go have dinner with her parents and then sleep in her own bed, “Without you groping me all night.”

“I’m not a sleep-groper,” I said. “I prefer to fondle women when they’re awake.”

“Yeah, that’s what you say now,” she said, “but I know I’m going to wake up at 3am with you humping my ass. I need my beauty sleep if I’m going to charm a bunch of investors tomorrow.”

She wouldn’t budge, so I admitted defeat and walked her to the elevator.

“Get plenty of sleep,” she said, and pushed up on her tiptoes to kiss me. “We’re going to kick ass tomorrow.”

“If you say so,” I said, taking the opportunity to squeeze her ass.

She swatted at me, winked, and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Alone in my apartment, I fired up my laptop and sorted through my email. International development mailing list digest, cheap plane tickets to Dar, update from Kris about her latest dating antics—and an email from my mother’s law firm.

Shit. Kris had told me to call them… weeks ago, now, when we met for dinner, the last time I had seen her in person. It had completely slipped my mind. I opened the email and read through it quickly. I didn’t recognize the name of the lawyer who had sent the email, but Kris had told me it was some new guy. He gave me his phone number and asked me to call at my convenience.

I glanced at the clock on my computer. It was only 4:30, and any lawyer worth his salt would still be in the office for another couple of hours.

I pulled out my phone.

He answered on the second ring. “Sekeley Lightner, this is Mark Amery.”

“Mark, this is Elliott Sloane,” I said. “I just received your email. I have to apologize for not getting in touch sooner. My sister told me that you wanted to speak with me, but I’m in the process of launching a new company, and it completely slipped my mind.”

“I understand,” he said. “Thank you for calling. Ordinarily I would do this in person, but we need to get the paperwork signed and filed soon, or the trust is going to default to—”

“Wait,” I said. “I’m sorry.
Trust
?”

Mark was silent for a few moments. Then he said, “I think you had better come by the office.”

I took a cab downtown. A mistake: it was rush hour, and traffic crawled maddeningly along. I stared out the window and tried to prepare myself for whatever the lawyer was about to tell me. If my mother had set up a trust that I didn’t know about, that
Kris
didn’t know about, and that Mark assumed I
did
know about—well, knowing my family, I expected drama, secret letters, hidden bank accounts, and a variety of intricate arrangements to keep my father in the dark.

Sekeley Lightner had its offices in a nondescript high-rise in the Financial District. Stepping out of the elevator, I experienced an immediate, crushing wave of painful reminiscence. After my mother’s death, and my belated return to New York, I had spent long, bitter hours in these offices, sorting out the details of my mother’s estate. She had made me executor, and I would rather have died myself than turned the duty over to my father. More than a decade ago, but change came slowly to old New York law firms, and all of the fixtures were the same, the furnishings, the wallpaper.

The receptionist—young, blond—smiled at me from behind her wide desk and said, “Can I help you?”

She was different, at least. Not someone I recognized. “I’m Elliott Sloane,” I said, “and I’m here to see Mark Amery.”

“Of course,” she said, perky, painfully young, and got up from the desk to lead me to Mark’s office.

Mark was younger than I expected, my age or even slightly younger. There was a time when all lawyers were impossibly old men, grey-haired and dignified, but I was older now, and starting to understand what my mother meant when she complained about her “boy dentist.” Soon I would be middle-aged and crotchety, and the world would be full of fresh-faced, adolescent doctors and lawyers, fetuses walking around in lab coats.

“I hope I’m not ruining your Friday night,” I said, after we shook hands and made our introductions.

“Not at all,” he said. “I’m low man on the totem pole, so I’ll be here until at least 10. The partners tell me that suffering builds character.”

A lawyer with a sense of humor. Wonders would never cease. I took the seat he gestured to, and he sat as well and pulled out a thick manila folder.

“I won’t waste time dancing around the issue,” he said. “Before she died, your mother established a trust, with you and your sisters as beneficiaries. The age of inheritance is set to when you turn thirty-five, which—”

“—is next month,” I said. “Right. That’s why you’ve been trying to get in touch with me.”

“Exactly,” Mark said. “Mr. Sloane, I’m not sure how much your mother told you about this trust—”

“Nothing,” I said. “I had no idea it existed until I spoke with you on the phone earlier today.”

He nodded, and opened the folder. He took a piece of paper from the top of the stack, glanced at it, and handed it to me.

I took it from him and glanced down at the page. The numbers made no sense to me at first, but my brain parsed them, mercilessly, and I looked up at Mark with the distinct sensation of having had the rug pulled out from under my feet. “This is millions of dollars,” I said, struggling to understand.

“Yes,” he said. “Two hundred million.”

“This isn’t possible,” I said. “My mother never worked a day in her life. How could she possibly—”

“It’s her own inheritance,” he said. “She never touched it. She married your father before she came into her own trust, and she decided to bequeath it to her children. She was a Vanderbilt, you know.”

“I know,” I said. My hands had started shaking. Two hundred million dollars, my God—

“It’s to be divided evenly among her surviving children,” he said. “Held in trust until each attains the age of thirty-five. Your sisters will receive their own portions on their thirty-fifth birthdays.”

I exhaled and looked down at the paper again. The numbers didn’t change. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m having some difficulty grasping the situation.”

“Understandable,” Mark said. “I’m sure it’s a lot to take in. If you aren’t ready to sign the paperwork this evening, we can certainly do it sometime next week instead.”

“There’s no need,” I said, numb, dumbfounded. “I’m ready now.”

I walked home afterward, four miles in the winter dusk. I wasn’t wearing the right shoes for it, and my feet ached by the time I got back to my apartment, but I needed the time and the cold breeze to clear my mind. Fifty million dollars in less than a month, and I would be free, free of my father forever, free to do whatever I wanted and create the changes I longed to see in the world.

And I hadn’t earned it, had done nothing to deserve it, and my father would never see it as a meaningful commentary on my worth as a human being.

I needed to call my sisters. Cassie would be furious. Julie would camp out at my doorstep until I gave her some money. Both of them would run to my father with the news as soon as they found out. Maybe I should call him first, which would at least deny him the pleasure of thinking he had caught me sneaking around.

I could imagine that conversation already. He would tell me that my mother’s weak female sensibilities had prompted her to establish the trust, that she knew I would never make anything of myself and wanted to provide for her pitiful, helpless offspring. A mother’s coddling, oppressive love. A son’s failure.