At the Billionaire’s Wedding (45 page)

At eleven o’clock, he folded his paper and left the park, as always—as always, before he’d doctored a rash on her butt with designer vodka and told her he was falling in love with her.

He didn’t call or text.

By the following week, the leaves on the little tree in the center of Green Park had begun to turn gold. Piers was there again, still without his chamois shirt. She should never have admired his arms. He was doing this to torture her. For vengeance, probably. At eleven o’clock, again, he left without looking at her or speaking to her.

The temperature dropped abruptly and the next week the little tree was bare. So were Piers’s biceps, despite the cold. Cali averted her gaze. She was dying to apologize to him for thinking he’d cut the bookmobile’s funding. But she didn’t understand the game he was playing now and she’d already cried over him plenty.

At five minutes before eleven she took a book from the front seat of the van and put it in Roy’s hands.

“Would you please go over there and give this to him?” She pointed.

Roy’s bushy gray brows flew up under his fedora. “You want me to give this book to
Junior
?” he practically shouted.

No movement of the
New York Times
in Piers’s hands. But she didn’t need him to react. Whatever he felt about her, whatever game he was playing, this time she was doing what she knew was right.

She nodded.

Roy looked down at the book. “But this here’s a children’s book.” He frowned. “Men like Junior and me don’t read children’s books.”

“Well, maybe he won’t read it. But I’d still like you to give it to him.”

Roy harrumphed, then started across the park. Cali jumped into the van and drove away. She knew she’d done the right thing, but that didn’t mean she had the courage to see how he would take it.

The next week Piers was at the park when she arrived. He wore a faded Stanford sweatshirt and read the
Guardian Weekly
. On the bench beside him was the book she’d given Roy to give to him. Its broad, bright orange cover glowed in the autumn sunshine.

The start of the school year brought a teacher and her class from the nearby middle school to visit the bookmobile. Helping the daycare kids and a handful of other patrons, Cali kept busy. When eleven o’clock came and she looked around, Piers had already gone. He’d left the book she’d given him on the bench.

For the first time in the months that she’d been bringing the van to Green Park, she walked over to his bench and looked down.
Wild About Books
by Judy Sierra. A story about a mobile librarian’s successful venture into uncharted territory.

She picked it up and turned to the final page. Her note was still tucked there.

To the Anonymous Donor of the Bookmobile,

I’d forgotten to say it before: Thank you.

Very sincerely,

California Blake

He’d left the book and the note. She didn’t understand his game, but it clearly wasn’t the one she’d half-hoped, half-feared he was playing.

She withdrew her note from the crease. Its opposite side was scrawled with his handwriting:

Great book. A little beneath my reading level, though I appreciated the themes. Maybe something more sophisticated next time?

P.S. One month down. Five to go.

One month down? What was happening in six months?

Her heartbeats jolted.

He couldn’t… He
couldn’t
mean what he’d said, what she’d said, how in six months she would believe it wasn’t only infatuation or lust between them. He couldn’t possibly still be pursuing her, not from silently across the park once a week. That would be insane.

But everything about his pursuit of her from the start had been insane. And he liked to win. He was like no other man she’d ever met, and he made her smile and feel hot and tingly without even getting near her now.

She thought about the bookshelf in the library at Brampton, how she’d been so eager to touch an original edition of
Pride and Prejudice
that she’d gone against what she’d known—that it wouldn’t even be on that shelf—and pressed her nose up against the clear plastic. Then everything had come falling down on top of her.

She’d survived that catastrophe. She’d gotten bruised, but eventually she’d touched that precious volume. She’d held it in her hands. Maybe to get what she wanted she had to learn to not fear catastrophes. She had to trust that maybe touching something wonderful was worth the potential for hurt.

The next week, in a whisper, she told her friends at Green Park who he was.

“Well, I coulda told you that,” Roy scoffed. “I
said
he had the same name as his father, didn’t I?”

Again, Piers didn’t look at her or acknowledge her. Before she left the park she gave Roy another book for him, this time at his reading level:
The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck.

The note he left in it the following week read:

Intriguing. Moving. Grim. The wrong guys won, clearly. Now, give me a good comedy…

The next week she brought him Shakespeare’s
Much Ado About Nothing
, which he returned with no note, instead adding a DVD of Joss Whedon’s modern film version of it.

The next week, via Roy, she gave him Tolstoy’s tragic romance
Anna Karenina
. Piers’s reply the following week was succinct:

I know this is considered one of the greatest novels of all time. But just no. And no.

Cali rolled her eyes but she couldn’t stop smiling.

The next week, she sent Roy to him with Milton’s
Paradise Lost.
Seven days later, she sat on the bench in the spot Piers had just vacated and read his ten-page analysis on the themes of the idolatry of materialism and power, and the dangers of both hubris and the acquisition of forbidden knowledge. She was late for her second stop that day.

The next week, she put Paulo Coelho’s
The Alchemist
into Roy’s waiting hands. The Friday after that, on the piece of paper tucked into its final page, Piers had copied two lines from the book.

She smiled, and that was certainly an omen—the omen he had been awaiting, without even knowing he was, for all his life.

“Don’t give in to your fears,” said the alchemist, in a strangely gentle voice. “If you do, you won’t be able to talk to your heart.”

At home that night, she slipped the paper into her bed table drawer with the others.

A week later, she sent Roy to him with two nonfiction books: a book about burn victims and one about the children of alcoholics. The note Piers left on the bench with the books the following week made her eyes blur with tears.

I understand. And I’m not him.

The next week she handed Roy
Pride and Prejudice
. Not a library copy, but her own paperback with her name written on the title page in round teenager’s script. The copy she’d read a dozen times.

As Roy walked over to Piers and Cali quickly locked up the back of the van, Masala said, “Cali girl, this is gettin’ crazy.”

“Why don’t you just go over there and talk to the boy?” Maggie said.

Because he wasn’t a boy and she really was in love with him now. If he was playing with her, the heartbreak was going to be worse than anything she had imagined.

On Monday, Piers appeared in the
Star
in a photo spread of a big society party he’d attended over the weekend. On his arm in the pictures was a beautiful professional tennis player. The captions speculated, “Gorgeous Piers Prescott and his new leading lady. Could our favorite native son have finally found The One?” Aching, Cali clutched the paper in numb fingers and knew that he wouldn’t be at Green Park on Friday.

She went through the week distracted, her mind out of focus. But by Thursday she was already tired of that haze. Pining away didn’t work for her. On Friday morning she styled her hair, put on a pair of skinny jeans, and dabbed on lip gloss. If Piers didn’t want her, after work she’d go out somewhere fun and start looking for someone who did.

But when she reached the park and her sexy hat guy wasn’t there, the ache returned ferociously. She told herself this was okay, natural. But she’d thought they would at least part on friendly terms. She’d never imagined he would just disappear.

Masala and Maggie met her the moment she stepped onto the sidewalk.

“Girl, you look good.” Under canary yellow bangs, Masala’s brow was worried.

Maggie wrung her hands. “Where is that boy today?”

“You both saw the pictures in the
Star
, too, didn’t you?”

They nodded gravely, like they were at a funeral. Hers.

“How you doing, girl?” she thought Masala said, but demolition vehicles tearing down an abandoned crack house across the street drowned her out. A biplane engine overhead added to the clamor.

“Not great.”
Devastated.
But not forever. She would get over him. Someday. And when her heart stopped hurting she would look on this little interval as a learning experience. Or something. Eventually. Maybe by the time she was eighty. “What’s going on over there?”

“They’re building a garden.” Maggie tried to sound cheerful, but she darted another glance at Piers’s empty bench.

A sign wired to the new chain link fence around the lot proclaimed
COMMUNITY GARDEN - COMING
SOON, with an address two blocks away and a website where people could apply for a free plot. In smaller letters at the bottom was
P&P Enterprises, Inc
.

P&P Enterprises?

Cali shook her head. It was another sign, like the limo driver’s sign at the airport, but this time a mystical one rather than a literal one. A sign that she’d gone too far in giving him
Pride and Prejudice
. It had finally woken him up to reality.

“It wasn’t meant to be,” she said.

Masala squinted and cupped her hand over her ear. A guy with a jackhammer was going at it on the demolition lot. A wrecking ball swung from its long chain toward one of the three remaining walls of the ruined building and crashed into it.

“That is a wrecking ball,” Cali said dumbly.

“What’s that, dear?” Maggie shouted above the biplane’s engine.

“That building is like my love life. But I think that’s all right.”

“What’s all right, girl?”

“Ugly old things like fear and doubt must come down”—a tractor revved up its engine—”in order for beautiful new things to grow,” she shouted. “Like a garden.” She pointed to the sign.

“What, dear?” Maggie called over the biplane.

“Oh, hell.” Cali choked between a laugh and a sob. “I can’t even hear myself trying to talk myself into forgetting that I’m in love with a man who’s not in love with me after all.”

Roy came to her side. “I got somethin’ here for you,” he called over the noise. “From Junior.”

Cali’s stomach turned over. It must be a final good-bye note. Things with his new girlfriend must be serious. Probably he figured it’d be less uncomfortable for them both if he ended this in writing rather than in person.

As if in sympathy with the funereal tenor of the moment, the construction noises abruptly stopped. Overhead, the biplane engine seemed farther away. She braced herself for the good-bye and looked down.

It wasn’t a letter. It was a folded page of the
Wall Street Journal
. The heading across the top of the page read:

Crown Prince of Prescott Global Resigns

Holding her breath, she read.

Piers had left his family’s company, but he would continue on the board and still maintained a hefty share in the company that he’d held since his father went rogue and gave his shares to his son a decade earlier. The heir to the Prescott empire was, instead, turning his considerable business acumen to nonprofit urban renewal, starting with establishing community gardens and offering social services and job skills training in the neighborhoods where the people who needed them most lived. In six months, building would also begin on a second branch of Dr. John Vaughan Prescott’s free medical clinic. The new nonprofit organization under which this work would be accomplished was P&P Enterprises.

Beneath the article were two words in Piers’ handwriting:
Look up
.

“Look up?” she whispered. “Look up what?”

Roy tilted his head back. “Uh, Cali?” Maggie’s eyes went round. Masala’s lips split into a toothy smile.

Cali followed their attention upward. High above the Philadelphia skyline, on a backing of brilliant blue, a biplane was spelling out huge block letters in white smoke.

I CAN’T WAIT 6 MONTHS

I LOVE YOU, CALIFORNIA BLAKE

MARRY M

“The E’s coming, girl.”

But she didn’t need the E, because Piers was walking across the street toward her. She put the paper in Maggie’s hand and went to him.

“I know there’s a lot to say,” he said, coming close, his gaze scanning her face. “But it’s been three unbearably long months of seeing you without being able to touch you. So first you’ve got to say I can kiss you.”

“You can ki—”

Their mouths joined and fused together. He lifted her off her feet and held her tight.

“But—the pictures—in the
Star
—” she stuttered through kisses. “What about your girlfriend?”

“In my arms now, finally.” He kissed her like he’d never stop.

She tore her lips away. “In the
Philadelphia Star
. The party you went to last weekend. Your date?”

He cupped a hand around her face. “My sister’s roommate got dumped right before her big birthday bash. She’s like a little sister to me. I did it as a favor. One last favor before I checked out of that scene forever.” He kissed her again, fully and hard, reclaiming her entirely. “I have missed you unbelievably a lot.”

“You’ve seen me every week.” She smiled beneath his lips, running her hands down his back. “Just like before England.”

“It was torture then too. But then I didn’t know this flavor.” He covered her lips with his and her need for him filled every part of her body. Her fingertips brushed a paperback sticking out of the back pocket of his jeans. He surrounded her hand, pulled the book out, and pressed it into her palm.