Billionaire Takes All (11 page)

Chapter 19

Richard

It was barely daybreak and Black Rocket Records was busier than I’d ever seen, but not with customers, although they were here too. Half the store bustled about urgently with renovations. Was this all for that band’s album release concert?

The executive side of me quickly calculated the cost of the manpower, the materials and the temporary loss of revenue due to the construction. This wasn’t something a small store could afford easily. A pit formed in my stomach.

If this concert didn’t go exactly as planned the Rocket might not be able to make its next bank payment. That’s when bad things started happening.

I spotted Gloria immediately. She was barking orders at half a dozen workers nearly twice her size. Gloria wore a black, ragged top t-shirt and ripped jeans. She was sweaty from coordinating, moving things and also taking care of customers that were brave enough to enter.

Where was Judy in all this?

I walked in, idly rubbing my silver cufflinks. The last few weeks had been an avalanche of mistakes, and I was tumbling hard down the wrong path.

I canceled my engagement with Madison the night of the dinner. She unsurprisingly threatened legal action for a breach of our agreement. Fortunately nothing was signed yet so she didn’t have a leg to stand on.

In a lot of ways, walking into that coffee shop felt like I was back at square one. I had just arrived to town with no attachments and was looking to accomplish a goal. That goal had changed though. It wasn’t about the inheritance anymore.

It was about Gloria.

This time I was going to do it all the right way.

“Look what the cat dragged in.” Gloria wiped the sweat from her eyes with the back of her arm. Her shock of black hair was both matted to the side of her face and also stuck up at random angles.

“Must’ve been a big cat,” I replied, with a half smirk. The joke went over like lead balloon. Gloria wasn’t pleased to see me.

“I don’t have time for games.” She swept a hand at the men working on the stage and rearranging the store to fit the coming crowd. “There’s still a lot of shit that needs to be done before Friday.”

I switched to plan B.

“I was going to bring flowers…” I held up the bottle of fine whiskey, I’d brought for her. It was a bottle of Glenlivet vintage nineteen-sixty-four. Only a hundred bottles were ever produced. It arrived from Ireland this morning. “But I figured this was more your speed.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Gloria said, unimpressed. She lifted a cardboard box full of extension cords and walked toward the stage. “Leave it behind the bar.”

I frowned, setting the liquor on the floor and snatched the box out of her arms. Gloria sighed, realizing that I wasn’t going to let her carry it while I was standing here, then pointed to the stage. One of the workers grabbed the box when I got close.

“Let me help.” I set the bottle of expensive whiskey on the shelf beneath the cash register. Walking back to her, I took off my jacket off and tossed it on a nearby chair. “Looks like you could use an extra hand.”

“I don’t want you to wreck your thousand dollar loafers,” she smiled bitterly and without humor. Her icy tone stopped me from rolling up my second sleeve.

“Where’s Judy?” I asked, keeping the conversation light. I was trying to create the right atmosphere for an apology. It didn’t matter how sorry I was, if she wasn’t ready to hear it, then it would just fall on deaf ears.

“Probably draining the rest of our fucking bank account to pay for all this,” Gloria muttered under her breath. Then in a louder voice she said, “I don’t know. Not here. Which is exactly where
you
should be.”

“Wait.” I gritted my teeth; this wasn’t how I anticipated this meeting would go. “About that letter—”

“That
letter
was awfully clear. You don’t want to be with me. I get it. I’m sure you and Business Barbie will make a great couple.” Gloria left to help a customer.

She poured the girl a coffee, glanced over at me, then asked to see the girl’s ID. Confused, the college girl riffled through her satchel and eventually produced a driver’s license. Gloria carefully read it, then gifted the girl a twenty-five-thousand dollar bottle of liquor. The girl thanked Gloria with a wide, but still confused smile, then went off to the self service station.

She turned back toward me with a raised eyebrow and a look that said,
you can’t buy my affection.

Gloria was serving a small line of customers when I walked over. I wondered how she was going to spite me, now that she was out of gifts to give away. In between pouring cups of coffee and taking payment from people, she asked me, “Can’t you see that I’m busy?”

“Extremely so.”

“So tell me, Richard…” She slapped the cup down on the glass counter, forcing the customer back a step to avid hot splashing liquid. Gloria turned to me with a mix of anger and hurt floating in her stormy gray eyes. “What is it you want from me?”

I finally understood how Lucas felt when he’d lost Molly.

I ran over this conversation in my head hundreds of times. I broke it down into sections, planned it, and practiced it. Realizing I wasn’t going to get the right atmosphere for it, I went for my apology anyways.

All my practiced lines suddenly felt canned and artificial. They all came from the heart, but they weren’t as passionate they needed to be. I let them dissolve in my mind and went with the only thing that actually felt honest.

“I’m sorry.”

Gloria’s stone expression softened at the sincerity in my words, but that only lasted for a moment. Her resolve hardened immediately.

“I don’t care,” she said. “I want you to go.”

It was hard for me to wrap my head around her words. They were so… final. There wasn’t room for negotiation or a better offer. Suddenly it hit me. For the first time in my life I’d committed myself to something and I
failed.
That pit in my stomach became a wide chasm.

I wasn’t going to win this one.

I wasn’t going to win
her.

Defeated, I walked out of Black Rocket Records. I hadn’t even bothered to grab my jacket. It didn’t matter.

“Sir?” James, my driver, asked seeing the disappointment the bore heavy lines on my face. He shook his head opening the car door for me then corrected himself, “Is everything all right,
Richard
?”

It was a surprise he remembered our earlier conversations about titles and names. I hadn’t requested his services since the day he first brought me here. I didn’t know what to tell him, so I didn’t tell him anything.

No, everything was not all right.

For a long time we simply idled in the car, parked by the side of the road. He’d asked me where I wanted to go, but again I couldn’t answer.

I wasn’t the kind of man that was ever racked by indecision or hesitation. Whether it was the right call or even occasionally the wrong call, I’d always been able to make it quickly and decisively.

“Take me to my jet,” I said at length. “I’m done with Caldwell Hope.”

“Would you like anything from your apartment packed for you?”

“No,” I said gravely. The full weight of my failure in all things was pushing me into the backseat. Soon I’d disappear into the folds of leather and never be seen again. “There’s nothing left for me here.”

I’d failed Gloria.

I’d failed my father.

I’d even found a way to fail Lucas.

So what?
Dad’s voice said in the back of my mind. I imagined his voice shrugging indifferently somehow.
It was only the last failure that mattered; the one that stopped you from trying again.

I dwelled on those words as we drove in silence. I thought about the whole cryptic conversation we had that first day as we overlooked the town. We talked for such a long time yet so much went unsaid.

My ringing phone jolted me from memory.

“Richard speaking,” I said, distractedly. Part of me was still sitting on the bench behind my father’s estate, listening to him talk.

“Hi Richard. This is Jackie, your father’s nurse. I’m afraid I have some terrible news—”

My heart sank like a stone in a pond.

“I’ll be right there,” I said. I knew what she was going to tell me, but I didn’t want her to say the awful, final words out loud.

Your father is dead.

Chapter 20

Lucas

“Lucas?” a familiar voice in the hallway of my apartment called out.

I laid on the floor near the couch, plucking at my guitar. Through the haze of dead beer, every once in a while I could smell Molly’s perfume. It racked me with pain to know what I’d lost. Every time one of those dark thoughts threatened to break me I played faster and yelled out the lyrics I had. The song still wasn’t done.

Why couldn’t I finish this fucking song?!

I’d been at it for days now and I couldn’t figure the damn thing out! Molly’s song needed another verse and an outro, but every time I wrote one it fucked with something else!

It was driving me crazy. I didn’t sleep… I didn’t eat… I just wrote and played. Writer’s block had crippled me after the dinner at my father’s place. I tried all week to explain, but Molly wouldn’t see me or return my calls.

After that I locked myself in this room and threw away the key.

That’s why I needed to finish her song. I knew—
knew—
if I could figure it out then everything between us would work out too. It had to…

“Lucas,” the man repeated. “Are you home?”

The poet in me poured over all the other meanings of that phrase.

“Luke’s not home.” Caldwell Hope wasn’t my home anymore. It’s just another place I used to live.

“Oh good, you’re here.” Richard stepped over the cardboard cases long since emptied of beer. He wore a fine charcoal suit and had a tray of food in his hands.

After what he did, he was the last person I wanted to see.

“No one invited you!” I threw the nearest thing I could reach. He didn’t even have to dodge; the empty beer bottle flew wildly off course and shattered against a wall nowhere near him.

“No one mopes quite like a rock star.” Richard cleared a space on the kitchen counter and put the food down.

“The fuck do you want, Dick?”

“I got a call from management. They were worried that you hadn’t been eating and some of the guests have been complaining about loud crashes in the middle of the night.”

“No one trashes a hotel room like a
rock star
either.” I raised my warm bottle of beer, then took a sip

“You’re already drinking?” Richard at least tried to mask his disapproval this time, although I could still hear it in his voice. “It’s eight in the morning.”

“Eight AM to you maybe.” I finished the bottle, laid it on its side, then rolled it away. Time didn’t matter to me. I had all the time in the world to fuck up now. “How’d you even get in?”

“I told you, management called me over. They probably thought you were dead and didn’t want to be the ones to stumble across your body.”

“Well. I’m alive.” I spread my arms out. “Now get the fuck out.”

Richard sighed, unbuttoning his jacket so he could sit in a chair easily. “I’m not here just for that.”

“Dad’s dead, isn’t he?” The thought sobered me up immediately.

Richard looked down and said nothing. That’s when I noticed his red rimmed eyes. He didn’t need to answer, I knew it was true.

“When?” Nausea bubbled up my throat.

“A few hours ago. He just never woke up.”

I didn’t know if it was from the beer or what, but I wasn’t as destroyed as I thought I’d be hearing the news. I’d spent so much time pushing thoughts of his health out of my head that I had never prepared myself for when it actually happened.

I felt numb.

“I’ll go get changed.” I got up and left the room. I even made it all the way to the bathroom before I vomited my guts out into the toilet. It was mostly booze and it smelled awful.

I took a long shower; waiting for the tears to come. They never did. The fact that he wasn’t my biological parent didn’t mean a damn thing to me. He was my
real
father and I loved him. That’s what bothered me the most.

Was I so broken that I couldn’t even cry for the death of a loved one?

Chapter 21

Lucas

The rest of the day was a painful circus of bullshit.

Richard and I got some food to help me sober up, then started making the arrangements.

I quickly discovered that I hated the whole system of taking care of a dead family member. Between the medical examiner, the funeral director, getting the death certificate and planning the wake, there was no time to grieve.

How did they expect anyone to do all this?

It was like trying to plan a birthday party after just getting stabbed in the heart. The whole thing was fucking insane!

At the end of the day—that felt like a month— Richard and I drank beers in Dad’s garage. He sat in the Aston Martin and I sat next to him in the nineteen-sixty-six Shelby Cobra. The tops were down in each car making it easy to talk to one another.

“What a fucking zoo,” Richard said, popping the top on a cold beer.

I did a double take at him. Richard never swore. That polished, professional exterior was finally breaking down enough that someone might mistake him for an actual person.

“Is what’s her face coming to the funeral?” We decided to keep the wake small and private. Family was flying in from all over the world. The rest of the week was going to be hell. Richard gave me a questioning look that needed clarification. “Uh... Madeline? You know the one who looked like the blonde Terminator robot from that movie.”

“Madi
son
.” Richard chuckled. “No, she’s long gone.”

“Good. I didn’t like her. You really aught to call the dark-haired girl though, you smiled more while you were with her.”

“So people tell me…” He blew out his air, shaking his head, then took another sip.  “That’s over too. You talk to Molly?”

“She won’t see me either.” I pressed the perspiring can into my forehead, letting the condensation cool my skin. It was a balmy, awful night and I still felt like shit from the week long bender. “We’re really bad at this whole falling in love thing.”

“Amen to that.” Richard tipped his beer slightly in a mock toast.

“I didn’t knock anyone up.” I turned to him and asked, “You?”

“Nope. I have no idea what’s going to happen to his inheritance now that he’s gone. My lawyers are looking over the will, but with the way he was acting these past few months it’s anyone’s guess.”

“If there’s a historical society of puns and bad jokes—” I said flippantly. “He probably donated it all to them.”

Richard laughed.

We reminisced about old funny memories involving our parents and even some of the hard ones. Most of it was positive though, and talking to Richard felt good. For the first time in a long time, we were completely on equal footing. We were two parentless children sharing our loss with one another.

It was a very brotherly thing to do.

Some time passed, and a familiar buzzed feeling washed over me. It helped me draw up the courage to ask something I never thought I would.

“Why did you hate me so much?”

“I never hated you, Lucas. If anything I was jealous.”

“Jealous?” I chuckled, getting caught by surprise. “What the fuck for? I’m not even biologically a King.”

“That never mattered to me. We were close long before either of us knew about your adoption. I was jealous at how easily you figured things out.”

“You’re crazy. You got way better grades than me.”

“That’s only because you didn’t try. Remember that catapult I made for science class?”

“The one that exploded?” I laughed, remembering the look on his teachers face when it hurled the rubber band ball in the opposite direction, then fell apart like in an old cartoon.

“Yup. Once we found all the pieces, you had that thing reassembled in no time. When we tried it again, it double the distance of any other catapult. I still have the first place ribbon somewhere.

“My point is had you just focused your natural talents you’d have been a force to be reckoned with. You could’ve done great things for the family company.”

“I always loved the family, even during the dark times when I had to go live with the Morenas. I just couldn’t do the grad school and college thing, man. My passion wasn’t in any of it. I wasn’t cut out for a life of business.”

“That’s why you didn’t accept the partnership offer at my company when you left the Morenas.” It slowly started to dawn on him. “Dad thought the deal had voided years earlier, so that day they came knocking took us all by surprise.”

“I should’ve handled that better, I’m sorry.” I said, finally seeing how poorly I handled the whole situation back in the day. I basically told him to go fuck himself. “I didn’t mean to blow you off like that. I was still all fucked up from the deal dad made to adopt me. I guess I wasn’t feeling much like a part of the family at the time.”

“You were the golden son; smart, ruthless and always in a rush. You followed perfectly in Dad’s footsteps; the quintessential high-powered corporate executive. You were exactly what our father wanted an ideal son to be.”

My voice cracked at several parts, the words I said raked the bottom of my very soul. I usually wore my emotions on my sleeve, but this shit was all buried down deep. In an already emotional day, this stuff was hard to get out.

“I was suddenly the one that didn’t fit in,” I finished, looking away. Facing any one after admitting all that was tough, let alone the man I hated for years. 

Richard got out of his car and sat next to me in the Shelby. He opened a beer and gave it to me.

“It didn’t matter who your real father was, as far as we were all concerned you were always one of us.” Richard let the words float in the air for a long while.

What did I say to that?

With the news of what happened to Dad and the shit show that was literally everything else in my life, I honestly didn’t know how to feel. After I found out I was adopted I put up these barriers between me and the rest of the family. It was like I was keeping them all at arms reach so I wouldn’t get hurt again.

“For as much of a pain in the ass as you are, you’re always going to be my little brother.” Richard put his arm around my shoulders and hugged me.

I never dreamed Richard and I would have a heart-to-heart, we were just so different… I felt so heavy yet so light at the same time. Even through the sadness surrounding my Dad’s death, a massive burden had been lifted. I had my brother back.

I didn’t have to keep it together any longer.

For several long minutes the tough, in-charge King brothers wept like only those in mourning can. We lowered our guards and let ourselves openly cope with not only the grief of loss, but also the realization that we were siblings that didn’t have to hate each other. 

We could choose a different path.

“We’ve been acting like real assholes, huh?” I was so tired of fucking things up and making things worse all the time. There had to be a way to fix things.

“It’s the King way after all. If you ignore your problems they’ll probably go away.”

“Or they’ll blow up in your fucking face,” I said. The sudden exhaustion of redlining these past few days hit me like a speeding train. I didn’t know how much bonding I had left in me before I just passed out. I wouldn’t leave just yet, this was all too important.

“I don’t know why dad put that clause in the inheritance, but he was right about one thing,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“He said we’d never be able to find better women in the world than the ones here.”

“There are two women out there we can’t live without.” Richard nodded thoughtfully, then his eyes narrowed dangerously. I knew right away that an idea just popped into his head when he started rubbing his cufflinks. It was a habit he never out grew. “I’ve got a new proposition for you.”

I looked at him sideways. “Another competition?”

That’s just what we needed…

“No,” he said, waving his beer back and forth, shunning the idea. “Look where that’s gotten us. I propose we work together and actually
help
each other.”

“What about the inheritance?” This didn’t seem like him at all. It was the opposite of pragmatism. Help the other get all the money?

“We don’t even know if there is an inheritance anymore.” He looked at me with hard blue eyes, that were so similar to my own it was almost like looking into a mirror. “Can you honestly tell me that money is more important to you than getting Molly back?”

There was any doubt in my mind. Molly was more important to me than all the money this world had to offer.

“What do you have in mind?”