I Married a Billionaire: The Prodigal Son (Contemporary Romance) (17 page)

“…launched his eventually multi-
billion
dollar company as a teenager, first headquartered in a dilapidated frat house with red cups scattered all over the lawn.” He stopped and smiled. “Fourteenth Ave house, are you out there?” There was a polite chorus of chuckles. “I’d like to point out that I’m pretty sure that’s just been added to this anecdote for color, the cups on the lawn were not necessarily integral to his success. Within just a few years, his sales were rising fast enough to make waves in the technology world. His competitors weren’t worried - at first. But now, the Plum 5 is probably in about half of the pockets in this room - and the Plum 4.5 in the other half.” He smiled. “Please join me in extending a warm welcome to Daniel Thorne, here to accept his honorary PhD.”

He came out, robes swishing behind him, smiling and shaking the president’s hand. He took the framed degree and tucked it under his arm before standing at the lectern.

His eyes scanned the room. When they settled on me, and flickered over to Walter beside me, I tried to read some change in his expression. But there was none that I could detect.

“For the record, I couldn’t have done it without the red cups,” he said.

The hall roared with laughter.

He had to raise his hand to get them to quiet down. “I was on the fence,” he said, loudly to be heard over the residual noise, and then everyone finally fell silent. “I was on the fence, about my topic tonight. I had something prepared, but in light of recent events, it seems silly to talk about that now.” He paused, let out a long breath, and looked up at the room.

“Just a few short weeks ago, my estranged father came back into my life. I know many of you are still likely living at home during the summer, and most of you probably still put up with your parents, in one way or another. But there are some of you out there, I’m sure, who can hardly be in the same room as their parents without a fight breaking out. Maybe, once you’ve graduated and gotten a job, you plan to cut down contact to one phone call every other holiday.” He let his eyes fix on the middle of the room. “Or less.”

Everyone was silent.

“You might think I’m planning to tell you that you should be grateful to have them in your lives,” he said. “No matter what. But I’m not going to tell you that. I’m just going to tell you about my father.”

He paused for a long moment.

“Growing up, I wanted the same things every little kid wanted. All the latest toys, the video game consoles - this was back when there were still cartridges, if you’ve ever run across one of those artifacts in your basement - but there wasn’t always enough money to go around. We never went without anything that we needed, and there were always presents on holidays. But I never had some of the things the other kids had.”

He smiled. “Until, one year, my dad managed to get me a Nintendo. I marveled at that thing, even though it was already a few years out of date. I remember staring at it, turning it over and over and trying to divine its secrets. At night, all I dreamed about was finding the secret to that device. I figured it had to make sense, somehow. If someone else could it invent it, I could invent something like it. It was just a matter of gluing the right parts together in the right order, and suddenly I’d be making…”

Looking around the room, his smile waned a little.

“But I didn’t know,” he said. “And right away, I realized that was a problem. If I was going to commit myself to something like this, at the ripe age of eight, I had to have a business plan.”

The room was taken with subdued laughter.

Besides me, I could almost feel Walter cringing. I knew this was a piece of his history that he wasn’t particularly proud of.

“So I started looking through business magazines and newspapers. I figured someone must have Nintendo’s sales numbers, somewhere. I was right. There were figures in there, vague ones, not really intended for the kind of in-depth projection I was doing.” He smiled. “I came up with some numbers that I liked quite a bit. Obviously, my next step was to find out what made this thing tick.

“I took it apart while my dad was out, even though I was pretty confident that he’d be impressed with my entrepreneurial skills once I explained my plan. On the other hand, I knew I’d been yelled at plenty of times for taking things apart that I wasn’t supposed to, so I decided to hedge my bets. Of course, the whole project took longer than I thought. I wasn’t allowed to use the camera anymore for semi-related reasons, so I tried to take as many detailed mental ‘snapshots’ as I could, before I put the thing back together. When he saw what I’d done, my dad didn’t give me a chance to explain at first. But even when I did, he thought it was ridiculous.

“The point here isn’t to make fun of my dad for not knowing I was going to be Daniel Thorne. No one could possibly predict that, least of all him. If you met a parent who was convinced that their child was going to be the next Steve Jobs, you’d find that person insufferable. My dad was never like that. He kept me grounded. He wanted me to set the kind of goals for myself that I could actually succeed in. He didn’t want to see me shoot for the stars, only to crash.

“What he wanted for me, more than anything, was to avoid some of the pain that he had experienced in his own life. All parents are like this, even if they don’t always express it very clearly. When they fight with you about a decision you’ve made, it’s because they love you. They love you more than they can bear.

“I’m going to become a father next year.” He gave them a moment to digest this, but the room stayed silent. “So naturally, I’ve given this issue some thought. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that I can do to make this easier on myself. Already, I find myself consumed with worry. I know once my daughter’s grown up and moved away, it will only get worse. I won’t be able to protect her anymore. And no matter how hard I try, I may not always be able to convince her that she’s about to make the wrong decision.

“And I’m grateful for that. Because I know that I, like my father, and his father before him, and every father in the world, am going to make mistakes. I am going to be wrong. From time to time, I will hurt her. She will sometimes look at me and think that I must be the cruelest person in the world. I don’t want any of this to happen, but I know I can’t stop it. I can look into my feature just as clearly as if I had a crystal ball

“But I don’t, of course. And that’s the problem, isn’t it? I don’t know what my daughter’s future is going to be, and she will be the only one who can make it happen. There’s no one else in the world who can choose for her. Not even her mother. Not even me.

“That will be the hardest thing I ever need to come to terms with. All I can hope is that if I go too far off track, my wife Maddy will let me know.”

He paused, and smiled again.

“You will make mistakes,” he said. “You will all make mistakes in your lives, and not all of them will be in something as important and raising a human being. But there will be times when you feel sure you’ve made a mistake that you can’t recover from. You’ll want to give up. You’ll be so overwhelmed with frustration and fear that you’ll forget something very important.

“If you want it enough, you can always get a second chance.”

I looked over to see Walter’s reaction, and to my complete and utter surprise, his eyes were brimming with tears.

Thirteen

I’d seen sitting with the phone in my hand for almost half an hour.

So far, I had managed to dial the number twice, and halfway a few times, before I set the phone back down and got up to pace anxiously. I knew I had a limited amount of time before the news of my pregnancy would got all the outlets, and if my parents found out from a tabloid before they heard it from me…well, that was pretty much as good as deciding I never wanted to talk to them again.

“…hello?” My mom always sounded suspicious when she answered the phone.

“Hi, mom,” I said. “It’s me.”

“…hello,” she said, as a statement this time instead of a question.

“Can you get dad on the phone?” I asked. “I want to tell you both something.”

“Oh my God,” I heard my mom say, more to herself than to me. I heard the phone lower slightly. “Oh my God! Howard! Howard, get over here!”

There was some confused rustling and talking in the background.

“Hello?” said my dad.

“Hi, dad,” I said. My throat was already starting to tighten. “Is Mom there too?”

“Yes, I’m still here,” said my mom, breathlessly.

I cleared my throat. “I’m pregnant.”

“OH MY GOD!” My mom was crying, instantly. And I realized I was crying too.

“Your mother,” said my dad, with a slight quiver in his voice, “your mother was afraid you wouldn’t tell us.”

“Of course I’d tell you,” I managed. I took a few deep breaths to compose myself. “Are you going to come visit?”

“Yes, honey, yes,” my mother sobbed. “Of course.”

“I mean, before the baby comes. You…you never got the chance to meet Daniel.”

“I know,” said my father. “We’ve got a lot of lost time to make up for.”

“Stop it, Howard,” my mom wept. “You’ve got me started again.”

***

The next day was Saturday, and I’d just put on my workout clothes and was seriously thinking about maybe someday eventually doing some kind of deliberate movement with my body. Daniel walked into the room, tossing something onto the dresser.

“I was thinking,” he said. “Maybe not the week after next, but the one after that. For your parents,” he clarified. “I’ve got that trade show next weekend, I’d rather not cut it so close.”

“Sure,” I said. “Just decide soon, I have to let them know so they can take the time off.”

“That’s my final answer,” he said, smiling. “What’s wrong?”

This was, most likely, directed at my slightly sad, slightly vacant expression. I hadn’t been able to hide it as much as I wanted to. Considering how Daniel and his father had managed to come to some sort of peace, and even Lindsey was headed up to meet with him soon, I couldn’t believe I was selfish enough to be thinking about my own sex life.

But ever since Daniel had uttered the words “
I don’t think I can do this now
,” after my panic attack, we hadn’t done anything remote like “
this
.” Sex, yes. But nothing like was I’d grown used to, with him. At the time I had assumed he meant not in this moment, not today. But then I realized he’d been scared off the whole thing for some indeterminate amount of time, and I never would have guessed how much I’d miss it.

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling tears gathering in my eyes. “I don’t know what’s wrong.”

I
did
, of course, but I didn’t know how to explain it.

He held me close, and I know he must be dying to ask me what the hell I was talking about. But he didn’t. He just sat there quietly, stroking my hair, while I searched and searched for the right words to explain how I felt.

“Things feel…different lately,” I said, finally. “Ever since…”

I lost the words again, and floundered quietly for a moment.

“I know it’s been…” Daniel looked nearly as anxious as I felt. “…since my dad came back, I know it’s been a bit…but I like to think I’m doing better than the last time we had a crisis.” He smiled, hesitantly. “Aren’t I?”

“It’s not that,” I said, shaking my head vigorously. “It’s not about your dad.”

“Then what is it?” He put his hands on my shoulders, holding me away so he could look into my eyes. “The baby?”

I nodded. “Yes. Well, no. When I…after I had my, you know, the panic attack. You said. You said you didn’t think you could ‘do this.’”

He’d started chewing on his lower lip, looking away from me now. Eyes on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t even like bringing it up. I know it’s not something we really…talk about. But I feel…it feels so strange, not having it. The way you are with me…it makes me feel safe. I don’t know why.” I’d never really explored this before; I didn’t talk about it with other people, and certainly not with him - not until the rope or the toys came out. “It’s not that I can’t handle myself. But I like not having to, all the time. I like going into a situation where I know I’m going to be told what to do and I don’t have to think. I don’t have to worry. I can just
be
. And
feel
. I know it sounds weird, but I…”

Daniel finally looked back up at me. “I’m sorry,” he said, softly. “I’m sorry that we don’t talk about it.”

I shrugged.

“I should be able to,” he said. “
We
should be able to. But it was always something…” He took a deep breath. “The first time I realized…well, you remember I told you about that woman. The tantric expert.”

I smiled. “I do remember her. I’d love to take her out to lunch sometime.”

Daniel winced.

“I’m kidding,” I said. “Probably. Anyway, what about her?”

“I knew I was in trouble. The first time she let me tie that rope around her wrists, and I felt the way it glided under my hands, and how her arms pulled behind her back, and how…how placid and happy she got. I knew that was what I wanted. I knew I was going to be addicted to it from then on. But it’s not the sort of thing you talk about. Or that’s what I thought, at any rate.

“Most of the women I met, they liked it when I would take control. They especially liked it, I think, because I was ‘quiet.’ So it came as a welcome surprise. I think they saw it as me coming out of my shell. But really I was always just playing another part.”

He reached out and tucked a lock of my hair behind my ear. “But I never want to risk hurting you,” he said. “I never want to risk pushing you too far. But it’s always felt like talking about it, actually trying to work something out and make sure we’re all in agreement about how far is too far - would somehow - I don’t know. Break the spell.”

I shook my head, smiling. “There’s no spell,” I said.

“You’re always saying how you…” he paused, searching for words. “…’can’t say no’ to me. And I think there’s a part of me that’s afraid that you might really mean that. More than you realize.”

“It’s not true,” I said. “I do this because I want to. I do it because I trust you not to push me too far.”