The Billionaire's Allure (The Silver Cross Club Book 5) (5 page)

“No,” Jack mumbled around the croissant he had just shoved into his mouth.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full, dear,” my mother said.

“You asked me a question,” he said, still chewing. “It would be rude not to respond.”

My father’s newspaper emitted a noise that sounded suspiciously like laughter.

“Jonathan Archibald Douglass Langdon,” my mother began, and I rolled my eyes and tugged the mimosa pitcher a little closer. My parents really should have stopped after me. Three children was two too many. I needed to think of some way to convince my mother that Saturday mornings were an important time for me to do anything other than this. Maybe I could invent a satellite office in Shanghai that desperately needed my attention. The time zones didn’t make any sense, but she wouldn’t bother to do the math. My father would, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t sell me down the river.

When the meal was finally over, Jack and Rosemary both left for their rooms and the delights of social media, or whatever it was today’s youth did in their spare time. I sighed and leaned back in my chair, and my mother gave me a sympathetic smile.

“They’re no worse than you were at that age,” she said. “Better, in fact. Of all my children, you were the one I was most convinced would send me to an early grave.”

I winced. Was there some sort of seminar for teaching mothers how to inflict guilt trips? “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”

“Never,” she said serenely. “It was the worst six months of my life.”

With a great crinkling of newsprint, my father folded his paper and set it down on the table. “Not at breakfast, Marjorie,” he said. “Max is sorry enough. We all did stupid things as teenagers. Your mother told me a story once about you, your high school boyfriend, and his father’s Cadillac—”

“She never,” my mother said, blushing. “Edward! Tell me you’re just—”

“Oh, she did,” my father said. “I know everything. Every last embarrassing detail.”

“I get the feeling I shouldn’t be present for the rest of this conversation,” I said. My mother only blushed like that about things that were somehow related to sex, and I
really
did not want to know about my mother’s teenaged sexcapades. Talk about mentally scarring.

“Silly child,” my mother said, still shooting a warning look in my father’s direction. “Help me clear the table, please, sweetheart.”

I rose from the table and helped her carry plates and serving platters back into the kitchen. The housekeeper had the weekends off, and my mother began loading the dishwasher, one plate at a time, in the particular order she insisted was the only way to make sure the dishes actually got cleaned. I handed her plates and coffee cups. After a few minutes of working in companionable silence, she said, “You seem distracted, dear.”

I thought for a moment before I replied. “I suppose I am,” I said. “I recently… Well. This is a sore subject for you, so maybe we shouldn’t talk about it.”

“This has to do with your adolescent misadventures?” she asked. “It
is
a sore subject, but if you need to unburden yourself about something, I’m always happy to listen.”

“Poor Mother,” I said. “We’ve all been a trial to you over the years, haven’t we? We should take you on a nice cruise to make up for it.”

“What a lovely idea,” she said. “I’ll look forward to it. Now, tell me what’s on your mind.”

“There was a girl I became friends with,” I said. “When I was… away. After I came home, we lost touch. I found her again recently, but she doesn’t want to talk to me.” There: that was the most watered-down version of events I could possibly come up with. I didn’t want to lie to my mother, but I also didn’t want to spill the entire complicated truth.

“Hmm,” my mother said. We had never talked much about what I did during the six months I was away, and I could see her processing this new information, fitting it in with whatever else she had pieced together. “What’s her name?”

I hesitated again. It was a common enough name, and I couldn’t see the harm in telling. “Beth,” I said. “Elizabeth.”

“She must be very dear to you,” my mother said.

I felt an unexpected lump in my throat, and fought hard against the swell of emotion. “She was,” I said. “She still is.”

“Why doesn’t she want to speak with you?” my mother asked.

“She said I abandoned her,” I said. “She called me the Ghost of Christmas Past.” I smiled wryly. “It didn’t make a whole lot of sense. She was pretty angry.”

“She sounds like she has a lot of personality,” my mother said.

I had to laugh at her polite euphemism. My mother was a master of the subtle put-down. She had been setting upstart Junior Leaguers in their places since before I was born. “That’s one way to put it,” I said. “Anyway, it’s nothing to worry about. A minor distraction. Everything with work is still going fine. I’m eating my vegetables and staying out of trouble.”

“I know you are,” my mother said. “But sometimes a young man needs a bit of trouble. Let this girl shake you up a bit.”

I smiled at her. “I intend to.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Beth

He was, of course, at work again on Saturday evening.

“I don’t believe this,” I said, holding my drink tray, staring across the crowded room at Max’s dark head, bent over his laptop.

“Believe it,” Trina said. “I don’t think he’s giving up. He’s, like, determined.”

“
Fuck
,” I said succinctly, and Trina gave me a startled glance. I didn’t swear much. The waitresses probably thought I was losing my mind. I certainly felt like I was. Maybe Max was a hallucination. A mirage. He couldn’t possibly be so pig-headed as to show up
again
, even after I swore at him on the sidewalk and told him to leave me alone for good.

And yet. There he was.

I reminded myself that I did, actually, want to know what he had to say to me, despite my unfortunate temper tantrum the night before.

“I’m going on break,” I told Trina. “Watch my tables for me, would you?”

“Sure thing, boss,” she said, snapping me a crisp salute.

I walked through the narrow hallway leading into the back of the club, through the locker room where the kitchen staff kept their things, and out the back door into the alley that ran behind the club. A few of the busboys were out there, smoking and talking to each other in Spanish, and they all twitched guiltily when I came through the door. “You need us?” one of them asked.

I shook my head. “I’m just getting some air.”

I walked to the end of the alley and stood there in the dark, bracketed between two buildings, watching the pedestrians walking along 9th Avenue, the energetic bustle of a Saturday night in the Meatpacking District. Anyone could have seen me standing there, but nobody glanced in my direction, and with my black coat and clothing, I felt camouflaged. Safe.

I stood there for what seemed like a very long time, thinking about Max, about the past, about how much I had loved him once upon a time. Not so long ago, really. Both the blink of an eye and an eternal rotation of the universe.

Finally, a noise in the alleyway behind me returned me to the present. The busboys were heading back inside. One of them paused and held the door for me, and I shook off my reverie and followed them inside. It was time to get back to work.

For all that I felt like I had stood in the alleyway for hours, I had only been outside for a few minutes, and Max was right where I had left him, frowning intently at his computer. He had ditched the suit and was instead wearing a cream-colored cable-knit sweater that made him look like an Irish fisherman. The club had a dress code, but I would have been shocked if he cared.

Okay. Enough was enough. If I didn’t do something about this, he would keep showing up at the club every night until one of us died.

I marched up to his table and said, “How do I get you to stop coming here?”

He looked up at me with a slow smile that set my heart beating a little faster, damn him. “Have dinner with me tomorrow.”

“Fine,” I said. I was scheduled to work, but I could take the night off.

He blinked, looking a little taken aback. Good, I thought. Join the club. “Fine?”

“Sure,” I said. “One dinner, and then I’m done with you forever? Sounds like a bargain to me.”

His eyes narrowed. I knew that look, and it didn’t bode well for my peace of mind. “One dinner,” he said. “And then we’ll see.”

One meal. One night. It was nothing.

Famous last words.

* * *

Max and I first met on the sidewalk outside of a youth shelter in Midtown. I was sitting on a low retaining wall, smoking a cigarette that another kid had given me—more out of a desire to seem cool than any interest in the cigarette itself. Max strolled up to me, tall, lanky, hair flopping in his face, and asked me if I had a light.

That was how we met.

“I don’t smoke,” I said, despite the cigarette in my hand, giving him a slow once-over, taking his measure. His clothes were grubby, but well-made. Wealthy runaway? Shoplifter? “And neither should you. It’s bad for you.”

He grinned and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I don’t smoke, either,” he said. “I just wanted an excuse to talk to you.”

I blushed. I didn’t know how to talk to boys. They mystified me. Whenever one seemed like he might be flirting with me, I got nervous and flustered, afraid that it was just a joke, and that if I acted like I was interested, he would laugh and mock me.

“I’m Max,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Beth,” I said.

“Beth,” he repeated. “Elizabeth. I like it. That’s a lot of name for a small girl, though. I think I’m going to call you Bee.”

“You don’t just get to change my name because you feel like it,” I said, although I was secretly pleased. I liked the idea of being given a new name, re-christened into this life I had chosen for myself.

“I can do whatever I want,” Max said, outrageously cocky, still grinning, and I knew that if I didn’t walk away from him right then, there would be no going back.

I didn’t walk away.

“You’re staying in the shelter?” I asked.

He nodded. “I’ve been here a couple of weeks. I ran away from my foster home because I got tired of my foster dad using me as his punching bag. What about you?”

His forthrightness surprised me. Most street kids were reluctant to talk about their pasts. Everyone had their own sorrows, and it was considered tacky to ask someone too many questions about their past. Or any questions at all, really. But now that Max had told me his story, it would be rude of me to refuse to reciprocate. “My grandmother died,” I said. “She raised me. I didn’t want to go into foster care.”

“Smart choice,” Max said. “It sucks. Better to be on the streets. At least that way you can make your own choices, you know?”

I nodded. I knew.

I had been homeless for a month. My mother went to prison for the first time when I was six, and my grandmother raised me after that, through the turmoil of my mother’s periodic reappearances and failed attempts at sobriety. My grandmother was a warm-hearted, tough-minded woman, and I adored her beyond measure. When she died, shortly before the beginning of my junior year of high school, my mother was doing four years upstate, and there was nobody else to take me in. I’d heard enough horror stories about foster care that I decided homelessness would be a better option. I could bounce around the New York City shelter system for a year, until I turned eighteen and could apply for housing assistance. I was smart, resourceful, and—being seventeen—thought I was invulnerable. I had it all figured out.

The reality was, of course, nothing at all like I imagined. The city’s youth shelters were overcrowded, and each had a waiting list of several weeks. I ended up sleeping in parks and behind dumpsters in blind alleys. It was September, and the nights were still mild, but I knew it would get cold soon. I was hungry. I wasn’t very good at panhandling. I still looked too clean and well-fed, too much like a person who was cared for. The street kids I met didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I spent a lot of time in the public library and the museums, wandering around looking at art until closing time.

When I finally got into one of the shelters, it wasn’t much of an improvement. My bed was in a large dorm: noisy, no privacy. I tried to make friends, but failed dismally. “Go home to your mommy,” one girl hissed at me. “My sister needs that bed.” Someone stole my extra pair of socks. Someone else squirted half a bottle of ketchup into my shoes.

Max was my first ray of hope: the first person who had spoken to me beyond insults and commands. I didn’t realize how lonely I had been until he offered me the promise of conversation and human companionship. But I was suddenly desperate for more of it, and terrified that he would leave me. I tried to think of something to say, the perfect combination of words that would make him stay and talk to me. But nothing came to mind.

He scratched his head and looked at me, chin tipped to one side. “My brother’s panhandling at the subway station,” he said. “You want to go meet him?”