The Billionaire's Allure (The Silver Cross Club Book 5) (6 page)

“Yes,” I said, clutching, greedy, worried that I would sound too eager. “Yeah. That sounds cool.”

We walked together, and Max told me a complicated story about how he had almost gotten arrested for stealing dog food. I didn’t quite understand whose dog it was, or why Max had been the one to steal the food, but it didn’t matter. He did a funny impression of the officer that had me laughing until my ribs hurt. By the time we reached the subway station, I was completely smitten.

There was no going back.

“There’s my brother,” Max said, pointing. The boy crouched on the sidewalk was very clearly not related to Max by blood. His brown skin and sharp nose made me think he was indigenous Central or South American. He looked very small huddled there in his oversized coat, but he stood up when he saw us, and he was taller than I expected. Not as tall as Max, but certainly much taller than me.

The boy loped over to us and bumped his shoulder against Max’s, close and familiar. “Who’s this?”

“Renzo, this is Bee,” Max said. “She’s staying at the shelter.”

Renzo shook my hand. He had a dry, firm grip, and he looked me over with a suspicion that I found far less unsettling than Max’s easy acceptance. Suspicion made sense. Renzo was cautious, and I appreciated that. “Max adopted you, huh?”

I glanced at Max, uncertain. Most street kids, deprived of safety and love, made their own families. People had street aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, and even grandparents. The kinship networks were elaborate and vital, and adoption was taken pretty seriously. I didn’t want to make any assumptions about what Max intended. “I’m—I don’t…”

“She’s cool,” Max said. “How was your take, Renzo? I made thirty bucks earlier. Let’s go get coffee.”

Renzo shrugged. “As long as you’re buying.”

We went to a Dunkin Donuts and sat in a corner with our backpacks at our feet, hands wrapped around our styrofoam cups of coffee. Renzo didn’t say much at first, watching me narrowly while Max told a series of increasingly outlandish stories, but the tense set of his shoulders gradually relaxed. He leaned forward, interrupting Max mid-sentence, and said, “How come you’re on the street?”

I told him the same thing I had told Max, about my grandmother and foster care.

“My dad kicked me out of the house because he caught me kissing a boy from school,” Renzo said, a little belligerent, like he expected me to react poorly.

“That’s shitty,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”

“Okay,” Renzo said to Max. “I like her. She can be our sister.”

It was as simple as that. My adoption served as my entrance into the street society that had so far been closed to me. Renzo had been on the streets for more than a year and had an extensive family tree stretching back several “generations,” and suddenly I was everyone’s cousin. The girls in my shelter dorm stopped picking on me. Kids who had previously ignored me would now nod at me when I passed them on the sidewalk and ask if I wanted to go panhandling with them.

I did, sometimes, but I spent most of my time with Max and Renzo. We did everything together. They had both entered the shelter at the same time, and when their thirty days were up, I surrendered my bed and went with them to camp in Central Park. We found a dried-up culvert, sheltered from the elements, and Renzo covered one end with a tarp and some scrap plywood to act as a wind break. It wasn’t glamorous, but I felt safe there, sleeping at the back of the culvert with Renzo and Max up front near the opening, protecting me.

The nights got cold sooner than I expected, and my pile of blankets wasn’t warm enough. I spent a few miserable sleepless nights before I said anything about it, and Max and Renzo both frowned at me like I had utterly betrayed their trust.

“You should have told us,” Max said.

“We should have thought of it,” Renzo said. “You need a sleeping bag.”

“Aren’t those expensive?” I asked.

“They are,” Max said, and grinned. “But we aren’t going to buy one.”

Renzo and I were never any good at stealing, but Max was an expert. He would go downtown right at rush hour and pick the pockets of Wall Street types as they left work. He shoplifted like it was his pre-ordained fate: food, medical supplies, expensive sneakers that he hawked on street corners, even special women’s vitamins that he insisted I take. “They’re good for your bones,” he said, and would stare at me expectantly until I gave in and swallowed the enormous pill. So when he told me that he would get me a sleeping bag, I didn’t ask any questions, and he came back to camp that evening with a brand-new sleeping bag, tag still dangling from one corner of the stuff-sack.

“I don’t know how you do this,” I said, clutching the sleeping bag to my chest, moved almost to tears by the thought of how warm I would be that night.

“Magic,” Max said.

“Stupidity,” Renzo said.

“It’s not stupid at all,” Max said. “I’m very careful.”

“You’re going to get arrested one of these days,” Renzo said.

“Probably,” Max said, and grinned. “But they’ll let me go. I’m too charming to go to prison.”

Renzo was my brother from the first moment we met, but Max never was. He couldn’t have been. We were lovers before I knew what that word meant, holding hands while we crouched on the sidewalk with our cardboard “HUNGRY” signs, trading uncertain kisses at night while Renzo snored in his sleeping bag five feet away. As winter closed in, we zipped our sleeping bags together most nights, sharing body heat and breath. I lost my virginity to him one cold December night in a crummy squat on the Lower East Side. He was everything to me: my beating heart, my true love.

Then he disappeared.

Nobody knew anything about it: not me, not Renzo, not any of our street relatives or friends. Max disappeared without a trace, between one day and the next.

We searched. We asked everyone we knew, and they all spread the word. We never learned anything. We didn’t know Max’s last name, and we didn’t trust the authorities enough to go to them for help. It was like Max had been plucked from the sidewalk and lifted straight up into the air. He was gone. He wasn’t coming back.

I mourned him. Renzo and I both did, for months. We entertained each other by inventing stories about what Max was doing. He had joined a circus and become a lion tamer. He was sailing the Red Sea as a pirate. After a while, we started to believe our own stories, no matter how far-fetched. It was better to think of Max herding goats in Hawaii than to dwell on the probable truth that he was dead.

Homelessness was a strange liminal state. The future receded out of sight, hidden by the day-to-day concerns of food, shelter, staying warm. It was hard to stay focused on my original goals when I spent so much mental and physical energy tending to my most fundamental needs. I wanted an apartment and a job. I wanted to go to college. But those things seemed like impossible fantasies. Life was the street: scrabbling, begging, fighting tooth and nail just to make it to the next day.

In the end, it was Max who saved me. Every night that we slept together, zipped together in our sleeping bags, we traded stories of what we would do when we got out. We would have a big house, and all the food we wanted. We would sail around the world. We would climb Mt. Everest. I didn’t want to let him down, dead or not, wherever he was in the world or outside of it. I wanted to to have a good life. I wanted to do all of the things we had talked about.

So when I turned eighteen, I applied for housing assistance. It took a few months after that for me to climb to the top of the waiting list, but then I had my own apartment—small, but mine. I got a job shelving books at the library, and another job as the overnight cashier at a convenience store. I signed up for a writing class at CUNY. I made ends meet.

I got out.

Renzo didn’t. He moved from marijuana to heroin, and then he started dealing and stopped returning my calls. I lost touch with him altogether after he was sentenced to a short prison stint for selling to an undercover cop. I looked for him, but without a last name to help me, and in a city the size of New York, it was a futile effort, a search for the needle in the proverbial haystack.

I missed him still. I missed both of them: Renzo, and the Max I had known, the boy I’d fallen in love with.

But he wasn’t dead after all.

He had just left me. He had let me think he was dead, for
years
, and now he had strolled back into my life like no time had passed at all.

God. What was I going to do?

CHAPTER FIVE

Beth

I showed up late to dinner on Sunday. Not
too
late, only about fifteen minutes, but late enough that I hoped Max was squirming in his seat, wondering if I would come after all.

It was very petty of me. I knew that, and I did it anyway. He made me feel so powerless, and I was desperate for some measure of control, illusory as it might be.

He had given me an address in Columbus Circle, and I took the train there without considering the implications or looking it up on the Internet first. I regretted that decision as soon as I exited the subway, glanced up, and saw the Time Warner Center in front of me.

Oh, God. Leave it to Max to pick somewhere unbearably fancy. How on earth was he going to afford this?

Because I certainly wasn’t going to offer to split the bill with him. Dinner was
his
idea; he could pay.

I went into the lobby of the building and took the escalators to the top floor of the atrium. I had worn a simple black sheath dress with heels and my grandmother’s pearls: nice, but maybe not nice enough, and I felt incredibly self-conscious as I approached the restaurant’s glossy blue doors. I should be wearing a floor-length gown and a mink stole. It was that sort of place.

But Max was sitting on a bench just outside the restaurant, wearing nothing fancier than slacks and a jacket, and I relaxed slightly. If he wasn’t dressed to the nines, then I didn’t need to be, either.

He looked up as I approached, and I saw an expression flicker across his fast, too swift for me to read. “You’re here,” he said.

“I’m late,” I said, acknowledging it, not apologizing. “This is a fancy restaurant. Are you sure you can afford it?”

Another flicker. I was teasing him, but he seemed to take my question at face value, because he said, “Pretty sure.” He unfolded himself from the bench and stood up, towering over me, even taller than I remembered. I was very short, so even average-sized people seemed giant, but Max was legitimately much taller than any person had a right to be.

We were too close, suddenly. I swallowed and took a step back. His crisp white shirt was unbuttoned at the neck, revealing the soft hollow of his throat. His big hands dangled at his sides. I remembered what those hands felt like on me, holding me close, touching my hips and breasts. The memory hit me sharp and sudden, and a wave of heat rolled through my body and warmed my cheeks. God. I couldn’t think about these things with Max standing right there watching me. He would see it on my face.

“Are we going to eat?” I asked.

He grinned then, showing his even white teeth. “Beth, you’ve never had a meal like this in your life.”

We went into the restaurant. A man greeted us, nodded to Max in a strange little half-bow, and said, “Right this way.”

I glanced at Max, suspicious, as we followed the maitre d’. The man had recognized him, which meant either that Max had come into the restaurant before I arrived to make his presence known, or that he was a regular customer. The former seemed more likely, but I wasn’t convinced. Max seemed totally at ease here, hands tucked casually in his pockets, like he ate at places like this on a routine basis. It was hard to envision. Max the urchin, all grown up and—what? Some sort of business magnate? Max the tycoon.

A lot could happen in eight years.

The maitre d’ led us to a door at one end of the restaurant, which he opened to reveal a private room, not large, with a table in front of a wall of windows overlooking Central Park.

My breath caught in my throat. It was past dark, and the lights of Columbus Circle shone below us, and the lit candles on the table were reflected in the glass. Were we really going to eat here, all by ourselves, suspended in a warm, glowing bubble high above Central Park?

Evidently.

“Enjoy your meal, Mr. Langdon,” the maitre d’ said.

Langdon. I filed that away. As soon as I got home, I was going to do some serious Internet stalking.

I didn’t know much about restaurants or fine dining, but I knew this was one of the best in New York—maybe
the
best. And Max had reserved a private room for the two of us, and the maitre d’ knew him by name.

You could steal a suit, but you couldn’t steal dinner reservations.

“I thought about reserving the entire restaurant,” Max said, like he was reading the thoughts right off my face, “but I decided you would accuse me of gross ostentation.”

“This isn’t much better,” I said. “Honestly, Max.”

“It’s going to be great,” he said. He settled one hand against the curve of my lower back and guided me over to the table. “We’ll have a good meal and catch up. Doesn’t that sound nice?”