Cruel Money: Cruel Book One

by Linde, K. A.

  I peered through the darkness. That was when I saw a small puppy-shaped blob walking across the bed. I relaxed with a sigh. I must have left the door cracked. Totle scratched at the covers, and I pulled them back, so he could crawl under them. He nuzzled into my stomach and then unceremoniously plopped down. I giggled while petting his head. Then, I promptly fell back asleep.

  Saturday morning, I woke to frantic calls from outside my door.

  “Aristotle!” Penn cried. “Totle! Totle, come out now. We’re not playing a game. Totle!”

  A second later, Penn pushed into my room without an invitation and rushed forward as if he were determined to search every inch of the house.

  “Have you seen Aristotle?”

  I pointed at my chest. “Safe and sound.”

  “Oh Jesus,” Penn said. He sank down onto the bed. “Thank god. I didn’t know where he was or if he’d gotten out last night. I was terrified that he’d gotten onto the beach or the pool.”

  “Well, don’t worry. He’s fine. He just found a new place to sleep.”

  “What a lucky guy,” he deadpanned.

  I cracked up. “Want to see him?”

  “Is that an invitation?”

  “And you were doing so well,” I said with an eye roll. “Get out of my bedroom.”

  “I’m kidding. Yes, let me see Aristotle.”

  “I heard you call him Totle though.”

  Penn offered a smirk. “It’s catching.”

  I peeled the covers back inch by inch to reveal the small dog curled up against me. He opened one eye in disdain, as if to say, How dare you take the covers away. Then, he saw his dad, and his tail started wagging.

  “There you are, you little shit. You scared me,” Penn said. “Who knew I could ever freak out this much over anything?”

  “Well, just look at him.”

  “That’s how he fools you,” Penn insisted.

  “He’s not the only one,” I muttered.

  Penn frowned and then seemed to realize that he wasn’t just in my room, but he was also lying on the bed. We were having a totally normal conversation.

  “You’re not going to kick me out for this, are you?” he asked with a sly grin.

  I sighed. “I mean…you broke the rules.”

  But I couldn’t hold back the smile from my face. He had done everything I’d asked. There had just been this…awareness of him at all times. The knowledge that he was there. So close yet so far away. Half-naked on the beach. Playing with the puppy. Writing, always writing. And it hadn’t been bad per se. In fact, it had been a bit too inviting.

  For that alone, I should walk away and never look back.

  Because no matter how well behaved he’d been for almost two weeks, I knew who he was, where he had come from, and what he was really like. Even if he didn’t want anything from me, I didn’t trust myself enough around him for us to stay neutral in each other’s territory.

  I wasn’t neutral when it came to him.

  Not even close.

  “Well, you broke the rules, too,” he argued.

  I had. I definitely had. Because I couldn’t stop looking at him.

  Even now in lounging shorts and a pink T-shirt, he was sexy as sin. Dark hair wild, as if he’d been running his fingers through it all night while writing. Those bright blue eyes that just did me in. He was a work of art. Even when he wasn’t dressed like James Bond, he projected the same aura. The same intense vibe that said he was commanding the situation and dominating every endeavor.

  I liked it. I shouldn’t like it.

  “I did,” I conceded. “We both did.”

  “But…”

  “But I think it was okay.”

  Lies. It wasn’t okay. It was so, so far from okay.

  “Me too,” he said with that smile that said he was imagining all the things he could do to me in this bed. “Trial period over?”

  I held up a finger. “We have one more day!”

  He laughed and rolled off the bed. “One more day then.”

  I didn’t need another day. I was going to let him stay.

  And I was going to regret it.

  Natalie

  12

  Part of me really wanted to see Penn mess this up. It would be better for my sanity; that was for sure. But the other part of me, the stupid part of my psyche, said that having him around had been nice. Even as scarce as he had made himself.

  Of course, there were always signs of him or short glimpses of him in other rooms. But he was staying in the master suite, which was about as far from my room as a person could get in a house the size of a small planet.

  I shook my head in frustration at myself. Penn was doing the right thing here. He hadn’t been a jerk once.

  Still, it had been a bit like coming upon a lion in the wild. Seeing it in its natural element was beautiful and also…terrifying. You wanted to run for your life, but you were afraid to move, or the predator would pounce.

  I made sure to spend my day away from him, but by evening, I’d given up on work. I barely had any words and knew it wasn’t going to get any better. I stepped into the kitchen and thumbed through the mail. The house barely got anything, except spam. All the bills went to the city to be paid. I usually even forgot to check it. Penn must have gotten this yesterday.

  I dumped the first couple of items in the trash and then stopped on a cream matte envelope with my name on it. What the hell? I hadn’t gotten any mail here. I hadn’t even given my parents this address. It made no sense.

  With a bite of curiosity, I tore open the envelope and dug out what appeared to be a party invitation. My eyes bulged. Holy shit!

  Without a second thought, I burst out of the kitchen and out to the back deck. I wasn’t surprised to find Penn there. I’d heard the door close and Totle’s distinctive jingle while I was working. I found him reclining on a chair with Totle curled up next to him, half under a blanket. He had a glass of bourbon in one hand and a pen in the other. His notebook was open on his lap, but he was staring off toward the ocean.

  He glanced toward me as the door slammed behind me, and Totle’s head popped up. “What’s up?”

  “Have you seen this?” I asked, thrusting the invitation in his face.

  “Uh…” He glanced at it. “Oh, yeah, that’s the gala that Katherine mentioned. I see she sent you an invite.”

  “I didn’t think she really would.”

  “She follows through on her promises.”

  “Well, I can’t go.” I sank into a seat across from him and pulled my knees up to my chest.

  “Why not?”

  “Do you really have to ask that? I would never fit into something like that. I showed up here with two suitcases for my entire worldly possessions. I don’t remember stuffing a ball gown in there.”

  Penn cracked a smile and took a sip of his drink. “I’m sure that Katherine would help with that.”

  “I don’t need charity,” I spat.

  “Katherine would see it as fun, I assure you.”

  “I’d never be able to afford it. Or pay her back.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “Well, I do worry about it! I wasn’t raised like that.”

  “Money is not an object, Natalie,” Penn said evenly.

  “Maybe for you.”

  “Do you want to go?”

  I stared down at the invitation. I did want to go. It sounded like a dream. Or a fairy tale. Something people did in the books I read religiously and in the movies I’d grown up on. But it sure didn’t sound like me.

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “Then we’ll go.”

  My head popped back up. “We?”

  “Not together,” he replied hastily when he saw my scrutiny. “But I can drive you into the city and drop you off with Ren. She’ll handle it from there.”

  “And the money?”

  He shrugged. “Money doesn’t matter.”

  “Spoken like someone who has it.”

  “Fo
r someone who works for people with money, you sure seem to have a great disdain for it.”

  I pursed my lips. “It’s not that. I just…I’ve never had money. You and your friends are the haves. I know how the have-nots live. Seeing the other side is magical and depressing. It’s something I’ll never have. No matter how hard I work.”

  “That’s not the American Dream.”

  “Yeah, as if pull yourself up by your bootstraps works for people like me,” I said sarcastically. “Most people are held down by the circumstances they were raised in. Few have real opportunity to jump classes, Penn. And, even when they do, they’re not really accepted.”

  “That’s an incredibly jaded perception of our world.”

  “Or an incredibly realistic one.”

  Penn reached over and scratched Totle’s head. “Can I ask you a question?”

  I shrugged. “You can stay.”

  He grinned. “Well, that’s a relief. Though that wasn’t my question. I kind of already guessed that one based on the fact that you’re actually speaking to me right now.”

  “Fine. I must be transparent.”

  “Trust me. You’re not.”

  I blushed at the look on his face that said he wanted to unravel my mystery. “What do you want to know?”

  “What were you doing that first day on the beach?”

  “You saw what I was doing,” I said with a shy laugh.

  “No, I mean, why were you out there in the first place? I could never piece it all together.”

  “Oh.” I stared down at my hands. This wasn’t really a story I wanted to tell. Not because I was embarrassed by what I’d done, but more about why I’d done it. How could I tell the person who had everything that I had nothing? How could he even relate to my rejection? It felt like opening myself up to vulnerability that I didn’t know I could handle.

  “Look, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  I sighed and met his gaze. Honestly, what would it hurt? I hadn’t told anyone else about it. I’d even kept it from Amy. She was still learning the publishing process, and she had such faith in my abilities without any real knowledge of how it operated. It might actually be nice to talk to someone who knew about how it worked even if it was from academia and not fiction.

  “The day that you and your crew showed up, I had just gotten several nasty rejection letters from my agent. Well, from my agent’s assistant. They basically said that I couldn’t write, my characters were flat, boring, and unlikable, and overall, I was a hack.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. Well, it turned out that I wasn’t even supposed to get those emails, but my agent’s assistant had mistakenly sent me the unedited versions of the letters. I got an apology email Monday morning, but by then, it was too late.”

  “Way too late. That assistant should be fired.”

  I dismissively waved my hand. I didn’t want to get anyone fired, but yeah, it was a huge mistake. And I still felt the ripple effects of those comments in my current work.

  “Anyway, I was so angry that night. I printed out every rejection letter I’d ever received and burned them in, like, ritual sacrifice. Then, for my cleansing, I…well, you know.”

  “Skinny-dipped. Yes, I recall that part.”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “That’s right. And I felt so much better, like I’d let the weight fall off my shoulders. I was ready to take on the world. Anything thrown my way, I could handle.”

  “And then I appeared.”

  “And then you appeared,” I parroted.

  “Ah. No wonder you were so angry. And drunk.”

  I crossed my legs into a pretzel and tilted my head up to the stars. “You didn’t make it any better, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “What if I never write a book worth reading?” I whispered my greatest fear into the silence.

  I didn’t know why I’d said it at all. Let alone to Penn. What had he done to deserve this confession from me? Nothing. But, for some reason, it was so easy to talk to him. Maybe it was because I had been cooped up in this house for two weeks. Maybe it was because I was lonely. Or maybe it was just him.

  It had been easy to talk to him in Paris. Though I had been a different person then. I didn’t know why I had done it, but it was out there now. Too late for me to take it back.

  “I don’t think that could possibly be the case.”

  I snorted in disbelief. “You obviously didn’t read the rejection letters.”

  “I have a number of peer-reviewed articles published. I had to send them out to a lot of different journals before they landed anywhere. And I constantly got feedback from other philosophy scholars about my work. Most of it was far from positive or constructive. It might surprise you, but I know all about rejection.”

  “It does surprise me,” I said with an eye roll. I doubted many women had rejected him. That was for sure.

  “Look, rejection doesn’t mean that what you’ve written isn’t worth reading. It means, it didn’t work for that person or the next person or their marketing team or whatever it is. Harry Potter was rejected, like, a dozen times before it was picked up. I bet those other editors feel like idiots right about now. You’ll find the right place for your work, and then those other editors will rue the day they rejected you.”

  “We can only hope,” I murmured. Though I did feel slightly better. It helped hearing it from someone who had been there. Even if tangentially.

  “You’ll get there.”

  I chewed on my bottom lip and nodded. I hoped he was right. “What’s your book about anyway?”

  “My book?” he asked in surprise.

  “Yeah. Penn Kensington’s philosophy. What interests you?”

  He closed his notebook on a chuckle and tossed it onto the table between us. “Sex.”

  I sat up straight. “Are you kidding me?”

  “You asked.”

  “I was asking about your work,” I insisted.

  “Get your head out of the gutter, Natalie. I was talking about my work.”

  I furrowed my brows skeptically. “You write about sex…professionally?”

  “I study ethics. One of my areas of focus, including the one that I’m writing my book on, is the philosophy of sex.”

  “Okay. What does that mean exactly? You’re looking at whether having sex is ethical?” I asked, suddenly intrigued.

  “It’s complicated,” he said softly. “I’ll back up. Philosophy is the study of what really matters, such as knowledge, reality, and existence. It looks at how we know what we know, whether or not there’s a god, if we have free will, what is right and wrong behavior, et cetera. Ethics is the latter.”

  “Who knew I’d be getting a philosophy lesson tonight?” I said with a laugh.

  “I don’t have to explain,” he said with a shrug.

  “No, keep going. I’m interested,” I insisted, leaning forward. “We’re talking about right or wrong.”

  “Yes. The ethical theory that I most agree with is from Aristotle.”

  “Hence the dog.”

  “Indeed. As I mentioned on Lewis’s yacht, for Aristotle, you want to reach eudemonia, the ultimate state of happiness. And developing that happiness is done by creating good habits…essentially.”

  “This has something to do with sex, I presume.” I tilted my head and smirked.

  Penn arched his eyebrow. “Well, the general theory regarding sex is what we call the standard view. Sex is okay between two people in a committed relationship—preferably marriage—and the purpose is for procreation.”

  I couldn’t roll my eyes hard enough. “Well, that’s incredibly outdated.”

  “Is it?” he asked calmly. “I think most people will say that waiting to have sex is a smarter, safer choice.”

  “Yeah, and those same people are having sex before marriage,” I pointed out. “I doubt anyone only has sex to have kids.”

  “Right. I don’t think people follow the standard view, but that�
��s what is set up as the paradigm. It’s the best way to mitigate the risks of having sex.”

  “I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you don’t subscribe to this mentality,” I said cheekily.

  “I do not.”

  “Color me shocked.”

  “I enjoy sex,” he said blatantly. “Most people enjoy sex. It’s a pleasure unto itself and for much more than procreation. And the basis of my research is dismantling the standard view in an Aristotelian ethical fashion. It’s proving to be challenging.”

  “I couldn’t imagine doing what you’re doing. Challenging sounds like an understatement. You’re trying to disprove a cultural stigma.”

  “Well, in philosophy, we try to explain the existence of God and our reason for being. I would hope that I could explain why sex for pleasure brings us happiness.”

  I laughed and nodded. “Fair.”

  I sank back in my chair again and assessed him. I knew nothing about philosophy. But I could probably listen to him talk about it all night. His clear love for what he was doing drew me in. I found it interesting that, of all the things that he’d said and done with me in Paris, it was this that felt the most real. That he’d wanted to escape his family and become someone else. That he’d wanted to be a professor and study philosophy. I hadn’t known how much of that was bullshit, but six years later, he was living it.

  “You really were telling the truth in Paris,” I said softly.

  “About everything that mattered.”

  “Huh,” I said, getting to my feet and moving to stand before him. I took the glass of bourbon out of his hand. He looked surprised when I drained it. “Would have never guessed.”

  “Disappointed?”

  I shook my head. “If I could change in six years, maybe you could too.”

  “Maybe?”

  “It’s still up for debate.”

  “Seems fair.”

  I held up the empty glass. “Want another?”

  “I can get it.”

  “Yeah, but I offered.”

  “Are you going to get your own or keep drinking mine?”

  “That’s up for debate too.”

  “Then, make it a double,” he said with a flash of a smile.