Ruthless Tycoons: The Complete Series (Ruthless Billionaires Book 3)

by Theodora Taylor

  My father’s gnarled hand suddenly covers mine and that’s when I realize I’ve stopped typing. I must have been staring at the screen for minutes on end.

  I glance over to find his bent head angled toward me, regarding me with concerned eyes.

  “I’m fine, Daddy. Do not worry. I just want to find a job.”

  He throws me an expression between a grimace and a smile and I say, “I know this is in God’s hands and there’s nothing more I can do, but I want to help. And I’m angry it is so hard for young people to find jobs right now, because I have this powerful need do something. Like, anything, you know?”

  He gives me another fleeting expression, more grimace than smile this time, and I get it. I do. “Story of your life,” I answer with another wave of guilt for whining about how hard it is to find work when he has to fight hard every day just to swallow. And soon, he won’t even be able to do that.

  During the last doctor’s visit, we were told he had a month or two, tops, before he needs to be fitted with a breathing tube and IV.

  “Sorry,” I say. Then I turn back to see what he’s been watching on TV… the French Open. Despite having won the second set and put the first point on the board in her third set, Venus Williams is struggling a full three points behind her Serbian competitor. It is not looking good for Daddy’s favorite tennis player.

  “Maybe her sister will beat her later,” I say, when Venus loses the match with a shot that fails to make it over the net.

  Daddy waggles his chin in a way I know means he is too disappointed to watch the next match. I pick up the remote and start flipping through the piddly collection of channels we get with our old rabbit ears antenna. Mommy refuses to pay any money toward the devil box, which she only got to keep Daddy company when he could no longer walk on his own. But before I can get through the small rotation, the kitchen phone rings again.

  And this time I am almost certain it is not a bill collector. I pick up the phone with even more trepidation, wondering how I am going to get Holt Calson to stop calling me here.

  “You cannot be calling me here,” I whisper as soon as I pick up.

  “Oh, I’m sorry! Is this a bad number?” a female voice asks. “It’s the one we were given. But if there is a better number, I can call you on that one.”

  It’s definitely not Holt. Nor is it a bill collector. Even the most chipper of creditors have an edge to their voices when they call. “I am talking to Sylvie Pinnock, right?” she asks.

  “Yes, this is she,” I answer, quickly resetting my tone to polite. “Who may I ask is calling?”

  “This is Beth Standwin. I’m calling from the Sunny Horizons Childcare Center to see if you’re available to begin work with us as a caregiver on Monday.”

  I hear her words but I do not understand them because I have never even heard of Sunny Horizons. “You are offering me a job at your daycare?”

  “Yes,” she answers. “The hours are from 9 to 5 and you would be floating between the various rooms at the facility. It will be similar to what you did at…” I hear a few clicks on her keyboard and she comes back with, “The Beaumont Academy’s afterschool program.”

  Yes, that had been my job exactly, but how does she know this? Unfortunately, I can’t ask with my father in the next room so instead, I say, “You’ve already checked my references?”

  “Well, no…” The woman clears her throat. “But you came highly recommended to us by a donor whose family has been very generous to our institution.”

  And that’s when the penny drops. “You are located at Yale?” I ask her.

  “Yes, on the West Campus. Are you familiar with it? We’ve only just opened.”

  “I can become familiar by Monday,” I say hesitantly, even as the catch that is Holt Calson hovers in the back of my mind.

  “Super!” Beth answers. Then she tells me about my salary. And this time, it’s not the back of my mind that catches, but my breath. The figure she quotes is nearly double the state’s minimum wage, and a full five dollars more than what my mother makes an hour cleaning houses.

  I manage to thank Beth for the opportunity and tell her I am excited to start on Monday, but I am swimming in a sea of confusion on the inside.

  I do not understand how one rich boy can have the power to get me such a well-paid job in this economy. Moreover, I do not understand why he would do it for me.

  Then, before I have even five minutes to wonder about what has just happened, the doorbell rings.

  It is not my Aunt Judith who lives down the street and often finds reasons to check on me on Saturdays when I’m alone with my father. I know this even before I open the door because she is the sort to pound instead of knock and yell, “Sylvie, come let your auntie in!” before it would ever occur to her to make polite use of our bell.

  It’s a courier in a black uniform who makes me state and sign my name for his records before handing me a box that turns out to have the purse Prin loaned me inside.

  I pull out my phone and find a few messages from my mother, along with one clearly marked HOLT CALSON even though I never put his number in my phone: ur welcome. i expect 2 c u after work on Monday.

  I push “Reply” below the message and ask without any humor whatsoever, “Are you still on drugs?”

  The answer appears on the small screen of my flip phone immediately. “Not the same ones as Friday,” he answers.

  I want to tell him not to text me anymore. It is an extra charge I will have to explain to Mommy and she is having a hard-enough time keeping both our lines on as it is. Besides, I am not the kind of wild girl who can or will give him what he wants. But the fact is he’s kept a promise I did not ask him to make. So, I tell him the truth as best I can. “I am not an ungrateful girl but I cannot do the things you want with a boy I barely know. This is not who I am. Also, I cannot have this conversation much longer because we do not have text included in our service plan.”

  His answer is a long time coming and I can just imagine him in that overwide bed of his, staring in confusion at his phone. Wondering at my audacity. But then he finally responds, strong, and clear: “Then you’ll come to my place every day after work until you get to know me.”

  Chapter Four

  HOLT

  Three weeks later…

  “Holt, Holt…wake up! It’s time for a squirrel hunt!”

  My eyes open with the expectation of finding my mother, standing over me, her hair in two long braids, her eyes bright with adventure.

  But only slices of moonlight and the shadows of overlarge furniture occupy the dark beyond my bed. My mother is not here, and even if she was, we’re not at our country house which is the only place we’re allowed to hunt squirrels. We learned our lesson about the squirrel hunts in New Haven the first time we tried it. We got picked up by the local police less than an hour after leaving our apartment building. That was the first time Dad posted an additional nighttime guard at the lobby elevator.

  But not the last.

  I hadn’t been downstairs since mom returned from her latest “rest,” but I was willing to bet my favorite lacrosse stick that another guard was now posted down there, making sure the new drug cocktail she’s on doesn’t give her any other “spontaneous ideas.”

  I get up and out of my bed anyway. I have to pee, but I don’t head for the one in my suite, because the one across the hall is actually a shorter walk in the dark.

  However, I find the hallway outside my room even more menacingly dark than my moonlit bedroom, which means Mom still is not entirely healed up. When she feels okay, Mom leaves the hallway light on for me. When she doesn’t, the light switches remain in the off position, the blackout curtains are drawn, and our place stays as dark as her mood. I don’t really need the light, but I switch it on anyway. It’s a habit I got into the first time Dad made her go on a vacation without me—one of the many ways I’d learned to pretend my mother was still there, even when she wasn’t.

  But after I flip the lights on, I don
’t continue to the bathroom. In fact, I freeze because of what I can now see taped on Mom’s door: a note with my name written across the top in capital letters. It looks innocent enough, but something about it feels radioactive to me.

  Still, I go to it. Because my name is on it. And I have to get closer to read the rest of what she’s written in her generously looped Spencerian cursive: Holt, please don’t come in. Get a guard and tell him to come in. Then go back to your room.

  I stare at the note. Rereading it three times but still not comprehending it. And then somewhere in the background, the Beastie Boys start shouting about how I have to fight for my right to party.

  I wake again. This time with a start because I’m no longer a little boy and, unlike ten years ago, I now have a slick rectangular device that screams music at me instead of ringing like the cells my guards used to carry.

  I don’t open my eyes. Just fumble around until I find the sleek phone that was hand delivered to my apartment a few days ago around the same time middle-class nerds started camping out to get the new iPhone.

  “Hello?” I mumble after depressing the touchscreen button.

  “Why the hell haven’t you turned in your paperwork to HR?” My dad’s aggressive Arkansas accent bellows across several state lines.

  Ah, fuck. They talk about women being micromanagers, but I can tell you right now that’s a load of sexist bullshit. Because there isn’t a woman alive who has anything on my dad, who’s obviously been abusing his position in order to talk to HR about me.

  “Uh…” I answer. It’s too early in the morning, afternoon—whatever fucking time it is—to be coherent.

  Not surprisingly, Dad doesn’t like my answer. “Filling out the gotdamn paperwork is the one gotdamn thing you had to do to get this job!”

  “I know,” I answer, wondering, not for the first time, if my father—or Big Jack as he makes everyone call him at the office—purposefully held on to his accent after four years at Yale and three at Wharton as a means of intimidation.

  “Are you even awake?” he asks.

  “Am now,” I answer, still too fogged up by whatever I smoked and drank last night to come up with a less snotty response.

  Right on cue, Big Jack asks, “You backtalking me, son?”

  “No, I’m not,” I answer, my voice flat as I scrabble around my nightstand to find my small mirror. On it is a half-smoked joint and a couple lines of what might be coke or some smashed up pills. I opt for the joint and tell my dad, “I’ll get the paperwork in.”

  “It was due yesterday,” he reminds me, even though—c’mon—he and I both know deadlines don’t apply to people with as much money and power as we have.

  “Give me ‘til the end of the week, then.” I say.

  “Get it in tomorrow. If you overnight it, it’ll be here by Friday.”

  I don’t answer. Just wait for the penny to drop.

  Which is stupid, because it never does. He says, “I mean it, Holt. Get it in TOMORROW!” his voice is so belligerent, I can tell he’s been hitting the bottle, too.

  Like father, like son. The thought makes my stomach twist. Almost as bad as the thought of leaving this building and showing up in New York on September 3, ready to become the person he groomed me to be from birth.

  “Look, son, if you were down here I could have my girl take care of it. But you were the one who decided to stay back east. That means I can’t hold your hand or stand over you. The days of us getting handed shit on a silver platter are over now that we’ve got this board, so either you step up or the next president of Cal-Mart might not be a Calson.”

  “I’ll get it in,” I say again, more to get him off the phone than to reassure him. I know he’s disappointed in me. Far as I know, he’s been disappointed in me since my birth shut down any chance he had of having another child with the society wife he’d moved heaven and earth to bag—only to find out she was defective. Not only could she not reliably throw a masters of the universe-level dinner party, he had to pay a pretty penny to keep her manic episodes out of the paper. And that was before my arrival took out her uterus.

  My birth pretty much put the nail in the coffin of their marriage. Growing up, it was my mother and me along with the occasional nanny who was more of a guard than anything else. My father was just that guy who dropped by once a month and then, after two hours of barking commands at everyone including my mother, left me with a list of things to work on between then and his next visit.

  For most of my life, I worked on that list. Even harder after my mom’s death, in order to prove I wasn’t like her, and that I was a son worthy of the Calson name.

  But all that stopped the day of my graduation when he came up to me and said, “You gotta keep your mouth closed when you know there’s a camera on you, son. Or turn your head so they can’t see you talking. That’s PR 101. You better work on that before you start in New York.”

  You better work on that. That was all I received from him after busting my ass for five years to get a combined BS/MBA so I could start living his dream that much sooner. And that’s when I got it. Really got it. He’d never forgive Mom for being crazy, and he’d never forgive me for having a crazy mom. I could fulfill every wish on his “work on this” list, and he’d still come up with shit for me to do to prove myself to him.

  As if on cue, Dad huffs into my memory of the last day I spent comfortably outdoors with, “I’ve fired assholes within the first month for not getting the reports to me on time. Believe me, if the New York office tells me you ain’t pulling your part of the ox up there, I’ll ship you down here to Arkansas faster than you can say your own last name. We clear on that, son?”

  “Yes,” I answer, too brain scrambled to argue with him. The phone beeps and I pull it away from my ear to look at the display. It’s Javon.

  “Dad, someone’s on the other line. I need to go. I’ll get the paperwork in, for sure.”

  “You better—” he starts to say but I switch to the other line before he can get out another threat.

  “What’s up, Von?”

  “You told me yesterday to start calling a half hour before your dinner company arrives.”

  My dinner company… “Fuck, is it 4:30 already?”

  “Yeah, it is,” Javon answers.

  I hang up the phone and jump into the shower, just managing to pull on a pair of sweatpants and a Henley before the Beastie Boys start up again. “She’s here already?” I ask when I answer the phone.

  “Yeah, looks like her bus was ahead of schedule,” Von answers.

  “And she’s still saying no to the car? Did you ask—?”

  “Every day just like you said, but she ain’t budging.”

  Okay, shit…so I don’t have time to get in even half a joint. I scan the room for options and settle on the mirror with the lines, hoping like hell it’s oxy and not coke. She’s already cagey around me. The last thing I need is her running away because I’m talking too fast and too much. I grab a cut piece of straw off the mirror and dip my head, deciding I don’t want to give her the excuse she needs to call my bluff and never come back—

  “Fuck!” I yell, head kicking back when the line I just snorted burns into my nasal cavity. Not oxy…must be the leftover Ibiza MCAT Luca brought a few weeks ago.

  But the burning sensation soon gives way to a kind of distant euphoria that I still vaguely remember from the party. Fuck cloud. And with only those two words as warning, a carnal image hits me square in the brain. Her riding my dick…my hands guiding her thick hips as I watch her breasts bounce.

  And now I have two problems because I immediately become hard as steel inside my sweatpants at the thought of finally getting what I want from her.

  Calsons get what they ask for. Whatever they ask for. Whether it be favors from politicians, appearances from worldwide superstars at our investor meetings, or sex from the most mesmerizing woman we’ve ever met on a balcony.

  But she said no. And she’s been coming here daily after work,
but even when she’s laughing at something I said or talking excitedly about her day at the childcare center, her eyes stay wary. I shake my head at the tent in my pants because there’s no doubt about it: this hard on will definitely chase her away.

  Feeling like I’m the one who just graduated from high school, not her, I strip off my sweatpants and change into the tight swim trunks I used to wear while vacationing in Europe. Those, and a pair of jeans hide the erection.

  But it feels like she can still tell something’s off with me when I open the door.

  “Are you alright, my friend?” she asks, lifting an eyebrow at me.

  Fuck cloud. Fuck cloud. “I’m fine,” I answer.

  “You are smiling,” she points out like she’s just diagnosed a medical condition. “You have a big, big smile on your face. Why?”

  “Dunno, happy to see you, I guess,” I answer, standing back and waving her into the apartment.

  She doesn’t answer, just regards me warily as she comes through the door with a brown bag of Chinese food Javon ordered.

  While she’s setting it out, I focus hard on finding a screw top bottle of wine in the cabinets full of liquor.

  “No beer tonight?” she asks when I come back to the table with an open bottle in my fist.

  “Nah,” I answer. And saying that one word—only that one word—takes all I’ve got, because MCAT is a tongue loosener of the worst kind. I want to tell her every truth I’ve been holding back from her these past weeks. That there’s no reason for her to be so self-conscious, because she’s beautiful to me and sexy as fuck. That I think both our worlds would change forever if she would just let me in.

  I also want to remind her that I am a Calson and Calsons get whatever and whoever the fuck they want. Resistance is futile—I want to tell her that. I want to tell her that. I want… I want… I want…

  But I don’t. Instead, I grind my teeth hard, leaning into the MCAT’s side effects so my tongue will stay caged. Don’t talk. Stay quiet. Don’t scare her.

  “I listened to all the music on the mixtape square and I liked it very much. Thank you.”