The Billionaire's Embrace (The Silver Cross Club)

by Bec Linder

  A vacation would likely do me some good. Bora Bora, the Comoros. Possibly Mustique. I could escape from the dreary New York winter, find some sun-dappled maiden eager for a fling.

  I sighed. There was no time. I had three mergers to oversee in the next six weeks.

  An image from the night before surfaced in my brain: a woman with her skirt hiked up around her waist, moaning my name...

  I rubbed my eyes. That had been at the third club, after Carolina had jettisoned Jaen and ensnared a larger, more muscular victim.

  No more clubs, no matter how much Carolina pouted. I wasn’t twenty-three anymore; my liver couldn’t handle the alcohol, and my cock couldn’t handle the multiple women. If I wanted to have a breakdown, it would have to take a more discreet form. Something in private, with no risk of the tabloids finding out.

  The Silver Cross, maybe.

  I couldn’t risk it. I hadn’t been there in two months, not since Regan broke up with me over the phone just before Christmas.

  Christ. Regan.

  I wasn’t prepared to think about her.

  Fortunately, Henry pulled up outside of the office before I had a chance to delve too deeply into that particular well of misery. He slid open the partition and said, “See you tonight, sir?”

  “Most likely,” I said. “I’ll give you a call.” He nodded at me, and I opened the door and went out into the world.

  Sutton Industries occupied the top floors of a large skyscraper in the heart of the financial district. I had considered the idea of constructing a building exclusively for the company’s use, but discarded it as ostentatious and unnecessary. We had no use for an entire building, and I had little desire to be a landlord. Renting suited me well enough. Let someone else deal with it when the heating went on the fritz.

  I strode into the lobby and took the elevator all the way to the top floor, where my office was located. There was a little room for ostentation in a CEO’s life, and I found that my expansive view of lower Manhattan and the Harbor satisfied my urge for world domination. As a life-long New Yorker, I shared the common belief that nothing of importance lay west of the Hudson, but I enjoyed being able to survey New Jersey and reassure myself that I had no need to ever go there.

  As soon as the elevator doors slid open, my secretary descended on me like a wrathful harpy. “Mr. Sutton, your conference call is scheduled to begin in fifteen minutes—”

  “Yes, I know,” I said, accepting the coffee mug that she handed to me and taking a scalding sip. “I’ve been very bad, and you’re tremendously disappointed in me. You still have breakfast for me, though, right?”

  She pursed her mouth at me, but I could tell that she was amused. Nancy and I had reached an understanding: I would make her life extraordinarily difficult, and in return, I paid her a salary fit for a king. It suited both of us. “I shouldn’t feed you, but I will,” she said. “Egg and cheese biscuit, waiting on your desk.”

  “My savior,” I said. “Bless you.” I headed toward my office, anticipating greasy food and a second round of painkillers. “Don’t let anyone in until at least noon, would you?”

  She said something behind me, but I didn’t listen, already halfway through the door into my office. I closed the door behind me and leaned back against it, exhaling, allowing my eyes to close for just a moment. No more drunken escapades, I told myself sternly. The hangovers weren’t worth it, and severely limited my ability to be productive the next day. When I was younger, I could stay out all night drinking like a fish and feel fresh as a daisy the next morning, but age had taken its toll on me. Time and tide wait for no man.

  I had enough time to cram the egg and cheese biscuit into my mouth before the conference call began, and the rest of the day passed in a steady blur of work: phone calls, papers to sign, executives to confer with, an unexpected crisis in the Nairobi office. Before I knew it, 6:00 had arrived, and Nancy was knocking on my door frame and saying, “I’m heading home, Mr. Sutton.”

  I put down my pen and rubbed my eyes. “Is it that time already?”

  “It’s that time,” she agreed. “You should get going, too. You know it makes the staff nervous when you’re here late.”

  “Yes, they always think the company is collapsing,” I said. “All right. I’ll just finish this up and then I’ll leave.”

  “Right,” she said, giving me a suspicious look, but I gazed back at her with such bland innocence on my face that she rolled her eyes and headed for the elevator.

  She was right, though. It wasn’t good for me to spend so much time at the office. I forgot what the outside world looked like. Trees. Fresh air. Not that the air in Manhattan was ever particularly fresh, but it was a step above the dry, recycled wind that constantly gusted through the overhead vents in my office.

  I stood and went to the window, looking down at night falling over the city, the lights across the water, the tankers slowly moving out toward the sea. I was a wealthy, powerful man living in the greatest city on earth. I had more money than I would ever be able to spend, and I was respected by my employees and my peers. The worst thing that had ever happened to me was my father’s death, and that came after I was a grown man and abundantly capable of processing my grief. I led, in short, a charmed life.

  And yet I felt like my chest had been scooped clean. Like if I thumped on my breastbone, it would sound a hollow echo.

  I didn’t want to think about it. I turned away from the window and put my coat on. It was Friday night; I didn’t want to go home and sit in my empty apartment.

  I pulled out my phone and dialed Carolina’s number. There were worse things in life than having a good time.

  Chapter 12

  I spent the next week in a drunken blur. Carolina was more than happy to take me out clubbing every night, and I slept with more women than I had in the past year, two or three in a night. I didn’t learn any of their names. I didn’t ask. They were nothing to me: warm bodies. I would have felt guiltier about that had I been more than a warm body to them. We used each other, and everyone went home happy.

  Or at least slightly less sad.

  Not that I was sad. That would have been absurd. What did I have to be sad about? Fourth-quarter profits? Buying out a promising tech company from under Google’s nose? Everything in my life was going, as the saying went, swimmingly.

  And yet I couldn’t shake that hollow, scooped-out feeling.

  I woke up one morning with a killer hangover, and while I was emptying the contents of my stomach into my toilet, I realized that I didn’t remember anything that had happened. Arriving at the club with Carolina, yes, but after that, nothing. My memory was a blank, like some great hand had descended from the sky and erased the evening from existence.

  It had to stop. I couldn’t afford to lose control in this way, and blacking out at night clubs was absolutely unacceptable. If I kept it up, I would have my mother leaving me threatening messages about impropriety and lawsuits.

  I looked at myself in the mirror: my bloodshot eyes, my lined face, weary with excessive partying and a lack of sleep.

  Regan was gone.

  I hadn’t died yet.

  And although I couldn’t predict the future, I didn’t anticipate dying for quite some time; and this was no way to live. I had a corporation to run, and self-indulgent paroxysms of alcohol and womanizing wouldn’t strengthen my position.

  The next time Carolina called me, I would tell her no, and stick to it. I would focus on work, and stop catering to my empty heart. Worse things had happened. Life would go on.

  It did. I worked at it. I got back into the habit of daily exercise: weights in the morning, and running five miles in the evening after work. I bought a juicer. I even tried meditating, and even though I found it excruciatingly dull at first, I stuck with it, determined to put in a solid month before I abandoned the idea as fruitless.

  When I went to pick up my Little Brother that Saturday, for an afternoon of wandering around the zoo, he looked at me suspiciously
and said, “Are you on drugs?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m not on drugs. I’ve been juicing.”

  “That’s drugs,” he said, and yelled over his shoulder into the house, “Ma, Carter’s on drugs!”

  “Not juicing like steroids,” I said. “For God’s sake, Nelson. Like vegetable juice.”

  Nelson’s mother came to the door and gave me the same suspicious look her son had bestowed upon me. “You on drugs, Carter?”

  “Vegetable juice,” I said. “And meditation. Honestly, Ms. Turner. You know I’m not into that sort of thing.”

  She grinned at me. “Just making sure. Y’all have fun. Don’t keep him out too late, he’s got that robotics thing tomorrow.”

  “I’ll have him home in time for dinner,” I said, and sternly pointed Nelson toward the car.

  Nelson was ten. He liked computers, science fiction, and geology. His mother told me that he mainly hung out with the girls at school, but that he was considered so peculiar that nobody messed with him. I had known him for three years, and he had always seemed very content with himself, unbothered by what anyone else thought. He knew what he liked, and he was going to do it.

  His mother had confessed to me, a few months back, that she had initially been doubtful that a white man could provide her son with the sort of role model he needed. I still wasn’t convinced that I was the right person for the job, but I was doing my best. I had helped Ms. Turner enroll Nelson in a magnet school, and I sponsored his robotics team. I taught him how to swim. I took him to the library as much as he wanted. I would, when the time came, help him navigate the process of college applications.

  I wouldn’t have to do anything in terms of actually getting him into college. I was confident that Nelson had that part covered.

  That afternoon, we went to the Bronx Zoo. It was cold, but we agreed that winter was the best time to visit the zoo, because we had the entire place practically to ourselves. Nelson showed little interest in the charismatic megafauna—“They’re big,” he said about the elephants, looking unimpressed—but he would have spent all day in the reptile house if I let him. I didn’t find frogs particularly interesting, but Nelson’s excitement was contagious, and I had to dredge my memories of high school biology to answer his questions about camouflage and toxicity.

  “So why don’t they just make themselves brown, like the lizards? They can’t get eaten if nothing can see them,” Nelson said. “Why go to all the trouble of making themselves blue?”

  “I don’t know, Nelson,” I said, for the fourth time in a row. “Why don’t we find a book about amphibians?”

  “I thought you were supposed to know this stuff,” he said, and shook his head slowly, so like his mother in his disappointment that I couldn’t help but laugh.

  We had pizza for lunch, at the overpriced cafeteria, and he said, “You’re acting all sad and stuff.”

  “Am I?” I asked. I didn’t think I was behaving any differently than I usually did.

  “Yeah. Like, quiet,” Nelson said. “Was somebody mean to you?”

  I smiled at him. For all his sharp intellect, Nelson was still very much a child in some ways. “Sure,” I said. “You could say that. It’s not a big deal. Let’s finish eating and go look at the monkeys, okay?”

  He didn’t mention it again, and was so worn out by the time we left the zoo that he fell asleep in the car on the way back. His mother took one look at him and said, “Oh Lord, dinner and straight to bed with you, kid.” He nodded sleepily and shuffled inside.

  “Sorry,” I said. “You know how he gets.”

  “Oh, I know all too well,” she said. “You won’t come in for dinner, will you?”

  I shook my head. She always asked, and I always refused. I didn’t want to impose. “I still have some work to take care of tonight. Tell him good luck at his competition tomorrow.”

  “I will,” she said. “Thank you. I know he’ll have all sorts of stories to tell me about those animals.”

  “Make sure to ask him about the frogs,” I said, and waved to her as I walked back to my car.

  I thought about it over the next few days. Was I acting sad? I didn’t think so, but nobody could accuse me of being excessively self-aware.

  I asked my mother about it, when I had dinner with her on Tuesday night.

  She set down her fork and gave me a piercing look. “You seem perfectly ordinary to me. Is it about that girl you’re seeing? Oh, what was her name—”

  “Regan,” I said. My mother hadn’t forgotten a name in all the years I’d known her; she being deliberate obtuse in an attempt to annoy me.

  “Yes, that’s right,” she said. “My mind isn’t what it used to be. Old age, you know.”

  I rolled my eyes and took another bite of food. I wasn’t going to embark upon this conversation.

  “She seemed like a very nice girl,” my mother continued, obviously unwilling to let it rest.

  “I’m not seeing her anymore,” I said stiffly. This wasn’t a topic I was eager to discuss.

  “Oh?” my mother said, perking up. “That’s a shame, although I have to say, she didn’t seem as though she would be capable of meeting the demands placed on a politician’s wife. She didn’t have any fire in her.”

  That was completely untrue. Regan’s fire was banked down to hot coats, but it still burned fiercely. She had, I suspected, spent most of her life trying to extinguish it altogether, and she hid it well, but I had caught enough glimpses to know that it was there. But I had no interest in defending her. She had left me—thrown me away with a five-minute phone conversation that let me know exactly how little I meant to her. So I merely said, “Mother. I’m not going into politics.”

  “Of course you aren’t, dear,” she said, which meant she had already started planning the first campaign.

  She didn’t push the issue further. We finished our meal with a pleasant discussion of the new exhibit opening at the Guggenheim. Then, over dessert and coffee, I said, “I’d like to ask you a question about Father.”

  It was a sensitive subject, and not one I broached lightly. My mother raised an eyebrow at me and said, “Go ahead.”

  “Why did you take him back? After he left,” I said. “What made you do it?”

  She sipped her coffee and looked at me over the rim of her cup. “Why are you bringing that up now?”

  I couldn’t have said, other than that I had spent the last few months thinking about loss, and my father leaving had been the first time I realized that I wasn’t the center of the universe, that other people had inner lives, and that even the people who were supposed to love me the most would abandon me if it suited them.

  I was eleven when my mother discovered that my father had been having an affair for the past two years with a woman in her garden club, the young wife of a plastic surgeon. I still remembered the late-night arguments behind closed doors, after they both thought I had gone to sleep. It ended with my father moving out. He was gone for almost five years, and during that time I saw him on only a handful of occasions. He traveled a lot in those years, working on expanding the business overseas, and he had no time for the adolescent son who missed and needed him.

  I never knew what led to my parents’ eventual reconciliation, and I had never asked. I woke up one morning and my father was sitting at the breakfast table, and that was that. It was never discussed, and I did my best to forgive him and put the past behind me, but his absence hurt me deeply. We never regained the closeness we had when I was a child, and even when he was on his deathbed I found that I couldn’t relinquish my resentment.

  “I always wondered,” I said. “He was gone, and then he came back, and neither of you ever explained it to me.”

  “No,” my mother said. “We didn’t.” She took another sip of coffee. “We probably should have. Carter, there are some things in life, about duty, and loyalty, and turning the other cheek, that are impossible to explain. You’ll have to learn those lessons yourself. Your father and I both made m
any mistakes. I chose, in the end, to forgive his, and he forgave mine.”

  “He left me,” I said, a plaintive whine that broke out of me without permission. I hadn’t intended to say that.

  “He left both of us,” my mother said, unsympathetic, and finished her coffee.

  That was that. My mother was clearly not going to be a good source of insight into my emotional state. I abandoned that notion and instead took Carolina out for lunch at her favorite Chelsea hotspot. She was happy to accept my invitation, and happy to drink three mimosas and order the most expensive item on the menu.

  I would expect no less from Carolina, of course. She was one of two people I considered an actual friend, the other being Elliott, who was currently “finding himself” somewhere in Southeast Asia. I had known the two of them since we were all snot-nosed brats at a tony private school on the Upper East Side. When I was younger, I had a wide and varied circle of companions, but as I grew older I realized that most of them were interested in me only for what I could do for them. One particularly painful incident had led me to cut ties with most of those so-called friends. Carolina and Elliott were the only ones who had stuck with me through thick and thin, wild parties and the hungover aftermaths, terrible breakups, post-adolescent ennui, and everything in between. I trusted that they would never take advantage of me.

  Well, Carolina was always willing to take advantage of my credit card, but that was different.

  She spent a good quarter of an hour chattering about her latest photoshoot, and then set down her mimosa and said, “Very well, you asked me to lunch for a reason other than to listen to my silly model talk. Out with it.”

  There was no point in beating around the bush. “Nelson told me that I seem sad,” I said.

  She laughed. “Is that all? Poor Carter, so unaccustomed to having emotions. No, you don’t seem sad. It’s only that you were much happier when you were dating that woman. Nelson is noticing the contrast, I think.” She leaned toward me across the narrow table. “You pretend otherwise, but she obviously meant a great deal to you. But you have mourned long enough, I think.”