The door handle to Cal’s office turned, the door began to open and I heard a voice.
Correction—I heard two voices.
The first belonged to Lydia.
I panicked.
As Cal’s pushy personal assistant walked in, I grabbed the Harrods bag and the flowers and dived under Cal’s desk.
There I huddled with my knees around my ears as I heard Lydia and Cal enter the room.
“I know it’s hard to work around all this construction but we’re close to getting a green light on the Hudson account,” Lydia was saying. “Another two days and—”
“Actually, Lydia, I was thinking of taking a couple of days off. I think we should just leave these guys alone and let them get the job done.”
“What do you mean, take a couple of days off? You never take a couple of days off.”
“Oh look, the fortune cookies arrived!” Cal said excitedly, hurrying over to the desk. I held my breath. “Can you please organize to have these sent to my house? Angus will love them. I need to call him right away.”
“Mr. Croft, I still need you to approve the amended plans before—”
“Lydia, I said I’m calling Angus. Can we just hold this conversation for two minutes?”
With an impatient sigh Lydia plonked herself down in a seat opposite Cal’s desk.
I heard Cal dialing a number on his phone, followed by one side of a conversation.
“Angus… yeah, it’s me. Guess what arrived for you today?... U-huh, the fortune cookies from Tucson. That makes at least one box from every state. We’re going to have to start collecting cookies from overseas now… What do you say we put Shanghai at the top of the list? … Haha, I promise… And yes, I got today’s text message. Count your blessings, not your heartaches. I always do… You know, you’re one of them. You’re one of my blessings… I love you too, I gotta go. I’ll see you tonight.”
Cal hung up the call.
Curled up under his desk, my heart began to ache.
Who was Angus?
Was it his roommate, the one who sends him philosophical messages every morning?
Why did he tell him that he loved him?
“Don’t let anything break,” I heard Cal tell Lydia. “What’s inside is fragile.”
Cal might as well have been talking about my heart, but I knew he was referring to the box of fortune cookies as he handed them to Lydia. “Oh, and don’t tell the delivery guy about Angus. Only a handful of people know about Angus, I don’t want anyone else finding out about him.”
“Now can I finally have ten minutes of your time to approve these plans?”
“Of course,” Cal said.
Together the pair of them left the office.
Silently I crawled out from under the desk.
My heart was suddenly swimming in an ocean of doubt and hurt.
My head was spinning, and when I looked down the floor had become a moving target.
I swayed as I hurried for the door.
I felt sick.
I felt stupid.
I felt like I was sinking.
Thankfully I must have looked like a construction worker in my T-shirt and shorts, or at least close enough, because nobody looked twice as I made a beeline across the construction zone straight for the elevator.
I got in and the doors closed before anyone else could join me.
I took a breath so deep that I shuddered while the elevator plunged toward the ground.
On the street outside I hailed a cab.
I sat silently in the back seat until the taxi pulled up outside Mrs. Mulroney’s Little Flower Shop and the driver told me the fare. I reached into my pocket only to find my wallet was gone.
“Oh fffffuck!”
* * *
I paid for the cab with the few loose notes and coins I could find lying around my apartment. I didn’t go back to Cal’s office to try and retrieve my wallet… or the bag of clothes and flowers I’d left behind in my dazed exit.
Instead, I formed a nest of seclusion on my sofa, with a blanket and a tub of chocolate ripple ice cream and the last ten minutes of Doctor Zhivago playing on repeat over and over again… the part where the good doctor and Lara are supposed to be together forever… until he curls over and drops dead of a heart attack… and she never even knows he was right there. Goddammit, love is cruel.
Bang-bang-bang!
The rattling on the window almost gave me a heart attack.
“Jesus, Tilly, can’t you use the door when I’m feeling this fragile?” I said, sliding the window to the fire escape open to let Tilly in.
“Fragile? What happened? You were supposed to deliver flowers. What are you doing standing there with a blanket around your shoulders. You look like you’ve just been rescued from a night at sea.”
“Get yourself a spoon from the kitchen. We’ve got ice cream to eat.”
Tilly ran and fetched a spoon then joined me on the sofa. We took turns digging into the chocolate ripple as I told her my tale of woe.
“At first I thought I was afraid of a commitment. Then I thought I was afraid of a commitment to a billionaire. But it turns out none of those things even mattered. Brace yourself… Cal is seeing someone else.”
“Shut the front door! Who? How do you know?” Tilly dug out an extra-large scoop and started mauling it.
“His name is Angus. He’s his ‘roommate’. He doesn’t want anyone to know about the two of them.”
“He told you all this?”
“No, I heard him talking on the phone. To Angus. I heard it all… from under his desk… where I was hiding at the time.”
“Did he see you?”
“No, but he’ll figure out I was there. You know those kids who left a trail of breadcrumbs through the woods to find their way home? Well I accidentally left a trail of flowers… and my wallet… and a Harrods bag full of Mrs. Mulroney’s clothes that are all going to lead straight back to me.”
Tilly circled me with her finger. “Oh, dear. See this, right here? This is a train wreck.”
“I panicked. I had to get out of there.” I took another slurp of ice cream off my spoon before it melted completely. “He even told his secretary not to tell the delivery guy about Angus. That’s me! I’m the flower delivery guy! His secretary was talking about me.”
“I thought you said there were no secretaries anymore.”
“Don’t nit-pick, I’m dying here. Just like Doctor Zhivago. Watch this scene. You think she’s going to look over her shoulder and see him, but no. And now he’s gone. Another victim of a broken heart.”
“Are you sure that Angus is his lover?”
“Oh God, do you have to use that word? Lover? It makes the whole situation sound like some arty French film from the seventies. This is the opposite of art, Tilly. It’s my life!”
“Are you sure that you’re not jumping to conclusions?”
“The only thing doing the jumping here is Cal… straight into bed with Angus.”
Tilly rolled her eyes. “Don’t make me slap you, Jackie Collins. You’re turning this into a soap opera faster than anyone can say ‘I’m pregnant… and you’re the father.’”
“Okay, just so you know, twelve-year-old girls shouldn’t go around saying those kind of things, even in the context of a joke.”
“I’m not the one on the emotional rollercoaster ride here. You are. Are you going to listen to my advice or not?”
“Oh, it is a rollercoaster!” I moaned through a mouthful of choc-ripple therapy, only half listening to what Tilly was saying. “Any minute now I’m going to be wearing someone else’s lunch on my face, just like Mr. Banks says. God, I can’t believe Cal’s cheating on me. Oh wait, maybe he cheated with me! Jesus, I think I just became the other woman in this scenario. Now I feel used and cheap!”
“Calm down. Breathe for me. Just breathe.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly as melted ice cream bubbled and oozed down my chin. “This doesn’t look pretty, does it?”
&
nbsp; Tilly shook her head and wiped my chin with my blanket. “Let’s look at the facts and approach this from a more mature point of view, shall we?”
I nodded, obeying in silence.
“Fact number one: All we know about Angus is what you heard from one side of a phone conversation, correct?”
I nodded again.
“Fact number two: Cal has been nothing but a gentleman to you since you met him, and hasn’t once given you reason to doubt his intentions or sincerity.”
Another nod.
“Fact number three: You need to dig deeper and find out the truth behind Cal’s feelings for Angus, before you do something stupid that you’ll regret forever.”
“Is that really a fact, or just your opinion?”
“It’s my opinion, soon to become a fact if you do as I say. Don’t throw away this chance at love, Matt. If he is seeing someone else, then let him go. But if there’s a perfectly logical explanation to this and you let your jealousy and paranoia ruin it, you’ll never forgive yourself.”
“You’re right. I know you’re right. But how? How do I find out who Angus really is and what he really means to Cal?”
“Just ask him. Not now, obviously. You’ve got enough explaining to do with that Harrods bag full of women’s clothes you left in his office. But when the time is right, you’ll know. Just ask him. If he’s got nothing to hide, he’ll tell you.”
I jabbed my spoon into the tub of ice cream and took Tilly by the hand. “You know, you’re going to make someone very happy someday.”
Tilly shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. The important thing is that I make myself happy. Not just some day. Every day.”
At that moment, I wished I had the same strength of character and sense of self-worth as a twelve-year-old girl named Tilly. Maybe when I grow up.
Suddenly we both jumped at the sound of my phone ringing.
It was sitting on the coffee table in front of us, and when Calvin Croft’s name appeared on the screen, we looked at each other.
“Answer it,” Tilly said.
“No, you answer it.”
“Really? Thanks! I’ve been working on my character for Penelope Pilkington. She’s a buxom redhead with an unfaithful husband she knifed twelve times because he called her ‘Toots’. Next week she’s going to have an affair with a movie star and discover a cure for cancer.”
“On second thought, let’s save Penelope for another time. After breaking into Cal’s office dressed as a tea lady, I think he’s been through enough for one day.”
The phone kept ringing.
“Well are you going to answer it or not?” Tilly asked.
“Yes. No. I think so.”
“Just remember, he deserves the benefit of the doubt. You owe him that.”
I took a deep breath—
—and picked up the phone.
“Hey,” came the sound of Cal’s voice, surprised that I actually answered. “It’s me, Cal.”
“Hey,” I said, trying not to sound awkward and suspicious but doing a terrible job of it.
“Just breathe,” Tilly whispered to me, taking on a yoga pose. “Breathe.”
“How are you?” I asked casually. “Busy day?”
“Oh, the usual. Meetings to attend, documents to sign, things to tidy up in my office.”
I gulped. “Oh really? What kind of things?”
“Um… well… weirdly enough, a bouquet of flowers, a bag of women’s clothing… and your wallet.”
At that moment, I squeezed every part of my anatomy as tight as I could in sheer humiliation. My eyes, my fists, my sphincter… you name it, I give it a good old wringing out. After a painfully long pause all I could say was, “Oh. So that’s where I left it.”
“Well, yes. Apparently so. It has your drivers license in it, as well as a gym membership card that looks like it’s never been used and a Blockbuster card… which I thought were extinct.”
“They are. I was holding onto it as a keepsake to show the grandkids.”
He paused on the line a second longer than I expected then asked. “You want grandkids?” He was smiling when he spoke, I could tell. It was funny how quickly you can recognize the sound of a smile in someone’s voice, even when you’ve only known them a few days.
It made me smile. “Yeah. I think so. I could teach them all the things not to do when trying to impress someone. I started my list just this afternoon.”
He laughed. “So, if the wallet is yours, I’m guessing it’s safe to say so are the flowers and the bag of clothes?”
“Actually, neither. The clothes belong to Mrs. Mulroney, that was a disguise to thwart the evil and relentless paparazzi. The flowers, well, they’re for you. The only other thing I might have left behind is my dignity, which has probably shriveled up into a ball so small by now, you may not even see it. Just let the cleaners vacuum that one up, I’m getting used to life without it.”
“I’m so impressed.” There was that smile in his voice again. “You broke into my office… just to deliver me flowers… dressed in a woman’s overcoat and the most sensible shoes I’ve ever seen? You really are one-of-a-kind, Matthew Darcy.”
“You’re not angry?”
“Hell, no. I’m flattered you’d go to such an effort. I’m touched, I’m thrilled, I’m… relieved. To be honest, I tried calling you a few times today and when you didn’t answer, well… God, I’m gonna sound like such an idiot…”
“What?”
He took a deep breath over the phone. “Well, when you didn’t answer, I felt just a little bit… heart-broken. God, I’m sorry, that sounds so… fucking… needy. Can I take it back?”
“Sorry, it’s out there now.”
“Well then, so is this invitation—Matthew Darcy, will you give me the pleasure of joining me for dinner tomorrow night at my favorite Italian restaurant?”
I beamed. “I love Italian food. Calvin Croft, it would be my honor. Where’s the restaurant?”
“Rome.”
I dropped the phone.
Tilly looked at me in panic. “What’s the matter? What just happened?”
“He wants to take me to dinner. Tomorrow night. In Rome!”
Tilly and I both gasped.
From the floor, we could hear Cal’s voice through the phone. “Is that a yes? Matt, are you still there?”
I snatched the phone off the floorboards. “It’s a yes. Oh yes!”
“Great, I’ll pick you up at six in the morning. Don’t be late. Till then, buonasera.”
He ended the call with a kiss.
I ended it by dropping my phone in the tub of choc-ripple ice cream.
Chapter Five
It seemed to be my favorite new habit—pacing up and down the floorboards of Mrs. Mulroney’s Little Flower Shop. It was just before six the next morning and Mrs. Mulroney was sorting through her dawn deliveries, bunching up lilac, separating lilies, wrapping sunflowers in old sheets of newspaper and filling buckets with fresh water.
“I can’t go,” I muttered. “I’m calling it off. For all I know I’m one of a dozen guys he’s dating. I mean, who’s to say Angus is the only one? I can’t do this. I can’t go.”
“I totally agree with you,” Mrs. Mulroney nodded. “Let me go instead.”
“You’re not helping.” I picked up my backpack which was sitting by the door. “I’m unpacking. I’m serious, I’m not going.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, of course you’re going. Just listen to yourself, you sound like a neurotic mess. Three days ago, you believed in true love, now you’re ready to put it on trial and send it to the gallows. Just relax. What was it Tilly told you?”
“She told me to give Cal the benefit of the doubt before I find out who Angus really is.”
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—listen to the twelve-year-old. For all you know Angus is Cal’s pet goldfish.”
“If that’s the case then Cal phoned his goldfish yesterday, sent him a box of fortune cookies and told him he
loved him.”
“Maybe you need a fortune cookie right now. Heaven knows you need all the advice you can get. Oh wait, here’s your horoscope,” she said, glancing at a sheet of newspaper on the workbench in front of her before pretending to read it. “Avoid kicking black cats under ladders, don’t accept any suspicious gifts from gypsies… oh, and if a dashing billionaire offers to fly you to Rome and shower you with gifts, don’t trust him. He’s after something.”
“Exactly my point!” I said. “He’s after something for sure. I just have to figure out what.”
“Oh Matthew, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you don’t have anything. Except maybe, just maybe, he wants you for your sweet personality… and your cute button nose… and that irrepressible sense of humor of yours. Have you ever thought that perhaps they’re the things he’s after?”
Mrs. Mulroney put down her flowers and walked up to me. She pushed the hair from my worried brow and said, “Let him take you away. Let him wine and dine you. And when you trust him—completely trust him—then let him have your heart and tell him to take good care of it. Or else.”
“Or else what?”
“Or else he’ll have an angry Irishwoman to deal with. And that’s something you wouldn’t wish upon anyone.”
At that moment Cal’s limo pulled up outside.
“Your chariot awaits,” Mrs. Mulroney said. “Now go, relax, let yourself have some fun. And tell the Pope I said hi… just don’t tell him you’re a homosexual. I’ll be mad as a cut snake if you ruin my chances of getting through those pearly gates. I’ll be pushing my luck as it is trying to sneak my hipflask through security. Now shoo.”
I picked up my backpack and filled my lungs with courage. “Here we go.”
Out on the curb, Cal was already holding the limo door open for me.
“Good morning,” he said, leaning in for a kiss.
I tried not to hold back, but I did. Just a little.
He sensed it. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, of course,” I nodded.
“You’re not afraid of flying, are you? Don’t worry, a few bubbles on the plane and you’ll forget all your cares. I’m here to look after you.”
If Cal was a liar, he was damn good at it. His reassuring smile got me every time. I kissed him, this time like I meant it, then slid onto the slippery leather seat of the limo.
The Billionaire's Boyfriend Page 9
