by Holly Hart
“We’ve got a unique combination of resources,” I say. “We have an obligation to use them to help those who can’t help themselves.”
“It’s a tall order,” says Maksim.
The rest of us gape at him.
“Maks!” Tricia cries. “You got it right!”
He beams at us like a kid who brings home an A+ test to his parents.
“You’re right, buddy,” says Carson. “But we have to start somewhere.”
Tricia’s tears are flowing freely again now, and I’m barely keeping mine in check. This might just be the most emotional moment of my life outside of Leo’s birth.
“You guys are my heroes,” she sobs.
That’s it; the dam’s breaking again.
“What do you mean?” I say. “You saved both our lives that day! And Maks risked his life to try to save mine!”
Jesus, now we’re all blubbering. We sit there like that for a while, laughing, crying, hugging.
Finally, we get ourselves under control, outside of the occasional snuffle.
“All right,” she says. “Now that the fucking love-in is over, let’s eat.”
We lose it all over again, and laugh so long and hard that we wake Leo from his nap, and he starts to wail from his bedroom at the noise.
The sun has begun to go down in a ball of fire by the time they come around to collect the dishes from the banquet. Leo is squirming in my lap at the head table; he’s normally an easy kid to keep entertained, but a wedding where he’s surrounded by Russian women constantly pinching his cheeks has pushed his patience to its limit.
I sneak into my purse and pull out a small Rubik’s cube, which he snags greedily and takes with him under the tablecloth. It should keep him occupied for an hour at least – or until he solves it, whichever comes first.
Out in the courtyard across from us, the string quartet is warming up for the dance to follow. I get the feeling Maksim’s family will enjoy it, but Tricia’s will be calling for a DJ within an hour.
Carson reaches over and takes my hand, bringing it to his lips. His kiss is warm and familiar and still sends a tingle through me after all these years.
“Penny for your thoughts,” I say.
He frowns. “I don’t think we can afford that anymore.”
I slap his arm with my free hand and roll my eyes.
“Are you ready for all this?” he asks softly. “It’s not going to be easy.”
“Neither of us has ever done anything the easy way, my love.”
He sighs. “I suppose you’re right. The curse of being blessed with an embarrassment of riches.”
I squeeze his hand in mine, feeling the warmth there, the familiarity. I imagine I can feel the beat of his heart in time with mine.
“Hey,” I say. “Guess what?”
“What?”
“I’m still so happy it was you.”
Tricia comes trotting over, radiant in her dress and rimmed with the blazing colors of the sunset against the rich green of the courtyard behind her. She yanks up the tablecloth, startling a shriek out of Leo. She picks him up and hauls him off, giggling with him like a loon, onto the dance floor, where she does her best to keep him moving to the delicate strains of the chamber music.
Carson leans in and kisses my cheek.
“I’m still so happy it was us,” he says. “All of us.”
We sit there in silence a long time, drinking in the beauty and reveling in the utter contentment of this perfect moment.
Part III
Faking It
Fake Husband, Real Daddy.
I've got the perfect kid, and I’ve got the perfect life.
But there’s something missing: the perfect virgin wife.
It doesn't matter if it's fake.
The second Penny walked into my office, I knew I was f*cked.
Nineteen, sweet, soft, delicious.
I sense it just by looking at her. The hesitation when she hides from my stare.
She's a virgin.
Her sweet scent tempts me to pluck the innocence right out of her.
When my billionaire nemesis bribes Child Protective Services to pressure me to sell my company, Penny steps in to play mommy.
She has no idea how bad I want this. How bad I want her.
Fake marriage to help save my daughter?
What a f*cking turn on.
She played mommy in my time of need.
Now it’s time for me to play daddy!
92
Penny
Glass. Glass everywhere. That means reflections: everywhere.
I can’t hide from the reflections; nor can I hide from myself. Everywhere I look I see a ginger girl with an ironing board chest and a bowling ball ass staring back at me. Oh, and she’s pale, to boot. I need some sun: except – even if I get some – I’m not going to get a killer tan, just freckles.
I accepted long ago that I’ll never be on the cover of Vogue.
But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
“Don’t just stand there, girl,” Miss Casey says. “How did you get this job, anyway?”
I can’t believe I have to call this woman Miss Casey. I feel like I’m back in kindergarten. She’s a stern woman in her late fifties, and it shows. She wears her hair in a tight bob, pulled back, and a freaking tweed skirt pours all the way down past her ankles.
Seriously; I kid you not.
But the worst part of all this? She makes me feel exactly who I am – a nineteen-year-old virgin, and hopelessly out of my depth.
“Sorry,” I squeak. The tray of hot drinks rattles in my hand, betraying my nervousness.
Now that I’m here, it all feels so real. It’s my first day, but I’m not just working behind the counter at a Starbucks – not even close. A security lanyard dangles around my neck. I’ve been background checked like you wouldn’t believe.
Just getting into the skyscraper headquarters of Thorne Enterprises was, well, thorny. I had to dance through half a dozen security checkpoints. The closer I got to the CEOs office, the more intense they got: hard-faced men – all ex-special forces – eyeballing me, hands twitching on their weapons.
I dunno. It all seems a bit much. But – I made it here: to the inner sanctum. Miss Casey’s desk sits right in front of the frosted glass doors to the CEOs office. New York stretches out ahead and below of the skyscraper’s huge windows – all the way to the horizon, and fifty stories down.
“Give me that,” Miss Casey huffs.
Close, but no cigar.
“I can do it,” I squeak. But it’s too late.
I’d done my research – just like anyone should do when they get a new job – and a whole lot more. But Charlie Thorne’s secretary is an enigma cloaked in mystery. As far as I can tell, she’s been with Mr. Thorne from the start. He took her with him on his meteoric rise to billionaire-dom: lucky woman.
She reaches over to grab the tray. At that same moment, a harried-looking executive in a tailored suit storms into the office lobby. It would be a cliché to say he’s leaving sheets of paper in a trail behind him, but that’s close enough.
“Ella,” he grunts. “I need to see Charlie: now.”
He doesn’t even bother looking at Mister Thorne’s secretary. I know his type: self-important; myopic; bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders. I recoil in distaste. The tray rattles, again.
I wish you could see the look on Ella – no – Miss Casey’s face. A stormy darkness, worthy of a summer Oklahoma tornado, crashes across her visage, and that’s just when she’s facing me.
“Excuse me?” she hisses. Her voice is chilling. It reminds me of every terrifying schoolteacher or imposing headmistress I have ever had in my life. “Precisely what did you just call me, Michael?”
The executive glances up. His thin eyelashes brush each other rapidly as he realizes his mistake. Unfortunately, he’s got too much pride to back down.
“Ella,” he says, doubling down. “This is none of your business. I need
to see Charlie – now. You’re just a secretary –”
Oh, crap. You should not have said that. You should NOT have said that.
Miss Casey holds up a single finger. Michael freezes, as though she’s reached in and squeezed his vocal chords. “You,” she says, “wait.”
She turns to me. She fixes me with an intense, questioning stare. I just stand there, steam wafting from the hot drinks. I know she’s about to really test me; I just don’t know whether I’ll pass.
“Penny, please go into Mr. Thorne’s office and deliver this tray. If you can accomplish this task without being seen or heard that would be lovely. Don’t spill anything.”
She turns away.
My throat clenches. A tiny shudder of adrenaline passes through my body. This is what I wanted – of course it is. I couldn’t be closer to power than I am about to be. Yet: after all this work; the research; the job hunting; the hours of careful preparation for the interviews; I couldn’t be more terrified.
“Sure thing, Miss Casey,” I say. I twist on my heel and face the big frosted doors. Be seen and not heard. I can do that. I’ve been doing it all my life.
“And dear?” She says more than asks. I turn my head. “Remember the nondisclosure agreement you signed. Believe me, it’s ironclad. If you reveal a word you hear in there, I’m afraid that’ll be it for you.”
I nod. The tray rattles. My stomach does a backflip as I realize I’ve landed myself in an incredibly serious situation.
Miss Casey dismisses me, turning back to the hapless executive. She lowers her voice to a hushed, outraged whisper. I can’t fault her professionalism. She’s all kinds of pissed, but there’s no way she’s going to let her boss hear the drama.
“And, as for you, Michael: let’s get some things straight. It’s Mr. Thorne, not Charlie. And I am most certainly not called Ella.”
“But Charlie – I mean – Mr. Thorne said I could –”
I push the frosted doors aside. They whisper open without a sound, and hush the argument behind me.
A huge office opens up in front of me. The CEOs desk is right at the other end of the sixty feet long room, pushed up against the floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Otherwise, the office is sparsely decorated.
Whoever Charlie Thorne really is, apparently he doesn’t do ostentatious wealth. This place is elegant and understated. Even so, it screams that it’s the office of one of New York’s most eligible, and billionaire, bachelors. It surprises me. I expected everything to be dripping leaf gold.
I hear the murmur of conversation. I freeze for a second. I need to remember why I’m here: I’m Mister Thorne’s new personal assistant. Everything he knows, I need to know.
“Mister Thorne, I really must insist –”
He sees me.
His piercing gray eyes search me out from across the room. Crap, I didn’t expect him to be quite so handsome. In the pictures I’ve seen he looks colder, somehow. In all the research I did, I’ve never seen him do a spread in BusinessWeek or Time Magazine. He’s not in the society pages, either. He’s not that kind of billionaire. He’s elusive, hard to pin down. He flies under the radar.
He beckons me over.
A prim lady is seated in front of Mr. Thorne’s desk. Her legs are crossed, and her hands rest neatly on a yellow legal notepad on her lap. She’s sitting on a wing-backed, aged maroon leather armchair. She twists to look at me, but dismisses me instantly. Strangely, my new boss’s gaze never wavers. His eyes follow me all the way in.
“The fact is, Mr. Thorne, we’ve had a number of complaints. I really don’t see how you can run a corporation of this size and still have enough time to devote to a healthy home life –”
Mr. Thorne bites his lip. I can tell he wants to say something, but is only holding back through a monumental force of will. I close the distance to his desk.
“More to the point, my records state that you are a single father. You are unmarried. This is simply not acceptable. How can you possibly hope to provide a stable environment for your daughter? The simple fact of the matter is that my department is of the mind to remove her from your care until –”
“Miss –” he says, his face flinching with the effort of not biting back at the woman. It doesn’t take a genius to work out what is going on. The woman in front of him is from Child Protective Services. If I heard her correctly, she wants to take away Charlie Thorne’s child.
I didn’t even know he had a daughter. How the hell did I miss that?
“Ms. Winters,” she says. I reach her, and I see a sickening, saccharine smile sweep across the face. It’s such an obviously fake smile, it hurts. I can’t believe that she believes the words coming out of her own mouth. I feel like I’m watching a game of chess play out in front of me.
Charlie smiles at me. I mean – Mr. Thorne. I can’t let myself think of him as a real person, though this situation is quickly making it difficult not to.
“Ms. Winters,” he says. “What complaints are you talking about? My daughter has everything she could ask for. I’m there when she wakes up; I’m there when she gets home from school. She has the best tutors; the best of everything. Hell, she’s on a hockey tour of England at the moment –”
The woman from CPS raises her hand. “You’ll understand, of course, I simply cannot reveal my sources.”
An idea strikes me with the force of a lightning bolt: a way to solve Charlie’s problem – and my own – in one fell swoop. It’s neat: it’s tidy; it’s damn near genius. If I manage to pull it off. And that’s a big if.
“But you’re happy to sit here,” Charlie spits, “and threaten to take my daughter away because I –”
Oh God, I can’t believe I’m going to do this. Someone stop me. This is quite simply the most foolhardy, craziest thing I’ve ever done. How can it possibly end well?
I bring the tray to rest on the green leather that tops Charlie Thorne’s mahogany desk. My heart is thundering inside my chest. My throat is clenched.
I walk towards him, breaking his train of thought. He looks up at me questioningly. His eyes would steal the breath out of me, if I had any to give. I don’t. I need it all.
I loop my arm around Charlie Thorne’s waist. I reach up onto my tiptoes – I need to – and plant a little kiss on his cheek. “Charlie,” I say in a stage whisper, in an accent that makes me sound like I grew up on the Upper East Side, not half-homeless in Brooklyn.
“I’m so, so sorry I’m late. It was the traffic. I had to get out of the car on 5th and run the rest of the way. Did I miss anything?”
You could hear a pin drop. Charlie Thorne – billionaire Charlie Thorne – a man who has never met me in my entire life, looks me in the eye. He has no idea who I am. I can tell he doesn’t know what to do.
“And you are?” Ms. Winters says from her armchair. She ruffles through the papers on her lap. “I don’t have any records of you having a girlfriend, Mister Thorne. And might I say that I find it somewhat improper –”
“Girlfriend,” I say. I let out a tinkling little laugh that seals my fate. “Charlie, please. Didn’t you tell the poor lady?”
Cruella de CPS’s forehead wrinkles suspiciously. “Tell me what, precisely?”
“That we’re married, of course,” I say. “We kept it quiet, but only because that’s what Charlie’s like. You hate being in the society pages, don’t you, darling?”
I hear an intake of breath. I can’t tell whether it’s from Ms. Winters, or from Charlie himself. Since the lady from CPS opens her mouth a second later, I realize that it’s Charlie: definitely Charlie.
“So you mean to tell me that you are –”
“Penny Thorne, of course,” I say. I lean against Charlie’s perfect, muscular frame. He’s wearing a light gray suit that matches his eyes, and hugs his billion-dollar body. He feels stiff. I wonder if he’s about to throw me out; to apologize for the crazy lady that burst into his office. But he doesn’t.
I realize that he can’t. I’ve put him in a no-win s
ituation. If he denies he’s ever met me, then that’s just more evidence in the take-his-kid-away camp. But even if he embraces my lie, it still might not be enough.
But right now, it’s the only shot he’s got.
Ms. Winters turns to Charlie: my new husband; kinda. “Mr. Thorne, would you please explain exactly why you failed to inform my office that you were married.”
I freeze.
This is the moment of truth. A year’s work might – in just seconds – be thrown onto the scrap heap. Maybe I moved too fast. Maybe I ruined everything. I hold my breath.
“That,” he breathes, “is a very good question.” He pauses. The silence in the room lingers. My eyes track a seagull holding position on a thermal wind , forty stories up in the New York skyline. I certainly wish I was out there, carefree on the breeze, not here.
Winters’s eyebrow kinks. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to enlighten me as to whether it’s a question with an answer?”
Charlie heaves a sigh. My lungs are still frozen, that same breath straining to get out. But I hold it still, waiting for the answer. I’m about to find out if my new surname is Thorne.
His arm falls to my waist. He hugs me tight and brushes his lips against my forehead. Where his skin touches me, I feel an electric tingle I never expected.
“It’s just been so frantic,” he says. His reply is halting at first, but quickly strengthens. This man is a born actor. I guess you have to be, when you’re dealing with this much money. After a while, you’re just playing a part. “It all happened so quickly. What’s it been, months?” He says.
My eyes narrow as I try to head him off. I know exactly what Ms. Winters is going to say about that. I can’t let her think that we had a shotgun wedding, especially when the reality is so much worse.
“Mr. Thorne –” she says. Her voice is hard, lips pressed tight against each other. I cut her off.
“Yes,” I say. I stroke an imaginary piece of fluff from his suit pants. “Months – since the wedding, that is. But we’ve been dating for years.”
