Tame Me

by Natalie Rios

  Tame Me

  AN HEIRESS SERIES NOVEL

  Natalie Rios

  Tame Me

  © 2017, Natalie Rios

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  “You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.”

  - Bob Marley

  Chapter One

  Charlotte

  “You’re cutting me off?” I ask. That can’t be right. I refuse to believe those words had actually left my father’s mouth. “As in, nothing?”

  “That’s right, kiddo,” Dad replies in a tone that’s entirely too cheery considering he basically just stabbed me in the heart. “I cancelled all of your credit cards and you will no longer be receiving money from your trust fund. Or dividends from your shares at Kensington. As of today, the only money you have is what you already had saved in the bank.”

  “But that’s next to nothing!” Too late, I realize this is exactly the wrong thing to say. My father’s expression grows somber while my mother actually grimaces, as if hearing that sentence caused her physical pain.

  “That’s no one’s fault but your own. You’ve been receiving tens of thousands of dollars every month for years now,” he says.

  “How could you be so irresponsible? You should always save for a rainy day. I’ve been telling you that for years,” Mom jumps in.

  Rolling my eyes, I begin to pace. “Kensington Investments has been successful for more than half a century now. The company’s worth billions of dollars. What rainy day are you talking about?”

  “That attitude, young lady, is exactly why you’re being cut off,” Dad lectures. “You’re thirty-one years old, single with no family of your own, and have never worked a day in your life. It’s about time you take an interest in something besides leather handbags and traveling to exotic resorts.”

  “So now you’re shaming me for being single? This isn’t the 1920s, Dad. A woman’s sole purpose is no longer to get married and have children.”

  “You don’t really have a purpose, honey,” Mom gently replies. “All you do is travel and spend money.”

  “We’re doing this for your own good. You can’t just live off your trust fund forever,” Dad agrees.

  “Yes, I can! People do it all the time!” I argue. “Aunt Vivien lived off Kensington money until she married a man with even more money.”

  “And look at how well that turned out for her.” Dad’s voice is solemn, pain marring his eyes as he thinks of his late sister. “Addicted to drugs and dead by age forty. Is that what you want for yourself?”

  I feel like the world’s biggest jerk. How could I forget what happened to Aunt Vivien? Her story is the very definition of a tragedy. “Okay, so she wasn’t the best example. How about...” My mind completely draws a blank. Shit. Why is it so hard for me to come up with another example? “That actor’s son. The one who was in that show Mom loves.”

  “Who?” Dad’s face pinches and he looks over at Mom for clarification.

  “Ryan Blake? Never mind him. He’s in rehab now. Got arrested for another DUI.” Well, damn.

  “Cousin Grant! He lives off his trust fund.” But just as the words leave my mouth, I realize this example also doesn’t work. My cousin Grant Bonner, son of world’s richest man Jack Bonner, has a job working as some sort of manager at a luxury casino in Las Vegas co-owned by his sister and her husband.

  “Grant was cut off and it did wonders for him. Found himself a solid job so he can make money on his own and landed himself a pretty wife, too,” Dad points out.

  Grant may have a job, but my parents are re-writing history. “Uncle Jack never officially cut him off. He always had access to his money and just chose not to use it.”

  It’s true, the Bonner siblings had some sort of falling out with their father several years ago. To this day, neither one of them is willing to talk about it, but the only one who had been threatened to be cut off was the sister. Grant refused to take his father’s money out some sort of show of solidarity.

  “Regardless, he didn’t use his family money for a time and now he’s set up with a career.”

  “At his sister’s casino,” I snap.

  “Charlotte, honey, we don’t really care where you find your calling so long as you have one,” Mom interjects. “We just want you to be independent and happy. If you want to work for your cousins, go for it. We would be thrilled for you.”

  “Ellie actually did get cut off.” Dad smirks at me as if to say ha, gotcha! Rubbing his hands together, he’s bouncing with excitement. “Jack cut her off and she married Drew. Now they’re in the hotel business together.”

  Rewriting history, again. “Ellie got married so she could inherit Aunt Vivien’s money to pay for Drew’s casino. I wouldn’t call that being independent.” Technically, this is more a rumor than a fact. Ellie laughs it off whenever I ask, so it really could go either way.

  “Charlotte Burgundy Kensington! How dare you!” Outraged, Mom wags her finger just an inch away from my face. “You should know better than anyone not to gossip about people’s relationships. Those two are clearly in love and it’s none of your business what your cousin did or didn’t do with her money!”

  Ouch. Way to hit where it hurts.

  “Sorry, sorry! I do know better. Really,” I insist at their skeptical looks. Feeling like complete and utter shit, I spend the next five minutes profusely apologizing to them.

  Here’s a little sordid Kensington family history for you: my father was born into one of New York’s elite families, the Kensingtons. His family owns the financial dynasty known as Kensington Investments, the third largest mutual fund and financial services group in the world. Which is just an extremely boring way of saying these people have MONEY, in all caps.

  My mother, not so much.

  She grew up in a trailer park in rural Alabama. At age seventeen, she dropped out of high school and ran away from home to work at a strip club. Yes, Tiffani Kensington used to get paid to take off her clothes. That’s actually how my parents met. My father saw her dancing and as disgusting as it is to think of my father watching women dance and get naked, they both claim it was love at first sight and were married within a week.

  Even though they’ve been together for well over thirty years at
this point, people still whisper things like gold digger and Anna Nicole wannabe behind their backs. Sometimes they even say it to their face. Almost every time, it’s the reason why my family is shunned from societal events.

  The thing is, my mother is no gold digger. She loves Dad and that’s the only reason she married him. His money is the icing on the cake. But try explaining that to the blue blooded families among the East Coast WASP crowd my father had grown up with. Even Grandpa Arnold had a hard time accepting a stripper for a daughter-in-law and his father had grown-up on a dairy farm that bordered a brothel house.

  Point is, I know how sensitive my family is to any accusations of marrying for money. And my parents are right. Regardless of why they got married, Ellie and Drew look at each other with hearts in their eyes. Fawning over each other and their toddler on a regular basis, not caring who was watching or what anyone else has to say about it.

  In other words, they’re disgustingly cute. Being around them can be completely nauseating. Who cares what had set them on the path to happiness?

  “Enough!” Dad makes a chopping motion through the air with his right hand. “Your friends and family all have careers. Even your brother has his nightclubs.”

  “Which he bought using family money,” I can’t help pointing out. Let’s not act like Jackson had done something truly difficult. “Didn’t you pay for the building the New York club is in?”

  “If you want family money to start your own business, just say the word. We can set up a meeting for you to present your business plan, just like your brother did. You’ll need a project description or scope along with pricing information. A PowerPoint presentation would be nice for any visuals, including charts. Jackson presented his fee schedule along with sketches and designs he had for the club’s interiors.”

  Business plan? Fee schedule? I have no idea what those even are and how my idiot brother, who very nearly flunked out of college, had come up with both is beyond my comprehension.

  Besides, I don’t have any ideas for starting a business. My brother loves club hopping and he’d never found a club that quite fit the scene he was looking for. Creating the perfect place for himself made sense in a way. But me? Hell if I know what I want.

  Sighing, I rub at my temples, feeling a headache coming on. “I don’t want to start my own business. I wouldn’t even know how.”

  “Figure out what you want and learn what you need to get it,” Dad suggests, as if it were all so simple. “Work for someone else. It’s not like you’re starting from zero, Charlotte. Our family has plenty of connections. I suggest you start using them for the better.”

  And then they stand up and walk out of the room. Fuck.

  My family is full of talkers. We talk about everything, ad nauseam. When planning a vacation, we will literally sit in the family room and argue for hours about where to go. Hours upon hours. The second a decision is reached, we get up and leave the room. That’s our signal: a decision had been reached and it was final. No more talking, no more negotiating.

  Which means I need to figure out a way to make money, fast. I’m a big spender, always have been. Ever since I graduated college, I’ve been traveling the world, staying in different hotels and hostels every time. Whenever I’m in New York, I crash at my parents’ or brother’s place, but that’s pretty much it. Without the money to stay in a hotel, I’m living off my family’s generosity.

  And if their current attitude is any indication, their generosity had run its course.

  I have no time to waste. Dad is right. As a Kensington, I have connections. First and foremost are the Bonner cousins. Ellie and her husband Drew are my best bet. They’re family and, more than that, Ellie and I are close.

  I also happen to know for a fact they hired her brother Grant and his then-girlfriend-now-wife about a year ago. To do what exactly, I have no idea. But a huge, up and coming casino in Las Vegas has to have some job available for me. I’m even willing to move to the arid as fuck Mojave Desert, where daily hair fizz/puffiness was all but guaranteed. Seriously, the last time I visited Ellie, I resembled a buff laced Polish chicken by day two.

  Take a second to look that up. And, yes, my hair really did look like that. If Dad’s goal is to get me married off, that look is not the way.

  Surprisingly, Ellie answers her cell phone on the first ring. “Well, hello there stranger! Calling to announce you’re on your way?”

  “Pfft, I wish.” Pausing a moment, I try to figure out how I should word things. Admitting to my billionaire cousin that I’ve been cut off is very high on my list of most embarrassing things that could possibly happen to me. Begging her for a job ranked slightly higher on said list. Then again, honesty is the best policy and I’m never one to mince words. “Dad cut me off so I need a job.”

  “Wait, what? Uncle Marlon cut you off? Like, for real?” Disbelief drips from her every word.

  “I know, right?”

  “Wow, I never thought he’d actually do it. I mean, he’s been considering it for years now-” Wait, what? Dad had been thinking about this for years? And he talked to his niece about it? And she hadn’t felt a need to mention it to me? “But he kept thinking you’d grow out of it on your own.”

  “Grow out of what? Being rich?” I probably shouldn’t snap at her right before I ask her for a job, but I can’t help it. I’m irritated with the both of them for talking about me behind my back. Ellie is supposed to be my friend. Actually, in a lot of ways, she’s my closest friend.

  “Um, no. I think he’s more concerned about the traveling. Lack of vision, roots, and all that.”

  Roots. My family thinks I lack roots. What does that even mean? “What exactly would give me roots?”

  “Well...” She drags the word out and I can picture her twirling the ends of her hair along her index finger as she thinks of a way to let me down easy. “Having a permanent home, for one thing.”

  “I have a home.”

  “Charlotte, be serious. A hotel room is not a home.”

  “Says the woman who lives in a hotel.”

  “Actually, we don’t anymore. We bought a house a couple of months after I got pregnant. Moved in a little more than a year ago.” How did I not know that? Has it really been that long since I last visited? “And even when we did live at the hotel, we always stayed in the same room. We had our own furnishings with pictures hanging on the walls and a kitchen to cook in. No housekeeping, just us keeping things tidy.”

  “I do move around a lot,” I acknowledge. “What can I say, I like to travel. A change of scenery does wonders for my disposition. And considering how much I move around, it doesn’t really make sense for me to buy a permanent space.” It sounds defensive, even to my own ears. “Besides, you know cleaning isn’t exactly a Kensington virtue.”

  It’s true. With the exception of Ellie, we are all slobs to varying degrees. Even my mother, who had married into the family, isn’t exactly big on keeping things orderly.

  “I’m just pointing out what Uncle Marlon’s referring to when he says you need roots. As long as you’re happy, it doesn’t bother me if you hotel hop until you’re eighty.”

  Christ, that sounds awful. Old, exhausted, and needing help just to get around. Traveling with arthritis sounds about as depressing as discovering that amazing smell you get from freshly cut grass? Yeah, that’s actually the grass releasing a chemical distress signal. So next time you mow your lawn and find yourself thinking hmm, that smells good, remember what you’re really saying is their tears are so delicious.

  “A career probably wouldn’t hurt either. With regards to roots,” Ellie continues.

  Great segue. “Yeah, well. That’s actually why I’m calling. To ask for a job.”

  “A job,” Ellie repeats, sounding a bit stunned.

  “Yeah, a job. You know, that nine to five thing people get paid to do, usually involving a desk.” There is a long pause on her end, so long I wonder if we’ve been disconnected somehow. Or maybe I accidentally pressed m
ute? With these touch screen phones, it happens from time to time. “Hello? Ellie? Can you hear me now?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “Do you need me to give you a better definition of the word job?”

  “No,” Ellie laughs nervously. Why is she nervous when I’m the one asking for a favor? “It’s just that...Um, I don’t know how to put this. We don’t exactly have any desk jobs available at the moment.”

  “What!” I refuse to believe that’s true. “A hotel as large as that and not a single job opening? Does no one ever quit? Or get sacked?”

  “I didn’t say we have no jobs, I said we don’t have any desk jobs. All executive, management, and administrative positions are currently filled. We do have service job openings.”

  “Service jobs? What the heck is a service job?”

  “Bartenders, housekeepers, waitresses. There are also a few casino openings. Blackjack dealer, poker dealer. That sort of thing.”

  Hmm...Being a dealer sounds like it might be fun. “Okay. I’ll just take one of those jobs.”

  There’s another pause. “What job?”

  “The Blackjack dealer one,” I impatiently reply. “Can’t be that hard.”

  Another nervous laugh. “Uh, have you ever even played Blackjack?”

  “Not really. I’m more of a slot machine kind of girl. But does that matter? You just add up to twenty-one, right? How hard can it be?”

  “Very, actually. You have to have experience in customer service as well as cash handling. You’re interpersonal and problem-solving skills need to be top-notch. We’re not just some rinky-dink place in the middle of nowhere. Our casino is right on the strip. That means it’s high volume and our dealers handle a lot of money. The dealers are our eyes and ears on the floor. We count on them to help catch anyone trying to cheat the system, not to mention potential robbers. We don’t put just anyone on our tables.”

  “You’re not even willing to give me a chance?” That fact really stings. This is my cousin. Family. Doesn’t that count for something?