“Maybe we can try surfing,” Emma was saying happily. “I know you wanted to try surfing in Maui.”
“And you refused because you were trying to hook up with that trust-fund kid at the pool,” I responded automatically.
She giggled. “Absolutely. But I’d try it this time, if you want to. Besides, surfer girls have awesome bodies.”
I felt like crying all over again, but for a completely different reason. Rick might have left me, but Emma hadn’t. She was right here at my side, doing whatever she could think of to make me feel better. She was my best friend in the entire world. She would never leave me.
“Thank you, Emma,” I whispered, reaching for her hand. She stopped what she was doing to nod at me, her face serious.
“You’re welcome, Annabelle.”
It’s going to be okay, I told myself as we returned to packing. So long as you have Emma, you’ll be just fine. And you’ll never be alone.
Chapter Four
Ten Years Later
Las Vegas
I was already awake and staring at my clock when it turned over from 5:29 to 5:30. I reached over to turn off the alarm just as it began its beeping.
“Get up, Annabelle,” I said out loud. My voice sounded loud in the silent room and I sighed, closing my eyes. The day was pretty packed—in fact, I’d been awake for the past twenty minutes, going over and over the schedule, what I would have to do, how I would never have enough time. I sighed again, throwing the blankets off my legs. Two sighs and it wasn’t even six a.m. yet. I slipped my feet into slippers and padded out to the kitchen where my shiny, top-of-the line, single-serve coffee maker was already filling my mug. I breathed in deeply, the smell of coffee making me feel marginally better. As soon as the drip stopped, I grabbed up the mug and took a long sip, thanking my stars for the hundredth time that I had found the temperature-control model for a steal on eBay. Not having to wait for coffee to cool was proof enough of man’s triumph in the world.
I leaned against the counter, sipping the dark brew, wishing I could add a little sugar. Or some of that flavored liquid creamer I’d purchased in a moment of weakness. Empty calories, I reminded myself, pushing off from the counter in search of something to do to keep my brain off the bitterness of the black coffee. In the living room, I picked up a small, silver remote. With one push of the button, the heavy drapes over my floor-to-ceiling windows slid open, and I allowed myself a moment of satisfaction. Those drapes cost more than six months’ rent on my first apartment. When Emma and I, fresh off the high of selling our first club, had bought units in this building six years ago, I had let myself splurge a little, opting for some of the high-end finishes I had gone without my entire life. Luckily, my frugal nature had soon reappeared, but I could never find it in my heart to regret these shades. “Worth every penny,” I murmured, stepping up to the window. The sky was pitch dark, no hint of sun trying to move into the horizon yet. I wondered, vaguely, when was the last time I saw the sun through this window. Typically it was dark when I got up in the morning and dark when I got home.
“Can’t beat the view, though,” I reminded myself, staring out at the Strip, resplendent in neon, bright against the darkness of the early morning sky.
My phone rang, and I jumped a little at the breaking of the silence. I pressed a button on the wall next to the window, and Emma’s voice quickly filled the room. “What’s up, bitch?”
“Drinking coffee. You?”
“Oh God,” she moaned, and I adjusted the volume a little. “I’m trying to convince myself to get out of bed.”
“You’re supposed to be meeting me downstairs in twenty minutes,” I reminded her, looking at the clock above my fireplace. “We have Pilates, remember?”
“I know,” she whined. “But I’m too tired. You would not believe the night I had after you left.”
I rolled my eyes at my reflection in the window. “Mr. Three Piece Suit wasn’t all he was cracked up to be?”
She giggled. “The suit was pretty hot, wasn’t it?”
Emma and I had gone out after work for a few drinks at one of our restaurants, our favorite way to unwind. But I’d found myself too stressed out to really relax and made my excuses to head home after a few hours. By then, Emma had already been sending some pretty strong signals to the banker across the room, and I wasn’t at all surprised when she elected to stay.
I half-listened as she started in on some long, involved description of their interaction in the restaurant, and later, at some bar. The synching audio systems I’d had installed allowed me to talk to her from any room in the house, so I took advantage of it in order to start getting ready for our six a.m. Pilates class in the gym downstairs. By the time she was done telling me about her already-fizzled love interest, she sounded a lot more awake.
“I guess I should get dressed,” she said. “God knows I could use the work out. I’m sure Pete was staring at my love handles last night.”
I rolled my eyes at the thought of Emma with a millimeter of extra fat around her stomach. “Save me a spot, okay?”
“Got it.”
I glanced at the clock by my bed. 5:48. The elevator ride down to the gym would take approximately two minutes, leaving me with a full ten before class started—and probably an extra five before Emma showed up. I glanced around the room, silent as it was when I rolled out of bed.
I loved this time of day. In a city like Vegas, there was very little stillness. All through the night, the lights on the Strip flashed, the casinos raking in their money, the traffic clogged and moving at a snail’s pace. In my little apartment, high above the world, I imagined the energy, the thrum of life below. A lifelong insomniac, the frenetic pace of Vegas had been a welcome distraction at night, an unspoken agreement between me and the city that we’d have each other’s back, keep each other company.
But at this time of morning, right before sunrise, it was as if the entire city finally took a breath. Not a pause, not exactly, but a brief moment to inhale, preparing for the day ahead.
And I was always awake to see it.
I knew I should get downstairs. I hated being late to anything, hated the attention that accompanied that last minute slither through the back. It was worse in exercise classes. The women in our Pilates class were the type that wore makeup and styled their hair just to come to the gym, the type who made everything into a competition. The room was a minefield of side-eye glances and judgment, everyone sizing up everyone else. Is she thinner than me? Is her hair better? Where’d she get those yoga pants? Who can do the deepest V-seat in class? I’d long admired Emma’s ability to swan in at the last minute, taking her spot confidently, no matter what time, no matter how many eyes were on her.
Yet I lingered at the window, looking down over my adopted city. Vegas had been home to me for a long while now. Fresh out of college, bank account full of her father’s money (an investment, he said), Emma and I arrived, eager to make our mark. And we had, quickly and with great fanfare. I squinted out into the darkness, looking for that point of light that represented our start here. A few blocks from the Strip, down by Mandalay Bay, too close to the airport to be trendy. Yet we’d made it trendy, that little club, made it into something cool and exclusive, the kind of place you had to be in the know to know about. We’d bought the property, revamped the club, and made it into something special, something buzz worthy, a place with a waiting list, a place where celebrities had to fight to get on the guest list. And then, we’d sold it to one of the major real estate groups in the city for four times what we’d put into it. And we hadn’t looked back since.
Well, unless you can call what I was doing now looking back. I made it a practice to find it in these early morning views of the city. I wasn’t a particularly sentimental person but, even for me, there was something special about that club, the first project of the newly formed R&E Development Group, the project that put us on the map.
We rarely bothered with little clubs anymore. We’d moved on to restau
rants, to vast, sophisticated nightclubs, to spas and performance spaces.
And today, we were taking it up another notch. A hotel. That was the next item on Emma’s list of things to be conquered. The step that would put us, finally, in the big leagues. Make us one of the major players in the real estate scene. No longer a niche company, no longer beholden to investors. With a deal like this, we could be our own investors.
And, hopefully, save ourselves from bankruptcy.
I massaged my temples, feeling the ever-present thrum of a headache intensifying.
It was hard to imagine we’d come so far only to be at risk of losing everything. From the outside, I knew we looked to be in good shape. Hell, even people within the company had yet to grasp the danger we were in. But the economic downturn had hit us as hard as the rest of the industry. Our first few years, we’d been flush with cash—we would develop, we would sell, we would profit. But as prices dropped, selling became harder. The profit margins shrank. Finding investment partners became more difficult, forcing us to spend more and more of our own capital on the next project to keep moving forward. We had to take out loans, the interest piling up breathtakingly fast.
If we didn’t catch a break soon, if we didn’t make a real profit, free and clear, our move into the red was going to get a lot more permanent.
The prospect of bankruptcy was terrifying to me. That would probably sound like a an obvious statement to most people, but in the circles we ran in, business risk was a part of life. And most of these people wouldn’t really be affected, not personally. Money was something to be played with, something to take chances with, something to multiply when you could. But at the end of the day, there were family fortunes, inheritances, and trust funds to fall back on. Money wasn’t real. There would always be more money.
It was a perspective I couldn’t wrap my mind around. I still remembered, very clearly, the terror that had run through me that day all those summers ago when I had gone through the books at my dad’s shop and realized the trouble he was in. How close he was to losing it all. When you live on the edge of ruin, the prospect of bankruptcy is a much different thing. A living, breathing beast, capable of devouring your entire family, your entire life.
You’ll be fine, I reminded myself, for the hundredth time. Of course I wanted to see R&E do well, to turn it around, to survive. But no matter what happened to the business, I realized that I, personally, would survive it. I had savings. A home. Brains. Experience. I could get another job. The success or failure of this business didn’t necessarily mean my own success or failure.
I knew these things. But it was harder to make myself feel them.
I tried to picture myself in another job, working for a big development outfit, maybe, a cubby of an office, crunching numbers, working myself to exhaustion. It didn’t seem too much different than what I had now, with R&E, if I was being honest. But at least now, I had the small satisfaction that my exhaustion was for my own benefit, not some faceless millionaire stranger.
A small satisfaction, indeed.
But it was a viable option, getting another job, if disaster struck at least. I had a law degree from one of the best universities in the country. I had years of experience. I would be okay.
I would also be stuck.
That’s what it all came down to, in the end. If the business failed, I was stuck. The years of working, of saving, of being frugal and denying myself the things I had always wanted to be able to afford—it would all be for nothing. I would still be here.
And there was nothing I wanted more desperately than to leave here.
My phone buzzed in my hand, and I jumped. On the screen was a message from Emma. Heading down now. Shit. Emma was on her way down, and here I was, staring out the window, lost in my thoughts. As if I didn’t have things to accomplish, a long list of to-dos that would occupy my entire day.
I picked up my bag on the way out and scurried to the elevator that would take me down to our building’s gym, to where Emma was waiting, ready to start one of the most important days of my life.
***
Two hours later, I was balancing a cup of coffee on top of a heavy stack of files, trying to keep my briefcase and my purse from slipping off my shoulder and somehow get through the glass doors of our office building at the same time.
“Let me, Miss Elliot,” my assistant Lucy said, sliding around me to hold the door.
“Thanks, Luce,” I said, grateful. I did not need to start the morning, today, of all days, with a coffee stain on my shirt. As I passed through the door into the lobby, Lucy reached out and grabbed the coffee while simultaneously slipping an arm around the files, freeing me of my burden.
“You should have called me if you wanted coffee,” she chided as I rearranged the briefcase and purse on my shoulder. “That’s like, my job.”
“I needed a caffeine fix just to get into the building,” I told her, waving at Huck, the security guard, as we passed his desk and headed for the elevator.
“You need a surgical pump or something,” she said. “Like, intravenous.”
I laughed, trying to ignore the pounding in my head, the earlier thrum of a headache having turned into a near-migraine at some point between Pilates and my morning shower. Usually, I found my morning exercise class to be one of the few times the headache would fade, but the stress of today was apparently too great to expect any favors in that department.
“You okay?” Lucy asked as we stepped into the elevator. “You look tired.”
I winced, reminding myself that she was far too young to understand the insult implicit in that observation. But the reminder only made me grumpier—oh, to be so young as to not worry about the ever-present threat of looking tired.
“I’m a little stressed about the meeting,” I explained. Understatement of the year.
She gave me a sympathetic head tilt. “It will work out,” she said bracingly. “I know it will. You’re all way too amazing to not get it.”
“We’ll see about that.”
She shook her head, wide-eyed. “No, really, Miss Elliot. How could they say no to you? I’d kill to stay at a hotel you guys worked on—anyone would.”
“There are a lot of things that have to go right first.” The list started to scroll before my eyes, the way it did dozens of times every day. Convince the developers they wanted to work with us. Convince them to give us more money than they think we needed. Finalize the plans. Convince the zoning commission to approve our bid. Organize all of the various contractors and consultants that would need to be brought in. Somehow manage to stay afloat until the money starts coming in…
One thing at a time, I ordered myself, rubbing at my forehead again. The developers first. Concentrate on the developers.
Lucy was saying something else, but I tuned her out, knowing the gist of her sentiments before she even opened her mouth. Lucy had been my assistant for only three months, but that had been more than enough time for me to glean a full understanding of her opinion on the company, on Emma, on Vegas, on style, on what was trendy. She had a lot of opinions, Lucy. Most of them were complimentary, gratifying, even. She was very positive. Silly as hell, sometimes, but hey, she was young. Time and age had yet to turn her into a bitter, cynical bitch like me.
She was still innocent enough, for example, to be in awe of Emma’s fancy clothes, of the dinners and drinks we partook in as a matter of course of business, of our matching apartments in a modern, luxurious, amenity-filled complex just blocks from the Strip. To a girl like Lucy, we were the epitome of elegance and sophistication, with our designer heels and designer bags and designer hair and designer makeup.
What she didn’t see were the hours I put into scouring eBay, hunting down sample sales, clipping coupons, hounding consignment shops—all in an effort to maintain the required façade of success. Of looking like I belonged in this lifestyle, with these people. It was exhausting, the effort it took to appear to fit in, an effort I had been making my entire life.
It was all such bullshit. Lucy just wasn’t old enough to see that yet.
And I couldn’t blame her. Wasn’t I the same way, when I first met Emma and her friends? Was there ever any girl so in awe as I was in those early days at Country Day?
The elevator doors opened to our floor, and Lucy gestured with the coffee cup. “After you, Miss Elliot.”
“Lucy,” I said as sternly as I could manage. “I’ve told you a thousand times; call me Annabelle.”
She blushed a little, looking even more adorable than usual, and I forced myself not to be jealous. When I blushed, it turned into giant red blotches all over my face and neck, not the little rose-colored cheek apples Lucy had going on right then.
“There is one thing I don’t really get, Miss—Annabelle,” she said as we walked through the open concept area of the office.
“What’s that?”
“Well, these people you’re meeting with, Covington Group—they’re a development firm, right?”
“That’s right.”
“And we’re a development firm.”
“Also right.”
“Well, I don’t get it. If they do the same thing as us, what do they need us for? What do we need them for?”
“Covington is a much larger firm, Lucy. An international firm, they’re not based here. This is a smaller project for a company like them, and they’d rather work with a local company to do the actual development.”
“But then you have to share the money.”
“True. But we don’t have to put anything up. Usually, we have to work with a bunch of investors to get financing for one of our projects. Working with Covington means we can skip the investors, do the work, and get paid.” And not put any of our own funds into it, I thought. And maybe, somehow, get ourselves back into the black and avoid ruin.
“There you are,” a voice sounded down the hall, and I couldn’t keep myself from closing my eyes, albeit briefly. I thought Lucy might have caught me, because she was clearly concealing a smile as Mary click clacked her way across the marble floors toward us.
Persuaded Page 6
