Charming: A Cinderella Billionaire Story

by Sophie Brooks

  Ford blinked, as if I’d just thrown my margarita in his face. But then he laughed. “Damn, you had me going there for a minute. No wonder you’re so good at your non-waitressing job. But surely it’s more flattering than a trash bag?”

  “Not much.”

  “Well, then, I hope it’s at least a comfortable trash bag. But I believe I was asking about your family when you so deftly got me off track.”

  “Hey, you were the one who salivated when I mentioned my uniform.”

  “Touché. But let’s get back to the original question. I take it your parents are no longer in the picture?”

  I set my fork down on the plate, letting out a little sigh. I didn’t like to talk about this, but it was part of who I was. And part of the life that Cara and I lived today. “My mom was diagnosed with cancer when I was in my senior year of high school. Stage Four.”

  “I’m really sorry to hear that,” he said softly, reaching over and putting his hand on mine.

  “Thanks. It was… rough. Cara was just eleven, and my Dad… well, he tried to do what he could to help out. For a while. But he had to work or else we wouldn’t have had health insurance, and well, it was pretty much just me to help my mom. When it got really bad, I wanted to drop out of high school, but she wouldn’t let me.”

  I didn’t even like thinking about those days. Rushing home each day on my lunch break, as often as not calling the school to tell them that I wouldn’t be able to come back that afternoon. My teachers understood the severity of the situation, but still, my grades plummeted. I might not have even graduated if my GPA from before senior year hadn’t been so high.

  Ford squeezed my hand but said nothing. He looked prepared to wait patiently all night, for which I was grateful. Most people expected me to rush through my story so they could move onto happier thoughts.

  “She lasted until that next winter, spending the last four months in hospice. She died about ten months after the initial diagnosis.”

  “And you were what, nineteen?” he asked, and I nodded. “Much too young.”

  “Cara was younger.”

  “Yeah. But it sounds like most of the caregiving work fell to you.”

  “Well, yeah. She was just a kid.”

  “So were you. What happened with your Dad?”

  “He… helped out. For a little while. But then he couldn’t stay. He’s out of the picture, now.” I said, borrowing his phrase from before. Ford seemed to understand my unspoken plea to change the topic.

  “That was a couple of years ago, right? So you’re twenty-three now?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m thirty-one.” The noise of other diners seemed to increase, so I leaned forward to hear him better. “Does that bother you?”

  An eight-year age difference? Was he kidding? We lived in completely different worlds in terms of income, life-style, and social class, and that’s the difference he was worried about? “No.”

  Ford look relieved as he took an extra big bite of his chimichanga. I couldn’t finish my chicken, especially not after all the chips and salsa we’d eaten. As he was distracted with food, I could study him with less likelihood of getting caught. It really was hard to fathom that a guy who looked like that could be sitting here across from me. My eyes were drawn to the way his powerfully muscled arms filled out the navy V-neck he wore. The way the material fit snug across his chest. We really were from different worlds. But oddly enough, his favorite Mexican place was now mine, too. “I should bring Cara here sometime,” I said. “She’d really like it.”

  He looked across the table at me. “Maybe we should bring Cara here sometime.”

  I stared at him for a moment. Did rich people take lessons on saying the right thing at the right time? “That sounds good,” I said. And it really did.

  After that, Ford insisted on paying, not even letting me get the tip. And all that on the top of the new door and the hotel room. He was nothing if not generous.

  It was quite dark when he walked me to my car. But even in the dim light, I’m sure he could see how beat up my old silver hatchback was.

  As I turned to thank him, I caught a distant expression on his face, as if he was looking through me, not at me. “Ford? Thank you for dinner.”

  “What? Yeah, you’re welcome. I was just… I was just thinking about something. About what we were talking about earlier.”

  “About the merits of strawberry versus regular margaritas?” I ventured with a smile, but he remained serious.

  “About the night of the break-in. When you gave me your address. I—I just wanted to say that meant a lot to me. That you trusted me.”

  “It meant a lot to me that you came there yourself,” I said, his serious mood making me more somber, too. I had my back to the car, and Ford stood in front of me, really close. It made me think about seeing him in my living room that awful night, when I’d been so scared. I remembered throwing myself into his arms once I’d recognized who he was. It had been like his presence meant safety. And comfort. Even though I’d never laid eyes on him before.

  I looked at his tall frame, standing close enough to touch. I wondered if I’d get a chance to feel his arms wrapped around me again. And if so, when.

  As he placed on hand lightly on my arm and leaned down to kiss me on the cheek, I wondered if he was thinking about the same thing.

  I hoped that he was.

  12

  Autumn

  It felt strange to be back in my apartment the next night, but I’d insisted to Cara that we couldn’t spend the whole week in the hotel room. Our stuff was here and we could cook and eat much more cheaply here. Plus, I would have felt like an idiot taking fantasy hotline calls in a classy, luxurious hotel room.

  Sitting at my desk with my most recent knitting project waiting for a Sultry Sirens call should have felt familiar, but somehow, it seemed like everything had changed.

  For one thing, all the stuff the burglars had trashed was back in order. The police had caught the thieves before they could leave with our TV and anything else they thought might be of value, but there was still a big mess.

  One of the junkies who’d broken in had told the police he’d heard that people in this apartment building had secret riches hidden inside our units. Preposterous, but those idiots must have believed it because they’d painstakingly searched unlikely places such as the underside of the couch, the hardback books on the shelves, and even the crumb panel of the toaster, of all places. Cara and I had spent hours on Sunday cleaning up.

  For another thing, there was now a really strong, sturdy door between me and the poorly protected hallways of the building. That was something to feel good about. But thinking of Ford made me a little apprehensive about my phone fantasy shift tonight. He’d proven, over and over, that he was a real person. A really kind, helpful person. Usually, it didn’t help me do my job to think about the real lives of the men who called me.

  Some were probably married—there wasn’t anything I could do about that. And I got the feeling that some callers were just lonely. Others seemed to have bad things going on in their lives that made them seek out comfort from a stranger. I didn’t like to think about that.

  I’d taken a call once from a man who’d been in a really bad place. It had been really difficult to hear him talk about how hopeless he’d felt about his life. He needed a counselor, not a woman pretending to be the girl next door, but I’d done my best to listen to him. To help him.

  It was definitely easier for me to think of these phone calls in terms of exchanging goods and services. I was providing a service to a customer. Yes, it was a very intimate service, but it that’s what the job entailed. Getting to know Ford made me think of it as something more real. Shared intimacy between real people, not between a client and a service provider.

  But I didn’t have to worry too long, because Ford was the first caller of the evening. That was unusual—he generally called toward the end of my shift. But after the standard “hi, how was your day,” o
ur conversation picked up where it left off at the restaurant on Saturday. He’d always been easy to talk to, but now he was even more so. An hour and then two passed as we talked.

  Or, I did most of the talking. He asked me a lot of questions. Not the kind of intimate questions other callers asked. Those, I could rattle off sexy answers to without missing a stitch of my knitting. But Ford’s questions were more probing, about my dreams when I’d been younger, what I wanted to be when I grew up, and what universities I’d considered attending before my mom got sick.

  For the first time during one of our phone calls, he was making me a little nervous. Not because of what he was asking, but why he might be asking it. He was a rich guy, that much was clear. He was a problem solver, that was evident, too. But I didn’t want him to think of me as a problem that had to be solved.

  It had happened before. It was almost inevitable when you were in Cara’s and my situation. The first time had been right after mom died. Her cousin Lacey had flown in for the funeral and then stayed on to help out. At first it had been great. She’d taken charge of the many details that had to be worked out for the service and the burial. She’d stayed for ten days, helping out in dozens of different ways—for which I’d be forever grateful.

  But things didn’t go so well after that. The plan was for us to move out to Arizona to stay with Lacey and her boyfriend after Cara’s school year was over. We went out there for a week during spring break, and it quickly became apparent that Lacey’s boyfriend, whose house she lived in, did not want two strange, sad girls around. He was a big time introvert and pretty much the moment we’d shown up, he took to staying out quite late, which upset Lacey a great deal. After we’d returned home, there were lots of phone calls during which she insisted that it would work out, but it never did. Now we only heard from her at Christmas and birthdays.

  The second time someone had stepped up to try to fix our lives it was the father of one of Cara’s friends. He and his wife had recently had a baby—a very unplanned baby—and he figured that Cara and I could live in the room above their garage and I could be the nanny for the baby. But it soon became clear he was hoping I’d take care of more than just the infant.

  Ford wasn’t like Cousin Lacey or Brenda’s father, but still… as we talked I heard that tone in his voice. The “I’m going to solve all their problems and completely change the poor orphans’ lives” tone. And that wasn’t something one person could do for another. Lives didn’t change with the wave of a magic wand—or a rich man’s credit card. Cara and I were making our own way. We were doing okay.

  Whenever I got the chance, I asked him questions about his interests and his time at school, too, but he was a little less forth-coming than I was. From what I could gather, he’d been a good student without a whole lot of effort on his part. He’d enjoyed his classes when he was getting his MBA, but he hadn’t gone out of his way to apply himself—much to the disapproval of his father, it sounded like.

  I also got the impression he’d been a pretty hard partier in school. I could see that. He was smart, funny, and charming, but sometimes I sensed a little bit of a wild side there. A bad boy side that he’d hidden when he joined corporate America. And in college and grad school, he’d been in a fraternity. I bet he’d had a lot of close frat brothers, and I was pretty sure he hadn’t lacked much for female companionship. Probably still didn’t, but I didn’t want to think about that too much.

  The time passed quickly, and I’d gradually relaxed as I listened to stories from Ford’s past. The knitting on my desktop remained untouched, and I was surprised when I looked at the time on my laptop screen. “Wow, we’ve been talking for almost three hours,” I said.

  “Has it been that long? Time flies when you’re prying a pretty woman for information.”

  As if I hadn’t figured out that that’s what he’d been doing. But still, I was willing to tease back. It made me a little smug that Ford’s small talk hadn’t been quite as subtle as he thought it had been. “Are you planning to use this information for good or for evil?”

  “Guess you’ll find out. But maybe it’s a little of both.”

  “I still can’t believe we’ve spoken this long. I’ve never spoken to just one man for almost my entire shift.”

  “Is that a problem? Doesn’t Sultry Sirens make the same amount of money whether you talk to five perverts or just one?”

  That made me laugh. “I guess you’re right, it doesn’t matter to them. But I’ve got to say, you’ve scored pretty low on the perversion meter tonight.”

  “Oh really? Is that a challenge? Because if it is, I’d be more than happy to rise to the occasion,” he said, with extra emphasis on the word rise.

  “I’m sure you would,” I said. “But I like talking to you like a friend, too.”

  “Don’t tell me I’m in the friend-zone already. You really know how to crush a guy’s ego.”

  I laughed again, but to be honest, I wasn’t sure what he was to me. Or what I was—if anything—to him. Just a project in need of solving? Just a woman in need of rescuing? I wasn’t ready to believe it might be something more. “You’re in the Ford-zone. That seems like a pretty good place to be.”

  “I can live with that,” he said. “Do you have to leave soon to get Cara?”

  “Pretty soon.”

  “Then I should let you go, Summer.”

  Oh, right. I was supposed to be someone else here. I’d been my true self all night with him without once thinking of how unusual that was. “I guess I should get going, Client #25642.”

  “Well, it sounds like you’ve got my number, all right.”

  “And don’t you ever forget it. Good night, Ford.”

  “Good night.”

  My personal phone rang as I stepped out into the hall. I swiped the call open and put it to my ear, wondering if Ford was calling back with something he’d forgotten to say. But instead, an automated female voice greeted me with a familiar message.

  I stopped, mid-step. Hesitated for a split second. And then said, “Yes, I’ll accept the charges.”

  I stepped back inside my apartment and closed the door.

  13

  Ford

  “A reporter from the journal is requesting two minutes of your time, sir.”

  I stared at the phone on my desk in frustration. “Refer him to the PR department, Ann. That’s what they’re there for.”

  “It’s a her, sir. Marsha Trent. Said she just wants one quote on the health of the corporation.”

  Briefly, I rested my forehead on one hand. Fucking reporters swarmed around like vultures when things weren’t going well. But this one I knew, or had known. A vision of a tall, willowy redhead tied to my bed, squirming and moaning my name as I made her come, flashed through my mind.

  “Tell her that we’re utilizing the best minds in the industry to strengthen our brand and get ahead of the curve with emerging technologies.” It was utter garbage, and Marsha would know that, but she’d print it and put as positive a spin on it as possible. It wasn’t quite one of the pearls of wisdom my father used to spout to the press, but the world was different now, especially the business world. Trouble was, our corporation was largely the same entity it had been when my father ran it. “Is Garrett back yet?”

  “He’s coming up now.”

  “Thank you.”

  Five minutes later, I was feeling anything but grateful.

  “It’s just not the right time,” Garrett said.

  I squeezed my hands into fists, trying to fight for patience. “Why not?”

  “The board feels that in this economy, it’s not the time to try something new. We need to stick with what works. You of all people know how many hard-working men and women are counting on us to keep our company strong.”

  With effort, I kept myself from pounding my fist through something. Didn’t he realize how many jobs we’d already saved? Didn’t he realize that if our bottom line didn’t improve, the stop-gap measures wouldn’t work forever?


  “I know you’re disappointed, son,” he said, coming over to the window where I was staring at the skyline, wishing I’d been able to go to the board myself. I’d done a lot during my time at this company, but I still hadn’t mastered the art of being in two places at once.

  Now Garrett was patting my arm in a paternal way. “I’m disappointed as well. But now’s the time to keep our heads down and stay the course. Your father knew that, and I think you do, too.”

  Some of my anger dissolved at the mention of my dad. He’d devoted his entire life to this place, and Garrett had been by his side every step of the way. As frustrated as I sometimes got with the older man, deep down, I knew he had my best interests, as well as those of the corporation my father had loved, at heart.

  I turned to the man who was the same age my father would have been, and I didn’t have to say anything. He already knew I’d beaten back my anger and frustration. He thrust his hand out, and I shook it. “Glad there are no hard feelings. Let’s do lunch—maybe next week at the country club?”

  I nodded and he left my office.

  Too keyed up to sit, I paced in front of the floor-to-ceiling window that dominated an entire wall. Some days I felt I was doing good here, making smart decisions like my old man had, and other days I felt like I was on the bench waiting to get called into the game. Today, it was definitely the latter.

  Stopping mid-stride, I made a decision. Just because I couldn’t steer the company in the direction I wanted didn’t mean that everyone’s career had to remain stagnant. I thought about what Autumn and I had talked about last night. About her interests in school, and her hopes and dreams for afterward. Hopes and dreams that had never come true for her. She’d set aside her entire future for first her mother and now her sister. If anyone deserved a new path forward, it was her.