Instead, I shut off the water and put my hands on the counter, trying to rein in my anger. She said she’d have an open mind. That meant she was supposed to agree with me. To see that this was the best thing for her and her sister. And it was. It truly fucking was. Why couldn’t she see that?
I strode to the refrigerator and took out two plastic containers. “Other people who make the same kind of income you do live in this building. Why the hell shouldn’t you and Cara? You’re just as deserving as they are. More so, even.” I tossed the two containers on the counter between us and growled at her. “Chicken salad or roast beef?”
Autumn had been staring at me openmouthed, but now she looked down at the counter and then back up at me, blinking in surprise. “What?”
“Lunch. Do you want the chicken salad or roast beef sandwich?” I growled, still pissed.
“Umm….” she looked back at the two clear plastic containers which each contained wrapped sandwiches, chips, and a pickle slice. A woman from the leasing office had left them here for us. “Umm…” Autumn said again, as I glared at her. And then I saw her shoulders shaking as she looked down at her choices.
“What?” I barked.
She looked up at me, and then I saw it. She was laughing. I gaped at her for a moment, not getting the joke. “What?” I said again, this time a little exasperated. At my office when I raged, no one laughed.
“I’ve never had anyone offer me lunch options and yell at me at the same time.”
“Well, then this is a first,” I said gruffly.
She nodded, but her shoulders were still shaking. Dammit. I meant every word I said. My caring about her safety wasn’t funny. But okay, maybe my getting her lunch in the middle of my rant was. A little. Shit, why did she have to look so damn cute when she laughed? I needed to stay firm. Demand that she see reason. And not let the corner of my mouth raise into a half smile. But I could feel it doing so anyway.
She smiled bigger at my capitulation, and suddenly I couldn’t help chuckling along with her. “You are the most frustrating woman,” I said, still a little irritated with her and a lot irritated with myself for not holding strong. But her laughter was just so infectious. “Just for making me break down and laugh, you get the chicken salad.”
“Okay,” she said, pulling the marked container toward her. I went back to the fridge and found two sodas for us. “Thank you,” she said as I set them down. She opened her diet soda and took a long sip, her eyes never leaving mine.
“What?” I asked, opening my soda and downing half of it.
“Can I ask a rude offensive question?”
“Offend away.”
“If I rent this apartment… umm… what happens if things don’t work out with us? Not that I’m trying to jinx us or anything like that,” she said hurriedly. “But just… it seems important to take that kind of thing into consideration.”
That meant she was thinking about saying yes. Hot damn. And I wanted to tell her that if she thought we were going to fizzle out anytime soon, she was greatly mistaken, but I didn’t. She’d see that soon enough. And from a business standpoint, it was a reasonable question. “Your contract is with the leasing office in this building. It has nothing to do with me. I can’t get you evicted, I can’t get you a further break on the rent, I can’t walk in on you naked in the shower.” I raised an eyebrow at her with that last part and was pleased to see her mouth twitch upward at that.
“Seriously, you can do whatever you like and it’ll still be your apartment. You could call me every name in the book. Or dump me. Or hold an orgy without inviting me. And it’ll still be your apartment.”
“Even if we break up?” she said, holding but not eating her sandwich.
“Even then,” I said. “But if we ever did break up, I’d hope we’d remain close enough friends that you’d invite me to your orgies.”
Now I got a real grin, and then she finally took a bite of her sandwich. She looked lost in thought for a long moment, and then she said, “Deal.”
“About the orgies?”
“About the apartment.”
Holy shit, really? Victory washed through me. She was going to live in a safe place. And she was going to be much closer to me. I wanted to race around the counter, pick her up, and swing her around the air. But instead I decided to go for broke. I tuned into what she was saying, I’d almost missed it while contemplating the second part of my plan.
“Thank you so much, Ford. This is—this is going to be life-changing for Cara and me.”
“You’re welcome. But… I did forget to mention one rule they have here.”
She grinned at me, probably thinking I was going to say something dirty. Which actually wasn’t a bad idea. But this was important too. It was time. “This is a residential building. No tenants are allowed to operate a business on this premises.”
Autumn was frowning, clearly not following what I was saying. “In other words… no working from home. Such as taking calls for a fantasy hotline.”
Now her frowned deepened. I knew this was none of my fucking business and hypocritical besides. But there was no way I was letting a bunch of horny assholes jerk off to her sweet voice anymore. “It’s time, Autumn. You have a good job now. A professional job. If you quit Sultry Sirens, you can spend your evenings with your sister. Or with your boyfriend. Please?”
She was silent for a long moment, her food forgotten in front of her. “If I hadn’t taken that job, we never would have made ends meet. I know it sounds strange, but it’s been a good job for me. It’s a good company. They’ve—they’ve done right by me.”
That was good to hear, but she didn’t owe anyone anything. “You don’t need it anymore. You’ve got a good place to live and a full-time job with benefits.”
“Thanks to you.”
“And thanks to you. You’re becoming quite an asset at Heidi’s company. And the people here, the staff, the other tenants, they’re going to love having you and Cara around.”
She was silent again, somehow looking smaller than she had a few minutes ago when she was laughing at me. I wanted to go to her, to hug her, to spank her, to fuck her—anything I could do to make the right words pop out of her mouth. To make her agree with me. But I could only wait. And I sucked at waiting.
“Okay,” she finally said.
“You mean it?”
“I do. You’re right, it is time to quit.”
Relief flooded through me. “So no more talking to perverts on the phone?”
“Well, I’ll probably still talk to one—but only because he knows my real number.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” I said. And then I did walk around the counter and hug her. The spanking and fucking would have to wait for another time, unfortunately. We both had to get back to work.
But she’d agreed. She’d live here. She’d quit the fantasy hotline. She wouldn’t be anyone else’s fantasy except mine.
It was a great fucking day.
28
Autumn
“Well? What do you think? Do you like it?”
Cara looked up from the papers in her hand, her script for her play, as I struggled to formulate an answer. We were sitting in our living room—well, our living room for now. A week from now, we’d be moving into our new apartment. It was hard to believe it was really happening, but it was. I’d already signed the lease.
“It’s not a hundred percent done, but that’s the first draft,” Cara continued. She’d just read the big speech the main character, the Cinderella character, gives to Prince Charming during the final scene at the ball. But the speech had made me a little uneasy.
“That’s a really good start,” I said cautiously.
Cara frowned. “That’s what Mrs. Hagen says when it’s not very good.”
Oh, yeah. I forgot that Cara would know that trick. She had many of the same teachers I had when I was in high school. “Well, it is a good start. No one’s first draft is perfect.”
“I know,” Cara said. Sh
e took a deep breath, seeming to steel herself. “So what part do you think still needs work? This is the big speech. It’s the focal point of the whole play. I need to get it right.”
“Well… you’ve said before that you want the main character to be the prince’s equal, right?”
“Yes. Ella’s his equal in every way, but she doesn’t have the money or the power that he has.”
“Okay, but in this speech, it kind of sounds like he swooped in and changed her life. Like she didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“But he did change her life,” Cara said.
“I know, but she changed it, too. By being a strong woman in her own right. By insisting that she wanted more from her life than being a maid to her stepsisters and stepmother. She tried to make her life better. And when the prince came along, he was able to help her because of his power and resources—but also because he recognized what a strong person she was.”
“Yeah, that’s the whole point of the play.” Cara blinked at me, frowning. She clearly didn’t understand what I was saying. I supposed I wasn’t doing a very good job of explaining.
“It’s just … her speech makes it sound like it was all the Prince’s doing. Like she didn’t do anything on her own.”
“But nothing changed in her life until he showed up.”
“I know. But she laid the foundation for creating a better life for herself. I think you need to emphasize that.”
“Autumn, she can’t stand up there and say that she’s done things right. This speech is all about what he’s done for her. And about how much she loves him.”
I pulled my legs up under me and sighed. This was a fundamental difference to me, and it bothered me that Cara couldn’t see it. But I didn’t know how to explain it to her any better. “Well, as I said, it’s a good start. But maybe you could try to show that she loves him and that they support each other. That’s it’s a two-way street.”
“But what can she give him? She’s dirt poor, and he has everything.”
Sinking down into the sofa, I rested my head against the cushion behind me. “Just an idea,” I said mildly.
“Okay, well, thanks,” Cara concluded uncertainly. “I’ll think about what you said when I write the next draft.”
That conversation weighed heavily on my mind the next few days. But things were busy with work. We were planning a new series of videos for another company, and I’d been assigned to help write the accompanying training manual as well as narrate. Trying to write clear, concise instructions was a world of difference from reading off a script. The latter came easy to me, the former did not. But I’d been a fairly decent writer in high school English classes, and I felt like I was making headway. At work, at least.
With Cara, it was a different story. We’d always been so close, and we rarely fought. But I was still unsettled by our difference of opinion over the big speech in her play. And on Wednesday morning, the same issue came up in a different way.
“I’m meeting Ford after work today to look at the new apartment. Do you want to come?”
Cara’s eyes lit up at the mention of Ford, as they always did, but then her face fell. “I can’t. I have a test in trigonometry tomorrow. I’ll just go to the library after school as usual.”
I nodded. I’d told Cara that I’d quit my “customer service” job answering phones for a cable company, but thus far, she’d stuck to her schedule of going to the library on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays after school. Which reminded me of something. “Oh, and tomorrow I can’t pick you up after school. I’ve got to take the car in.”
“Is it still making that noise?” she asked, pouring herself a little more cereal while I sipped my coffee.
“Yeah. And yesterday, it felt like it was losing power when I tried to accelerate.”
“That’s not good,” she said with a frown. “Do you think it could, I don’t know, cut out while you’re driving?”
“I hope not,” I said, though that had been my fear, too. “I’m not going to take the highway anywhere, and I’ll be careful.” For the past two days, I’d kept an eye out for places I could pull over if the car gave out. It had originally been my mother’s and it had well over 100,000 miles on it.
“That’s scary. Why don’t you just ask Ford for a new one?”
“What?” I said, choking a little on my coffee.
“Ha, ha, maybe he’ll get you a Ford,” Cara said, not noticing my reaction. “But no, he’s rich, he’ll probably get you a beamer.”
“He’s not getting me a car.”
“Well, you won’t know until you ask him,” she said, looking at me with guileless blue eyes.
“I’m not going to ask him.” I still couldn’t believe she was suggesting this.
“Why not?”
“Because he can’t buy us a car.” Shock at my sister’s attitude made it hard to come up with a coherent argument.
“Why not?” she said again. “He got us an apartment. He got you that job.”
“Cara… he arranged for the interview. I got me that job. And as for the apartment, he didn’t get it for us. He arranged for us to lease it on a sliding pay scale, the same way many other tenants do.”
She appeared to have heard very little of this. “He wants us to be safe, Autumn. That car’s not safe. He’s a billionaire. Buying us a car would probably be no different for him than us buying lunch at a restaurant.”
Her cereal finished, she took her dish to the sink and put the milk back in the fridge. I stopped her before she went back to her room to grab her stuff for school. “Cara… it’s not his job to fix our lives. That’s our job. To make the best life we can for ourselves. Ford is our friend, not our fairy godmother. We can’t ask him for anything more than he’s already given us.” And I already felt extremely guilty for what he’d done for us.
But none of this seemed to sink in. “I still say he’d want us to be safe,” she said as she left the kitchen. “Our new door is proof of that. That sucker is sturdier than a drawbridge.”
“It’s not his job to fix our life,” I repeated, frustrated that I wasn’t getting through to her. I’d never felt this disconnect from Cara about anything important.
“Well, maybe he should. Look at how much our lives sucked before. Face it, BF—Before Ford—was a lot worse than AF. And After Ford means a great apartment and a great job for you. So why shouldn’t it include a safe car for us?”
After Cara left to catch the bus, I stayed frozen in my chair, my coffee chilling on the table next to me. Finally when it was almost time to leave for work the tears came. For Cara’s sudden attitude. For being unable to get through to her.
But mostly because she said that our life, the life I’d worked so hard to create for her, had sucked before Ford. BF, she’d called it. Had it really been that bad? According to this new, entitled version of my sister, it had.
29
Ford
“Come see the view,” I said, taking her hand. We’d kissed when I met her downstairs and I’d given her the keys, but she’d seemed a little distant.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, but still in that flat tone. It was the same tone she’d used when she told me she quit the Sultry Sirens job. Was she regretting that decision or was this just about the apartment?
“Don’t you like it as much as the other one?” I’d told her that the unit I’d shown her before was a model. The one she and Cara were moving into was a few floors lower, but basically the same except for the furniture. The living room was filled with a rich mahogany dining room table, bookcases, and a sofa and love seat set that she hadn’t even commented on. She still hadn’t answered, so I asked again. “Don’t you like it? I can see when the next one’s opening up. I think someone’s moving out next week.”
“No, it’s great,” I said.
“But…?”
And then it all came pouring out. Words—and tears. I led her over to the larger couch and pulled her down next to me. She tucked her feet to the side and l
eaned against me. As I held her, stroking her hair, she told me about her fight with Cara. About the thoughtless things her younger sibling had said. And I felt a brief stab of guilt. This was exactly the kind of thing she’d been worried about before the Chicago weekend when she’d said she was worried about Cara getting spoiled.
“I’m sorry,” I said, kissing the top of her head as I ran my fingers through her silky blonde strands.
“For what?” she said through her tears. “For being really nice to us?”
“For how upset you are now.”
“I just—I just never dreamed she felt that way. That our lives sucked before.”
“She probably doesn’t.”
“Then why’d she say it?” Idly, she ran her fingers across the smooth black fabric of my pants, up and down my thigh. I doubted she even knew she was doing it, but I certainly did.
“Because she’s a teen. And teens say stupid shit sometimes. I certainly did. Cara is a great kid, but she’s still a teen. So she’s supposed to say mean things—especially to people she loves.”
“Did you?”
“All the time,” I said. “The shit I said makes Cara’s words sound like something out of a Hallmark card. I used to belittle my dad about being a corporate stooge. About putting every ounce of his energy into that corporation and never having a life for himself. And now I’m the CEO, and I see what an ass I was.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Sorry I was an ass?”
“Sorry you can’t take it back.” Maybe she’d recognized the pain in my voice.
“Me too.”
We were silent for a few minutes, but it was a comfortable silence. I was glad she felt she could tell me these things. When we’d first met, she was so guarded. But now, every time I saw her, she was opening up more and more. I wanted her to trust me.
After a moment, she spoke in a quiet, contemplative voice. “This was my fear—ever since I met you. Not that this is your fault. It’s not, it’s mine.”
Charming: A Cinderella Billionaire Story Page 18
