Dirty Filthy Rich Men

by Laurelin Paige

  I stared at the program. It was still open to the page that had started this whole conversation and caused us to miss two panels already.

  His picture showed he’d aged well.

  But I already knew that. I’d seen both of their pictures many times, and they’d both aged well. Weston King and Donovan Kincaid were famous in the ad world. Instead of following Harvard with jobs in their fathers’ investment firm, they’d opened up an international advertising agency. Weston ran the office in the States and Donovan ran the branch in Tokyo.

  When I’d agreed to go to New York for three days with Ashley for this conference, I’d had no idea he’d be a speaker.

  “He probably won’t even remember me,” I said, staring at his panty-melting dimple.

  “Who could forget you? With a face like his, I’d use any card I had to try to get close to him. He’s a hottie. Oh, wait, I forgot you’re more into brains than looks these days—maybe he’ll share all his award-winning inspirations with an old friend.”

  I shook my head and pulled my hand through my hair—the ponytail was long gone, but the habit was not. I probably should see his speech anyway. And what was the harm in sticking around afterward? Wouldn’t it be nice to finally have some closure to those days?

  The waitress returned with the bill and Ashley quickly signed.

  “All right,” Ashley said. “Ready, Bri?”

  It was a loaded question. Was anyone ever ready for men like Weston King and Donovan Kincaid?

  Pulling out my phone, I used the camera to freshen up my lipstick and took a deep breath. “Let’s do this.”

  Part Two

  Men

  Six

  “He won’t remember me,” I insisted. I had to concentrate in order not to fidget. The martinis I’d had earlier in the night had worn off an hour ago, and I was nervous. How had I gotten talked into this again?

  “Would you stop saying that?” Ashley peered around the people in front of us, probably sizing up how long it would be before it was our turn. We were lined up with a dozen or so other women who’d stayed after the keynote at the “Advertising in a New Age” convention to greet the speaker, Weston King. “You’re smart. Witty. Put together. Gorgeous. No one can forget you.”

  The woman she was describing had only existed for the last handful of years. Before that, I’d been awkward and shy. I’d hidden behind plain features and a mess of mousy brown hair that I’d typically worn in a ponytail. “You didn’t know me in college. I was definitely forgettable then.” And obviously nothing special since I couldn’t manage to keep my spot at Harvard for more than one semester.

  Ashley inhaled, a sign that she was trying to stay patient. Then she turned to me and gave me her most encouraging smile. “I know you now. Even if he doesn’t remember you, he’ll pretend he does just to keep talking to you.”

  My lid twitched as I fought not to roll my eyes. “Shut up.”

  “I can’t. I have a perfectly non-lesbian girl-crush on you. You know this. I can’t understand anyone who isn’t in love with you.” She wrapped her arm through mine, and we stepped forward. One more person stood between him and us. Between Weston and me. Between my past and my present. Was I ready for my worlds to collide?

  Honestly, I was probably getting psyched up over nothing. Too many years had gone by to make a big deal about the threads that had been dropped back then. A decade, in fact. We’d hardly even known each other back then. I’d had one real conversation with the man—boy, at the time—and the rest of my experience with him had been in watching from a distance.

  It wasn’t as if I were standing in line to see Donovan Kincaid. Now that would be something to be anxious about. He would remember me. He’d have to. What had happened between us had been so small in the scheme of time but so big in the scope of the impact it’d had, at least on my life. Did I have the same effect on him?

  I was still thinking about Donovan, about his chiseled jaw and his hazel eyes and the awful way we’d parted when the woman in front of us made her goodbyes and stepped out of line, leaving me standing face to face with Weston King.

  Jesus, he was beautiful. He’d always been beautiful, but the last ten years had only made him more so. I’d spent the last ninety minutes staring at him as he’d given his talk in the Javits Center, so I should have been prepared, but close-up, his attractiveness was even more striking. His blue eyes even more shocking. His smile even more stunning.

  He had the kind of looks that would make any girl’s panties damp. I was convinced of that.

  “Hello,” he said, smoothly. So smoothly I couldn’t tell if it was out of recognition or simply charm.

  “Uh, hi.” That was all I could manage to get out. I might be coiffed and put together on the outside, but seeing Weston King promptly brought back all the awkwardness of my youth.

  Thankfully, Ashley was there to come to the rescue.

  She stepped forward, nudging me with her. “Hi, I’m Ashley. This is my friend Sabrina. We work at Now, Inc. in L.A. and we wanted to tell you that we really enjoyed your talk tonight. I particularly liked your insight on the relationship between departments within an agency. I’ve seen the same competitive struggles between the sales team and the creative in our office.”

  “Thank you,” Weston said. “The war between salesmen versus artists. It’s the nature of the beast, I think.”

  He directed his comment to both of us, but all I could do was nod like an idiot.

  Ashley inhaled audibly—that almost silent cue she was frustrated—and put her arm around my shoulder. “Also, she’s too shy to say it, but Sabrina went to college with you.”

  “Ashley!” I warned. This was the problem with having a “no boundaries” type of friend. If I didn’t stop her, soon she’d be spouting out that I’d had a massive crush on him back then too. God help me if she brought up Donovan. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

  “We went to school together?” For the first time since I’d stood in front of him, Weston looked at me—really looked at me.

  His gaze tickled as he studied my face, and I felt my cheeks flush. “I was only at Harvard for part of our freshman year.” Not that that had been my choice. “I’m sure you don’t remember me.” Jesus, I couldn’t even look him in the eye. What was wrong with me? I was twenty-seven, not seventeen.

  He cocked his head. “Did we know each other very well? What was your name again?”

  Oh god. He really didn’t remember me. This was utterly humiliating.

  “We spoke just once or twice. I’m Sabrina Lind,” I said, wishing I could crawl under a rock. “Really, I wouldn’t expect you to know me. It was just an interesting little tidbit I could tell my friend to make her think I was cool.”

  He laughed politely, showing off the dimple I’d been so fond of all those years ago. Come to find out, it still made my knees weak.

  “Anyway,” I said. There were a few people behind us waiting to meet him. More women eager to melt from thirty seconds of his attention. It was time to get going. “Good to see you. You gave a great speech.”

  “I appreciate it.” Weston continued to survey me, still trying to place me, but then I prodded Ashley to go, and he turned his attention to the women behind us.

  “Well, that was embarrassing,” I whispered as soon as we were a handful of feet away.

  “It was so worth it,” she said, fanning herself with her program. “I can’t believe you went to school with a wickedly handsome mega billionaire. He’s even hotter in person than he was on the cover of Money magazine last year. That dimple!”

  “Right?” It was nice to have someone else witness the beauty that was Weston King. “You should see him without his shirt on. He was on the rowing—”

  From behind me, I heard Weston say a word that caught my attention.

  Heart beating, hands sweating, I turned around to see him staring after us. “What did you say?”

  “You were in Donovan’s class,” he repeated, his eyes wide with
recollection. Donovan. That was the word that I’d heard. “You stood me up.”

  He did remember me.

  “Told you so,” Ashley whispered at my side.

  I pinched her arm and called back to Weston. “I had a really good reason. I promise.”

  He put a finger up to signal for me to wait as he finished signing the program of the woman in front of him. When he was done, he sauntered toward us. “I’ll let you tell me all about it over drinks.”

  Weston pinned his eyes on mine. “Okay, your father died, you went home and raised your sister, finished college, got your MBA. Then what?”

  It had been almost an hour and a half since Ashley had so kindly feigned too tired to join us for a nightcap, and Weston had taken me to one of his favorite local nightclubs, The Sky Launch, for a drink, which had now turned into two. The circular booth we sat in overlooked the dance floor below, but because of the way it was set off with glass walls, the music wasn’t too loud to talk over. It provided a very unique vibe, one both intimate and alive.

  “That’s about it, really.” I hadn’t bothered to tell him about my fight to get back to Harvard or how the MADAR foundation had refused to give me my scholarship back after I’d left without finishing the semester. Though it had happened ten years in the past, it was still a sore spot.

  “That can’t be it. There’s always more,” he prodded. “How did you choose advertising?”

  “Well. Advertising actually found me,” I said, kicking off my shoes and folding one foot underneath my thigh. “I’ve always been equally left- and right-brained, and I wanted to find a job that involved numbers and metrics but also involved creativity, so I got my emphasis in marketing. After I graduated, I had an interview with a headhunter, and one of the jobs she had available happened to be in a marketing department in an ad agency. Of all the positions she showed me, it was the one I was least interested in. But then when I got the offer and I flew out to Los Angeles to visit the office, I fell in love with the energy there. There was numbers and structure and ideas and art. Where else do you get all of that mixed together?”

  Weston had taken off his jacket earlier. Now, he loosened his tie and stretched his arm out across the top of the bench. “Some people think that makes those of us who choose this field crazy.”

  His choice of words stung at something that hadn’t bothered me in a long time. I’d wondered if I’d been crazy back then, when I’d been younger and the thoughts and feelings I’d had were strange and unusual and hard to grapple with. The people and fantasies that had turned me on had been frightening and dark.

  But I’d grown up and realized that my time at Harvard had not been the norm. It had been a period of dalliance and in no way defined what I was to be for the rest of my life. My thoughts were normal. My fantasies weren’t strange. I wasn’t crazy.

  Sometimes I worried I had to work a little too hard to convince myself of that.

  But I was out with Weston King, and if that was crazy, that was exactly the kind of crazy I wanted to be. The kind of crazy I hoped I was. So I said, “Probably so. But what’s wrong with that?”

  Our eyes met and held. As the night had passed, we’d moved closer and closer to each other. Now we were tilted in toward one another, our bodies only inches apart. Either this was going somewhere or…

  “You’re still in the marketing department then?” Weston asked, picking up his manhattan and swirling it around before taking a swallow.

  “Started in research, and now I’m the manager of strategy and marketing.” I sighed inwardly. Thinking about my job was depressing. While I loved the actual work, the president who’d come on in the last year had been a nightmare to work with.

  Besides, what I was interested in was Weston’s firm—Reach, Inc. The business was only five years old and yet was already one of the leaders in the industry. It was the kind of career I’d hoped to have if I would’ve finished school at Harvard. “Your job, though…” I paused, hoping my jealousy sounded more like admiration. “What you’ve done is incredible.”

  Weston shrugged dismissively but somehow beamed at the same time. “It’s been quite a ride. I can hardly believe it’s my life.”

  This surprised me. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth—I’d thought he’d expect everything he touched to turn to gold. It was harder to resent his success when he was humble about it. “This is going to sound naïve, but what exactly do you do? How do you split everything up?”

  “Not naïve at all.” He set his glass down, and now we were close enough that my knee touched his. Warmth spread throughout me, gathering in my belly. “I actually have no idea.”

  I chuckled with unexplained nervousness. “Be serious.”

  “Well. We’re set up in a traditional agency structure with a board of directors that consists of five people.” Five men, from what I’d read. Talk about a world of the patriarch. Donovan was the only other one I knew by name. “There’s two guys in Tokyo, a guy in London, and Nathan Sinclair and I run the New York office together. Nate oversees creative and account services, and I run everything else.”

  “Which is a lot.”

  “Which is a lot,” he repeated.

  “So operations, marketing, research, finance…that’s all you?” I was surprised. Our office had three bosses overseeing all the areas and it was a smaller firm.

  Weston shrugged. “Mostly I hide in my office and read Buzzfeed all day, but somehow the checks keep coming in.”

  “You do more than that.”

  “We’re growing. We’ll have to change the structure soon.” Abruptly, he altered his tone, dismissing the previous subject and growing serious. “This is boring, though. Let’s talk about you.”

  I lowered my eyes, suddenly shy. “I’ve already told you everything about me.”

  “Let’s talk about our brief encounter in college.”

  “It was so brief, it could barely be called an encounter.” We’d had a class together, and once we’d shared a lunch. Then he’d asked me out, and I’d said yes, but I’d had to go home because my father died before the party had actually happened.

  “I’d never been stood up before you. That hurt.” He reached out to adjust my necklace, a simple cross that had belonged to my mother before she’d died. His fingers felt hot on my already too warm skin, like adding fire to fire.

  We sparked.

  “And yet you didn’t even remember who I was when you first saw me.” I put my hand on his thigh, lightly, cautiously. His muscle flexed under my touch, and a thrill shot down my spine.

  He tugged lightly on a piece of my hair, and I could imagine him pulling it harder. “I didn’t recognize you without the ponytail.”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  His face grew somber. “I really was into you, Sabrina.”

  The soberness of his declaration was hard to believe. “For all of five minutes. Literally five minutes.”

  “There were a lot of girls at that school. It took me a while to notice you.” He put his hand on my bare knee and stroked the skin on the inside of my lower thigh. “Not my fault.”

  “Uh-huh.” It was hard to refute him when my body was swimming in this dizziness. I’d wanted him so much back then. Not just him, but all that he stood for—his school, his money, his future. That want lingered into the want I had for him now.

  “If you’d have come to that party…” He trailed off, his voice thick and seductive.

  “Then what?” I’d thought about it from time to time over the years. Wondered what could have happened between Weston and me if we’d had the chance.

  He leaned in and told me now. “I would have tried to get you into bed.”

  I inhaled his words, taking them in all the way before responding. “I would have gone.”

  At least I would have if that other thing hadn’t happened. When he’d invited me, I’d hoped for that. After the incident with Donovan, I wasn’t sure anymore what I’d wanted.

  “You would have?”
r />   I nodded. “You wouldn’t have even had to try very hard. I had a major crush on you.”

  Weston’s hand moved higher up my leg, and he leaned in to whisper near my ear. “I’m going to try to get you into bed now.”

  He was a special kind of catnip. Not only was he someone I’d wanted in the past, but he’d also achieved everything I’d ever desired for myself. There was something unexplainably attractive about that.

  But I didn’t have to use words to tell him trying wasn’t necessary. Weston King had this one in the bag.

  Seven

  I picked up Weston’s slacks off the floor, shook them, then dropped them again when nothing fell out. Circling, I scanned the room for the third time. “I can’t find my panties,” I said with a sigh.

  Weston watched me from the bed, his head propped up with his hand. “You don’t need them.”

  “I do. I have to get dressed.” I looked again through the skirt, bra, and camisole I was holding, in case I’d missed my underwear clinging to one of them. Not there. I dropped the clothes on the bed and sighed again.

  “No, you don’t. Stay here,” he beckoned. “Stay in bed with me forever.”

  “I can’t. You know I have to get back.” After drinks on Friday night, Weston had taken me to his penthouse and fucked me until the sun came up. We’d stayed in bed all day Saturday and most of today, leaving only to eat on occasion. Now it was Sunday afternoon, and I had a red-eye to catch.

  “Where did you put them after dinner last night?” he asked, stretching so the sheet fell down his body, exposing his bare torso and the beautiful happy trail that I’d become so familiar with in the last couple of days.

  I dragged my thoughts back to the evening before. We’d gone to an Asian fusion restaurant. Weston had fingered me on the cab ride home. “I didn’t wear them to dinner last night.”

  “Oh, yeah.” He grinned, his eyes lighting up with hunger.

  My belly tightened. “Stop looking at me like that, or I’m never getting out of here.”