Girl Meets Billionaire

by Brenna Aubrey et al.

  It’s a crisp, sunny day, cool for September in New York. Magically, a limo is there. The driver opens the door.

  Henry turns to me, eyes a lighter, brighter shade of blue out in the sunshine. “How do you feel about walking a bit?”

  “I’d love a walk.”

  He puts Smuckers down, and we set out through the crowds.

  I catch people staring at us and I get the old familiar stir of worry that I’ve been recognized in spite of my hair-color change—long curly red hair was one of the more remarkable features of Vonda O’Neil.

  Then I realize it’s Henry they’re watching. Even outside! Young starchitect billionaire Henry Locke. Sure, they’re looking at me, but only to see who he’s with.

  And then somebody snaps a picture of us.

  My heart starts to pound. It’s okay if someone takes my picture, but what if they put it online? I look very different with my glasses and dark hair, but it’s not like I’ve gotten plastic surgery. Discreetly, I slide on my sunglasses. And then he looks over at me and I wonder if he noticed the cause and effect of that.

  My thoughts are interrupted by a fight up ahead—two guys have gotten out of their cars. There’s glass on the road. Fender bender. Voices are raised.

  Henry grabs my arm and puts me on the other side of him and sweeps Smuckers up in his arms, all this without even breaking stride. He mumbles something about the menace of texting while driving, but I’m stuck on the weird chivalry of him.

  The crowds thicken even more near the subway station, but he keeps Smuckers under control. Strangers usually can’t hold Smuckers right. Henry gets Smuckers.

  “You’re good with him.”

  “We grew up with these dogs,” he says flatly.

  Just then I recognize the corner we’re on. “Hey, we have to walk up the next street. Come on.” I lead down the block and turn, and there it is. “Griffin Place.”

  “What?”

  “Griffin Place, my fave building.” I point at the statue halfway up, the crouched winged lion. “See? My sister, Carly, and I…it’s just one of our favorites.”

  “Oh, the Reinhold building,” he says.

  “Right,” I say. “You probably know all the names.”

  “Being a smirkitect, you know. It goes with the territory.”

  “The Reinhold,” I say, trying it out, like finally learning the name of an old friend.

  We’re moving closer to it. “In all of Manhattan? You like the Reinhold best?” He sounds incredulous.

  “What? It’s great.”

  “Hmm.” He seems to view it as an odd choice. Looking at it through an architect CEO’s eyes, I suppose it is. The building isn’t tall, it’s not special in terms of fancy flourishes, it’s not even old—it’s the 1940s kind, all blocky gray stone and deep rectangular windows. But the griffin is cool. Brave protector friend, mouth open in a silent roar.

  He slows across the street, in the middle of the block from it. “What about it?” Like he’s trying to see it. He really wants to know.

  “It’s the griffin,” I tell him.

  “What is it about the griffin? A lot of buildings have them.”

  “I don’t know,” I say, but I do know.

  “Aesthetically?”

  “No.” I feel his gaze on me, and I know I’m going to tell him. I want to. I don’t know why. “Symbolically.”

  “What does this one symbolize?”

  “A moment in time,” I say. “When my sister and I first got here, we got lost. We took this bus and it was a disaster.” I smile, like it wasn’t any big deal, but it was terrifying. “She was crying, and I pointed this griffin out and made up this stupid story about him being our brave protector friend.”

  There’s this silence where I wonder if I’ve said too much.

  “Did he help? The griffin?”

  “A lot,” I say. “She stopped crying and we took pictures of him. I printed one out and put it in the kitchen. If nothing else, he scared the cockroaches back down into the drain.”

  “You came here after your parents died.”

  “Somebody has been busy investigating my background,” I say.

  “Surely you’re not surprised we investigated. Considering.”

  I shrug. According to our fake identities, our parents died in a car crash, then I graduated high school at age seventeen and got custody of her.

  All lies. Except the custody-at-seventeen part, though it was more like I took custody. Got my baby sister out of a dangerous situation and myself out of the blinding glare of national hatred.

  We keep on walking. I take a last look back, remembering myself then. Traumatized, slouching through the crowds in my new brown hair and innocent court clothes, hand-in-hand with Carly, finally away from Mom’s lechy boyfriend with his creepy stare that got creepier every time she passed out.

  Away from Mom’s growing desperation for money for the next fix.

  I’m not sorry I took Carly out of there. She was so young and vulnerable. I saved her—I know that to my bones. But she saved me, too. She was a reason for me to keep fighting.

  We stop at a Starbucks. I get a java chip Frappuccino and he gets a latte. We take a cab the rest of the way.

  The fabrication facility is a giant warehouse on Front Street—the old kind with arched-top windows.

  We enter a massive, well-lit, state-of-the-art space full of state-of-the-art machinery in bright, primary colors. The place hums with activity and guys in Locke-blue jumpers making giant things out of metal and wood.

  “We make doors and windows, refurbish heating plants, that sort of thing,” he says over the din. “Locke owns so much property, it stopped making sense to sub this stuff out.”

  I keep expecting Smuckers to react to the loud sounds, but Henry holds him tight and scratches his snout in a vigorous way, lulling him with an overload of attention.

  Is it possible that’s what Henry is doing with me? Is it working?

  He knows people’s names here, too. A few come up and pet Smuckers. We head to an elevator bank at the center of it all and take it up to the drafting floor. We cross a tundra of desks and people doing things on huge computer screens to get to a place with lots of long tables.

  He hands Smuckers over and pulls out a piece of foamcore the size of a door. “I’ll cut this down a little for the check.” He takes it to a table that has lots of measure markings and slices off two hunks with a large box cutter. “I don’t actually do this, typically, but I don’t want to pull people off jobs that have been waiting in a queue.” He pulls his phone out of his pocket and taps. Soon he’s the proud parent of a giant printout of a check front. He spray glues the back of the check and we roll it onto the foamcore, working together to avoid bubbles and wrinkles.

  Just like that, we have a giant blank check from Locke Worldwide. It’s signed, but there’s no dollar amount or recipient.

  “Maybe we should get an armored car for this.”

  He doesn’t reply; he’s setting the check aside to dry. He’s careful, even a bit of a nerdy perfectionist. “Come here,” he says.

  I straighten. Was it a little sexy, how he said that?

  He leads the way to a wide-open space full of architectural models; desks and cubicles line the perimeter. “We have a few exciting projects you should be in on,” he says.

  We end up at a table displaying a five-by-five block area covered with tiny buildings and roads and cards and tiny green trees and people.

  He puts Smuckers down.

  “I thought architects only made these on TV. I mean, don’t you have computers for this nowadays?”

  Henry kneels down, getting eye level with the thing. “Building is one of the most tactile things you can do. We’re creating physical environments. Making them tiny first, holding them and situating them, it reveals new things about the buildings and the spatial relationships. You see what feels right on the ground.”

  He touches the tallest building.

  “Where is this?”
>
  “Nowhere yet. It’s going to be along the Queens waterfront. The Ten—that’s what we call it.”

  I figure out the blue is the East River. “Dude, I hate to tell you, but Queens is all built up along the river.”

  “There’s a swath of factories there that are moving to a less expensive area. We’ll knock them down and replace it with residential and green space.”

  “It looks nice.”

  He twists his lips.

  “You don’t think it looks nice?” I ask.

  “It could be better, but it’s good for what it is.”

  “If it could be better, why not make it better?”

  “Too deep in the pipeline.”

  Smuckers takes this very inopportune opportunity to jump up and grab at a bit of fabric that’s dangling off the side. The entire model jerks, and a soda bottle at one end dumps all over a corner of it.

  Henry’s on it instantly, sopping it up.

  Another guy rushes over to help.

  They both look alarmed that the tiny buildings and tinier trees got wrecked. It’s all very strange, because this is just a model. It’s a train set village, people!

  Then I realize Henry’s really upset.

  Henry and this guy talk about who’s available to fix it up, and I get the feeling they want to quick-fix it, like there’s an ogre who lives in the closet who will come out and wreck the place if the model is messed up. Honestly, the whole thing is weird. Is Henry not the CEO?

  Everybody is on an RFI deadline, whatever that is.

  He scowls in his surly way at the wrecked side of town. I’m glad I’m not the person who put the soda bottle there.

  “Right. Okay.” Henry’s tone is that kind of fake calm where you know anger is just under the surface.

  He gets this cool intensity sometimes. It’s a disturbingly winning combination.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Vicky

  If you told me a month ago that I’d ever find myself in a workshop room deep in a fabrication facility owned by Cock Worldwide, crafting with Henry Locke, aka the top cock of Cock Worldwide, I would think, in a word, not.

  It seems like a dream doesn’t it? Not a dreamy dream so much as one of those weird jumble dreams. Like, Leonardo DiCaprio is your father and he sent you a letter but you can’t find your mailbox. Who blew out all the candles?

  Henry has a couple of junior guys bring the model into a small side room and set it on a table. He dismisses them, shakes off his beautiful suit jacket, and rolls up his sleeves. “This’ll just take a minute.”

  “Do you need it for a presentation or something?”

  “No, it just needs to be fixed,” he mumbles, conducting an intensive inspection of the thing.

  I stand on the other side of the table conducting my own intensive inspection of the tiny paper trees, or at least that’s the effect I’m going for while conducting an intensive inspection of his very large and muscular forearms, which are perfect in every way, right down to his golden skin and the sparse smattering of hair.

  Some kind of big and chunky euro car racer watch hugs his right wrist. His hand has that rough-hewn look, but it’s not gnarled or anything, like a woodworking codger. If the world of men’s hands is a three bears cabin, his are the “just right” ones with just enough scuff to them. Hands you can respect. Hands that would feel nice against your cheek.

  I swallow and force my gaze away to the built-in shelving, loaded with crafter supplies like modeling clay and paper and squares of balsa wood and cutters of every kind and glue and paint.

  “Are you sure this whole business isn’t a front for guys who are closet crafters?” I ask.

  He’s pulling down green cardboard squares and craft paper and tubes of glue. “This’ll just take a minute.”

  He presses some of the craft cardboard to a cutting surface and starts making tiny cuts with an X-Acto knife.

  He pauses and frowns at the thing. The sweet little dent appears between his eyes. I definitely like the dent. Seeming lost in thought, he starts unclasping his watch and pulls it off with rough efficiency, setting it aside.

  It’s a hot thing he just did.

  I remind myself that he’s just another handsome rich guy with every reason to bring me down. He even told me so.

  We will bury you.

  You’re supposed to listen when somebody tells you something like that. My ears are listening.

  The problem is that my libido is more interested in the competency porn striptease he did with the watch back there.

  I swallow. “So, what’s the deal? Why the urgency?”

  “The guy who makes our environmental elements, these tiny trees? He’s from my grandfather’s era…shit.” He grabs a new square. “It’s just a long story.”

  Just a long story I want to hear. Why the CEO of a powerful company has dropped everything to fix some tiny trees on a model neighborhood. “Quite the perfectionist,” I say.

  “Something like that,” he says in his clipped way. Long story. Period.

  Fine. Whatever, I think.

  He’s got a tree base created. He holds it up to soda-flattened one.

  “An earthquake and a hurricane at the same time,” I say. “Not a lot of buildings will withstand that.”

  He doesn’t think it’s funny. “See those balsa dowels?” He points to the left of the shelving area. “Can you grab one?”

  I get one and bring it over. He takes it and shaves a series of tiny curlicues off, and it comes to me that these are the branch thingys. He attempts to glue a tiny curlicue to the tree trunk by way of tweezers, a toothpick, and a dot of glue.

  Man fingers are good for a lot of things. What are they not good for? Tiny gluing work.

  He completely smears the trunk with glue, which he tries to get off with a Q-tip; he just ends up leaving fur on the trunk. “Crap.”

  “You could pretend it’s Spanish moss,” I say.

  He tosses it away.

  “You need help?”

  “I got it. I used to do a lot of this as a boy. Brett and me both. We’d spend hours doing these models.”

  “When was the last time?”

  “I got this. It’s like riding a bike.”

  “Except you have large hands now,” I say, and not in any way like I think it’s hot.

  He just tries to work at it.

  “It’s too bad you don’t have somebody with you who has way more recent experience gluing tiny things to tiny surfaces with her slim, womanly hands,” I say. “It’s really a shame that there isn’t anybody like that here.”

  He starts on another. Messes it up.

  “Dude. Let me help.” I tie Smuckers to a chair.

  “You think you’re an expert because of your Etsy dog collar store? This is a little more intricate.”

  “I make jewelry of all kinds, not just dog stuff,” I tell him.

  “We know,” he says.

  “Come on. You make the trunks and shave the branch curlies and I’ll do the gluing. And please, your technique? With the toothpick?”

  He looks up finally. “You think you can?”

  I consider telling him I’ll only help him if he confesses why it’s so damn important, but it’s getting painful to watch him struggle. “I know I can.”

  He cuts another trunk and slides it to me. I shove a toothpick up the trunk, basically reaming out the trunk, and then I make a small pool of glue and dip in the branches with the tweezer, then touch it to the area.

  “Oh. That’s more efficient.”

  “Was that a compliment?” I brush it off, because the air is humming between us. “Gluing stuff is my jam, baby.” I blow air on it.

  He cuts out another trunk. We get up an assembly line. We repair a few buildings. We collaborate on a tiny stop sign.

  It’s…nice.

  There’s something about making things side-by-side that only crafty girls know about, a kind of sweet, silent bonding that other people don’t experience.

  Henry and I a
re achieving this bond. I like it in spite of myself. Or in spite of himself.

  I glue a tiny curlicue to a tiny tree, feeling his eyes on me.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Henry

  Here’s the thing about business—you always make your moves from a place of control.

  I never ask a question without knowing the answer first. I never show people what I want unless I’m assured of getting it.

  And I never, ever operate from need.

  Needing something is the surest way not to get something. I learned that lesson young.

  Which is why it was a good thing those elevator doors opened.

  I was enjoying her embarrassment too much. She really was smelling me. Her neck was so pink when I called her on it, her frown so pouty, it was all I could do not to press her to the wall and take that pretty little mouth like a rabid animal.

  I cut out another trunk, focusing on getting my shit back together.

  Part of Vicky’s genius is that she doesn’t add up as a scam artist. She’s fun, interesting, easy to be with, pretty. Gorgeous, really, much as she tries to hide it. She’s creative. Tenacious.

  A weaker man might fall for her, might not care she puts all that goodness to use as a grifter.

  She stares down at her tiny tree, inspecting her handiwork. She sets it down and uses the tweezers to make a quick adjustment while the glue is still drying. The tip of her tongue edges out the side of her mouth as she concentrates, peeking just up over the very corner of her upper lip.

  If I was a different man—a more gullible man—I might be turned on by that. I might be imagining the taste of that tongue, maybe even the soft rasp of it against my cock.

  I get up and go to the window, to the familiar old view, force my mind far away, back to the long afternoons after school in this room with Brett and Renaldo. Dad would be on his jet somewhere and we’d have escaped from this or that bored French au pair and found Renaldo, gotten him to bring us up here. He was running a lot of the operations by then, but he was never too busy to teach us model making. Or he’d take us out to the sites and we’d watch the subs work, tag along while he lorded over the superintendents on building sites across the five boroughs.