Girl Meets Billionaire

by Brenna Aubrey et al.

  I wait. I know a rhetorical question when I hear one.

  “No. I’m not going to rock the company with that kind of announcement. I’m showing them that things remain consistent after Bernadette’s death. I want them feeling strong, steady, capable leadership.”

  “Okay.” I make myself not look at his hands. I try not to think too hard about him caring about people. Or turning out so different from Denny.

  We have a late lunch at a sidewalk café in Soho. It feels like a date. He asks me a lot of questions about my life and my jewelry biz. He seems really interested in the makers studio, and I swell with pride talking about it, because it’s such an awesome space and an amazing group of people.

  Then I remember he’s not my boyfriend. He’s not even my friend. He’s an entitled wealthy man who thinks I’m going to come to him and beg him to take me.

  I keep my distance.

  I tamp out every spark that lights between us. Sometimes I feel like Smoky the Bear, stomping sparks left and right. Too many to stomp out.

  Day after day.

  Biding my time.

  The worst are those moments when he lets down his guard, when he stops being beloved playboy Henry Locke. When it feels real.

  It’s a mindfuck when it feels real.

  Here is the last guy you should ever trust or want. He’s fooling you. Fake seducing you. And you want him anyway!

  The mindfuck of hanging out with Henry twists and contorts into confusing new shapes every hour over the following days.

  The man is on this kick of showing me every aspect of the company. “You need to understand things to vote out of a place of knowledge,” he says.

  This involves Smuckers and me getting picked up in a limo and taken to a different part of New York or New Jersey and meeting people and learning new things that a giant company does.

  Building turns out to be a small part of the Locke activities. Every one of those companies that got listed off in the will reading has its own little empire of activity.

  Henry does work in the car and discusses corporate things on the phone with the people we meet. He’s good at what he does. He really cares. Is this his new method of seduction?

  On one outing we tour a nearly finished building that has a zero carbon footprint—it’s heated and cooled through underground circulating water. Super green. Henry’s excited.

  It’s infectious.

  On another outing, we tour a mammoth prefab facility in New Jersey where they make parts of buildings so they don’t have to build everything on site. He’s just as excited about that. Also infectious.

  “How do you know everyone’s names?” I ask on one of our many limo rides.

  “I make a point of it.”

  “But how? You know so many names.”

  “If something’s important, you find a way to do it,” he says.

  Bird, I mumble.

  He gets that amused smile that always annoys me. “What was that?”

  I want to grab his lapels and yank him to me and say fuck you, lip to lips, and then kiss him.

  But I know where that leads.

  Instead, I lock my hands together in my lap and turn away.

  The worst thing is the family feeling throughout Locke Worldwide. Like they really are one big happy family with Henry Locke as the strong, fierce leader, a man who’d go to the ends of the earth for his people.

  It makes him twice as hot, how he fights for his people. How protective he is.

  At times, tooling around the five boroughs with Henry, touring sites, meeting employees, learning new things at Locke HQ, I get this feeling like I’m part of that team, part of the family that Henry fights for and protects.

  It’s intoxicating.

  And so predictable. So pathetic.

  It doesn’t take a team of psychoanalysts to understand why that would be wildly attractive to me, considering it’s been me alone for so long, looking after Carly on my own. Even back home, nobody was protecting us. Nobody was fighting for us.

  Sometimes when we’re talking about the company I use the word we. As if I’m part of the Locke family. So cool that we’re opening an office in Raleigh. How are we doing on our stadium proposal? Wow, our development team is kicking the shit out of those assholes at Dartford & Sons!

  I constantly have to remind myself I’m not in the family.

  We ride around in elevators and limos and other enclosed spaces and it’s exciting. Sometimes our gazes lock and the earth seems to still.

  My vibrator gets a workout at night.

  I’m a week through the twenty-one-day cooling off period and I just want to touch him. Even just his arm. He’s irresistible as catnip. Irresistible as a super-charged magnet. Or maybe irresistible as a black hole, the kind that sucks in spaceships and girls who just want to be loved and trusted.

  None of his affection is real, that’s the thing I need to remember. He’s had PIs on me, after all. He thinks I’m a scammer.

  I’m something far worse. I’m Vonda O’Neil.

  Again I remember that picture of me, smiling out at the world so hopefully, repeated a million times across Twitter and Facebook with captions like I’m a lying whore.

  Sometimes, right before I go out the door in the morning to meet the car, I give myself a little pep talk. I remind myself that I don’t need team Locke.

  I control a giant company and have access to all the money I could ever want. I ride around in limos with literally the sexiest man in New York, but somehow I’m still that hungry girl looking in from the outside, nose pressed to the bakery window, wanting just anything.

  A crumb.

  Henry is like the hottest and most charming vacuum cleaner salesman who ever came to your door. And you invite him in and you let him show you the vacuum, how well it cleans and how all of the attachments work. And you see that he loves this vacuum, and his love for the vacuum makes him insanely desirable. And you guys laugh and have fun cleaning the carpet. And it’s nice.

  And you keep telling yourself it’s not about you—he just wants to sell you that vacuum cleaner. That is his only motive! Except it’s getting harder and harder to remember that.

  Maybe sometimes, when he’s expertly changing that nozzle with his amazingly capable hands…or when he’s smiling at something you said, and you’re looking into his gorgeous blue eyes and getting that floaty feeling in your chest, those times you start to believe, that even though he came to sell you that thing, maybe he has started to like you.

  Then you hate yourself for being gullible, because hello! He’s New York’s most eligible bastard and you’re not even in the top million bachelorettes.

  In fact, you’re barely an eligible bachelorette for any bachelor, unless the bachelor in question is a poetry-scribbling parking lot attendant with self-esteem issues or a junior pastry chef with eight roommates and a video game obsession, or a cook/musician/student, not that that sums up my last three years of dating.

  One of the hardest things about hanging out with Henry is how he has this knack for reaching into me and hauling the pure Vonda out of me. Sometimes provoking it out of me. Sometimes enchanting it out of me with his questions and his jokes and his endless interest in my opinions.

  “I know what you’re doing,” I finally tell him at lunch after another afternoon of finding out about the awesomeness of Locke Worldwide, another afternoon of witnessing him play the part of the fierce protector, admired by all. We’ve left Smuckers behind today.

  “Beyond the supposedly fake seduction?” He cracks a popadam in half and hands me the big piece, because it turns out we’re both heavy into popadams.

  I take it, remembering what he said about his hands. So good between your legs. You’ll come to me. I’ll get you off. I’ll print every inch of your skin.

  Needless to say, my vibrator has been getting quite the workout in recent days.

  He studies my face, expression unreadable. He does that sometimes. Like he wants to know me. To figure me out. Again an
d again I tell myself it isn’t real, but it feels so good.

  And I want to kiss him. I want to press GO on us. I want to stab that button so hard he flies to me. I want him to print every inch of my skin. I’m not sure what that means in his mind, but I want it.

  “You know what I’m doing?” he asks. “What would that be?”

  “You want me to love Locke like you do,” I continue in a breezy tone. “You can’t trick it out of my evil clutches, you can’t seduce me, so you’re doing the next best thing. Trying to humanize it.”

  “Don’t count out the part where I seduce you. That’s still going to happen.”

  “Uh,” I say, belly tightening. “You probably think all women would just die for your magic peen.”

  “Not all of them.” Casually he cracks another piece of popadam. “Just the ones I’ve slept with.”

  Gulp.

  “And for the record, my seduction of you isn’t goal oriented. I’d seduce you if all you had was a dog bow tie Etsy store. Though, really, I should turn you in for animal cruelty. Because those bow ties you put Smuckers in? No.”

  “He likes his little bow ties.”

  “Trust me,” Henry says. “He doesn’t like the little bow ties.”

  “I think you’re just jealous.”

  His eyes sparkle. “That’s what you think?”

  “Maybe I’ll make one for you.”

  “My neck has a lot of girth.” He lowers his voice. “You’d need a lot of sequins.”

  I snort, but I don’t look at him. I don’t want to see that on-camera smile of his turned on me.

  I say, “You’re trying to make me see how important Locke is to all your family. Keeping me from killing it. You think I’ll kill Locke, but you don’t have to worry. Things are going to be okay.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to kill it,” he says in the voice he sometimes uses when he feels like his communication is important.

  I want to believe him. His opinion has become important to me, stupid as that sounds.

  I grab the last popadam. “Right now, I’m thinking about killing this. You mind?”

  I look up to find him gazing at me in his infuriatingly hot way. What is he seeing? What is he thinking?

  I snap off a bit. “Crackly,” I say. My forced brightness is designed to cover the hopeless feeling.

  It gets worse when he shows me his absolute favorite under-construction project, the Moreno Sky, a boutique hotel in Brooklyn that will be built in the crater of a half-crumbled-down building. It incorporates many urban ruin elements into the mod design.

  He shows me support beams of reclaimed wood, the slabs of reclaimed concrete walls with graffiti from the 1970s. “This would’ve ended up in a landfill.”

  I run my finger over the words Keep on Truckin’ in blue. “Did people say that?”

  “Apparently.”

  I can see why he likes it. The place incorporates a lot of the forward-thinking design principles from that building in Melbourne he’s so wild about. You can see it in the way the structure is mostly greenery and engaging public/private spaces at the bottom and the way the building takes on mass as it rises.

  He shows me more of the construction site, how they’re folding old into new. “This is cool as hell,” I say.

  He hands me a hard hat. “We’re not even in the building yet.”

  “Kaleb must hate it,” I say.

  “I practically had to give up my firstborn to make this happen,” he says. “Running this place, I don’t get to design and build that much anymore, or really getting my hands dirty on any level.” He says this last in a wistful tone. Like he misses it. “You have to see from the top. Come on.”

  We climb a circular concrete stairway to the main floor, what will be the future lobby. Right now it’s a noisy, unfinished space full of men and women doing different jobs—the trades, he calls them.

  One side is a two-story wall covered in plastic. When the place is finished, it’ll be a curtainwall, which is apparently a wall of windows.

  He shows me more old timber and twisted rebar that was heading into a landfill but that Henry feels could be incorporated into lobby furniture—he needs to get the bandwidth to figure it out somehow.

  That’s how he puts it. I love his lingo sometimes.

  We head to the “freight elevator” which doesn’t look like any elevator I ever rode or ever would want to ride.

  Henry punches a button that’s attached to a metal coil thing. There’s a screech and a rumble and our cage arrives. “Come on.”

  We step in and it hoists us up through a seemingly endless concrete column that would be utterly dark if not for a sputtering makeshift utility light clamped to the side.

  Fear spikes through me during the long flickers when I think the light might go out—I wasn’t prepared for how much like the well this would be—not the cage part, but how dark it is and the way we’re closed in by dark gray walls and you can see light way up high.

  I move a little closer to Henry. I was so scared in that well for so long. Scared of dying. Scared to call for help. Scared it was Denny and his friends out there, looking for me, scared that they’d get to me first, but wanting so bad to get out. Scared of the sounds. But mostly I was scared of the dark. I would sit in a little ball. I would tell myself if I got really small, even the darkness couldn’t find me.

  The elevator is taking forever, and I inch closer still, enjoying Henry’s nearness, his strength. I tell myself he’s just the vacuum cleaner salesman, not here to make me feel safe.

  His fake currency still spends.

  “Vicky,” he says.

  I brace myself. Does he notice I’m being a freak? “What?”

  “Are you going to smell me again?”

  I smile. “It’s just a little rickety.”

  “I forget you’re not used to this. Totally safe.” He puts his arm around me. “Okay?”

  I don’t know whether the okay is about his arm around me or the safety statement. “Okay,” I say.

  “I wouldn’t put you in here if I didn’t know it was safe. I wouldn’t do that.”

  I nod. It’s not the elevator now, it’s him, doing strange things to my body. Him being protective. Like I’m one of his people.

  “But if you want to smell me, you can.”

  I don’t want to smell him. I don’t want the warm weight of his arm to feel so good. I want him to stop making me feel alive and happy. I want to not perk up in some soul-deep way when our gazes find each other from across a crowded room. I want him to not seem to admire the Vonda in me.

  I want that not to feel amazing.

  I lean in closer, stealing what doesn’t belong to me. My head isn’t exactly on his shoulder—it’s difficult to do that when you’re wearing a hard hat. But it’s close.

  He brushes a lock of hair over my shoulder. His knuckles graze my jawline. His touch is featherlight. Barely there.

  But the energy of it hums over my skin, spreading outward in a burn, like fingers of heat warming cold, remote parts of me.

  I fight the urge to turn my face to his hand.

  “You look hot in the hat,” he says.

  “You’re just saying that.”

  But when I do turn my head, his eyes are dark. Serious.

  His voice lowers to a rumble. “I’m not just saying that, Vicky.”

  Oh, I want to kiss him. And, if anything, an elevator shaft that looks like a well should be reminding me why I have an allergy to rich, powerful men. It’s not.

  His eyes drop to my lips. My heart pounds.

  The elevator grinds to a stop.

  I’m shaking when we step out into wide open space, twelve stories over Brooklyn. And it’s not about fear.

  Open blue sky soars above us and massive pillars of concrete surround us, stretching upward. Chains with links bigger than my head are coiled in piles, and there are stacks of wood and massive metal things like strange Legos.

  I stroll to the far side, near a square
d-off column. There’s a brightly spray-painted scribble on the concrete surface. Not from the 1970s, but new. Everything up here is new. Raw.

  I toe the orange scribble like it’s more fascinating than the royal babies of England, but really I need to be apart from him, because I’m reeling from the goodness of his arm on my shoulder. The forbiddenness of ever falling for him. Of thinking he’s falling for me.

  He comes up next to me.

  I act like the operation of tracing the squiggle with my toe is of urgent importance. “Somebody went Jackson Pollack with the spray paint up here.”

  “That’s actually a message. It’s there to show the electricians the alarm conduit placement.”

  “How can you even read it?” I ask.

  He kneels next to me, and his dark suit jacket stretches over his thick, solid arms as he points to different parts. “This is orientation. Right here is just a measurement. The fact that it’s orange means any kind of telecom, but this’ll be an alarm, of course.”

  Of course, I think. Such a construction nerd.

  I stand, biting back the urge to run my hands over his shoulders, to get in on the tautness of fine fabric over solid man muscles.

  He twists and looks up at me, chin stubble glinting in the light. My heart is in my throat.

  I force my gaze back to the scribbles. “The colors tell you?”

  “Just like you see down on the street.”

  “You’re all secretly communicating with each other?”

  He stands. “Yellow’s natural gas. Red’s electric. Blue is water.”

  His nearness affects me like a drug. My eyes fall to his lips, and I shiver.

  “You cold?”

  I’m not, but he’s taking off his jacket and putting it over my shoulders now, cocooning my arms, and I like it very much. I like how warm and soft it is. I like how he adjusts it so precisely, like he cares greatly for my comfort.

  I tell myself the idea he cares about me is an illusion. Wishful, magical, ridiculous thinking.

  Ancient people thought the stars formed pictures of archers and bears and gigantic spoons, but can we be honest for a moment? They’re just stars. They don’t form pictures, no matter how many stupid diagrams you make. Like the stupidest dot-to-dot puzzles ever.