Billionaire's Match

by Walker, Kylie

  “But you didn’t.” Taking Holly’s face between her hands, Kelly’s lips turned upwards in the ghost of a smile. “You fought, and you’re still here. For Maddy and for you. Do you think Tommy would want you to waste all that?”

  Kelly’s words jarred Holly from the deep, dark hole that threatened to consume her. While they didn’t banish it completely, the blonde helped her friend to climb out of the abyss – to stave off another breakdown for a precious few hours.

  “No…” Kelly sighed. “I guess he wouldn’t.”

  Kelly’s smile was both reassuring and relieved. “That’s my girl.” She hugged Holly tight enough to make her companion wince before she drew back in horrified realization. “Oh, Jesus. I’m sorry!”

  “It’s OK.” Holly held a hand to her bandaged wounds, exhaling slowly as the pain faded. “They’re getting better.”

  At least…her physical wounds were.

  Chapter 2

  One week later

  Holly considered her life in terms of single days. It helped her focus and to keep her grief from overwhelming her. She told herself continually that she had to provide for her daughter – that her life couldn’t simply stop, no matter how debilitating her loss.

  More than a month had passed since Tommy’s death. She had been given ample time to stay in bed with the shades pulled. Ample time to wish that she had done something – anything – differently and more than enough restless nights for her nightmares to haunt even her waking moments.

  It was time for her to get back to work.

  Even though she had committed to doing it, however, forcing herself to enter the restaurant for the first time in a month was one of the hardest things Holly had ever done.

  It was a Saturday, early, and she brought Madison with her, hoping that her daughter would somehow keep the walls of Tommy’s from pressing in on her – threatening to strangle her. But once they were inside, Maddy immediately pulled away from her mother, turning to face her with inquiring, confused green eyes.

  “Is Daddy here? Are we going to see him?”

  Holly’s chest tightened painfully as she forced herself to remain calm. She wouldn’t be defeated by this – not now, and not ever.

  “Sweetheart.” Kneeling in front of her daughter, Holly took Maddy’s hand in a firm grip to keep her from fleeing. “We haven’t come to see Daddy. This was his restaurant, but he’s not here anymore. I told you: Daddy’s gone to heaven to be with the angels.”

  Madison’s miniscule face immediately screwed up in a mixture of anger and grief. “No!” She jerked her hand from her mother’s grip immediately, her head whipping back and forth with enough force to tangle her dark hair. “I don’t want Daddy to go to heaven! I want him here!” With that, she turned on her heel to rush towards the back of the restaurant.

  Holly was left in her wake, her stomach churning, as she looked over the pride and joy of her husband’s life – the crown jewel of all his achievements.

  Tommy had always loved to cook. Even when they were in high school, he’d constantly been absorbed in making up new recipes – bringing big brown paper bags with his concoctions to school for his friends to try. It was evident that he had a gift for it – so much so that he could even manage to sell some of the things he made in the lunchroom, competing with the school itself.

  Of course, all his football friends had always teased him. It was unseemly for a big, powerful jock to be into cream fraiche, ramekins and perfect interior temperatures. They jostled him as much as they could – which was to say, not much. Tommy had always been a big guy, and besides that, he had his brother Shane on his side.

  And Shane supported Tommy in everything he did.

  Or, at least, at one point he had.

  Shane had already been incarcerated by the time Holly found out she was pregnant. He hadn’t been around when she and Tommy made the decision to keep the baby – when her husband promised her that he would fulfill his dream of opening one of the best restaurants in Miami.

  It had taken all their savings to open Tommy’s door – months of blood, sweat and tears. Atop that, Holly had been caring for a two-year-old at the time, and Maddy often accompanied them to the rapidly developing location. Despite the fact that they weren’t extraordinarily moneyed, they managed to accomplish an upper class ambience in Tommy’s. It was enough to get their first few customers in – and Tommy’s skills in the kitchen had been enough to handle the rest.

  Though Tommy’s wasn’t exactly a five-star establishment, they made enough to cover their bills, pay their rent and their staff, and afford a modest living – no small feat in the cutthroat Miami food scene. They had steady lunch and dinner crowds, along with live music on weekends, and for a while, they were happy. Maddy loved visiting the restaurant – almost as much as she loved the free food and getting to spend time in the kitchen with her father – but now all of that had changed.

  While there was a sous chef that could still cook Tommy’s recipes, influx of customers had decreased considerably since the restaurant’s owner had been murdered in his own establishment. According to Kelly, half of their regulars had just disappeared, and even walk-ins were wary of giving them a first try.

  Which couldn’t be good for their finances.

  “You made it out.” Holly looked up to see Kelly standing over her. The blonde had obviously been standing in for Teddy at the bar – her hair was piled atop her head in a messy but attractive updo and she held a bottle of scotch. Holly surveyed the thin lunch crowd before sighing as she rose to her feet.

  “Has it been like this every day?” She asked even though she wasn’t really sure she wanted to know.

  Kelly winced. “A little better on weekends.”

  Well, she supposed that was something. Holly looked over her friend’s shoulder to see Maddy sitting at the bar, her expression sullen as she kicked her feet. When Kelly followed her gaze, she expelled a long breath. “I’ll get her some juice. You need to take a look at the office.” She touched Holly’s shoulder gently in reassurance. “I haven’t touched much since Tommy passed. I figured you’d want to look through it all. Are you…up to it today?”

  What a question.

  More than anything, Holly wanted to take her daughter home and bury her sorrows in coffee and miscellaneous TV reruns that she wouldn’t really watch. She wanted to be healed, body and soul – just as much as she knew it couldn’t happen overnight. She wasn’t ready for anything.

  But she would make herself do this.

  Running a hand through her mahogany locks, Holly nodded firmly. “I’ll be fine.”

  She would shut out the rampant images of what had happened the night of Tommy’s death, and her fear for the future. She had to – at least until she knew where they stood.

  With a quick squeeze, Kelly left her to tend to Maddy at the bar, and Holly reluctantly dug the key to the office out of her bag.

  When she opened the door, the scent of her late husband immediately billowed out and Holly’s throat clogged with tears that she struggled to contain. Vanilla tobacco – which he never smoked, cilantro and pepper.

  Taking a deep breath, Holly closed the door behind her before moving forward into the small space.

  Tommy always kept things fairly neat – and they remained that way, even in his death. A few office supplies painstakingly organized on the desk, three or four file cabinets containing paperwork from the past five years, a safe to keep their cash in…nothing seemed to have changed.

  Nothing and everything.

  As she sank down into the creaky leather chair behind the desk, Holly ran her fingers over its smooth, polished surface. Despite the fact that few people had been in the office in the past month, there wasn’t a speck of dust.

  Thank God for Kelly. Before Tommy’s death, she’d been the most carefree and adventurous of them, but she’d really stepped up to the plate now that he was gone. Holly didn’t know if she’d ever be able to thank her friend enough.

  For at least
ten minutes, Holly merely sat in the seat where her husband spent the majority of his time. She closed her eyes – and for the first time in five weeks, she didn’t immediately see the spray of blood that haunted her. She saw Tommy’s radiant smile.

  And she gathered the strength to go about her task.

  Slipping out of her sweater, Holly drew her dark hair over her shoulder to braid it into a single plait. She had an immense pile of files to go through, and she couldn’t have it getting in her way. The first file cabinet had an entire section of the last month’s paperwork – figures that she hadn’t even looked at. Holly withdrew them all – even going back two months before her husband’s death for good measure.

  If she got nothing else done today, she would have an accurate picture of where they stood financially – then she would know what action to take to save them.

  The past few weeks’ records only confirmed what Kelly had already told her. Business had slowed to about half of what it had been before. There were fewer party bookings, and two or three of the bands that used to play regularly refused to come back entirely. That, in particular, made Holly frown. She might have thought they had more respect for him than abandoning his business in his death.

  Even so, Holly didn’t see any problem that she couldn’t fix. They still had a steady cash flow – albeit a smaller one - and they had resources. She just had to figure out the best way to utilize them.

  That mentality sustained Holly right up until she reached the stack of paperwork from the two months prior to Tommy’s death. What she found among the many pages made her eyes widen and her stomach churn in shock.

  This couldn’t be right. It couldn’t be.

  According to the figures, Tommy’s was more than four hundred thousand dollars in the hole. Gaping, Holly flipped through page after page. She looked over the numbers again and again, completely flummoxed.

  What was this?

  When they opened the restaurant, she and her husband had gone into about sixty thousand dollars’ worth of debt in order to acquire everything they needed, but said debt had been paid off within six months. Ever since then, to Holly’s knowledge, Tommy’s had been operating at a profit. Of course, she didn’t often run the numbers herself. That was Tommy’s job. Holly helped more with day to day operations, floor managing and staffing. Her husband was the one who dealt with their money and kept them afloat.

  At least, that’s what Holly had always thought.

  As she frantically flipped through papers, she realized just how dire the situation with the restaurant was. Operating at half their normal capacity, it would take years for them to pay off the debt they owed. Debt that she couldn’t find the source of – even going back six, seven, eight months. Somehow, it seemed as though Tommy’s had been operating at a loss for the past three years.

  “Tommy…” Holly shook her head slowly, her expression forlorn. “Why didn’t you tell me about any of this?”

  How on earth had he shouldered all of this himself? It looked as if there had been several periods during which the restaurant began to catch up in its massive debt only to find itself under even more crippling monetary weight.

  Quite frankly, Holly wasn’t even sure how they’d operated so long at such an incredible loss, though it was obvious that Tommy had known.

  Quite suddenly, her husband’s behavior in the time leading up to his death made a strange sort of sense. The drinking, the anger…the way Tommy had withdrawn from his family and social life…If Holly had known how much stress he’d been under, she could have helped him shoulder it.

  But now, Tommy was dead.

  Chewing her lower lip firmly, Holly sat dead center in the middle of a pile of bills and financial records that made her head spin. How on earth was she supposed to keep Tommy’s open? She couldn’t afford to pay all of these bills, and the restaurant certainly couldn’t afford to pay them just now.

  Holly had nowhere to turn. Her in-laws weren’t moneyed enough to help her, and she didn’t have the resources to acquire a loan of almost five hundred thousand dollars. In the space of a few hours, her concerns had gone from strictly personal to a mixture of personal and business distress…and all at once, she was just as overwhelmed as she’d been in the first few days after Tommy’s death.

  Tears welled in her eyes, slipping hotly down her cheeks, and Holly bit back sobs of helplessness. Why on earth hadn’t Tommy said something to her? She was his partner – his lover. He should have known that she would always support him…

  And that’s when it hit her.

  Tommy had tried to tell her. The night he’d been killed, they sat down together, and Holly knew her husband was on the cusp of revealing something big…Inhaling sharply, Holly squeezed her eyes closed as the memory of that night assaulted her once more. All the blood, all the pain…watching the life fade from her husband’s eyes…

  Could it all have been over money?

  Holly liked to think that she kept well to herself. She and Tommy’s business was their own – but in Miami, corruption and crime ran rampant – a plague filled vein flowing just beneath the surface of the glitz and glamour. Could someone have killed her husband over the debt the restaurant owed?

  Wiping her tears away, Holly tried to concentrate. When she’d first come to after her surgery, the police had questioned her. They asked if she knew anyone who might hold a grudge against Tommy – anyone who might want him dead. Of course, she’d answered negatively. Everyone loved Tommy. His customers, his family, his friends…who on earth would want to kill him?

  Clearing her throat, Holly rose to her knees to grope atop her desk for her purse. Once she found it, she rifled through its contents until she came up with the card given to her the day she left the hospital. Detective Rachel Benson pressed it firmly into her hand, telling her to call if she recalled anything at all that might be of help in the case.

  She hesitated for only a moment before dialing the number. As she waited for the detective to answer, Holly took a deep, steadying breath. She was about to open a very dangerous can of worms – and she had no idea what it would mean atop the suffering she had already endured.

  **

  By the time Holly stumbled back into the house that evening, she could barely keep to her feet. She balanced a sleeping Madison on one hip and clutched a bag full of Tommy’s files in her free hand.

  Once inside her home, Holly locked the door firmly behind her before lowering her bag to the floor. Her daughter, she kept close to her for as long as she could. Maddy hadn’t let her mother touch her for more than an instant since her father’s death – and so she had to savor the liberties she took when she could.

  Slowly, Holly sank down onto the steps that led to the second floor, cradling her daughter in her lap. She rocked Madison’s sleeping form slowly back and forth, brushing stray strands of dark hair from her brow. When Maddy slept, the questions stopped. The pain stopped. She wasn’t cold and she didn’t burst into tears every time someone mentioned Tommy’s name. She was at peace…and Holly could only pray to whatever god that existed that her baby didn’t have nightmares.

  Madison was all that she had left of Tommy – her only daughter and the fruit of she and her husband’s love.

  Even now, she could remember the months of her pregnancy. Holly had been just as uncertain and nervous as she’d been excited. She’d watched her belly swell, felt her body shift as change after change occurred. Her feet disappeared, her breasts grew tender, and her hormones shot off the charts.

  And through it all, Tommy had been by her side. How many late nights had they spent curled up next to one another, his ear resting against her belly as he listened to their baby moving inside her? With every sonogram and ultrasound, he shared her enthusiasm. He never missed a doctor’s appointment, and even argued with her over which baby clothes were cuter. He was his daughter’s father in every respect, and the instant he’d seen her tiny, squalling face, Tommy had shed some of the only tears she’d ever seen.

 
; Now, Holly had to be strong for Maddy. She would never ask her daughter to forget her father, but she couldn’t let Maddy dwell on her grief forever. The little girl was already displaying several worrying symptoms of depression, and Holly feared she might have to take her to a psychiatrist if she couldn’t make Maddy better herself.

  And that might be too much for the small girl.

  “Oh, baby…” She brushed her lips across her daughter’s forehead, squeezing her tightly. “It’s going to be alright. Everything’s going to be alright.” Holly uttered the words as if saying them would magically force them into being. It was the only recourse she had – and she was going to cling to it for as long as she could.

  In her arms, Maddy shifted slightly, her small hand curling into her mother’s shoulder as she nestled closer to her in her sleep.

  The gesture was enough to make Holly’s heart swell with warmth – and also to let her know that Madison might wake soon if she didn’t get her to bed. Carefully, she carried the girl upstairs to a room decorated with posters of ponies and ballerinas. She slipped off Maddy’s shoes and sweater before tucking her into bed. Holly left her daughter’s daisy night light on, as she always requested, and left her sleeping peacefully, closing the door behind her.

  Then, she returned downstairs, trying to cling to the warmth Madison brought her as she dumped her paperwork onto the kitchen table. Though she knew Kelly told her not to push herself so hard her first day back at work, Holly would be damned if she didn’t at least try to figure out where all the restaurant’s debt had come from. It couldn’t have just appeared out of thin air. Things were bought to accrue debt. So, what the hell had they bought?

  She brewed herself a pot of a strong coffee as she sat at the kitchen table, her tired eyes scanning page after page. At least, she reminded herself, Detective Benson had promised her that she would look into the money the restaurant owed and to whom they might have owed it. If the Detective was going to do her job, she could at least step up to the plate herself.