Page 19 of Bargaining

I eased the envelope open and scanned the details of how to organize a flight on his private jet. My heart pounded. He couldn’t be serious? Who could accept something like that?

“What’s that?” Tiff demanded.

“Nothing.” I hastily stuffed everything back into the larger envelope. “No one should even be a billionaire. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. They could solve world hunger, but they just swing their dicks around instead.”

Curiosity lit her eyes, and she grabbed the envelope from my hand. She pulled the contract out and scanned it. Her eyes darted over the printed pages. “Right, all those Ashcombe boys were entitled manbabies, but I’ve dated plenty of entitled manbabies that I’ve had to support financially. At least you’ll get a Birkin out of it.”

Tiff fell silent as she scanned the contract. While she was distracted, I returned Dad’s books to their rightful place on the shelf. Tiff gasped. The contract dropped heavily onto the coffee table. She covered her mouth with a trembling hand.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

She spun to face me with wild eyes. “You need to sit down and read this.”

“No. Thanks.”

She thrust the paperwork toward me and spoke slowly, with quiet emphasis. “Youneedto sit down and read this.”

I made no move to retrieve the stupid thing from her. “I’m not interested.”

She flipped through the pages frantically, her voice rising with every word. “You just have to go to a few parties and travel around with him. It’s hardly a chore.”

“I don’t even like him. He ghosted me. You know how long it took me to get over him.” I sounded whiny, but my sister always had a way of bringing out the petulant kid inside of me.

“Good. This is your chance to get even. Spend his money. Make him pay for what he did. Take him to the fucking cleaners.” She rapped her knuckles on the table for emphasis.

“I’m not a prostitute. I don’t care if that’s how some people choose to make their money, but my body is not for sale.”

“Calm down, Julia Roberts. This isn’tPretty Woman. No sexual contact. He takes great pains to mention it in several bullet points. Cole wants your sparkling personality. He’s not offering you billionaire dick. Imagine the places you could see. A man like that isn’t staying in a Motel 6. You only have to do a year. That’s all. One year. You can endure anything with an ending.”

“Who wants toendurea year of their life? I want to figure out what comes next. I’m about to turn thirty and I have nothing to show for it.”

Tiff stroked the contract worshipfully, like it was some previously undiscovered edition ofPride and Prejudicewith an extended Mr. Darcy epilogue. “This comes next. Let it be this. You deserve this. Let this obscenely rich man spoil you and take you to all these fancy events. It’s a dream come true. You can put up with it.” She grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me around to face her. Her excitement spilled over into a grin. “You’re doing it. No debate.”

“You want me to marry an arsehole?”

“Give him a year, and he’ll give you five million pounds.” Her hands fluttered everywhere, and she laughed wildly. “Five. Million. Pounds. Either you bloody marry him, or I will. Cole Thorner isn’t just any old arsehole. He’s a cash-buyer arsehole.”

Chapter 9

Cole

A dozen executives, ranging from useless to abysmal, sat around a long table under gleaming office lights. Geoff, my chief financial officer, clicked through another disappointing slide in his shoddy undergraduate-level presentation. It looked like he’d thrown it together last night. He deserved to be sacked on that basis alone, but I couldn’t stomach another one of Lucas’s “you can’t sack everyone” lectures.

“As you see, this is the first year the shareholders won’t be receiving a profit,” Geoff said.

I leaned back in my chair and tried not to yawn. I could have done without a meeting with my board of directors today. A decent night’s sleep had evaded me ever since I’d heard the news about Roy. Impossible to get the image of Charlotte looking so forlorn on her doorstep out of my head. I was so tired lately, my eyes felt like piss-holes in the snow. The air-conditioner hum grew loud in the silence.

Lucas raised an unimpressed eyebrow. “You could at least pretend you care.”

I’d employed Lucas because it was good to have people around who weren’t too scared to be honest with me, and occasionally he came up with a useful suggestion. Today wasn’t one of those days. Today, he was just annoying the fuck out of me.

“The shareholders have been profiting off my hard work for years. They can suck it up for now. Loss is part of business. I’m not worried about it.”

Lucas squeezed his stress ball in his hands. “They won’t be happy.”

So? Plenty of people aren’t happy. I’m not happy right now, listening to this bullshit. I’m not happy with Ryan’s coffee breath and the way Malcolm’s ties are bright enough to trigger a migraine. I’m not happy that Gabe Rivers still won’t return my calls, or that I went to great lengths to put the perfect contract together for Charlotte and she hasn’t replied.

It had taken six months for her to even text. Now she hadn’t responded to my follow-up on the contract.