“Sounds…practical,” Phantom said out loud while deducing that must have been around the first time Garrett asked him for a loan, on top of what he was already getting paid for his money-laundering services.
“We were never the world’s most passionate couple,” she went on with no idea of the bullet she’d dodged. “Not like Luca and Amber. But we made sense. At least on paper….”
Her face took on a bitter cast. “And as it turns out, that’s probably why he asked me to marry him. Because his family wanted to acquire Glendaver—oh, I should add here that I come from this prominent Kentucky Bourbon family. Maybe you’ve heard our slogan? The Best Kentucky Bourbon Courtesy of Scotland.”
“Yeah, I know Glendaver,” he confirmed, leaving it at that.
And the doctor heiress went back to her main point. “I guess everyone knew this was basically a marriage of convenience but forgot to tell me.”
She shook her head. “I don’t even know why I’m so upset. I mean, what was I expecting? He’s the scion of this old-money family. And the only reason I even walk in the same circles as him is that my mom decided to adopt me from Africa as a Hail Mary to save her marriage—which by the way didn’t work.”
He had another urge he’d never felt before. To reach out and take her hand. To let her know she could expect whatever the fuck she wanted. Because a woman like her—generous, smart, and capable AF with beauty on top? A woman like her deserved nothing less than all her dreams coming true.
But Phantom was about as good at deep conversation as he was at shallow ones. Business. Business was pretty much his sweet spot. Especially the kind that came with high stakes and a side of intimidation. And this wasn’t that.
“Uh…” he scraped a hand over the shaved back of his head. “What part?”
“Excuse me?”
“You said your parents adopted you from Africa. Which country?”
She shook her head. “Nobody ever asks me that.”
He shrugged. “Guess I’m nobody then.”
She laughed. And this time, it was appropriate, so he chuckled too—but more out of relief that the sad cloud hanging over her head seemed to have dissipated a little. “I’m originally from Uganda.”
“Ever been back?” Phantom congratulated himself on that follow-up question.
If he wasn’t mistaken, this was how small talk was supposed to go. And who cared if he already knew all the answers to the things he was asking. At least Olivia was talking to him about herself instead of making excuses for her douchebag ex.
She nodded. “I go every year in May with my dad. He established a Glendaver Healthcare Center there before I was even born. That was actually where my birth mother delivered. But they only have white male obstetricians on staff and no one who focuses on women’s sexual health, so I do what I can for the couple of weeks I’m there. Especially for women with disabilities.”
“So that’s your specialty no matter where you go,” Phantom realized out loud.
She cast him a side-eye glance. “My birth mother was blind, and her pregnancy was due to rape. That and not being treated with special care made my birth very hard for her. Too hard…”
Olivia dropped her eyes to the ground. “She took her own life shortly after I was born, which was how I ended up an orphan. From what I could piece together when I tracked down a few of my Ugandan family members to ask them about it, I think she probably had full-on postpartum and understandable depression. When I found out the story, the whole story, and came back to my stupidly big house in Kentucky, I felt….”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, just so incredibly sad that no one had been around to help her—that she hadn’t had other women there who truly took her situation under consideration. And my dad encouraged me to do something about it so that other women wouldn’t have to suffer the way she did. You know CEOs—very biased toward action over moping around their homes because of things you can’t change.”
She looked back up to tell him, “So that was why I became a doctor as opposed to the wife of someone who has enough money to fund my charitable efforts. And why I never miss the May trip even if that’s been getting harder with the clinic’s growing popularity—wow, look at me, talking about nothing but myself and my problems.”
She threw Phantom an apologetic wince. “I never talk this much. I’m sorry for monopolizing so much of the conversation.”
“That’s okay,” he answered, meaning it. She was telling him all the in-between stuff you couldn’t get from far away. He liked that.
“Anyway, here I am,” he said, stopping in front of his high-rise apartment building—which was pretty much the opposite of the cutesy brownstone she shared with Garrett.
