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I smiled at her. “We’ll see,” I said. I sort of hoped he wouldn’t. Two weeks without hav**ing se**x with a stranger would be a real vacation for me.
“So, back to James Preston,” she said. “He’s extremely wealthy. As in, the top one percent in the country wealthy. He’s into real estate, like I told you. But don’t worry about that, and don’t talk about his business unless he brings it up. If he does, just ask questions, be polite, and listen. Men like James have women after them all the time. He has a fixed arrangement with you. This should be relaxing for him. A break from what his real life is like.”
Elena turned to me. “I want you to make this the best two weeks of his life,” she said. “A client like James Preston only comes around once. If he likes us and uses us again—or recommends us to his jet-setter friends—I’ll be able to put my girls through college. And you can get your brother into a single room for the rest of his life. Don’t f**k this up for any of us.”
James
Being a billionaire had lots of perks. Two of them were that you never had to pack for yourself and you never had to shop for yourself. Nita, my personal as**sistant, had bought me a new tux and a bunch of new suits for the trip. My housekeeper had ironed all my clothes and packed them all perfectly.
These things did not suck.
What did suck, however, was that I had over one hundred emails that I had to answer on my flight to Boston. It also sucked that I wouldn’t be able to bark into my phone at the various directors who worked for me. I was flying commercial for the first time in years. I thought it would be good practice—to be around people that I didn’t particularly care for, and to try and maintain my manners.
Because that was the real suck of the moment. I was going home, and that meant I had to deal with all the people who drove me crazy. I was going to have to behave, because it was my family, because my stupid brother was getting married, and because that was the decent thing to do.
I hated decent.
At least the escort would be there, and that would be my private little joke. My f**k you to my oh-so-proper family. I really hoped that she was nice, and that she had a sense of humor.
She was going to need it.
I finished making sure that my things were as**sembled and went to get some cash from my safe. As I grabbed the bills, I brushed the worn edge of something familiar, something I’d touched a thousand times. It was an old photograph.
I pulled it out, wishing that I could stop myself. It was of me and Danielle, from our senior year of high school. She was wearing a black dress, her dark-brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she was laughing. In the picture, I was looking at her and laughing, too.
It was the only picture I had of her. Of us. And for all the times I’d wanted to cut myself out of it, I couldn’t bear to.
I put the picture back into the bottom of the safe. And then I cursed the day that I’d entered this world, along with the day that she’d left it.
My driver expertly maneuvered my BMW in and out of traffic on the way to LAX. Goddamn traffic, I thought, but I really didn’t mind. Los Angeles had been good to me, and I was used to the traffic just like everyone else. It was a part of the landscape, just like the smog, the rolling hills, and the built-out horizon.
I hated to leave. I hated Boston—except for my sports teams. No matter how long I’d been in California, I would always be a Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics, and Bruins fan. I’d loved those teams since I was a kid. I didn’t miss the New England winters or my family, but I missed my teams.
I’d left Boston for grad school, and I went back as rarely as I could. But this time there was no way out. Todd was probably getting married just to spite me. In a classic di**ck move, he’d also asked me to be his best man. He had me then. My mother insisted that the best man had to attend every event, including the trip to Eleuthera, to fulfill his duties.
“Who takes their family on their honeymoon?” I spat out at her when she’d told me there was no getting out of it.
“Someone who loves their family,” she’d said icily. “But I guess you wouldn’t know too much about that.”
It was the flight from hell. I’d grabbed a window seat, ordered some coffee, and was reading the Wall Street Journal on my tablet. The other passengers were filing in, taking their seats. I took no notice of them until a frizzy-haired forty-something parked her kid next to me. “Be good,” she told the boy. “I’m in the row right behind you with the twins.”
She looked at me and pointed to the boy. I noticed that her mascara was smeared a little under one eye and that she had a little something that looked like jelly smeared on her cream-colored blouse. “This is Liam,” she said.
