“Lila.”
She looks at me with those big brown eyes and a rush of protectiveness moves through me. The more she underplays it, the more worried I’m getting. Is she in some kind of financial trouble? And with family drama attached to it?
That shit can get real complicated, real fast.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I say. “But you can.”
She puts her hands to her cheeks. “God, this is so unprofessional.”
I lean forward and gently pull her hands away from her face. Her rings are cool against my fingers but her skin is warm and silky.
Her breath catches when I touch her. I let go before I want to. I want her to trust me. To open up to me.
“Tell me what’s going on,” I say. “Maybe I can help.”
“You can’t fix it,” she says. “But thank you.”
She hasn’t moved back. I haven’t either. Her chin is tipped up slightly to look at me and her teeth are sinking into her bottom lip. I need to stop staring at her lips, because I’m doing an extremely poor job of being her client right now. Or even just a concerned friend.
“Try me,” I say.
She looks down. Her eyelids are dusted in champagne sparkle. She’s an artist in everything she does.
“Everyone in my family gets a trust fund,” she says at last. “But it comes with major strings attached. I never wanted to let them control me and manipulate me with that money, so I cut those strings.”
Trust fund. Okay. So she’s not in dire financial straits, which is good. I mean, I could have helped her if she was. But this is obviously a different kind of situation.
“I’m not sure I follow,” I tell her.
“The money in the trust fund is released when you reach certain milestones. Like graduating from an Ivy League—boom, a check lands in your account. Advanced degree like an MBA or doctorate? More money. Getting married—another fat check. Having children—yet another check.” She looks at me. “I never took that money. Never even tried. I don’t want anything from them. Now I have thirty days left before the deadline to get married. If I don’t claim that money, it gets redistributed to my siblings.”
She pauses. “That’s why my brother and sister are calling. Not because they care what I do. Because they care what they get. They’re calling to make sure I stay single and cooperative.”
I let that sit, thinking through what she just told me. “Hang on a second. So you get access to your trust fund if you get married, do I have that right?”
“That’s right.”
“But your family is calling to make sure you don’t get married.”
“Correct. My brother and sister are breathing down my neck now because they don’t want me to mess it up for them right at the finish line. But they have nothing to worry about. I’m very much single.”
She’s single.
That’s the minor yet somehow extremely important detail my mind seizes on. “So that phone call?” I ask.
“That was with the Sherwood family attorney. Calling to remind me that I need to get married by the time I turn twenty-six or I forfeit the money.”
The gears in my head are already turning. I can fix this for her. I can help her.
Like my brothers, I’ve always had a reckless streak. Unlike them, I just keep it quiet, which means nobody sees it coming. My opponents learned that the hard way.
I already know in my heart that I’m about to do something crazy, but I’ve got to warm Lila up to it a little first.
I ask her, “How much is that trust fund check worth?”
“Five million. My sister wants a vacation home in Nantucket. My brother needs to dig himself out of some bad real estate investments that have been all over the local news back home. It’s enough for them to be very invested in my continued singlehood.”
“And what would you do with the money?” I ask, purely curious. She deserves to do anything she wants with it, frankly.
