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She froze a little. “Oh? So, then we’re…alone?”
“For what we’ll be discussing, we don’t really want any witnesses, do we?” he said.
“I guess that makes sense for you,” she said. “Aren’t you worried that I’ll say something to somebody?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” he said. “Shall we eat?”
They prepared their plates, passing things back and forth. The process left Richard wishing that he’d left at least one of his servants around to plate the food before they left. Too little, too late, it seemed.
Once the food was plated, Stella took a bite from the roast and uttered a sensuous sounding “Mmmm.” It was enough to make Richard stop for a moment, the sound electric in his ears.
“Really good,” she said. “Your chef is a genius.”
“Of course, he is,” Richard said, cutting himself a slice and eating it soundly. He was looking down at his plate, again trying not to look at her. He needed to keep his focus.
“So, I imagine Stoney didn’t tell you every detail of what’s happening to my father’s estate,” he said to her.
“No,” she said. “He just told me the fast and dirty.”
Richard nodded. “Well,” he said. “My father owned one of the first internet service providers in the country. See, he saw where things were going technologically speaking and got in on the ground floor.”
“Mm-hmm,” was all she said.
“As you can imagine, investing in internet service made him a billionaire by the time he was fifty and created a fine legacy for his family.”
She didn’t respond to that, and he dared a look up at her. She was looking back at him, sapphire eyes shining like jewels in the light. He looked away.
“Anyway, the only thing he ever wanted for me was to be happy. That’s all. I could do whatever I liked, so long as I was happy at the end of the day. Otherwise, ‘life wouldn’t be worth living’ or so he used to say. I did a lot of things for my dad that I thought would make him happy. Turns out we have different ideas about what that ought to be.”
“Like getting married,” she interjected, and he looked up at her. She smiled politely. “He wanted you to get married and when you didn’t that must have been quite the disappointment for him.”
“My father was disappointed in a lot of things about me,” he said. “But that doesn’t matter anymore really, does it?”
Her brow furrowed a little, but she said nothing in response. He went on.
“He married a woman about forty years his junior when I was in my twenties and then when he started to show signs of dementia, she started taking over his duties at the company.”That was a real slap in the face,he thought bitterly. He was COO at the time and could have handled whatever needed to be without his father by that point, but still, his father chose Rebecca to run things in his absence.
“In any event,” he said, “the way it all works out in his will is that the only way I get ownership of the company and inherit his entire estate is if I’m married.”
“And that’s where I come in,” she said.
He nodded. “I was able to stall the estate attorneys, but it’ll only be a day or so before the subterfuge wears off when I don’t present a body. That’s all I need you to be. A body.”
She took a sip from her wine. “The things people will do for money,” she said.
“Why not? Money is everything.”
She smirked at him. “I don’t know about all that,” she said, “but I’ve got bills to pay just like you do, so this whole thing is going to be mutually beneficial for both of us.”
“I’m glad you feel that way,” he said.
They filled the rest of the time they ate with small talk, which Richard was always lousy at. He didn’t see any point in chatting about nothing. Who really cared about the weather or even how good the food tasted?
Stella on the other hand seemed to thrive in it. She jumped from subject to subject with such ease that he hardly noticed that time had passed and they were just about done with dinner. Stella had cleaned most of her plate and was dabbing the corners of her mouth with the napkin. “Very tasty,” she said. “Is there dessert?”
“Dessert’s in the den,” he said, pushing away from the table. “Shall we?”
He took her hand and led her through the house to his den in the back. She paused to look around at the fine paintings on the wall. Richard watched as she wandered over to one, leaning in to look closely at it.
