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CHAPTER ONE
There’s no good way to break it to your mother that her twenty-five-year-old daughter is dating a forty-nine-year-old billionaire. So I’d never really gotten around to it. By the time we flew to my hometown of Calumet, Michigan, I knew I was in trouble.
On the car ride from the Marquette airport, where Neil’s private plane had landed, I mentally rehearsed how I would explain to my mother that I was dating Neil Elwood, publishing magnate and tenth richest man in Great Britain.
Oh, she was going to be so pissed at me.
“Sophie? You’re awfully quiet,” Neil said, his eyes never leaving the snow-covered road for a second. He’d rented a car from the airport, a Malibu that, according to him, “drives like a broken shopping trolley.” He hadn’t been in a great mood since we’d landed.
“I’m letting you concentrate on winter driving.” It was a pretty good excuse; Mom said the Keweenaw had already gotten a hundred inches of snow in December alone. Highway forty-one was a hard-packed avenue of white, with a sheen of ice on top. Tall plow banks narrowed the road on either side,,and deceptively cheerful flurries fell in the gray early morning light.
Neil raised an eyebrow at the road ahead of us. “Darling, I learned to drive in Iceland. I’m sure I can handle this.”
“We get a higher average snowfall than Iceland,” I pointed out. But it wasn’t like I could hide the truth forever, and I really had to stop my whole head-in-the-sand routine. “Okay. Confession.”
“On the way to meet your family for the first time. Lovely.” He inhaled, audibly frustrated. “Do they at least know I’m coming?”
“They know you’re coming. My mom just doesn’t know…some stuff.” Better to do it like a Band-Aid. “Maybe I haven’t been entirely honest with her about your money. Or…your age.”
“Sophie!” he barked, tearing his eyes from the dingy snow on the road to frown at me.
“I didn’t lie!” And I hadn’t. “I just haven’t corrected my mom when she said ‘this kid you’re dating.’”
“This is bloody fantastic,” he cursed, a muscle in his jaw ticking as he locked his gaze on the road again. “As if I weren’t already nervous?”
“At least I told you before we got there.” Not that I was making it any better by asking for credit for that. We were already in the car. I could have easily just let this whole thing blow up in our faces upon arrival, and Neil probably suspected I had planned to do just that.
“Sophie, we have been dating for a year! Christ, we’re buying a house together. You didn’t think that eventually your mother would find out?”
I tilted my head and studied his profile. Since the chemotherapy he’d had the year before, his hair had come back in grayer. He’d started growing a beard, a precisely clipped shadow of silver that I absolutely detested, but tolerated because it seemed to make him happy not to have to shave as often. Even before the chemo, our age difference would have been obvious. But now that he was rocking this hot dad look, it was going to come as a bigger shock to my mother. She was only forty-two.
“You know, you’re very handsome when you’re annoyed with me,” I observed.
His mood didn’t lighten. “I’m always handsome, Sophie. Stop changing the subject. Why didn’t you tell your mother the truth about me?”
I shifted a little in the passenger seat. “I meant to. I really did. But then I let way too much time pass, and it got harder and harder to work it in to conversation. It never seemed like the right time.”
“And a house full of your extended relatives is the perfect venue for initiating that conversation, is it?” he fumed. “What is this? Are you…embarrassed of me?”
That made me laugh, despite the fact he was roaring angry. “No! Seriously, that’s not it. That’s stupid. But my mom is to me as you are to Emma. How would you feel if she moved to a different country with an older man she’d met only two months before?”
“It depends on if that man is Horrible Michael or not,” he grumbled. He hated his daughter’s fiancé for no reason I could see, beyond that fact that he was going to marry Emma. In Neil’s opinion, no one deserved Emma. He would have to cop to understanding my mother’s point of view, or concede that Michael wasn’t all bad.
The latter was never going to happen, so he said, “It’s completely understandable that you didn’t know how to explain our relationship to your family. I must admit to having a bit of an advantage here; as a wealthy, middle-aged man, I’m expected to have affairs with beautiful women half my age. It says nothing negative about my character. Those beautiful young women bear the brunt of the scorn, for being vapid, shallow gold diggers.”
“Now that I know you understand where I’m coming from, I feel even worse for not telling you.” I laid my hand on his knee. “I’m really sorry. Does it help at all that I never lied?”
“Your mother is expecting a twenty-four-year-old to walk through that door,” he reminded me grimly.
