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“I’m a spoiled little rich girl,” she said at last.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Sebastian responded unexpectedly.
Harper sat up sharply and frowned at him.
“I’m kidding,” he said. “Please continue. I’m just trying to keep things light.”
Harper slumped over and sighed. “My brother and I originally had trust funds set up
for thirty million dollars each. When my mother died, my grandfather decided that, without her guidance, it might be better to break it into two payments. A small, two-million-dollar payment when we turned eighteen, followed by the rest when we turned thirty.”
“Makes sense. An eighteen-year-old is more likely to blow all the money and have nothing to show for it.”
“Exactly. And, basically, that’s what I did. My father had given me everything I could ever want. When I went off to college, I continued to live that way, just on my own money for a change. When I started to run low, my father pitched in. But then he ran into his own financial problems and I was on my own.”
“I don’t hear anything that’s blackmail worthy. Did you spend all the money on drugs or something?”
“Of course not! I spent it on shoes. Clothes. Trips. Makeup. Designer handbags. Expensive meals. Nonsense, really, but what I’d always been used to. And, no, nothing was criminal. Embarrassing, but not criminal. I went to Yale for a finance degree and yet I was a fool with my own money. No...the problem came after my father got a divorce. My grandfather was worried that our dad had set a bad example and added an additional requirement to the trust to keep us in line—if we blew the first payment, we wouldn’t get the second.”
“Does he know what you did?” Sebastian asked.
“No. Most of the money was long gone before he even added the stipulation, but I’d transferred the funds into my private accounts so no one had any insight into my finances. But someone has found out. And if I can’t magically come up with a hundred grand, it’s going to cost me a cool twenty-eight million instead.”
* * *
Sebastian’s blood was boiling. He was pretty sure his doctor wouldn’t be too pleased that his relaxing vacation time had been overshadowed by drama of the worst kind. He could hear his pulse pounding in his ears as he marched down the stone hallway of the castle.
Harper was still in their room, spinning in circles and attempting to unpack her luggage. He’d stepped out to give her some privacy and to get a little air. The truth was that he didn’t want her to know how angry he was over her whole situation. After her confession, she might mistakenly think he was angry with her and he was anything but.
Instead he was feeling remarkably protective of Harper. It was almost as though she really was his girlfriend. With her curled up in his arms, it was hard for him to remember this was all a sham. It certainly felt real. Maybe too real for the first day of the charade.
Before he’d left the room, he’d promised to keep her secret, with one caveat. If he found out who her blackmailer was before she did, he couldn’t promise her that he wouldn’t cause some trouble for the jerk. She might not know that Sebastian had grown up on the wrong side of the tracks, but he had and, at a moment’s notice, the scrappy kid who’d used his fists to defend himself could come out. Whomever was putting Harper through this hell deserved a black eye. Or two.
Even as Sebastian headed down the staircase to the main lobby, he could feel his hands curl into tight fists. He was strung tight, clutching his notebook under his arm and ready to fight at the slightest provocation. He hadn’t been sure where he was going when he’d left the room, but he found himself loitering around the front desk. Perhaps the culprit would be there, waiting on a payment to be dropped off.
He was in no mindset to work, so he set aside his notebook, grabbed a copy of the local paper and settled into a large wingback chair by the fireplace. Despite being early summer, it was Ireland and that still meant cool weather, especially given they were near the northwest coast. The fire offered a comfortable, draft-free place to sit in the stone behemoth of a building.
Sebastian glanced over the words in the paper, but he was focused more on the comings and goings. There were few at this hour of the afternoon. It was likely that many had fallen prey to jet lag and were napping in their rooms before the welcome dinner. Most of the people he saw in the lobby were wearing the uniforms of the hotel staff.
After about thirty minutes, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed someone approach the front desk. He turned his attention fully to the man standing there, realizing almost immediately that it was one of the few people on the trip he actually knew—Harper’s ex, Quentin.
That made sense. Harper had mentioned that she’d been short on cash basically since college and she’d only dated Quentin a few years ago. If they’d been at all serious, there had to have been signs of her difficulties. Sebastian had noticed it in minutes. Quentin, of all people, should have been able to tell if Harper was broke. If not, maybe she’d confided in him and forgotten about it. And perhaps he might also know that her financial luck was about to change. It made sense. But would he be bold enough to try to get a piece of it?
Quentin stood nervously waiting at the counter for the desk clerk to return and, after a brief exchange Sebastian couldn’t hear, turned and headed back toward the elevators empty-handed. He glanced around the lobby as he walked, an almost agitated expression lining his face. And then his gaze met with Sebastian’s pointed glare.
He knew he could turn away. Try to appear more subtle in his appraisal. But at the moment, Sebastian didn’t care if the bastard knew he was watching him. Let him know they were on to his sick game. Let him check the desk twenty times tonight. He was going to be disappointed. No matter what Harper wanted to do, she was right about one thing. There wasn’t going to be any way to pull a hundred grand out of thin air in a foreign country.
It might even be a tricky thing for Sebastian to do and he had ten times that much cash in his checking account at any given time. Banks simply didn’t like handing over that much money. There were too many checks and balances, wire transfers, international calls and such before they parted with it. Perhaps if they were in Monte Carlo where people parted with larger amounts in the casinos on a regular basis, but rural Ireland? Not likely. If Quentin was behind this blackmail plot, his timing was crappy.
Quentin quickly broke their connection with an anxious biting of his lip and turned his back to wait for the elevator. Within a few seconds it opened and he disappeared without looking back in Sebastian’s direction.
Sebastian was so engrossed in watching his mark that he didn’t notice someone approaching his chair.
“May I join you?”
He turned and recognized Harper’s older brother standing there. Oliver and his wife, Lucy, had been introduced briefly to him on the bus, but they really hadn’t had time to talk aside from some basic pleasantries. Sebastian expected that he had questions for the new boyfriend. Any brother worth his salt would when his little sister was involved, even if she was a grown woman. “Please, have a seat. I’m just trying to stay awake until dinnertime, so I could use some company.”
Oliver chuckled and settled into the other wingback chair. He had a cut-crystal lowball glass in his hand filled with some ice and a dark amber liquor. “I know how that is. International travel messes with your internal clock. I’m hoping to eat a huge dinner, have a couple drinks and pass out at a reasonable hour. Whatever that is. I’m not sure if Harper told you, but Lucy and I have nine-month-old twins. Our sleep schedules haven’t been reasonable in quite some time.”
