Despite the Gentleman's Riches: Sweet Billionaire Romance (For Richer or Poorer Book 1) (2 page)

His personal line? As opposed to his impersonal one?

The glass doors drifted closed behind the movie-star look-a-like as my manager shifted back into gear and stomped toward me. From the expression on his face, I knew my customer's non-verbal rebuff was just going to make my dressing-down more painful.
Thanks, oh nameless one
, I thought sarcastically.

But, despite my best intentions to flick the hunky customer's card into the trash, it wound up sliding down into my jeans pocket. There, the card's hard corners poked me at intervals for the rest of the day.

I burned my uniform shirt in effigy in my backyard, but I held onto that pointy-edged card.

Before my anger built up enough to make flames look like a good idea, though, my found-cockatiel Florabelle and I banged around in our ancient trailer, pretending like it wasn't the end of the world that I'd lost my job. Well, I banged, and she squawked at intervals from her perch on the back of a wooden kitchen chair.

"What was I thinking, Florabelle?" I fumed. (
Squaawk!
) "As if owning my own home was such a feat. (
Squaawk!
) As if I'd always have that solid paycheck for the lot fee. (
Squaawk!
) As if I could create a home so safe you would always be protected and would never have to fly away again...."

The truth was that my pet deserved to be coddled after her tough start on life. Florabelle had come to me a few years prior when I was living in an apartment with a tiny balcony, the tropical bird showing up exhausted due to a long flight in from who-knows-where. I'd fed her and watered her and virtuously searched for her owners, knowing that pets weren't allowed where I was staying. But I'd fallen in love so quickly that I was glad when no one turned up to claim my avian companion.

After a few months of keeping Florabelle a secret, it seemed like a no-brainer to make a down-payment on a mobile home where no one could tell me that birds weren't welcome. And by paying extra every month, I'd proudly become a debt-free homeowner the previous year. It hadn't been easy to meet the minimum mortgage payment on a checker's salary, let alone to send in more of my precious funds on top, but making a home for myself and Florabelle seemed worth the sacrifice.

What I didn't realize then is that I'd still have to scrape together a regularly scheduled lot fee even though I owned my trailer free and clear. My current landlord was slimy and a bit scary, but the grand required to move off his property always hovered far beyond my reach. So I was stuck with what amounted to a monthly rental payment even though I technically owned my own home...and that money was going to be hard to come by this time around.

"Whose bright idea was it to pay ahead on my car insurance?" I groused, rubbing savagely at a stain on my stove-top in an effort to purge my troubled emotions. "If I hadn't changed over to the six-month policy, I'd be able to afford my lot fee right now!" I was always trying to cut corners and save money, so a ten percent annual savings over the monthly plan had looked like a good deal...until I lost my job and realized I was skint.

I should have noticed that Florabelle had gone silent during my most recent tirade, but I was too engrossed in my own travails to pay attention to the cockatiel. With the hubris of youth, I'd thought that I was unbelievably clever in buying the trailer, figuring I was investing in my future every time I patched the roof or fixed the floor. And yet: "Who knew that the adjective 'mobile' in front of 'home' was more dream than reality?" I continued my thoughts aloud, supposedly putting clean dishes back into the cabinet but really just taking out my aggressions on the particle-board doors.

Squaawk!

"Yikes!" I threw my hands up around my head to protect them from Florabelle's beating wings as she launched herself into the air. The cockatiel had finally grown sick of my anguish (or of the loud noises) and had proven once again that clipping the feathers of a determined bird only made her flight ungainly and erratic, not impossible. I'd shortened my cockatiel's wing feathers to nubbins in order to prevent escapes out of accidentally opened doors and windows, having gained my pet through the species' improper sense of direction and not wanting to lose her in the same manner. But clipped wings didn't ground my intrepid Florabelle; they just made her infrequent flights a hazard to herself and to those around her.

"Here, Florabelle!" I called, calming my voice with an effort so my pet would come in for a landing before she battered herself to death against a window. "How about you go back in your cage and I'll take my grumpiness outside?"

Suiting actions to words, I soon found myself continuing to pour out my soul to a companion, but this time to a less animated one. Yet, what my apple tree lacked in talkativeness, she made up for in the listening department. I could feel my blood pressure ratcheting down the instant I pulled out scissors and twine and began gently tying down new branches to prompt my tree to focus on early fruiting rather than on reaching for the sky.

"It's a conundrum, isn't it, Pippin?" I said, calling the tree by one of the three varieties that had been grafted together to make up her dwarf form—Pound Pippin, Arkansas Black, and Virginia Beauty, the names themselves good enough to eat. Unlike Florabelle, Pippin didn't deign to answer, but I still felt the tense muscles in my neck slowly loosening as I worked. My landlord always made fun of the strange appearance of my yarn-clad tree during his far-too-frequent visits, but Pippin didn't seem to mind her own lack of style, and the yarn training really did work. Even though she'd only been in the ground for a year, the five-foot-tall tree had set one tiny fruit this past spring, an orb that grew a little larger each day and promised to turn into a ripe, homegrown apple this fall.

"How could I possibly move out now that I have you in my life?" I asked, and Pippin clearly understood that the question was rhetorical since she remained silent. "But I don't see how I can find another job in time to keep this place going either."

My hand jerked involuntarily at the thought, pulling a twig until it cracked rather than bending it gently into position. "Damn!" There went any possible apples next year on the Arkansas Black limb. I threw down my tools, tears pooling at the back of my eyes as I realized that there was a limit to how much drama even Pippin could take.

Well, desperate times called for desperate measures. If neither of my usual friends was able to cheer me up, I figured I was going to have to take drastic action. Which is how I found myself digging a pit in the earth not too far away from Pippin's roots, topping a stack of flammables off with that scratchy Food City t-shirt and a dollop of gasoline, and letting 'er burn. If my future was going up in smoke, I might as well get some satisfaction out of the flames.

***

"Our Virginia Beauty has arrived!" Okay, yes, I'll admit that I'd chosen my tree in large part because one of her branches shared my name. Not the "Beauty" part, but my parents had christened me Virginia, and months ago I'd made the mistake of telling a non-profit member that my tree and I had the same first name. Ever since then, I'd become Virginia Beauty instead of Ginny to the kind, middle-aged ladies who formed the central backbone of Citizens United Against Dirty Coal (Cuadic for short).

"Hey, Ms. Cooper," I greeted the high-school biology teacher who had first sucked me into the group, long before we'd streamlined our focus to center around the current travesty. The educator kept asking me to call her Claudia, but old habits died hard and I wasn't quite ready to make the leap from student to friend. Still, I gave her a hug as I walked into the meeting room, noticing the hint of formaldehyde that followed the teacher around on dissection days. If my memory of high-school biology served, today's lesson would have been frog physiology.

"Ginny, just the person I wanted to see!" exclaimed Brett, the group's paid organizer, as he pulled me away from Ms. Cooper's side. I never let on, but I both crushed on and envied our sole employee, who managed to turn nature into a full-time job. Brett had gone off to some fancy college up north rather than barely managing to eke out two years of community-college night school like I had, so it was no wonder he'd been offered the paid position instead of me. Still, I couldn't help imagining a world in which I was Cuadic's organizer...rather than simply a volunteer who might not be able to attend the next protest if I didn't find a way to pay for gas.

Not that any of those issues were relevant at the moment. Everyone here was united in our fight against so-called Clean Power, so I pasted on a mostly-real smile and helpfully asked, "What do you need?"

"Did you turn off your cellphone?" Tom interjected. Our resident conspiracy theorist, Tom was positive that the government was listening in on our conversations using cellphone technology. That seemed like a tremendous waste of manpower to me since Cuadic members spent most of their time eating cookies (gluten-free, honey-sweetened rocks when it was my turn to bake) and gossiping about grandchildren, but what did I know?

"Sure," I lied, not wanting to explain for the twentieth time that I didn't own a cellphone. Sometimes it bugged me that all of the other members of Cuadic were pretty upper crust and considered cellphones about as costly (and definitely as essential) as shoe laces. But I had to pick my battles, and keeping a mercury-spewing power plant out of our neighborhood was the battle I'd chosen to fight. The truth was that pollutants in the environment caused cellular mutations, and our region already topped the nation in cancer deaths per capita. My campaign to ensure that everyone around me achieved their maximum longevity made helping Cuadic an essential part of my week, even if the other members seemed to live in a slightly different universe than I did.

In front of me, Brett rolled his eyes, proving that
he
at least recalled that I possessed no cellphone to turn off, then the organizer took my arm and drew me further away from the crowd that had gathered around the snack station. Usually, actions like this one would have made my knees go a bit weak as I imagined that Brett had finally come to his senses and decided to ask me out on a date. But for some reason, the fish-sticks-and-pizza guy's face drifted up in my mind instead. Before meeting Mr. Movie Star, I'd thought that Brett was handsome, but now I realized that the organizer's face was a little childish and soft around the edges. No firm jaw slightly covered with the hint of a five-o-clock shadow, no blue eyes that seemed to pierce my skin and head straight for my soul....

Remember, Mr. Handsome made you lose your job
, I grumbled silently, forcing my flight of fancy to make an emergency landing. Cuadic was my real life, the reason I was able to put up with creepy landlords and soul-crushing jobs, so I'd better pay attention during my three hours of reality per week. Because the truth was that, while I really
did
care about my crusading efforts to extend lifespans (and had harbored a major crush on the organizer for years), my perfect-attendance record at Cuadic meetings was primarily due to feeling accepted among its members in a way I never did in the outside world. Despite our differing incomes, the middle-aged ladies of Cuadic embraced my weirdnesses, and I wanted to enjoy fitting in while I could.

I turned my attention back to the guy in front of me, who had started our conversation without preamble. "Tonight we're going to be strategizing about the public hearing next week," Brett said, his eyes earnestly gazing into mine with a stare that had attracted so many middle-aged women to our cause. "I know you said that you'd be willing to make some posters for us to hold up outside the building, but I was hoping I could count on you to speak as well. I think more of our neighbors can relate to you than they can to the Señora," he added, the organizer's hint of a smile offering to share the joke with me. But this time I frowned instead of playing along.

While it was true that Brett and I had laughed together about the Señora in the past, the organizer's joke now seemed to be in bad taste. Sure, the so-called Señora
was
a humorous figure, the ultra-rich ex-wife of a coal company executive who had joined our group as a way of thumbing her nose at a cheating husband. While the rest of us showed up at protests in old jeans and t-shirts, the Señora emerged from a slick sports car in heels and pearls. She thought hefty contributions to the cause would buy her new companions' affections, too, but nobody ever invited the Señora out for ice cream after a sit-in. In the end, although anyone could join Cuadic, that didn't make the Señora one of us.

But was I any more a member of the group? I suddenly wondered if "Virginia Beauty" was my only nickname, or if Brett and company had dreamed up a less-fond moniker that they used behind my back. Was I equally laughable, the poor little trailer princess whose car roared as it pulled up out front because I couldn't afford to get the muffler fixed? Did the other Cuadic members sneer at all of my late-night cramming sessions as I used free library books to try to catch up to their level of education, hoping to make myself worthy of their organizer's notice?

Whether my suspicions were true or entirely off base, though, I cared too much about the cause to let my insecurities sway me from the path. "Sure," I told Brett, agreeing easily. "I'll speak at the public hearing." No matter that stage fright would keep me up half the night beforehand, and that the action would make my job hunt even harder. I'd brave my way through the former, and would figure something out when the time came to pay the bills.

I promised to speak at the hearing...but I didn't stay and bask in Brett's presence the way I usually would have. Instead, pretending that I'd developed a sudden craving for salty snacks (bound to raise my blood pressure and give me a stroke before I saw my fourth decade), I fled back into Cuadic's core group. For once, I wished that I was at home where I could consider my Cuadic membership in private, but the best I could do at the moment was to pull up a happy face and pretend to be having fun.

No one else seemed to notice my silent misery as I rejoined the masses jostling around the snack table, but Ms. Cooper's astute eyes took in my flushed face and down-turned lips. "Is everything okay?" the teacher asked, her words making it clear that she cared about me as a person, not just as a soldier in the battle against dirty power. And, for a minute, I wanted to let my tears gush out and to tell Ms. Cooper that I'd realized I didn't fit in at Cuadic any more than I did in the outside world. Instead, I just gave a humorless chuckle and admitted: "I lost my job today."