ALL THAT HE WANTS (Volume 1 The Billionaire's Seduction) (42 page)

“Like
what?!”

“Like never trust another person’s word. Always be able to back up your agreements by some form of leverage. Always watch your back. Destroy your enemies when you have the chance, to make sure they don’t recover and destroy you later.”

This was unbelievable. “You can’t live life like that!”

“I said
business
lessons, not
life
lessons. It’s not the same.” Suddenly his face grew dark, and he stared off into the distance. “Unless you get involved with someone who treats your relationship like a business.”

My stomach dropped. “I would never do that!”

His eyes found mine as he came back to the present, and his expression lightened. “I wasn’t talking about you. I know you would never do that.”

“Where was your mother in all this?”

He shrugged again and returned to his food. “If she wasn’t running her charity balls and dinners, then she was telling me to stop being a whiner and beat my father if I was so upset.”

“Jesus,” I murmured.

“Poor little rich boy, right? Rich people problems.”

“Child abuse isn’t ‘rich people problems.’”

He frowned like I’d just suggested something incredibly outlandish. “My parents didn’t abuse me.”

“Maybe not physically, but
emotional
abuse is still abuse.”

He waved off my comment with one hand. “Lots of people have it
way
worse than I do. I turned out fine. No harm done.”

I wondered about that.

Then I thought of something else I knew about him: according to some E! show I’d seen on the Dubai, Connor was the youngest son of the Templeton family.

“Don’t you have older brothers or sisters?”

“One older brother. Vincent.”

“How much older?”

“Five years.”

“What about you guys?”

“What about us?”

“Weren’t you close?”

He made a face like
Naaah.
The way you might answer if somebody asked if you wanted ketchup on your hotdog. “Not really.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I didn’t see much of him during the school year.”

“He didn’t go to boarding school?”

“Oh, yeah, he did. But he kept getting thrown out, so my parents kept shipping him around the world to new schools. So I only saw him during summers and Christmas. And not much then.”

“Why’d he get thrown out?”

“Sex, alcohol, drugs, bad grades – the usual.”

“Um… don’t take this the wrong way… but I thought
you
were the black sheep of the family.”

Connor laughed. “I am.”

“If your brother did all those things and isn’t the black sheep, what the hell did
you
do?!”

“Vincent shaped up after college. Well, law school, really.” Connor’s voice became tinged with the slightest hint of bitterness. “He figured out which side his bread was buttered on, and he buckled down and became a perfect little heir to the throne. Me… I was pretty much a good kid until my late teens, and then I
really
pissed off my family.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I quit college my freshman year, for one.
That
didn’t go over well.”

“Why’d you quit?”

“The way I looked at it, the world was full of limitless opportunities, and here I was stuck freezing my ass off in boring classes, just like every other boring school I’d ever been in.”

“Where’d you go to college?”

“Harvard.”

Of course.

“What’d you do once you quit?”

“Ha –
there’s
a fun story. I told my father I wanted out. He said ‘no, absolutely not.’ We had a big fight, I made some grandiose claims about how I could succeed better and faster than any of my ivory tower professors and clueless peers… and he made a bet with me.”

“What was it?”

“He’d stake me, to the tune of ten million dollars, and I could go out and have three years to make something of myself.”

“Ten million dollars?!” I yelped.

Connor smirked. “And here you were, thinking my father was such a bad guy.”

“Well… maybe I misjudged him…”

Connor shook his head. “No you didn’t. Ten million was nothing to him. It would be like you giving your kid the change under your couch cushions to go start a business.”

“Oh.”

My mind was spinning.

That must be a hell of a couch in the Templeton household.

“And for a mere pittance, he was buying my soul. It really was a deal with the devil. If I succeeded, then I owed him the original ten million, plus 75% of all profits as my primary investor. If I failed, then I agreed to go back to school. After graduation, I would enter whatever position in the family business that my father deemed fit.”

“What did you do?”

“I agreed, with the proviso that we cap the buyout at twenty million. Meaning if I could give him $17.5 million, that was it, we were done, and I kept the rest – plus my freedom.”

“What did he say?”

“He laughed – after all, remember, he thought I was going to crash and burn, and then he’d own me. But, being the consummate negotiator that he is, he wouldn’t do the deal for less than $30 million – meaning I would owe him $25 million to get out from under his thumb. The original ten, plus 75% of the 20 million in profit.”

“That doesn’t seem fair,” I protested.

“That’s another lesson I learned in Monopoly. In business, nothing is fair; you get what you negotiate for.”

“So what did you do?”

“I took the deal.”

“What happened?”

“I crashed and burned spectacularly,” he grinned.

“You lost ten million dollars?” I gasped. “In three years?”

“No – in nine months. I gambled recklessly on several enterprises, all of which tanked.”

“You?! But you’re, like, a business genius! How did
that
happen?!”

“Well, I was
trying
to lose the money.”

“WHAT?!”

“It was my form of adolescent rebellion. Anyway, that’s what my mother’s shrink told me at a Christmas party one year.”

“What did you do?!”

“I told him to stick to analyzing my mother and leave me out of it.”

“No, I mean – ”

“I know what you meant. I went back to my father and told him I’d lost the money.

“He said, ‘Well, now you’re going back to Harvard.’

“And I said, ‘No I’m not.’

“And he said, ‘We had an agreement!’

“And I said, ‘Do you have it in writing?’”

My mouth fell open. “Did he?!”

Connor burst out laughing. “No, he didn’t. I think it was the only time in his entire life he didn’t sign a contract – because he totally underestimated me. He thought I’d never learned a thing from him. You should have seen his face. Especially when I said, ‘And since you don’t, how are you going to enforce the agreement?’”

I laughed in spite of myself. “Did he know what you were referring to? The Monopoly games, I mean?”

“Oh, of
course
he knew. My father has a memory that’s a cross between a computer and a steel trap. He just didn’t think
I
remembered – or had enough balls to cross him.”

“What did he do?”

“He ranted and roared about suing me in court, then he threatened to disown me. I flipped him off and left the house.”

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

“It was pretty stupid, but – hey – I was twenty years old at the time. And it felt
great.
”

“But…. what happened after that?”

“Well, one thing I’d done with that ten million dollars was make a lot of contacts in the industries I targeted. And I had the family name backing me up, not to mention dozens of college and boarding school friends with rich fathers who had millions of dollars to invest. I secured a hundred million in seed money – with far,
far
better terms than my father had offered me, I might add. I buckled down and actually tried to make it work… and the rest is just boring details in a bank account ledger.”

He toasted me ironically with his glass of wine.

“You got people to give you a
hundred million dollars
right after you blew ten million?!”

“First off, you’ve got to remember, we’re talking about people worth hundreds of millions of dollars apiece. Some of them worth billions. A couple of million for an investment – especially backing a
Templeton
– ”

He said his family name in a hoity-toity, self-mocking way.

“ – was a no-brainer to them. Some of them wanted to get closer to my father. Those guys, I let them have the impression that I was still in the old man’s good graces. And the ones who hated my father, well, I let them know exactly what I’d done. They usually roared with laughter and then asked how big a check I needed. They figured I had inherited my father’s business sense, and they could stick it to my dad by helping me succeed.”

“Did your father find out?”

“Oh yeah. That was part of the fun – especially when my initial investors made back 300% within two years.”

“So… it was all just a… a ‘screw you’ to your dad?”

“Well, that, and getting rich in the process.”

“But… your father… you still
talk
to him, right?”

“Now we do. We didn’t for a couple years afterward.”

“Not even at
Christmas?”

“Oh, when he threatened to disinherit me, he wasn’t joking. And my mother went right along with it. I was ‘disinvited’ to all family functions for awhile. In fact, I didn’t see or talk to either of them for almost three years.”

“But – but Mexico – ”

“Yeah, well… that’s a bit more complicated.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what percentage of my actions was real fear for his life… and what percentage was feelings of responsibility to him, as a son for his father… and what percentage was just the ultimate ‘fuck you’?”

I stared at him blankly. I couldn’t think of anything to say. This conversation had gone
that
far beyond my realm of what constitutes ‘normal.’

“Nobody else would do it,” he continued. “Vincent sure as hell wouldn’t. In the end, my brother is only out for himself. Mom wanted to hire a professional go-between, a mercenary, to deliver the money. But I went to the dropoff without either of them knowing. Paid the ransom myself, just so I could stand there and look him in the eye. Kind of like, ‘I’m the son you hated, and yet here I am. Asshole.’”

Connor shrugged.

“In the end, I guess I still felt like I owed him that ten million… so… I had to repay him somehow. That, combined with all the other things I mentioned. Like I said, it’s complicated.”

“What did he say when you got him out?”

Connor grinned. “‘What took you so long?’”

“You’re joking.”

“No, I’m not. In that instant, I showed him up, utterly and completely… and the bastard didn’t have the graciousness to admit it. But that’s my father for you. On the other hand, I got invited back to family gatherings after that. They kind of had to.”

“You still care about him, though, right? I mean… you risked your life…”

“
That
is a question for another therapy session.” Connor took a sip of his wine, then gave me a lopsided, sarcastic smile. “Now aren’t you glad you asked about my childhood?”

“…I’m not really sure…”

“It was supposed to be a funny question. Nobody in their right mind would say ‘yes.’”

“Well… I mean… I want to know more about you… so I guess I’m glad I asked… I’m just so sad that you had to go through everything you did growing up…”

“Save all that sympathy for kids with unhappy childhoods who didn’t turn out to be billionaires,” he said lightheartedly.

“Hopefully they got to play a few games of Monopoly with their parents and didn’t have to worry about a knife in their back,” I muttered.

Connor laughed, then settled back in his chair. “But I learned a lot from those games.”

“What, how to rip people’s throats out?”

“
Businesses’
throats out,
businesses’
throats. Figuratively speaking, of course. But I learned something else, too.”

“What was that?”

“What I wanted to do when I grew up.”

“I thought you wanted to be a futures trader.”

“That was when I was five. Before the Monopoly games taught me what I really wanted.”

“…which was…?”

Connor gave me a chilling smile.

“To destroy my father’s empire… just to watch it burn.”

Things got less dark after that.

Although it took me awhile to recover.

Connor knew he’d frightened me a little, and so he spent the rest of the time regaling me with stories about playing pranks on schoolmates at boarding school… and bizarre tales of business deals gone wrong… and funny bits about how much Sebastian hated Connor’s family, and all the snide remarks he would make when he talked to them.

Eventually the wine took over and put everything into a nice, soft haze… and the food overwhelmed me with the sheer sensual delight of it all. And I forgot about the creepy family history.

For a while, anyway.

We finished dinner – all sixteen courses – around 11PM. I swear I almost asked the restaurant staff to cart me out in a wheelbarrow.

As we walked out into the lobby, Connor did the worst thing he could have possibly done under the circumstances.

“So… want to go back to the hotel and have crazy sex?” he whispered in my ear.

“UGH. NO,” I said, not wanting to admit that I felt about as sexy as a stuffed pig. “You paid too much for it to all come back up.”

He roared with laughter. “That’s gross… and yet, somehow endearing.”

“I’m so glad to entertain you,” I said sarcastically. “By the way… how much
was
that dinner?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“That’s what I was afraid of…”

Once we were back in the Bentley, I snuggled up next to Connor. “What are we doing now?”

“Are you tired?”

“No, I had a couple of nice naps earlier,” I said, then followed up impishly with, “Followed by some nice exercise.”