Serving the Billionaire (14 page)

When I opened the door and walked into my apartment, I saw it through his eyes: the tiny, cramped space, the hideous flowered sofa I’d gotten for $50 at a thrift store, the twin bed shoved against one wall with the sheets rumpled. I was fiercely proud of my apartment: I owned everything in it, and I paid rent every month, and it was
mine
. It had never looked so shabby to me.

I sat on the sofa and tried not to look at his expression as he came through the door. I remembered his clean, bright, airy penthouse, and felt ashamed. He looked incredibly out of place standing in the doorway of my tiny, dingy apartment, wearing a coat that probably cost a month’s rent.

He didn’t belong in my world. It was too small to hold him.

He made a slow round of the apartment, looking at the dishes draining beside the sink, picking up and examining the little animal figures I collected. I said nothing while he moved through the small space. I had the strange thought that if I stayed very still and didn’t speak, he would forget I was there.

But at last he stopped pacing and turned to face me, leaning against the kitchen counter. “I’m sorry about last night,” he said.

I didn’t respond; I couldn’t think of anything to say.

He paused for a moment, as though he was waiting for me to speak, and then said, “I shouldn’t have asked you to do that. I thought—well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. I made a mistake. I’m sorry.” He looked down at his hands as he spoke, fiddling with a button on the cuff of his coat.

He was
nervous
, I realized. I wasn’t sure what to make of that. “You thought I would want to,” I said, half-questioning.

“Yes,” he said. “Or—I suppose I did. I wasn’t thinking. And then you safeworded out, and I—” He broke off, and shook his head. “I was mistaken. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

It was a good apology, by just about any measure, but I didn’t want to forgive him just yet. Something in me had been badly hurt in that moment when he ordered me to suck another man’s cock, and I was wary of giving in too easily. I didn’t want him to think that he could do whatever he wanted and be instantly forgiven as soon as he fixed me with that sad, blue gaze.

So I said, “Who’s Carolina Ramos?”

I regretted the words as soon as I spoke them. I sounded like a jealous girlfriend. I wasn’t Carter’s girlfriend, and I had no right to be jealous. But as hurt as I was by what happened at the club the night before, I was more hurt by the thought of Carter kissing some model the same day we had shared coffee in his apartment. The day after I lost my virginity to him.

But he didn’t know that, and I couldn’t blame him for it. What to me had been a night I would remember in vivid detail for the rest of my life had been, for him, just another Friday evening. I was positive that Carter hadn’t been a virgin in at least a decade. Everything that was special about that night was probably completely mundane to him.

I was so busy beating myself up over my inability to keep my mouth shut that it took me several seconds to notice Carter’s reaction.

Instead of getting annoyed or defensive, he was
smiling
.

That annoyed
me.
“Is something funny?” I snapped. I didn’t like being laughed at, especially not when I was in such a vulnerable position, still in my pajamas with a billionaire in my apartment.

“I grew up with Carolina,” he said. “Our mothers are best friends. She’s like a sister to me. Where did you even hear her name?”

“Some gossip blog,” I mumbled, embarrassed. I shouldn’t have jumped to any conclusions.

He raised an eyebrow. “You read those?”

“I’m trying to teach myself about, you know. Clothing and makeup and... things like that.” I shrugged. “I didn’t go looking for stuff about you.”

“I see,” he said, and sighed. “Oh, Regan. You shouldn’t be working at that club.”

I stiffened. “Why not?”

“You can do better,” he said. “You have so much potential. Don’t waste it serving drinks to rich assholes.”

What a condescending thing to say. I laughed sharply. It didn’t sound happy even to me. “I can do better? I really can’t. My father was a drunk who beat my mother, who refused to leave him. We never had any money. My childhood sucked. I’ve been scraping by for years, one crummy job after another, and now I’m finally making
real
money. I just opened my very first savings account. Don’t lecture me about
better
. This is the best my life has ever been. And you’re—nobody has ever told you ‘no.’ But I’ve spent my whole life being told ‘no’ over and over again.” I rubbed my eyes, covering my face with my hands. I shouldn’t have said any of that.

“You’ve been through a lot,” Carter said. He took a step toward me and stopped. “Look, I know that I can’t—really understand what you’ve been through. But you shouldn’t limit your options just because you’ve had a hard life.”

To my horror, my eyes filled with tears. I covered my face again, this time to keep Carter from noticing that I had started crying. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I choked out. I took a few deep breaths, calming myself, and managed to get the waterworks under control. I lowered my hands from my face. “That’s not the point. I’m still...”
I’m still mad at you
, I filled in silently, assertion and reminder. It was hard to stay angry when he kept looking at me like that.

I had to end this. I should have done it the night before, and I hadn’t, and look how that had turned out. I couldn’t keep going like this, thinking about him all the time, hungry for his presence when we weren’t together. It was time.

“Carter, look,” I said. “This has been really fun, okay, but it’s not—it isn’t real life. We have nothing in common, not really. I need to focus on working and making money and—taking care of myself. It would be really, really easy for me to get in over my head with you, and I can’t let that happen. I know you aren’t serious about this; I’m just—a notch on your bedpost, I guess, like all those starlets you go out with, and I’m not really, you know. It’s fine that you do that. But it’s not really for me.”

He stared at me blankly. “Are you... breaking up with me?”

“No,” I said. “I can’t break up with you. We aren’t—there isn’t anything. But I think we need to stop spending time together.”

“Because of the starlets,” he said. His voice had no intonation to it; it was completely flat and emotionless. “What starlets?”

I turned to my laptop, still open on the sofa. “Amber Reynolds,” I said. “Tina Lafayette. Jennifer Hutchins. Michaela Lawrence—”

He held up one hand to stop me. “That’s enough. Are you going to believe those bloggers? They’re vultures. I speak to someone for five minutes at a party, and suddenly I’m having a passionate affair with her.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have to explain myself to you. It’s like you said. We aren’t. There isn’t anything.”

I deserved that, but it still stung. “The club,” I said, grasping at straws, desperate for a reason that he wouldn’t question, so I wouldn’t have to explain the truth to him: that I wasn’t good enough for him, and never would be. “You said you like watching. You’re there with the—the dancers, in the private rooms, and you—I mean, I don’t know what happens in there, but—”

“Are you really doing this?” he asked.

I ignored the interruption. “—but I think that you should, um, consider that the women you’re watching are people, with their own inner lives, and by perpetuating the exchange of female sexuality for money, you’re undermining the—the ability of women to meaningfully transform the accepted gendered behavioral binary.” I was babbling now, parroting things that Sadie had said to me without really understanding them. I hoped it was coherent enough that Carter wouldn’t see through my desperate verbal fumbling.

Carter folded his arms across his chest. “The gendered behavioral binary,” he repeated.

I nodded, deciding it was probably best if I didn’t say anything else.

“I suppose it makes sense you would think that,” he said. “I’m at the club a lot, after all. And I did tell you—” He stopped, and sighed. “I shouldn’t tell you this,” he said. “Please understand that if you breathe a word about it to anyone, you’ll be undoing several years of hard work on the part of many people.”

I swallowed. I didn’t know what he was going to tell me, but it sounded serious. “I understand.”

“I’m helping federal prosecutors build a case against Richard Hackett. He won’t meet with me anywhere except the club; he’s paranoid, thinks he’s being bugged. Well, he
is
, but he doesn’t have any proof of it.” He sighed again, and drew one hand over his face. “So that’s why I’m at the club all the time. Not, as you seem to think, because I enjoy exploiting women.”

“That’s not what I think,” I said, even though that was, in fact, pretty much what I had said to him. I decided that misdirection was the best tactic. “Who’s Richard Hackett?”

“You’ve met him. He’s the one who likes fingering the dancers,” Carter said.

His words made me blush, but I knew, then, who he was talking about. “You’re building a case?”

“Securities fraud,” he said. “Mainly insider trading.” He shook his head. “Men who have so much money that they can’t think about anything but making more.”

“But not you,” I said, almost a question. “You think about other things.”

Our eyes met. His gaze, so clear and direct, sent an electric current running down my spine. “I think about other things,” he agreed.

He was a better man than I deserved. I had known it instinctively since the first night I met him; and now I had the evidence, more than I could have asked for, and it only served to strengthen my certainty that I had to cut him loose. I was nobody, a cocktail waitress with a high school diploma. He was going to be President.

I felt hollowed out, like I had been scooped empty, every organ and hope and memory lifted clean out of me.

I said, “I’m sorry. I just can’t.”

He must have sensed the finality in my voice, because he nodded, lips compressed into a thin line, and buttoned his coat.

He didn’t belong in my world, and I didn’t belong in his.

L
ife after Carter was very quiet.

Without really meaning to, I began dividing my internal chronology into two eras: Before Carter and After Carter. It was a terrible idea, because it constantly reminded me of him and of what I’d lost. But by the time I realized what I was doing, it was too late.

Before Carter, I’d been a quiet, hard-working nobody, a silent mouse of a person, grinding through week after week and year after year of a dull, meaningless existence. But I hadn’t known it. It was just the way things were.

After Carter, I knew it.

It was hard to get up in the afternoon and go to work, with nothing to look forward to except years of loneliness and drudgery.

Maybe that was a little dramatic.

I felt dramatic, though. I felt like the heroine in a Romantic tragedy. I wanted to put on a long white dress and amble across the rain-drenched moors. I would catch a fever and waste elegantly away before I finally expired, in a heart-rending scene near the end of the novel.

Sadie was probably right: I read too many books.

I spent Thanksgiving with Sadie and her boyfriend, clustered around the table in Sadie’s tiny apartment. I wondered what Carter was doing. He was probably at his mother’s penthouse on the Upper East Side, eating a turducken and drinking expensive wine and laughing. He had only mentioned his mother to me once, but his affection for her had been obvious.

I hoped he was happy.

I wasn’t, and couldn’t imagine that I ever would be again.

I missed him all the time.

Work was no escape. I kept thinking I would turn around and see him there, looking at me from across the room, lifting his chin to let me know he wanted a drink. I thought I saw him, once, from behind, but then he turned and it wasn’t him at all, just some man wearing a suit.

I missed him.

Two weeks after he came to my apartment, I arrived at work just before 4 and stashed my things behind the bar, just as always. I greeted the other waitresses and the few dancers who were loitering around, just as always. And then Germaine came out of her office and said, “Regan, a word.”

I followed her in, feeling numb. Being summoned to Germaine’s office always filled me with nameless dread; I would probably never stop being convinced that she was about to fire me. But this time, instead of handing me my last paycheck, she said, “There’s a gentleman in room 4 who would like to speak with you.”

My heart leaped into my throat.

It had to be Carter. There was no one else it could be.

Still, I asked, “Can you tell me who it is?”

Germaine raised her eyebrows at me. “I think you should go see for yourself.”

Heart pounding, palms sweating, I left Germaine’s office and crossed the club to room 4.

I wasn’t sure what I was more afraid of: that it
was
Carter, or that it wasn’t.

The door was shut. I pushed it open without knocking.

The man inside turned—he turned toward me, and it was Carter, Carter’s hair, Carter’s blue eyes, Carter’s face looking at me from across the room.

“Regan,” he said, and my knees turned to jelly beneath me. I quickly took a seat on the nearest sofa. I didn’t trust my legs to hold me up.

Seeing him again was like having a hot fire lit in my belly. I didn’t know why I’d ever told him to stay away.

That wasn’t true. I knew exactly why. But all of my reasons seemed unimportant now.

“I’m sorry to corner you like this at work,” he said, before I could say anything. “You told me that nobody has ever told me ‘no,’ and maybe that’s true. I like getting my way. I’m not willing to let you go without a fight.”

“Oh,” I said. I was blank, numb.

“It’s true that we don’t know each other very well,” he said. “But you’ve had—some sort of pull on me, ever since the first time I saw you. I know you feel it too.” He spoke quickly, like he had rehearsed his words. “If you really don’t want to have anything to do with me, just say the word, and I’ll walk out that door and never speak to you again. But I’d really like to take you out for dinner tomorrow night.”