The Billionaire's Embrace (The Silver Cross Club) (16 page)

None of which explained why I had let Carolina drag me here.

Stupidity? Temporary insanity? Heartbreak?

I needed another drink.

I fought my way to the bar and was making good progress through some very nice Scotch when Carolina found me again. Some lanky model type had made his way into her orbit, his stubble and elaborately coiffed hair designed to make him appear just masculine enough to avoid androgyny. I sighed and set down my glass, preparing myself for what would inevitably come next.

Carolina sat down beside me on the sofa I had managed to procure, and said, “Carter, my darling, this is Jaen. We’ve just found each other. He told me about the best club, the absolute best, we
must
go. All of the best people are there. We will have so much fun. Say that you’ll come with us.”

And there it was: we would spend the rest of the night gallivanting around the city, going from club to club to maximize Carolina’s chances of being photographed somewhere with cachet. My role, of course, was to provide entry to any doors that were reluctant to open. “No,” I said firmly.

She gave me a look of such extravagant, wide-eyed incredulity that I couldn’t help but laugh. “But Carter! Jaen
knows
people. You wouldn’t want anyone to think that you are old and boring, no? You must get out of your house every once in and while!”

Jaen opened his mouth to say something, but Carolina help up one hand, and he subsided. Smart boy.

“I’m out of the house right now,” I said, amused.

Carolina leaned closer and spoke into my ear, her lips almost brushing against me. “Perhaps I forgot to mention that
you owe me
.”

Of course she wouldn’t have forgotten about that. I was terrible at poker, and yet I never learned to avoid placing bets. “Fine.
One
club.”

“Yes, of course,” Carolina said, sitting back and beaming. “Just one! Absolutely.”

As a promise, it rang falser than most. “Just let me finish my drink,” I said. I would need the fortification.

Well, and maybe Carolina was right. I should make the most of my wild youth.

* * *

I
woke with a start when my phone buzzed on the nightstand.

Christ. What time was it?

My tongue stuck to the roof of my dry mouth. I rolled over and squinted at the clock, but the blurry numbers wouldn’t resolve into anything I could read. It was light in the bedroom, full daylight. I should have been at work hours ago.

What day was it?

I was fairly certain it was Friday.

I grabbed my phone and looked at the screen. My secretary had texted me. I had a meeting that started in an hour; was I planning to make an appearance at work?

Fuck. It was a conference call about an upcoming merger—not something I could reschedule. I rolled out of bed and staggered toward the bathroom. My head felt like it was being squeezed like a rotten melon.

I wasn’t entirely sure what had happened last night.

Shower, suit, painkillers, quick shave, and I was out of the apartment in half an hour flat. I needed coffee, some fried eggs, and a nap. Two of the three, Nancy would have waiting for me at the office. The nap would have to wait until after my meeting. I knew some executives who kept cots in their offices, but I would have to settle for the floor under my desk. At least the carpet was thick.

I stared out the window as Henry drove south along the Hudson, my aching head resting against the glass.

Maybe I needed to take some time off.

With a few exceptions—food poisoning, cousin’s wedding on the West Coast—I had worked every single day since my father died. Even on the days I didn’t make it to the office, I still spent a few hours on my laptop. As much as I enjoyed the endless variety of problems that was presented to me on a daily basis, sometimes I had the urge to do nothing but sit on my couch and watch football. Impossible, of course; football didn’t have irate board members who would call me to yell about share prices.

It wasn’t that I had set out to be a workaholic. Necessity drove me to it. When my father died, I was fresh out of business school, and was forced to learn how to run the business practically overnight. My father’s death was unexpected—he was only in his early 60s, and in apparently good health—and I had been completely unprepared for the intricacies of running a multinational corporation. I spent the first six months getting by on five hours of sleep a night, going home only to shower and change clothes. By the end of it, I was running on fumes, but the company survived. And by then, working seven days a week had simply become a habit.

A vacation would likely do me some good. Bora Bora, the Comoros. Possibly Mustique. I could escape from the dreary New York winter, find some sun-dappled maiden eager for a fling.

I sighed. There was no time. I had three mergers to oversee in the next six weeks.

An image from the night before surfaced in my brain: a woman with her skirt hiked up around her waist, moaning my name...

I rubbed my eyes. That had been at the third club, after Carolina had jettisoned Jaen and ensnared a larger, more muscular victim.

No more clubs, no matter how much Carolina pouted. I wasn’t twenty-three anymore; my liver couldn’t handle the alcohol, and my cock couldn’t handle the multiple women. If I wanted to have a breakdown, it would have to take a more discreet form. Something in private, with no risk of the tabloids finding out.

The Silver Cross, maybe.

I couldn’t risk it. I hadn’t been there in two months, not since Regan broke up with me over the phone just before Christmas.

Christ. Regan.

I wasn’t prepared to think about her.

Fortunately, Henry pulled up outside of the office before I had a chance to delve too deeply into that particular well of misery. He slid open the partition and said, “See you tonight, sir?”

“Most likely,” I said. “I’ll give you a call.” He nodded at me, and I opened the door and went out into the world.

Sutton Industries occupied the top floors of a large skyscraper in the heart of the financial district. I had considered the idea of constructing a building exclusively for the company’s use, but discarded it as ostentatious and unnecessary. We had no use for an entire building, and I had little desire to be a landlord. Renting suited me well enough. Let someone else deal with it when the heating went on the fritz.

I strode into the lobby and took the elevator all the way to the top floor, where my office was located. There was a
little
room for ostentation in a CEO’s life, and I found that my expansive view of lower Manhattan and the Harbor satisfied my urge for world domination. As a life-long New Yorker, I shared the common belief that nothing of importance lay west of the Hudson, but I enjoyed being able to survey New Jersey and reassure myself that I had no need to ever go there.

As soon as the elevator doors slid open, my secretary descended on me like a wrathful harpy. “Mr. Sutton, your conference call is scheduled to begin in fifteen minutes—”

“Yes, I know,” I said, accepting the coffee mug that she handed to me and taking a scalding sip. “I’ve been very bad, and you’re tremendously disappointed in me. You still have breakfast for me, though, right?”

She pursed her mouth at me, but I could tell that she was amused. Nancy and I had reached an understanding: I would make her life extraordinarily difficult, and in return, I paid her a salary fit for a king. It suited both of us. “I shouldn’t feed you, but I will,” she said. “Egg and cheese biscuit, waiting on your desk.”

“My savior,” I said. “Bless you.” I headed toward my office, anticipating greasy food and a second round of painkillers. “Don’t let anyone in until at least noon, would you?”

She said something behind me, but I didn’t listen, already halfway through the door into my office. I closed the door behind me and leaned back against it, exhaling, allowing my eyes to close for just a moment. No more drunken escapades, I told myself sternly. The hangovers weren’t worth it, and severely limited my ability to be productive the next day. When I was younger, I could stay out all night drinking like a fish and feel fresh as a daisy the next morning, but age had taken its toll on me. Time and tide wait for no man.

I had enough time to cram the egg and cheese biscuit into my mouth before the conference call began, and the rest of the day passed in a steady blur of work: phone calls, papers to sign, executives to confer with, an unexpected crisis in the Nairobi office. Before I knew it, 6:00 had arrived, and Nancy was knocking on my door frame and saying, “I’m heading home, Mr. Sutton.”

I put down my pen and rubbed my eyes. “Is it that time already?”

“It’s that time,” she agreed. “You should get going, too. You know it makes the staff nervous when you’re here late.”

“Yes, they always think the company is collapsing,” I said. “All right. I’ll just finish this up and then I’ll leave.”

“Right,” she said, giving me a suspicious look, but I gazed back at her with such bland innocence on my face that she rolled her eyes and headed for the elevator.

She was right, though. It wasn’t good for me to spend so much time at the office. I forgot what the outside world looked like. Trees. Fresh air. Not that the air in Manhattan was ever particularly
fresh
, but it was a step above the dry, recycled wind that constantly gusted through the overhead vents in my office.

I stood and went to the window, looking down at night falling over the city, the lights across the water, the tankers slowly moving out toward the sea. I was a wealthy, powerful man living in the greatest city on earth. I had more money than I would ever be able to spend, and I was respected by my employees and my peers. The worst thing that had ever happened to me was my father’s death, and that came after I was a grown man and abundantly capable of processing my grief. I led, in short, a charmed life.

And yet I felt like my chest had been scooped clean. Like if I thumped on my breastbone, it would sound a hollow echo.

I didn’t want to think about it. I turned away from the window and put my coat on. It was Friday night; I didn’t want to go home and sit in my empty apartment.

I pulled out my phone and dialed Carolina’s number. There were worse things in life than having a good time.

I
spent the next week in a drunken blur. Carolina was more than happy to take me out clubbing every night, and I slept with more women than I had in the past year, two or three in a night. I didn’t learn any of their names. I didn’t ask. They were nothing to me: warm bodies. I would have felt guiltier about that had I been more than a warm body to them. We used each other, and everyone went home happy.

Or at least slightly less sad.

Not that I was sad. That would have been absurd. What did I have to be sad about? Fourth-quarter profits? Buying out a promising tech company from under Google’s nose? Everything in my life was going, as the saying went, swimmingly.

And yet I couldn’t shake that hollow, scooped-out feeling.

I woke up one morning with a killer hangover, and while I was emptying the contents of my stomach into my toilet, I realized that I didn’t remember anything that had happened. Arriving at the club with Carolina, yes, but after that, nothing. My memory was a blank, like some great hand had descended from the sky and erased the evening from existence.

It had to stop. I couldn’t afford to lose control in this way, and blacking out at night clubs was absolutely unacceptable. If I kept it up, I would have my mother leaving me threatening messages about impropriety and lawsuits.

I looked at myself in the mirror: my bloodshot eyes, my lined face, weary with excessive partying and a lack of sleep.

Regan was gone.

I hadn’t died yet.

And although I couldn’t predict the future, I didn’t anticipate dying for quite some time; and this was no way to live. I had a corporation to run, and self-indulgent paroxysms of alcohol and womanizing wouldn’t strengthen my position.

The next time Carolina called me, I would tell her no, and stick to it. I would focus on work, and stop catering to my empty heart. Worse things had happened. Life would go on.

It did. I worked at it. I got back into the habit of daily exercise: weights in the morning, and running five miles in the evening after work. I bought a juicer. I even tried meditating, and even though I found it excruciatingly dull at first, I stuck with it, determined to put in a solid month before I abandoned the idea as fruitless.

When I went to pick up my Little Brother that Saturday, for an afternoon of wandering around the zoo, he looked at me suspiciously and said, “Are you on drugs?”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m not on drugs. I’ve been juicing.”

“That’s drugs,” he said, and yelled over his shoulder into the house, “Ma, Carter’s on drugs!”

“Not juicing like
steroids
,” I said. “For God’s sake, Nelson. Like
vegetable juice
.”

Nelson’s mother came to the door and gave me the same suspicious look her son had bestowed upon me. “You on drugs, Carter?”

“Vegetable juice,” I said. “And meditation. Honestly, Ms. Turner. You know I’m not into that sort of thing.”

She grinned at me. “Just making sure. Y’all have fun. Don’t keep him out too late, he’s got that robotics thing tomorrow.”

“I’ll have him home in time for dinner,” I said, and sternly pointed Nelson toward the car.

Nelson was ten. He liked computers, science fiction, and geology. His mother told me that he mainly hung out with the girls at school, but that he was considered so peculiar that nobody messed with him. I had known him for three years, and he had always seemed very content with himself, unbothered by what anyone else thought. He knew what he liked, and he was going to do it.

His mother had confessed to me, a few months back, that she had initially been doubtful that a white man could provide her son with the sort of role model he needed. I still wasn’t convinced that I was the right person for the job, but I was doing my best. I had helped Ms. Turner enroll Nelson in a magnet school, and I sponsored his robotics team. I taught him how to swim. I took him to the library as much as he wanted. I would, when the time came, help him navigate the process of college applications.