The Proviso (49 page)

“You know all about my company,” Eilis said
suddenly. “Tell me about yours. What’s it called?”

“Taight, Inc.”

She chuckled. “That’s simple to remember. What kinds
of things do you do?”

“Oh.” He waved a hand, unsure how to describe it.
“It’s a hodgepodge of things that interest me. I have an office,
but I work at home a lot. I’m a serial starter.”

“Let me guess—it’s that ADD thing.”

He flashed her a grin. “Never underestimate the
commercial value of mental illness.”

That comment drew laughs from several people around
them, as well as Eilis, who was the only person he cared about
entertaining. “How did you get started?” she asked.

“If I tell you, do you promise not to think badly of
me?”

She nudged him with her body. “Too late for that,
Sebastian.”

He grinned. He’d never thought he could be this
relaxed with a woman he desired so badly, talking business, being
personal, not picking her up to take her directly to the Den of
Iniquity. He’d never thought he’d meet a woman who wanted to know
about him, who he was, how he ticked—and he wanted to enjoy it for
its own sake.

Maybe he’d been wrong about her fixation with Ford.
She was here, with him. She was smiling and laughing, going along
with the flow of the afternoon. She was asking questions, and he
hadn’t made any gaffes. Yet.

“My family was very poor, but my mother understood
how money worked. She just didn’t have much to work with because my
father had a tendency to give away what little we had to people who
had even less than we did.”

“Oh, how sweet.”

“No, it’s not sweet,” he returned sharply, surprised
at her comment and surprising her with his sudden sharpness. He
backed off the sharp and held up a hand to apologize and soften it.
“It’s stupid. You can’t help anyone if you have nothing and there
is no value in teaching your children that being—staying—poor is a
virtue.”

She remained silent, so he went on.

“I made my first loan—a whole quarter—when I was
ten. My father chastised me for demanding repayment. He said, ‘If
he was destitute enough to ask, he needs it more than you do.’ My
mother waited until my dad went to work the next day and set me
straight about that. She said, ‘Not only do you demand repayment,
you
never
loan money without getting paid for it.’ She
explained to me how interest worked. She taught me how to barter:
what was valuable and not, what might be valuable and why. She
taught me to read the stock tables. She taught me what good debt
and bad debt were, when, and how to tell the difference.”

“Well, if your mother knew all this—” Eilis
began.

“I’m getting there.”

Eilis laughed then. “She had a shoe box.”

“She did. She made
me
my first loan out of it
when I really began what she called ‘enlightened usury.’”

“What’s that?”

“In principle, it’s just supply and demand. You
charge exactly what people are willing to pay. If Johnny Rich Daddy
needed a loan—which is what my mother loaned me money for—I’d ask
for some outrageous vig and nine times out of ten, he’d agree to
it.

“So she made me this loan and charged me twenty
percent.” Eilis gasped. He noticed he was drawing some attention,
but that didn’t faze him. He wished the whole world could
understand how he made money and occasionally, he didn’t mind
sharing his methods and reasoning.

“She said, ‘I don’t want to know how much you plan
to charge that boy, but I’ll be very disappointed in you if you
charge less than double.’ So I charged him fifty percent. When it
was all done and I got my money back with interest, I paid her
back. Then she sat me down with a pencil and paper and showed me
how it worked and how much money I’d really made.”

“Margin.”

“Right. She didn’t know any of those labels, though,
so it was rough on me for a while when I actually went to business
school. I had to completely reorder my language so I could
understand the labels the people in my classes already understood.
On the other hand, they didn’t have a dime to their names and by
that time, I’d made my first million, so definitions didn’t bother
me too much.”

“You made that kind of money loan sharking?”

“Oh, no. I made odds.”

“You were a bookie?” Eilis demanded in a whisper
because she’d finally noticed that people were listening very
intently, and she began to fidget. So he winked at her and she
began to relax with a slow smile.

“My mother would have killed me. People who gamble
are stupid. I never gamble; I play to win. I don’t play games where
the odds are against me and I just happened to have a talent for
being able to figure rough odds on the fly. So that was a lot more
lucrative than loan sharking.”

“If you lived in a poor area, how did you get so
many customers?”

“Oh, Knox. I wouldn’t have made near as much money
in my neck of the woods alone, so I ended up loaning money to all
Knox’s private school schlubs. They’re also the ones who’d gamble
away their trusts given half a chance.”

“How did you make sure you got paid back?”

He slid her a look but ignored the question,
continuing with his story. “So, I had, oh, twenty-five thousand
dollars by the time I was sixteen. Then—” He shuddered. “—my mother
made me get a job.”

The line burst out laughing and Sebastian shook his
head. Feeling very . . . odd . . . in a good way . . . about people
listening to him and laughing at what he said, he continued to act
as if Eilis were the only one listening. “That was the most
miserable period of my life—strike that, the second most miserable
period of my life. I was a busboy at Shoney’s. It was hard work,
paid next to nothing and I was completely stymied by why what I’d
earned didn’t match what the check was for.”

“Ah, taxes.”

“Bastards.”

By this time, Sebastian had the line rolling and no
longer trying to hide the shameless eavesdropping. The movers and
shakers in the line had recognized him, but simply smiled and
nodded. They wanted to be normal people on Saturday as much as
Sebastian did. They should’ve recognized Eilis because they would
know her, but they didn’t have a clue who this gorgeous blonde was,
and suddenly he wondered how so many smart people could be so
collectively stupid.

“I was livid,” he went on, still talking only to
Eilis. “She just laughed at me and said, ‘Welcome to normal people
world, son,’ and I decided that just wasn’t for me. She made me
stick with it because she said I needed to know what it was like
for ninety-nine percent of the population.”

At that, the crowd applauded and Sebastian couldn’t
stand it anymore. He doffed a nonexistent hat and made an elaborate
bow to the crowd.

Eilis gasped in delight. “You’re a ham! I never
would’ve guessed.”

“Me neither,” muttered Sebastian, who, for the first
time in his life, understood what it was like to not have people
back away from him, to have people value what he actually said
instead of assuming just enough to be mad at him for what he hadn’t
said.

“Excuse me, sir?” came a small voice from below him
and he saw a black boy no older than ten or so. “Can you teach me
that? What you were talking about?”

Suddenly, his mother appeared and snapped,
“Christopher! You get over here this instant and don’t bother that
man. You can see he’s talking to his wife.”

Sebastian’s eyes widened.
Eilis.
Wife.
That felt kind of sort of . . . good . . . but he’d think about
that later. “Ma’am,” he said, his hand on her arm, “please don’t
rush off.” Sebastian squatted in front of the boy so he was at eye
level. He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and pulled two
business cards out and gave them to him.

“My name is Sebastian Taight—” and he heard a couple
of gasps in the somewhat trendy crowd, which still eavesdropped.
“You give one of these cards to your principal at school and tell
him to call me. You keep this one for yourself. If your mother says
it’s okay, you call me and I’ll take you around and teach you
everything you ever wanted to know about money. The more people who
have money, the better for everybody because money really
does
grow on trees.”

He knew that was too metaphorical for the boy to
understand, but he wasn’t eager to stifle children who understood
what they wanted but didn’t have the means to get it.

Sebastian rose and smiled at the boy’s mother. “Nice
to meet you, Mom of Christopher.”

“Thank you for being kind to my son,” she said.

“Mom?” Christopher said, looking up at her
pleadingly. “Please, can I call him?”

“May I,” she corrected.

“Tell you what,” Sebastian said. “I have to go to
the Board of Trade Monday. Would you and Christopher care to
accompany me?”

She swallowed, her eyes wide. “I don’t even know
what that is.”

“They buy and sell wheat there, Mom.” Sebastian
looked down at him, as shocked as his mother. “Please, Mom? Please
may we go?”

She looked down at him and caressed his face. “All
right.” Sebastian’s smile deepened when she looked back at him. “My
name’s Christina Van Horn.”

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Van Horn. If you’ll call and
leave a message with your address and phone number, I’ll pick you
up Monday morning at seven. That all right?”

“Yes, thank you,” she whispered and hesitantly
offered her hand to Sebastian, which he shook firmly. She and
Christopher turned then and walked up the street, across the street
toward the gated and fenced rattletrap neighborhood of pale blue
townhouses.

“That was nice,” Eilis murmured.

“Naw,” he murmured in return. “It helps my bottom
line to teach people how to make money.”

“How?”

“Money isn’t a zero-sum game. The pie gets bigger as
more people have money and therefore the pie has the opportunity to
gather more people. It’s a cycle. People making money, not being in
debt, letting their money do all their work for them, putting it
back into the economy by investing? Good for me. Companies working
at their best, hiring, putting out good products? Good for me.” He
stopped then. Generalities, principles, beliefs, he’d share.
Specifics, no, and especially not with a crowd packed with people
who could and would take detailed notes in their heads.

So he wrapped his hand around her neck to bring her
close to him—oh, she smelled divine, like almond and cherry
blossoms—and whisper in her ear, “I don’t think I’m going to be
able to have a decent conversation with you now with all these
people listening. Do you want to go somewhere else?”

“Oh, no,” she said in a normal conversational tone,
grinning, eyes sparkling, arms crossed over her chest. “I’m
enjoying myself immensely. Where did you go to business
school?”

Sebastian squirmed because at this point he was more
on display than he wanted to be—especially now that everyone knew
who he was—and he had just passed uncomfortable. On the other hand,
he wanted so very badly to amuse Eilis and he was doing a
very
good job. “Harvard.”

“What did you do between your horrible job and
Harvard?”

“I lived in Paris for six years and studied art at
the École des Beaux-Arts.”

Eilis’s mouth dropped and several people turned
around to stare at him. It didn’t help matters that now that he and
Eilis were in the threshold of the doorway, the whole of the
restaurant was listening—and it was a tiny place.

“Really.”

“Yes, really,” he repeated dryly.

“I— I’m—” Eilis laughed then, her fist over her
mouth to try to control it, but couldn’t.

“It’s part of the ADD thing.”

She laughed until she cried and he wanted to see her
that way forever. Other than his only actual lover, Vanessa, he had
never spent more than a few days at most fucking any one woman and
this one—ah, this one he wanted to take to his bed and keep her
there for as long as she wanted to be there.

He decided not to speak again until the restaurant
patrons had begun to mind their own business, and, fortunately,
Eilis understood without having to be told. However, the little
nudges in his ribs from her elbow didn’t make him stop wanting to
amuse her.

“What did you do in Paris besides study art?” she
asked later, low, once they’d gotten their butcher-paper-wrapped
soggy white bread and brisket-piled-to-the-ceiling sandwiches
complete with equally soggy fries and a mess of pickles.

“I discovered wine and absinthe—”

She gasped. “You drank absinthe?”

He grinned. “I
love
absinthe. Anyway, I
listened to a lot of good music, saw a lot of nice gardens—” He
smiled when she flushed and picked at her sauce-drenched beef.
“Fu—er, met a lot of nice women, ate a lot of good food, wore a lot
of nice clothes, and basically partied my way through school, Louis
XIV style.”

“Not like frat boys here, huh?”

“Oh, no. Paris is where I got culture. Knox
introduced me to a lot of things, but it was nothing compared to
what I could get in Europe. I loved it. Here,” he said when it
seemed she meant to stop eating after just a couple of strips of
brisket. He loaded up his fork, slathered the load with sauce, and
said, “Open your mouth.”

Confused, she did as he said. Her eyes widened when
he popped that bite in her mouth. “Eilis, if you don’t eat, I’ll
feed you myself.”

He suddenly wasn’t joking and it only took a
nanosecond for her to get it.

“I’m not as hungry as I thought I was,” she
whispered around the food, a sudden desperation in her eyes.

“Yes, you are. You’ve been hungry for the last ten
years.”

If it was possible, her eyes got even bigger. “How—
That’s not true.”

“Oh, sure it is. And I’m not going to argue about
it. You show me you can eat like you haven’t eaten in two weeks and
then maybe I’ll think about not holding you down and feeding you
myself.”