by Lux Miller
Glass Ceilings by Lux Miller
© 2019 Lux Miller
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact:
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Please note that this book contains mature content and situations that may be triggering for some and situations that are not appropriate for readers under eighteen years of age.
ONE
Ashley
To say that my father has impossible expectations is the understatement of the year. He thinks I walk on water. No matter what I do to the contrary, I still somehow manage to come up smelling like roses. For the last year anyway.
It hasn’t always been this way. There was a time in my life when my father’s attention was focused solely on the wicked woman who tried to steal him away from me. I tried to warn her not to mess with his international holdings, but some people have to learn the hard way.
I bet you thought I was going to say that I purposefully drove her away. That’s not the case. Though I hated her very existence, she made my father happy on the surface. For a short time, anyway. That was before her lying, cheating, scandalous ways were exposed. I might have had a hand in the expose, but she had it coming. Any woman with enough balls to try to embezzle money from one of the richest men on the East Coast is asking for trouble. Especially if she’s messy enough to get caught.
Sighing, I look at my pet mouse, Jus. (You say it like Au Jus - he’s brown and would probably get lost in a pot of gravy. I thought it was clever.) “I’m no rocket scientist, but it only took the half-price private investigator I hired a week to nail her trying to steal from my father. Granted, that wasn’t the only way he nailed her.” I roll my eyes and laugh as the little mouse squeaks in response. “Yeah, I know… that’s no way for a lady to talk. Maybe I’m tired of being a lady.”
I suspect seeing pictures of Helen banging the private eye had far more to do with her dethroning than her trying to steal from him. My father is a rich man, and he wouldn’t miss a few thousand dollars. After Helen, he decided he no longer needed a wife. His children were grown, his businesses across the globe were flourishing, and he could find the company of a woman with a simple phone call.
“Blake and Carter were the smart ones,” I muse to Jus. They went away to college and refused to come home. When Blake did finally return for the holidays last year, he did so with a pregnant fiancee. “Gwen is the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen. Father lost his shit to find out that his golden boy fell into bed with a common woman.”
It’s not really funny, but I snicker coldly anyway. The insult to injury was that Blake had the audacity to produce a bastard heir. Yes folks, my father’s business mentality is still living in the eighteen-hundreds, despite the fact that his only grandchild is an adorable child. I’m convinced he’s wrapped around her little finger and they haven’t even met yet!
“Carter really dealt a blow to father’s image. Getting arrested for soliciting a male prostitute while on vacation in California was bad enough. Father really didn’t appreciate my joke about Carter making good on the name of Rodeo Drive.” Jus presses his little nose through the thinly-spaced bars of his cage and I smile. He’s such a cute little thing, despite my father’s insistence that mice are dirty.
Carter ended up escaping most of the legal charges that California tried to throw at him, but my father still isn’t speaking to him. It doesn’t help matters that he stayed in California, far out of my father’s reach. Can’t say I blame him. If I knew what was good for me, I would have followed my brothers’ examples. I’m not even twenty yet, though — I have plenty of time to fuck up still.
I know I haven’t painted the best picture of my father as a man. He’s far from perfect, but he could be a lot worse. Though he publicly denounced both of my brothers and removed them as beneficiaries from his will, he didn’t force them to sell their stocks in the family business. My brothers are both set for life. I’m the prim and proper princess that my father now expects to take over for him when he retires.
“Ashley, you agreed to not be difficult about this,” muses my father from my bedroom doorway. I sigh and glance over my shoulder at him. He’s greying and I think Helen’s affair took a bigger toll on him than he’s admitting. I know I shouldn’t push his buttons, especially not on purpose, but I am over his whole plan of arranging a marriage for me.
Every little girl dreams of a fairytale wedding with taffeta and tulle and someday becoming the big, bad bosswoman of a Fortune 500 company. What they DON’T dream about is marrying some guy their father chooses so they can inherit a company that makes automatic flushing toilets.
You heard me… my father talked the inventor of the automatic flushing toilet into selling him his patent. Now my father produces hundreds of thousands of Flush-O-Matics a year for companies throughout the world.
I know my father’s a marketing genius, and he could turn any kind of crap into gold. (There’s an idea for your next model, dad! A toilet that converts poop bricks into bricks of gold…) But it’s hard growing up in the shadow of a nickname you’ll never escape.
I spent my formative years in a preppy boarding school that taught all the little girls how to walk with books on our heads, how to properly drink tea, and how to be a lady. It also taught me that no matter how much money you have, you can never escape who you are. From the moment I started at Langston Academy, I was known as the Potty Princess.
Besides learning the cold truth about first impressions, the only other useful thing I took away from my time in that stuffy place is how to effectively sneak a boy in and out of a dormitory. Let’s just say that when my father received a letter home when I was fourteen about ‘Lady and the Tramp’ that it was decidedly not talking about the Disney movie.
When my father realized I was hellbent on rebellion, he called me home and set me up with private tutors where he could keep me under his watchful eye. Not watchful enough, since my math tutor was a local college boy who taught me more about sex education than fractions and exponents.
I don’t think there’s ever been a man more grateful for his daughter to pass the final exams to receive a homeschool diploma. Instead of letting me spread my wings to fly, my father demanded I spend a gap year at home learning the ropes of how the business that I will someday inherit works. So, for the last year, I’ve been neck-deep in learning the ins and outs of how modern plumbing works. To say it’s been a shitty year would be putting it lightly.
I’ve been the obedient daughter and begrudgingly gone on every date my father has blindly set me up on. I say blindly because if he even bothered to take a look at who he was setting me up with, it never would have happened. I’m not shallow enough to judge a man strictly on his appearance, but it’s blatantly obvious that my father has never spoken to any of the men he’s tried to convince me to marry.
“The highbrow, spoiled sons of the East Coast Elite are, to put it simply, boring. Father, they want to talk business, and I want to talk adventure. I want to make my mark on the world, not sport a ten carat diamond on my hand. Please tell me you invited somebody that’s somewhat normal this time?”
My father shakes his head at me and I know he�
�s disappointed in my attitude. But truth be told, I’m about done with balls and soirees and highbrow events. The closest any of his potential suitors came to acceptable was the son of a business tycoon from Australia. The son was nice to look at and a fantastic kisser, but there was nothing else going for him. Sure, I could have entertained him in my bed for a few weeks and gotten some use out of him, but I’ve been trying to change my ways lately. That means getting through three dates before jumping into bed with the socialites.
My sudden change in attitude has nothing to do with my father’s insistence that my indecision is going to put him in an early grave. If he wouldn’t push the matter and force me to make a decision on marrying a guy I barely know, I might be more open to doing what he wants, rather than I want.
No strings attached is the safest thing for me right now, but my father is insisting on full-on commitment. My father is literally loaded, with more than one offshore bank account. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that most of these men aiming to hookup with me are doing so because they see dollar signs. I don’t need a fairytale. I just want to be happy.
I’m not even against marrying a bookish type. There’s an air of elegance about a man that’s not ashamed to admit he likes to read. But I’m not interested in a man who speaks to computers better than he does to people.
I wouldn’t be opposed to a physically attractive man, either, but that can’t be the only thing he has going for him. If I just wanted to rub elbows (and knees and all sorts of other body parts) with a pretty boy, it certainly wouldn’t be the shallow airheaded boys that live in my SoHo neighborhood.
Would it kill the fates to pop a bolt of lightning down to Earth and combine the two? Someone with a brain that isn’t weaker than me. I want a man that can pick me up and slam me against the wall, but I also want a man who can read more than the back of a cereal box.
As long as it gets my father off my back for a few weeks, I’ll throw on a pretty dress and mingle around with the pampered pretty boys. At least I can count on some interesting conversations. There’s bound to be a desperate man or two in the crowd.
“Ashley, I will leave you to do whatever it is you girls do to get ready for a social outing. At eight o’clock sharp, I expect you to look like a proper heiress.” He slips out of my room with a sharp slam of the door.
Sliding off my bed with a groan, I roll my eyes and check the mirror. Smoothing down my hot-pink, poofy dress, I laugh. I look ridiculous right now with the insane amount of satin fabric that’s bustled up around my hips. If this is the kind of dress that real princesses wear, you can have the crown. It isn’t worth it.
In an effort to fill out the dress as intended, I wore a corset underneath it and it’s laced tight enough that the boning on the sides is biting into my flesh and digging into my ribs. It’s not that I’m flat-chested, but the corset pushes those puppies up into something worthy of showing off with the lowcut neckline. Beauty is pain, right?
Grunting, I snatch my tiara off the desk and place it atop the ridiculously high hairdo that my father’s personal stylist whipped my hair into. I think she inhaled so much hairspray in the ‘80s that she thinks we’re still trapped in that decade. The higher the hair, the closer to God, right?
With the ridiculous amount of jewelry and expertly applied makeup, I look the part of a pampered princess. But looks can be deceiving. Truth be told, I’m more likely to snag the last piece of pizza and belch in your face than curtsy and bow my head to any man.
“Let’s get this disaster of a party started. The sooner I make my grand appearance, the sooner I can pretend to show a little interest in a handful of boys, then fake feeling sick and disappear. I give it ‘til midnight. If nobody worth their salt catches my attention, I think I’m going to mysteriously have a horrible case of ‘Oops, I ate too many tacos…’”
Jus tilts his head at me and I laugh at the sweet, little creature. Sometimes I feel like he’s my only friend. He’s certainly the only boy my father will allow in my bedroom and even that took a lot of convincing.
I have the feeling that someone is watching me, but as I turn around abruptly and scan the room, I see that it’s just my nerves playing games. There’s nobody here. Nobody has been in this room since my father installed bars on the windows.
‘Not leaving anything to chance or to your midnight discretion,’ he warned me when I demanded to know why he closed off my only escape route. He didn’t explicitly say so, but I get the feeling he’s not talking about my choice in footwear when he says discretion.
Shaking my head, I admonish myself, “Geez Ashley. You’re starting to become paranoid. There’s nobody out there watching my window at eight pm. Unless it’s a figment of my imagination that I dreamed into life. That’s about the only way I’m ever going to find a guy that ticks all my boxes and is still charming enough to convince my father that he’s worthy of my hand in marriage.”
TWO
Eli
It’s brave for me to standing here openly gawking at the tiny illuminated square of the penthouse window. I can’t see much as it is, and somebody could sneak up on me without me ever knowing. The moment someone catches me out here, I’m done for. I’m not being paid to stare at Ashley Rogers. Technically, I’m not being paid at all, but that’s another matter entirely.
Pierce Rogers barely tolerates me as it is. He reminds me daily that he ‘allows’ me to work for him as a modern-day indentured servant. He’s a shrewd businessman and he didn’t get to his social standing by mixing with us commoners. A fact he reminds me of daily as I travel between his upstate New York residence and the SoHo apartment that juts into the sky above me.
If I had any sense whatsoever, I’d get the hell outta Dodge while the getting’s good. I’m young and able-bodied. I could find a job almost anywhere doing exactly what I’m doing now. Wealthy businessmen in need of adept gardeners slash handymen are a dime a dozen in SoHo, and I could have my pick. My work speaks for itself. The Rogers’ estate has been awarded numerous times. Despite Pierce Rogers’ public claims, the impeccable maintenance of the gardens and landscaping has been my duty since I began my servitude here.
I know it sounds asinine for me to keep calling myself a servant. Sure, slavery was outlawed almost two hundred years ago, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead. What it means is that it’s changed forms into something that looks voluntary, but really isn’t. I may not physically be bound to the property, but there’s more ways than one to own a man. Pierce Rogers owns me, whether I like it or not.
My mother worked for Rogers until she fell pregnant. She never told me who my real father was, but I can only assume he worked at the Flush-O-Matic factory where she began working the day she turned eighteen. Rogers fired her as soon as she could no longer hide her pregnancy.
There’s a lot of he-said, she-said that was cranked through the rumor mill that attempts to explain the formative years of my life. We bounced around from homeless shelter to government housing and back again until somehow my mother wormed her way back into the shadows of Pierce Rogers by becoming involved with his gardener, Trevor. She married my stepfather when I was ten. He was never particularly fond of me. I think he saw me as more of a hindrance than a blessing, but my mother would hear none of it.
I still remember how she’d chastise me when Trevor and I would butt heads, which was often. It didn’t help matters that with my new stepfather came two annoying younger stepsisters. When we moved into Trevor’s humble home on the outskirts of the Rogers property, Trevor set the wheel in motion for me to someday take over his duties in the gardens of the Rogers estate.
Before I was seventeen, Trevor had unloaded nearly all of his duties onto my young back so that he could care for my ill mother. I don’t know if his heart was in the right place or not, but he taught me some valuable life skills. The man knows how to landscape like it’s nobody’s business, and he taught me everything I know about it. My mom and I both thought he was a good man. By the time I realized the tr
uth, it was too late.
My mom died days after the doctors said she was getting better. It was right before my eighteenth birthday, and it sent me into a wild tailspin. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was no longer bound to the poor life I’d been born into. That I may somehow find a way to escape the poverty that had defined my existence.
Fate had other plans. Before my birthday could grant me the freedom I longed for, Trevor caught me shagging Rogers’ wife at the time. She was an attractive woman who was incredibly bored and spent her days cooped up in the apartment in SoHo. The time Trevor caught us wasn’t the first time the twenty-five year old had begged me to fuck her, claiming that Pierce was always out of town and couldn’t satisfy her needs.
Despite me being of legal age to consent to our explicit activity, Trevor found a way to make sure it would be my undoing. You see… Pierce Rogers is fiercely protective of two things - his beautiful and untouchable daughter, Ashley, and anything he deems his personal property. That includes his wives, though it’s hard now to keep up with who he’s married to and who he’s just banging.
Common sense would’ve said to pack and run, but Trevor was clever. After he found out about my illicit activities, he followed me to Rogers’ apartment and videoed the affair. And he hasn’t hesitated to hold it over my head. Told me I’d better stay on and make him look good or he’d make sure Pierce saw the video of me lying spread eagle on their marital bed with my face buried between her thighs and my dick balls-deep in her mouth.