The Billionaire's Favorite: A Homesburg Romance

by Elle Chance

  If this was my father softer, I wouldn’t have survived him before. I guess that was good news for me. We spent a moment looking at the calculatedly smooth and bland surroundings. Everything was cream and covered in plastic so it could be wiped off later.

  “I prefer him too,” I told my father, having thought it over.

  “Evidently,” he said drily, but he bit back saying anything else about Josh for the day. Instead, my father asked me about a book he’d recommended me months ago that I’d read the description of, and he found his way to a long discussion on staying as sharp as possible through reading and educating yourself.

  It was dark by the time I tore myself away from my father.

  “That sounds like it went better than usual,” Patty said, glancing at me as we walked to where Rocco had pulled the car around. “I was expecting fireworks, with us rushing over here.”

  “It went all right,” I told her, lowering my voice. “It turns out telling him it scared me for him took him off guard.”

  “Yeah, strength in vulnerability. I read the book, but I doubt it would work if anyone but you did that with your father,” Patty said, giving me a pointed look. “You have him wrapped around your finger.”

  I laughed at that. “You all see something very different from I do when I talk to him.”

  I sent Josh a hopeful text about getting later drinks and smiled when I saw the response from him. Emoji filled as anything. Somehow weakness didn’t feel like the worst position for me to take.

  Especially when Josh’s last text was, “I have to show you something.”

  JOSH

  SOFIE’S RETURN TO the Lodge still felt monumental to me each time. But instead of being the sole billionaire in a nearly empty building, it was my love goggles that made her stand out among a sea of rowdy children having a birthday. She was wearing her same soft gray coat, the formal dress she always wore, blond hair loosening from the serious knot she put it in at the back of her head.

  “Hey, stranger,” she said as I wrapped her in my arms. “So what do you have to show me?”

  “It’s a surprise!” I told her. A little manically, because I wasn’t sure it was a good surprise. “Hey, team.”

  Patty and Rocco greeted me with the same level of enthusiasm as usual. I wasn’t quite their colleague, even if I was on Sofie’s payroll. I didn’t know how much she’d told them, and Sofie was always a little distant when we spent time with the two of them. Not so much that I’d done something wrong. But enough that I was sure they still thought this was some weird cover for her brothers.

  “Let’s get drinks!” I said to the four of them. I thought it would be good to keep Patty around.

  The four of us snagged a booth by the bar, and then I got drinks for the four of us. I sat down nervously and pulled up the surprise tweet on my phone. I looked at Sofie’s content face and screwed up my resolve. I was sure she wouldn’t be happy with what I was about to show her.

  “So, the surprise I mentioned is that someone posted a picture of us at the Lodge.”

  I set my phone near Sofie and watched the good mood drip off her face abruptly. There were a couple grainy pictures of her and I hugged Rocco in the background. Judging by the suit on me, it was when we went to visit her father.

  “Crap,” Patty said succinctly, coming around to see the pictures better.

  They’d been focusing on getting Sofie’s face in the pictures. Rocco and I and the kid at the front desk were all moving. But Sofie’s delicate features were clear there. And the caption read, ‘The Lodge is billionaire approved lol.’

  Sofie was back in scary unreadable mode. “Do we know who took the picture?”

  “Looks like a girl here with her parents last week. I asked Cory about it and he said they’re from the city. Friends of the Harcourts, who are the owners of the Lodge,” I said. I tapped back to the post and pointed out the location tag. “They probably posted it to help with the reopening. And it doesn’t hurt.”

  Sofie looked at Rocco, passing him the phone. “Looks like I have my work cut out for me. Cory had mentioned there might be an old guest house. It would be more secure to keep you here with everyone else. Plenty of people to watch and see if anyone fishy is poking around.”

  “And Cory is hiring an overnight guard. I told him to make it his priority,” I added. I wanted to be helpful. I wanted Sofie to be as happy as she’d been this morning.

  Sofie shook her head, still silent for a moment more. “I’m not worried about security. We may just need to hire a couple more people. But what if people ask around about why I’m here?” She looked at me when she said it, and the familiar guilt flooded through my chest. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  It wasn’t helping my warm feelings for Sofie that she was more concerned about her father than she was about herself at the moment. Rocco stepped out to make a couple phone calls to his company to talk over backup and maybe having someone outside Sofie’s door by the morning.

  “The last thing my father wants is people knowing he’s up here. I think that was part of the charm of a private room in a hospital in the middle of nowhere.”

  Patty had tapped out on her phone. Probably emailing someone, like the Foundation. “Well, we have a cover story.”

  Sofie gave her a concerned look.

  Patty gestured to the two of us cozied up on the same booth. “We have a cover story on the payroll. Hell, lover boy’s a writer.”

  “I don’t think it’ll be that easy, Patty,” Sofie said.

  “Won’t it? Josh writes an article on the most romantic getaways in the rural USA. Or he writes about his brother’s lodge. And there’s a picture of the two of you in it. Questions about your father would probably go away,” Patty said, putting her phone down to look at Sofie. “And so far people will think it’s a quirky vacation.”

  Sofie sighed and covered her face with her hands. “And what about when I’m here for another month?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll make some calls,” Patty said, standing to power walk her way to the bar.

  There was a fresh tightness from my chest, this time slanting towards hope. Not that going public while I was being paid was the most romantic thing. But Sofie and I had already crossed lines together in this relationship. Cory would absolutely want to murder me if we went that way though.

  Sofie was looking at where my phone had gone dark at the table still. Like she was haunted by the image of us standing together, my hand trailing toward her lower back. “Tell me about the ghosts here,” she said, surprising me.

  “Don’t you want to talk about—“

  “No,” Sofie said, stiffening her resolve as she turned from the phone. She was still as chilly as she’d been when she first saw the picture. “I don’t want to think about it right now. Tell me about why you thought this place was haunted.”

  It took my brain a minute to catch up with her change of conversation. “Step one to understanding it is to be a ten-year-old boy sneaking in with his older brother.” I looked around the bar, remembering what it was like to have walked through it. “The Lodge used to close in the winter. The owners would go to Florida and reopen it in the winter.”

  “The Harcourts,” Sofie said. Her cool thawed a little as she focused only on me and quickly drank her entirely drink in a swallow.

  “Good memory. They recently handed running the business over to Cory, after they tried to close for good last winter. He’s done all this renovation work for free, got a business loan to improve the place. Anything fabric got refurbished in the place, including the booths.”

  Sofie nodded. “So he’s hoping to pay back the loans by having business year-round.”

  “Yeah, imagine this place at Christmas,” I said. I could see the tinsel, the ornaments, all of it. “And he wants to get city people and younger people out here. But when we were kids, we used to break in around Halloween every year.”

  “Vandals. Are you going to drink that?” She reached hopefully for my drink
, gulping half of it down in one go.

  “Well, he knew which windows didn’t latch. So it’s not like we vandalized the place. But one year, we broke in and we saw some people dancing in the lobby. Romantic music and everything, we swore it. But there were no footprints in the dust, right?”

  Sofie quirked one eyebrow up at that. “They were dancing on Halloween night? Maybe they were messing with you.”

  “Maybe. But more likely, the Harcourts just let the housekeepers stay here over the winter. Or it was the Harcourts themselves. And I don’t think we would have been here on Halloween itself. But there was definitely dancing involved, and we booked it out of here.”

  Sofie smiled at the story, her eyes going to where Patty was pacing around in the warm lobby. “That’s a pretty cute story, Josh. You really oversold the ghosts around here.”

  “It’s part of my charm,” I told her.

  This is where my arm would go around her if she wasn’t hiring more security guards and bodyguards and panicking about her father. I’d lay on the charm and suggest we go upstairs.

  Sofie’s smile drifted from her face, slowly but surely. “I think we have to go public with our relationship. If people knew my father was sick, the business could be in trouble. And he would just lose it.” She looked about as unhappy as someone could be about admitting they were dating me. “But we should do it in a way that gets Cory business.”

  “I guess you’ll be giving me that quote about the Lodge, huh?” I said. I wished I hadn’t offered her my drink. I could use one right now.

  “Giving up so soon?” Sofie asked, and I didn’t follow. “About winning my father over? Writing the great Mark Barlow story.”

  I shook my head, looking away. I was being paid to be thrilled to be with Sofie, not to catch feelings of my own and get disappointed when she wasn’t right there with me. “It’d be unfair if I got both stories, right?”

  “I’ll get us more drinks,” Sofie said decisively. She followed me out of the booth to head to the bar. “This is all going to be fine,” she told me.

  And I watched the woman I was falling hard to walk away. I wasn’t sure I’d end up being fine at all.

  SOFIE

  “THEY DEFINITELY CHOSE the picture where you looked best,” Josh said when he showed me the Homesburg Lodge article. The cover image of “A Labor of Love in Homesburg Lodge” showed me cheesing for the camera while Josh looked at me. Cory was in the picture too, looking pained near us where we stood in the lobby with our arms around each other.

  It took a week for Josh to get the article together. It turned out he was a good, quick writer. His freelancing connections found a spot for the story quickly, especially when he namedropped me. The online publication resisted the urge to title it “The Billionaire Daughter’s Favorite Pocono Getaway.” They saved that for the subtitle.

  We’d gotten a photographer too, who had taken a few lovely shots of Josh and I smiling at the bar. At least it represented how our bond formed, even if he wasn’t the one pouring drinks in them.

  As a rich woman, I just had to put my hand on his chest in the pictures for people to get the idea. The online gossip rags were digging up as much about Josh as they could. Not much, outside of his witty quips online and articles. So far no one-night stands of Josh’s from the last year had come forward to throw off any timelines.

  “You look good too,” I told Josh. He brightened a little at the compliment.

  He was sitting in one chair in my suite, wearing a comfortable looking blue sweater I’d bought him. That summed up Josh for the last week: appallingly clothed around me. And heads down on the piece that would blow our fake cover.

  Somehow, we’d both come to a silent agreement to not hook up. Which was the logical choice, right? The only smart choice here, to not complicate an increasingly complicated situation more. But it was hard to be smart when Josh was in the room, glaring ruefully at his closing paragraph. I knew it was annoying him how much of the piece was fluff.

  “What does Cory think about it?” I asked.

  “He says they’ve had three extra reservations this morning. And he’s planning on increasing renovations even more before Christmas. He may not need to take construction gigs at all for a while.” Josh cheered up even more talking about Cory. He looked down, those brown eyes shyer around me recently, before looking at me from under his eyelashes. “I really appreciate you helping him out. I know this wasn’t an easy choice for you.”

  “When you can be a good guy in the business, always be a good guy. Exactly like my father never said,” I told him with a tight smile. “You should come with me to show my father the article. I think you’re winning him over by helping him keep his health private right now.”

  I hoped that conveyed how much I was rooting for him to win. The stress and scrutiny had made it excruciating to be open with him the way we were so recently. I hated the regression. I wanted to sit on Josh’s lap and make us both forget how complicated us being on top of each other could make things.

  “I said I’d always go with you to see your father. That still stands,” Josh said. He tucked away his phone and locked eyes with me. I could feel myself warming under his gaze.

  “Thank you for being such a good company in all of this,” I told him in a rush. “I know it’s gotten strange around here.”

  Josh shrugged and leaned forward in the chair. “It feels good to earn all that money you keep giving me. I’m happy to help.”

  And that something sparked in the air between us again. I wanted to close the gap but I was too stressed and just unsure how to. How could I push us deeper into this thing now? When we were keeping it quieter, it had been easy to let this thing between us grow. Now it felt impossible to claim to be in love in public while trying to explore my feelings in private. And I had no reason to think Josh was in as deep as I was.

  Rocco knocked on the door to tell me my on-site meeting had arrived. That had been another benefit of people knowing I was out here via social media posts. Suddenly, other potential donors were coming out of the woodwork of rural New York state. And they were happy to meet in Homesburg to get to talk to me in person.

  “Well, we’ll see my father at 3. I’ll see you then,” I told Josh as we headed out the door.

  “I’ll see if I can pencil you in,” Josh said, waving a broad goodbye at us. Josh made his way down the hall to get back to the work he’d delayed to have the article printed.

  And I headed to my day, ignoring the certainty that I’d be counting down the minutes to when I was with Josh again later today.

  “I love this song,” Josh told me, leaning over me to ask one of my new bodyguards to turn it up. Josh began cheerfully belting out the 80s ballad that somehow still dominated the radio stations out here outside of throwback hours.

  We still traveled to my father in one car, with Patty squished in the seat behind us now. She tapped me on the shoulder, distracting me from the warmth of knowing that Josh was back to his loud, happy self.

  “I’ve been getting tons of good press about the article. Are you up for having some friends visit from the city?”

  I glanced over an email from friends who were jokingly giving me hell for having kept my secret love on the down-low. I was afraid they’d be angry and was happy to see that so far my group of pals from college hadn’t taken it the wrong way that I was keeping it mum.

  “Yeah, that sounds good, actually. I never would have believed I’d host a weekend in the Poconos if you told me that in the summer.”

  Patty looked over to where Josh had gone a little flat while he glanced over the printed out copy of the article he’d brought for my father. “Sure, this has been a weird fall,” she said, giving me a cheeky grin.

  This meant that I wasn’t being as sneaky as I thought I was when I undressed Josh with my eyes. He chose that moment of my gazing to catch me looking, winking at me and sending butterflies through me.

  “Can you please turn the radio back down?” Josh asked p
olitely, turning to me as soon the music went down. “You’re sure this is even worth showing your father?”

  I smiled and reached out for his hand without thinking about it. “It’s well written. But don’t hesitate. He will smell your weakness and attack.”

  Josh gave my hand a squeeze, putting away the folder. “I definitely care more about what he thinks of me as a writer than as a man.”

  “How can you say that?” I trusted it was true from everything I’d seen of him. But it still puzzled me.

  Josh shrugged, gesturing to the countryside out the window. “There are a lot of country boy things I just was never good at. I’ve had practice not being manly enough my whole life.”

  I had to laugh at that. “You’re very rugged compared to my exes.”

  “Well, it doesn’t take much to impress you.” He softened the tease with a warm smile. “I don’t like hunting. I only did 4H one time and almost died because of it.”

  “Isn’t that the thing with the kids raising animals? Did a chicken get the best of you?” I asked, imagining a baby Josh losing a fight in a barnyard.

  “No, I ran away with the calf I was raising one night. I made it a couple miles before Cory found us in the woods.” Josh shook his head as he told the story as though he couldn’t believe his younger self. “I had been crying when we fell asleep, and I thought I went blind when the frost gummed it together. I’m lucky I have all my fingers.”

  “Aw, Josh, that’s so sweet. What happened to the calf?”

  “4H animals get sold at county fairs, so Bertha went off with someone and probably had a ton of babies.” His eyes were bright as he told the story. “Oh yeah, she was a dairy cow. She wasn’t even dying. It’s not like she was a pig raised for slaughter. They banned me from 4H after that. Cory never made fun of me, though.”

  I wanted to reach out and squeeze him from hearing the story. “You could probably tell my dad that story. He lost most of a toe in the Swiss Alps.”