Girl Meets Billionaire

by Aubrey, Brenna

  I cling to Smuckers, feeling like it’s us against the world. Even Smuckers is upset, though I suspect that’s more about being surrounded by strangers who are clearly aware of him yet who mysteriously have all failed to rush over to pet him.

  “Let’s all take a breath.” The main lawyer, Mr. Malcomb, is next to me now. “This is all getting a little close to duress for my comfort. A contract created under duress isn’t valid.”

  Everyone looks at Henry.

  “I am an officer of the court, Henry,” Malcomb adds.

  “Yeah, you’re an officer of the court who stood by while Mom was getting soaked by a scam artist,” Henry says. “That’s the problem I’m having here, Malcomb.”

  “She was of sound mind, Henry,” Malcomb retorts. “It’s what she wanted.”

  Malcomb and Henry go on to debate the concept of sound mind.

  I have to admit that Henry has a point. A toy dog whose head fur is frequently groomed to resemble a large marshmallow seems a very poor choice to run an international corporation.

  Lawyer Malcomb turns to me. “In the decade prior to her death Bernadette assigned a longtime officer of the company, Kaleb Rowland, to cast the vote of her late husband’s fifty-one percent along with his own twenty percent, with her son Henry acting as CEO. Kaleb and Henry have been excellent stewards of Locke Worldwide. Under their guidance, the firm has expanded enormously and created a massive amount of wealth. While we’re working all of this out, I’m going to suggest that Smuckers might see his way clear to allow Kaleb to retain his proxy while Henry continues on as operational CEO. You’ll stay on, Kaleb?”

  Everyone looks at an older man with a thick pelt of shiny gray hair. Kaleb, I’m guessing. He crosses his arms and grunts.

  I scratch Smuckers’s neck, trying to think when he last peed.

  Breathe. Think.

  Another thing I learned while a pariah is to understand things fully before making big decisions, because one of the ways people push you around is to make you think you don’t have time.

  “Can you please explain the terms in a way I’ll understand?” I say to Malcomb.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Henry sighs. “Do we have to go through this charade?”

  I turn to him. “Okay, I’m getting a little tired of your attitude.” I pull Smuckers’s little face closer to mine. It comforts Smuckers, but I kind of think it makes me harder to yell at. “Here’s the situation—an old woman who felt utterly alone in life left things in her will to her dog. You want somebody to feel angry at? Go look in a mirror.”

  The room seems to still. Henry regards me coolly, like he’s totally in control, but a vein in his neck has become more defined, like a violin string tightened beyond factory specs. “You don’t know anything about this family,” he finally says.

  “I know you’re all…a bit unpleasant.” Even Bernadette was unpleasant, but I don’t say that.

  Henry undoes his one suit-jacket button, wristwatch glinting in the dazzle of the chandelier. And then it’s gone, back under his perfect sleeve. He says nothing, just undoes the button. I don’t know, maybe it’s the wealthy man’s version of rolling up his sleeves. He then turns and huddles up with Brett and Kaleb. Talking about me, of course.

  Talking about charging me with a crime. Maybe paying me off. That’s how rich guys control poor women. Young women. Me.

  Been there. Done that. Vowed never to do it again.

  Back in Deerville, Denny Woodruff’s family went with paying me off—half a million dollars for my silence about what Denny did. My life would have been half a million percent better if I’d taken that money, but I was sixteen and idealistic. I wanted to make sure other women would steer clear of Denny.

  I sometimes miss that brave, strong girl who wanted justice. That girl who believed if she stood up for herself and told the truth, nothing could hurt her.

  We’ll bury you, Mr. Woodruff said when I refused to take the money.

  We’ll bury you.

  And they did it.

  Or, at least, they buried brave, carefree, teenaged me. The brave girl named Vonda who wore bright, pretty things and wouldn’t back down from a fight. The one who didn’t have to fake a backbone.

  They made me regret not taking the money. They made me regret standing up. The regret’s almost worse than having been dragged through the mud of real life and social media hatred.

  Regret for doing the right thing is a kind of poison in your veins.

  And standing there in the middle of that lavish room of Lockes, I want to rage at the world.

  Chapter Three

  Henry

  Perfect. Just perfect.

  Every part of her is perfect. The whole sexy librarian look she has going, all big brown eyes behind smart-girl glasses. Glossy hair caught up in a pretty ponytail. Determined frown, clutching the dog in her arms, angry about Mom being alone.

  Hollywood’s top casting professionals couldn’t have done better if they tried. So innocent and lovely, with a fun dash of wit.

  The clever candlestick comment?

  Slow clap.

  And she’s right about one thing—it’s Mom I should be angry at.

  I close my eyes, trying to shake the image of her, frail in that hospital bed, so diminished from the woman I knew. Managing to depart this earth without uttering a word to me. Her last words were to a scam artist. And a dog.

  When I open my eyes, my cousin Brett is looking at me, waiting to see what I say. Everyone is always waiting to see what I say.

  “Grifter,” Brett says when I don’t speak.

  I gaze over his shoulder at her with all of her innocent allure. “We got this,” I say.

  He wants me to say more. He’s waiting. He knows I’ll do anything to protect this company, to protect the people whose livelihoods depend on us. He’s nervous.

  I give him my smile. I really turn it on for him. “Don’t worry. She’ll be crawling on her knees before this is over. Gratefully,” I add.

  Kaleb comes up, balancing on his cane. He, too, wants to see what I’ll do. He’s seventy. He gets that this isn’t his fight. “Girl could do a lot of damage,” he warns. “Especially if she has people.”

  “We got this,” I say again. “The little scammer has no idea what she’s stepped into.”

  “You can’t contest the will,” he points out unhelpfully.

  “Doesn’t matter.” So like Bernadette to put a self-destruct provision into her will. Preventing challenge of any kind. It’s how she was in life. If you argued with her, even about something as objective as the air temperature, she’d shut down the whole discussion. That’s enough, Henry!

  Until she finally ghosted on me and the rest of the clan nearly ten years ago. Over a missed dinner, as it happened. A calendar screw-up. On her part.

  With a simple command I can cause skyscrapers to rise up from brownfield lots or send buildings crashing to the ground, but I couldn’t get a frail old woman to answer the phone. Or the door. Go out to brunch at the Gramercy.

  I’m done thinking about her, though. She doesn’t matter anymore.

  I turn to the window and try to collect my thoughts. My next moves will have lasting implications for the people in this room as well as the legions of employees and vendors of Locke Worldwide who trust me. They need me strong and smart.

  Early on, Brett and I bribed a doorman to let us in to see Bernadette—she preferred the name Bernadette over Mom. We even engaged a therapist to help us bring her back into the family fold. No go.

  From our descriptions, the therapist speculated that she might have mild dementia, possibly paranoia; he couldn’t say for sure, and you can’t force somebody to accept help or be treated.

  One of the little known facts about extreme wealth is how stunningly long you can go with untreated mental illness if that’s what you want.

  You can believe in bizarre things and rave and go out to restaurants and order foods not on the menu, and they’ll call you eccentric and smile and t
hank you for the huge tips.

  And obsequious lawyers on your payroll won’t push back when you decide to leave everything to your dog, in care of a woman who claims to sense that dog’s thoughts or whatever it is, because the checks you write are good.

  The checks you write are so very good.

  We had no clue she was dying, of course.

  I shove my hands in my pockets.

  I glare over at Malcomb, sitting there with his colleagues, hiding behind confidentiality. I get it about the confidentiality. Still. He could’ve found a way to alert me.

  Years ago, back when Dad died, Bernadette assigned Dad’s share of the voting rights to Kaleb, Dad’s second-in-command. It made sense at the time—I was in high school, too young to run things.

  But then I graduated with my architectural degree and took over as CEO. I started to build and acquire other companies, turbocharging our growth.

  Still my mother kept Kaleb holding ultimate veto power. She and I would argue about it, back when she was still talking to me.

  Kaleb didn’t use his veto power a lot. He was happy to let me make Locke into the powerhouse it is, happy for my excellent ideas, but he’d veto the shit out of the things I cared most about.

  I was CEO, but Kaleb was a roadblock to the real change I wanted to see.

  Kaleb’s a decent guy, but he’s stuck in the legacy way of building. Cost per square foot.

  It was bad enough having my hands tied by Kaleb, unable to fully run the company as I wanted. And now?

  Now it’s controlled by a dog and a scammer.

  Brett’s talking about Malcomb. “…probably an extensive competency determination he and his estate people put Bernadette through before allowing this…enough not to get disbarred.”

  I nod. Malcomb’s good. He would’ve ensured she was of sound mind—sound enough, anyway, for the will to hold up in a court of law.

  “So. Not the straight line to control I envisioned.” I say it lightly, like it doesn’t matter. Good old Bernadette, lashing out at me one last time for making her life miserable. My rap sheet for that stretches clear back to infancy.

  Again the crafty little scammer asks what things mean. What exactly Mom stipulated. She’s a good actress, I’ll give her that. With her glasses and glossy ponytail and demure dress. A simple string of dark beads.

  This is the woman my mother favored over her own son?

  “I’ve prepared extracts,” Malcolmb says, leading her to the table. I follow along.

  Malcomb hands her a stapled sheet. “Bernadette divided her assets three ways. Henry and Brett have inherited a number of properties and a share of liquid assets save what she distributed to the five second cousins. Smuckers’s inheritance is listed here. He’s in control of the family business, Ms. Nelson.”

  She looks at the sheet, stunned. “So all the cranes and…”

  All the cranes. I catch Brett’s eye. The cranes? Like she thinks we run a crane company?

  “She left Smuckers fifty-one percent of Lockeland Worldwide, Ms. Nelson,” Malcomb says. “It’s a global corporation that includes a dozen distinct entities.”

  “What does it mean though?” she asks.

  Malcomb shoots me a nervous glance. Yeah, he should be nervous. He’ll never work for this family again, and nobody I know, if I can help it, though he may have a future in drawing up wills for people who want to torment their kids.

  He points to the sheet. “These are the companies under Smuckers’s control.” My stomach turns as she reads silently. I know the list by heart. It’s arranged in chronological order. Locke Worldwide Construction comes first—that’s the company my grandfather founded to build homes out on Long Island. The development company comes next, when my father joined in and they started building grocery stores and shopping malls. As soon as I came on as CEO, we exploded the firm out into high-rises, massive public projects, lending, even asset management, because giant buildings are investment vehicles, just like stocks, and so that’s the financial portion.

  It was my vision a decade ago to spread over an entire web of related sectors, and we did it. We killed it.

  He talks to the grifter like she’s an idiot.

  Clearly she’s anything but.

  “It means, if Smuckers wants to, he would take his place on the board with your assistance. He would attend meetings and vote on things, and his vote would decide issues, mostly around the overall direction of the company. As CEO, Henry runs the day-to-day stuff. But as a board member and owner, Smuckers would provide the vision and direction, while drawing a monthly stipend.” Malcomb points to her handout.

  Brett touches my arm. “If the dog dies under suspicious circumstances, the shares go to the Humane Society. Natural life for that dog is ten more years.”

  “What?” I say. “You were thinking about killing the dog?”

  “Dude,” he says. “Gotta explore our options here.”

  “We’re not killing the dog.”

  He puts up his hands like I’m attacking him. “It won’t help anyway,” he says. “We have to pay her off. How much? What do you think? Smuckers can choose to hand over those shares.” Brett makes quote fingers for Smuckers. Brett is a quote fingers abuser.

  Kaleb wanders over. He wants to hear what I think.

  I fold my arms. “This is just a business problem with a business solution. We’ve had disasters before, right?” Just this year we had to tear down a partially built distribution center because a subcontractor screwed up the rebar. That was a twenty-million-dollar mistake that wasn’t on us to fix, but we fixed it. People need to know that Locke does the right thing.

  “Don’t start too low,” Kaleb says.

  It galls me to give her anything. “Three million cash,” I say.

  Brett winces. It’s not the amount. We won’t even notice three million. He thinks it’s too low, that’s the problem. She really is holding all the cards.

  “Three million, and we don’t press charges,” I say. “If she did any kind of research, she’d know—you know.”

  She’d know about the deep friendships we have throughout the city. We don’t own judges and cops like a crime family does; we have something more powerful—friendship in high places. Friends in high places tend to see things your way.

  “At least offer four point five,” Brett says. “It feels like five. She’ll go to ten, then, and we meet at seven.”

  “It’s a good payday for her,” Kaleb says. “Assuming she’s not part of an organized team.”

  “I don’t think she is,” I say.

  “How do you know?” Kaleb says.

  Because there’s an echo of loneliness to her. I hear it in her bravado. I see it in the way she straightens her spine. The cold steel you grow in your spine when nobody else is pulling for you.

  I don’t say that, though.

  “Because she’d use them to squeeze us. She’d come in like a tiger with some boiler-room financial guy or a shady lawyer. Not like…” I gesture at her. “Please.”

  “Right,” Kaleb agrees.

  The room has emptied. Some of our cousins still linger in the hall. Some of the younger ones probably nabbed a bottle of booze and went to the second-floor balcony to smoke.

  Malcomb’s explaining things to the scammer and the rest of the guys are doing phone things.

  She looks up as if she feels my attention. Yeah, you’ve got my attention, I think. I stroll her way. I cross my arms. “Let’s talk.”

  She furrows her brows. “Okay.”

  “We’ve called the police. They don’t have enough to make anything stick—yet—but they’ll have questions.”

  She straightens. “But I didn’t do anything!”

  Did she even hear the yet? The yet was the most important part of my sentence. It was the opening of our negotiation. “We’ll let them decide that. I don’t imagine they have enough to make anything stick—yet.”

  Meaning once we dig into her background, we’ll find what we need. If she’s a s
cammer, there’s something.

  She looks worried. “I have to pick up my sister.”

  I frown. “Maybe you should’ve thought of that before you decided to defraud a vulnerable old woman.”

  “I didn’t defraud—”

  “It’s just us here, jelly bean, so you can stop with the pretense.” She starts to protest but I roll right over her. “The good news is that I’m prepared to hand over a cashier’s check this afternoon to get clear of all this. Malcolmb and his team will draw up papers and you’ll sign over the ownership. You can probably get more cash out eventually, yeah, but it would take years, and I think we both know the risks.”

  She’s peering at me uncertainly.

  I grab a pencil off the table and flip over a sheet of paper. You always write the big numbers for people to see. You always add the decimal point and the extra zeroes, too. The zeros have power. I write it out: $4,500,000.00.

  She stares at the number, as though stunned. It’s a lowball, yes.

  Brett drifts over. “It’s a good deal, and we walk away,” he says. Like he’s offering a helpful reminder. “This is a good deal. Let’s resolve it now.”

  She turns to me, clutching my mother’s stupid dog. “Four point five million?” she says incredulously.

  The dog licks her chin.

  I wait. Where is the counteroffer?

  Where?

  I tighten my jaw. Is it so low to her she’s not even bothering? Was she thinking in terms of billions? Is this an organized thing after all? Is there a team behind her?

  Brett’s gotta be thinking it, too. I don’t look at him. How’d I peg her so wrong?

  There might be a team behind her, but she’s alone now.

  I step up the pressure. “Here’s the thing, Ms. Nelson,” I say. “It’s the four point five million, plus we don’t use the very considerable resources we have to destroy your life and quite possibly ensure that you end up rotting in a prison cell.”

  Her eyes shine. They’re the warm brown of a beer bottle, fringed with dark lashes. I wish I could read her thoughts, her emotions—I can see she’s having them. I tend to be good at reading women.