The Belated Billionaire

by Elana Johnson

  Dinner would be later. Katie would be more irritable.

  All because a woman didn’t trust Katie with a key or a garage code. Finally, just when Katie was about to call Mrs. Chu and reschedule, the woman pulled into her driveway.

  Katie got out and collected her huge bucket of cleaning supplies. She gave Mrs. Chu a look when they met in the garage. “I’ve been waiting for almost forty minutes, Mrs. Chu,” she said. “It really would be easier if you gave me a key.” She spoke in a professional and kind manner, which was the exact opposite of how she felt.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Mrs. Chu said, bustling up the few steps and into the house. She held the door for Katie, who put on her strongest work ethic and busted through the chores at Mrs. Chu’s house.

  If she could, she’d give Mrs. Chu to someone else, but the woman wouldn’t allow that either. She bowed Katie out of the house with cash in her hand, and Katie drove ten over the speed limit to her next client’s house.

  Avery Lind just wanted her bathrooms cleaned and every floor in the house done. Once a month, Katie did a deep-cleaning job like scrubbing the refrigerator from top to bottom or wiping down all the cupboards. But today, she mopped and vacuumed, wiped and polished, before hurrying to the after-care club to pick up Heather.

  “Sorry,” she said as she entered the large multi-purpose room where Heather sat at a table alone, her head bent over something as she worked.

  “It’s fine,” Tina said, picking up her own purse. Of course it wasn’t okay. Katie had delayed Tina from going home too.

  She flashed a smile and headed over to the table. Sitting, she groaned, sighed, and said, “What are you painting?”

  “The mountains,” Heather said, her brush moving in swift strokes across the paper.

  Katie wondered where she’d ever seen mountains. They certainly didn’t have any in Kansas, and while Hawaii was an island chain of the tops of mountains, they weren’t like the Rockies or anything.

  Tina sat down across from Heather. “Are you going to tell your mom what we talked about?”

  Heather met Tina’s eye, a bit nervous. But Tina smiled, her teeth bright and white against her darker skin. So nothing serious.

  “Oh, yeah.” Heather put her brush down in the tray and twisted to face Katie. “Miss Tina says I should enter the community art contest.” Her dark eyes held excitement and hope, and Katie couldn’t remember the last time she felt like that about anything. Maybe when she and Claire had started Clean Sweep.

  “Oh? When is that?” Katie asked, looking at the mountains again. She could barely tell what it was, and she wondered what Tina saw that Katie couldn’t.

  “It’s always held in December,” Tina said. “As part of the Christmas festival.” She picked up Heather’s tray of paints. “She’s quite talented.”

  “I thought you were going to bake for the festival this year,” Katie said as Tina walked away and started cleaning up the tray of paint in the sink.

  “I am,” Heather said. “I have time to do both. I’m here every day anyway, and I don’t like the sports. Miss Tina said I can stay in with her and paint if I have a project.”

  So perhaps Tina had offered the idea out of pity. The idea didn’t sit well with Katie, but she didn’t want to be the one to douse her daughter’s hope with cold water. She was only ten. Life would certainly have plenty of ice water to throw on her dreams.

  Bitterness crept up Katie’s throat, but she swallowed it back and smiled. “Sure. It’s a great idea.” She stood, her muscles protesting mightily at the movement. She knew better than to sit down before she was done working for the day, and she was most certainly not finished with everything yet that day. “Come on, bug. We need to get home and get dinner going.”

  Heather stood up and shouldered her backpack. They left with Tina, who said she’d get an entrance form for Heather, and once they were in the car, Katie said, “How about we pick something up for dinner tonight? I don’t feel like cooking.”

  Usually when Katie suggested that, Heather would volunteer to make something easy like grilled cheese sandwiches or spaghetti. But tonight, she said, “Me either,” and looked out the passenger window with a sigh.

  “You okay?” Katie asked, her mind flipping through places she could go for dinner. There were dozens of fast food or fast casual places, but some of them didn’t have drive-throughs, and she honestly wasn’t sure she could get out of the car and go into another building that wasn’t her house.

  “Why were you late tonight?”

  “Mrs. Chu,” Katie said, an inkling of darkness entering her voice. She reached over and patted Heather’s leg. “You know I’d be home with you all the time if I could, right?”

  Heather swung her head toward Katie, her dark eyes round and watery now. “I know.” Her voice sounded tinny, and Katie waited for the tears to come. At first, she’d been concerned when her seemingly normal and well-adjusted daughter randomly cried, claiming she wasn’t sure why she was sad. Only that she was.

  Over the last three years since it had started, Katie let her cry, usually as they laid together in Heather’s bed, and she stroked her hair, and sang her nursery rhymes from her babyhood.

  “Have you heard from Dad?” Heather asked as the first of the tears splashed her cheeks.

  “Of course I haven’t,” Katie said in a quiet voice. “I tell you every time I do.” Her second ex-husband got to email sometimes, and he’d sent a birthday card for Heather every year despite his incarceration.

  “Someone at school today said I couldn’t come to their birthday party because I didn’t have a dad.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Katie asked, instantly hot and furious. The reason Ray was in jail was not her fault. And yet she felt like she and Heather paid the price of his decisions every single day of their lives.

  “I guess it’s a daddy-daughter party.” Heather sniffled, this episode much shorter and less intense than others had been.

  Katie bit back the words, “You wouldn’t want him there anyway.” Heather had been too young to understand what was really going on with her dad. She knew he was there one day and gone the next. Living in Kansas for kindergarten and then moving to Hawaii, where they’d lived ever since.

  They’d had many talks since then, but her memories of Ray were childlike at best, and Katie actually wanted to keep it that way.

  “I find it hard to believe you’re the only one without a dad,” she said. “And you have a dad. He’s just not here with us.”

  “And he never will be,” Heather said, a hint of bitterness in her tone.

  Katie pressed her lips together. “No, Heather, he never will be.” She thought of Theo, but immediately dismissed the thought. However, maybe Heather could take another man and go to the party. Katie knew plenty of men.

  “Could you go if you had a man with you?”

  “I don’t know.” Heather turned back to the window. “I don’t care anyway.”

  But it was obvious that she did.

  “Whose party is it?”

  “Amelia Grace.”

  Katie almost winced but managed to turn the motion into her moving to turn on the blinker so they could turn onto their street. “I’ll call her mom tonight and ask.”

  “Who would I go with?”

  “I don’t know,” Katie said. “Claire’s boyfriend?” She glanced at Heather, but she wasn’t looking at Katie. “You like Chuck, right?”

  “Yeah, he’s nice.”

  Katie patted her daughter’s knee and turned into their driveway. It wasn’t until she put the car in park that she realized she’d never stopped to get dinner.

  “It’s fine,” Heather said when Katie lamented their lack of readily available food. “I’ll throw in a frozen pizza while you check all the timecards.”

  “So what did Chuck say?” Theo asked, watching Katie lift her steaming cup of coffee to her lips.

  “Oh, he can go.” She sipped, very aware of the way Theo’s eyes tracked ev
ery movement she made. She half liked it and half wished he’d take the staring down a notch. “Heather was very happy about it.”

  Theo had been a great listener at their quick get-together for coffee. Though it was still plenty warm, Katie liked nothing better than a good cup of coffee, with flavored creams and fancy big-chunk sugars.

  He’d been messaging her for a week now, and she couldn’t put him off any longer. Didn’t want to put him off at all. But she also didn’t want to come across as desperate to see him again.

  So when she’d suggested that she had forty-five minutes for coffee, he’d said he’d meet her in the new Brew Bar on the ground floor of the Sweet Breeze Resort and Spa. He’d even beat her there, which surprised her as her office was only a block away and she’d come straight over.

  They’d only talked about Heather today, all mentions of her website or app staying silent. She met his eye, realizing he’d asked her something and she’d missed it. “I’m sorry, what?”

  He shook his head, a smile touching that powerful mouth and making her warmer than she thought possible. “I just said she’s lucky to have a mom like you.”

  “Hmm,” she said. She was actually surprised Theo hadn’t asked why Heather’s father wasn’t in Getaway Bay with them, but perhaps he was biding his time. Waiting for a better opportunity.

  Her phone bleeped and his did too, almost in tandem. “Oh, wow,” she said, picking up her device. It had given her and Theo another date recommendation. “Parasailing?” She looked at him, her eyebrows lifted as if they were asking him if he’d go with her.

  “I got the same thing,” he said, setting his phone face down on the table.

  “Should we go?”

  Those bright blue eyes came back to hers. “You want to go parasailing with me?”

  Katie was quite tired, and she was much too old to play games. She’d avoided him for eight days before suggesting coffee. He was handsome in his light gray suit, the black striped tie knotted just-so at his throat. She let her eyes fall to that knot, wondering what it would take to get him to loosen up around her.

  Or maybe this was the loose version of Theo, especially now that he clearly had more money than a person would ever need.

  “Yes.” She looked back at him, almost daring him to turn her down. “Theo, will you go out with me?”

  “Of course,” he said, his voice catching on the very last syllable. He cleared his throat, and she couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw a hint of a flush stain his neck. He signaled the waiter that they were ready to pay, and he put a fifty-dollar bill on the tray before claiming her hand and saying, “Do you have time for to walk me back to my office?”

  Katie didn’t really have time to do that, no, but the feel of her hand in his was too delicious to pass up. They strolled along the beachwalk, and he told her about Ben, a man who worked with him in the condo-slash-office.

  “That’s all you’ve got?” she asked. “One man?”

  “Here,” he said. “My company runs out of Dallas. I’ve got oh, probably four hundred employees there.”

  And Katie thought she’d been doing well to have seventeen. You are, she told herself. All of her girls worked every day, so she had a lot of clients.

  Theo stopped at The Straw and bought her a Peach Power smoothie before sweeping his lips across her forehead and saying, “I can tell I’m boring you. Thanks for the coffee. I’ll call you later.”

  He left her standing in the shade outside the smoothie stand, waiting for them to call her name, the burning, tingling, absolutely electrifying sensation of his lips on her skin pounding through her bloodstream.

  “How’s he going to call me?” she whispered to the trees and sand. After all, he didn’t have her phone number, as all of their communication had been through the app.

  She yanked her phone out of her pocket and typed quickly. You weren’t boring me. And if you really want to call, here’s my number.

  “Katie,” a woman called, and she jumped, accidentally adding two extra sixes on the end of the number. She strode forward and got her peach smoothie, erased the extra numbers, and hit send before she could question every decision she’d made in the past forty-six years.

  Six

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Theo eyed the boat, all the wires and ropes, and that huge reel on the back of it with suspicion.

  Katie tightened the strap on her helmet and picked up the bag the instructor had given her. “What? You don’t?”

  No, he didn’t want to fling himself off the back of a speed boat and hope his parachute deployed. He valued his life, thank you very much. And he most certainly didn’t remember Katie as a thrill seeker.

  “Of course I want to,” he lied, hoping the little white fib wouldn’t blossom into something he couldn’t control. “I’m just surprised you do.”

  “Have you been on the monster zipline yet?” She stepped onto the boat like she did it every day of her life.

  “Monster zipline?” Theo stared at her, very hesitant to leave dry land. Yes, he’d been through the orientation. Intellectually, he knew what to do. The videos did look fun. But actually doing it?

  She laughed. “Yeah, it’s the longest zipline in the United States. It’s beautiful, out over the forests over on the cattle ranch side of the island.” She cocked her hip and put one hand on it. “You don’t want to do this.”

  “Not especially, no,” he said. And he couldn’t believe she did anything with the word “monster” in the title. Twenty years ago, she wouldn’t even allow zombie movies in the house.

  “But GBS recommended it,” she said with a teasing quality in her voice. “Why would they do that if you hadn’t fed them something to indicate you liked this kind of activity?” She giggled, and Theo definitely wanted her to keep doing that. “Hmm?”

  “There’s something I should probably tell you,” he said, stepping onto the boat. It didn’t rock like mad and spit him into the ocean, and his nerves went down a rung.

  “What’s that?”

  “Apps are just machines,” he said. “Not everything GBS says and recommends is one-hundred percent accurate.”

  “But it’s our roadmap to a great relationship,” she said.

  Theo cringed at the tagline, hearing the accompanying jingle in his head. “Yes, but…I just don’t think it’s always right.”

  “What makes you say that?” She watched him with curiosity in her expression, her head cocked slightly to the side, probably thinking he’d had some disastrous dating experiences to speak of.

  He wished he did, because if he told her, she’d become the fifth person on the Earth to know how he’d earned his billions.

  “Because I invented it,” he said. He knew every line of code, every parenthesis and every parameter. And it was a machine, and it could fail, make mistakes, and was only as good as the information fed into it.

  “You two ready?” The instructor practically dive-bombed onto the boat, jostling Theo and making him throw his hands out to latch onto something. That something, unfortunately, was Katie, and she sucked in a breath as he curled his fingers around her bare upper arm.

  Then her pealing laughter filled the sky, and pure humiliation filled Theo from top to bottom.

  “You’ve got the helmets and bags,” the instructor said. Theo strained to remember the man’s name, thinking it was something like Ed or Al or something short. “So all you need are life jackets.”

  He grinned like the Cheshire Cat, and Theo didn’t feel comforted from the width of it. He took the life jacket, though, and stuffed his arms through the holes, tightening it almost to the point of painful.

  “Your helmet,” Katie said, extending it toward him with an equally maniacal smile on her face. “This is going to be so fun.”

  “Have you done this before?” Ed/Al asked, and she said, “No, but I’ve always wanted to.”

  He stood behind the steering wheel and gave no warning when he accelerated. Theo almost went toppling into the reel
on the back of the boat, and he cursed silently. Cursed his app that had recommended this date. Cursed the coupon emails that Katie received which had advertised the very parasailing she wanted to do.

  She’d bought their tickets and then called him. “Saturday,” she’d said. “Tell me you’re not busy about noon.”

  “No,” he’d said before realizing what he was committing to. And honestly, at the time, he didn’t care. If she wanted to drive up to the dormant volcano and sacrifice him on Saturday at noon, he probably would’ve agreed to it. He just wanted to keep seeing her, keep talking to her, keep learning more and more about her.

  Which was why he braced himself as Ed/Al accelerated again, a whoop coming from his mouth that did little to inspire confidence in Theo that his parasailing instructor was actually a responsible, careful man.

  Sure enough, he took them out into the ocean until there were no other boats nearby. Wasn’t there some sort of buddy system for boats? If so, this guy had just broken it.

  He gave a few more instructions, and then he had Katie come over and get strapped into all the wires and ropes and cords and who knows what else.

  “You guys will be tandem sailing,” he said. “One off each side.”

  “Won’t we run into each other?” Theo didn’t even like to swing next to someone, worried about twisting and turning and crashing and burning.

  “Nah,” Ed/Al said.

  “Have people ever hit each other?” Theo asked next, wondering why these weren’t on the FAQ portion of the Bonnet Yacht Club’s website.

  “Not that I’m aware of.” The instructor gave Theo a wary glance. “You’ll be fine, man. You ready?”

  Theo was not ready, nor was he fine, but he allowed Ed/Al to strap him in and tell him to perch on the very small corner of the boat, where two yellow feet had been painted. He resumed his position at the steering wheel, but instead of blasting off and throwing Theo backward into the water, he operated a hydraulic winch, moving it over toward Katie first. She sat; he buckled; Theo watched.