How to Belong with a Billionaire

by Alexis Hall

  Another one of those looks I couldn’t quite read—a touch of warmth beneath that refined façade. “I don’t mind at all. But I can also accompany you, if you’d prefer.”

  My mouth was dry as Mars. “I think…I think it should be me.”

  “Whatever you think, Mr. St Ives. The divorce is largely a formality at this stage but it may afford your mother some peace of mind. Assuming, that is, she wishes to divorce your father.”

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  Finesilver suddenly got very interested in the steering column. “Abusive relationships are complicated. When you’ve had your power systematically stripped from you, it’s no easy thing to claim it back.”

  I thought of Mum, with her quilts and her baking and her books, the way she spoke with her eyes, and how full of laughter they were these days, her hand slipped into Hazel’s as they walked hand in hand along the treasure-strewn tidelines of Kinlochbervie’s beaches. “I think she’ll want to.”

  There was the briefest of pauses. Then Finesilver nodded. “I’ll take you to the station.”

  He called up Google Maps and got us on the road again. I stared out the window, at the rough northern skies and unfamiliar streets, with their huddles of suburban homes, washed the dirty orange of Skittles by the streetlamps. Dread was as heavy as an unwanted coat, pressing me down into the seat. Though I fucking well deserved to feel it.

  “So,” said Finesilver, making a frankly tragic attempt to sound casual. “What kind of Gothic novels does Miss Hart prefer?”

  I had no idea if he genuinely wanted to know or was just trying to distract me. But either way, I was very willing to talk. And Finesilver, though he maintained an air of studied indifference, seemed more than willing to listen—though it was hard to imagine what use he was going to get out of knowing Ellery was a fan of The Monk and Melmoth the Wanderer. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could slip into casual conversation. But then again, it was funny to imagine him trying—standing there, with his neatly folded hands and his stiletto poise, wanting Ellery to behave in a legally responsible manner and also tell her he really liked du Maurier too.

  Anyway, in fifty minutes I was at the station, and half an hour after that I was on the train, headed north. I emailed work to tell them I’d had a family emergency—which was actually true, even though I’d been the one to cause the emergency—and wouldn’t be able to make it for a couple of days, and I booked myself a room in a cheapish hostel near Edinburgh Waverly, since there wouldn’t be another train to Inverness until the next morning.

  It was weird to be able to do that—my problem-resolving skills were obviously nothing compared to Caspian’s, and having to wait for a train counted as a pretty much minor problem, but I’d still managed to resolve it. Time was, I wouldn’t have been able to, at least not without scrounging money from my family. Having a job, even a job that didn’t pay all that well, could really change your perspective on things. And in spite of feeling broadly terrible about everything, I couldn’t help feeling a tiny bit good about this. The knowledge that I could occasionally help myself. That I could, with careful saving, buy a plane ticket to Boston. Afford to get a room when I needed one. It was reassuring and liberating and probably the closest I’d ever got to grown up. And grown up in a real way. Not a desperate pretense of it or a nebulous sense I was failing to be, or do, what I was supposed to. And all it took was a tiny piece of control, dropped like the keys to Bluebeard’s castle into my hand.

  This small triumph of adulting aside, I can’t say it was an awesome journey. True, the last two times I’d made it, I’d been in a state of dire heartbreak, but this time I was making it because I’d almost destroyed the one place I knew I could always go in a state of dire heartbreak. And that was way worse.

  One bad sleep, four hours on a train, and a juddery bus journey later, I was on Bervie Road—a twist of grey through a world of brown, raw hills and brittle, scrub grass skeletons, and a sky the colour of stale tears. I always forgot how bleak this place could get in winter. Or maybe I stopped noticing because it never felt bleak. It was reading by the fire. And board games after midnight. And all the hot chocolate you could drink. It was the end of the fucking world, and it had been nothing but good to me. How could I have been so careless, so selfish and ungrateful, as to jeopardise it?

  Pulling out my phone, I texted Hazel. Asked her to make some excuse and come to meet me. Then flipped up my collar, turned my face into the teeth of the wind, and set one foot in front of the other, making with steady steps for home.

  I saw Hazel’s hair first—a spark of purple against the steel horizon—and then the rest of her, coat billowing Byronically behind her as she strode towards me between the ice-crisp fields. I was incredibly glad to see her. And terrified at the same time. And it was really hard to keep walking, like I was slowly turning to stone, legs first.

  “Ardy?” Hazel called out, the moment she was within earshot. “Are you all right? That was a pretty worrying text you sent. You’re not pregnant, are you?”

  I tried to laugh but my mouth was broken.

  Her own grin faded. “Okay, what’s wrong?”

  Oh God, I was going to be sick. “I’ve…I’ve done something horrendously fucked up.”

  “Well”—her mouth tightened into a resolute line—“you tell me what’s happened and we’ll figure out how to get it sorted.”

  There was something profoundly terrible just then in being trusted. And trusted absolutely. It was like I’d been given this precious thing, and I hadn’t even noticed it was mine, and then I’d woken up one day and stood on it. “It’s not…I don’t…I don’t need help. I just don’t know how to say…how to say it.”

  “Listen.” She’d gone a bit pale. “There’s nothing you could say we couldn’t deal with. And there’s nothing you could do you couldn’t come back from.”

  The part of me that was just a snake-eating-its-own-tail of guilt wasn’t sure that was true. But Hazel had never lied to me. Never evaded. Never held anything back. “Can we sit down? Even though it’s freezing?”

  Hazel nodded and we stepped off the road, crunching over the fields to some exposed scarp, where we plonked ourselves. While Hazel was digging her rainbow mittens out of her pockets and putting them on, I stared blankly at the landscape—the frost-limned grass fading into the flat silver sheen of the loch and the sky.

  Come on. I could do this. I had to do this. I sucked in a lungful of air so cold it scraped my throat raw. “The thing is, my dad found me and—”

  “Oh my God.” Hazel exploded off the rock. “That shameless bastard. I’m going to kill him.”

  “We went for coffee, okay?”

  She spun back round. “Wait. You what?”

  “He said he wanted to get to know me—I mean obviously he didn’t—but I fell for it.” The words, which I’d been worried wouldn’t come at all, came stampeding out like panicked wildebeests. “And he fucked with my head and nicked my phone and he was coming after Mum. But he’s not anymore and there’s some divorce papers she can sign if she wants to and I know I did a really bad and stupid thing and Mum needs to know but I can’t bear the thought of it.”

  There was the longest silence. And believe me, nowhere could do silence as deeply and purely as Kinlochbervie in the middle of winter.

  “Hazel…” I said in the smallest voice. “Please don’t—”

  Except I couldn’t finish. I didn’t know what I was trying to say. Please don’t hate me as much as I hate myself right now?

  She ran her fingers through her hair. “Fucking hell, Arden. I’m not sure whether to shake you or hug you.”

  “I’d rather you hugged me.”

  “Of course I’m going to bloody well hug you.”

  She held out her arms and I launched into them, not quite crying but probably only because I was all teared out. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

  “I know you are, love. I know.”

  Eventually, I was all right to be let go
of again. I sat back down, wiping my nose classily with my sleeve. “I get that I fucked up. Like really fucked up.”

  “Honestly”—she jammed her hands into her pockets—“I don’t quite understand what I’m feeling just at the moment.”

  That sounded bad. That sounded super bad. I tried to say something but I only managed a horrified gulp.

  “I mean, when you were little and I’d tell you don’t run into the plate glass door or wait until the bus has gone by before you cross the road or let Rabbie lift the pan of boiling water from the stove, you listened to me. Admittedly, not all the time, but enough that you didn’t die. And now part of me is wondering…didn’t you see the door, didn’t you believe the bus was coming, did you think the water wasn’t hot? Did I not make you understand?”

  Oh no. No. No. No. “It’s not your fault,” I cried. “It was me. All me.”

  At this, her shoulders went back. “Well, that’s not true either, is it? That man is a manipulative son of a prick, and there’s no getting away from it. I just wish you’d…”

  “Listened,” I finished for her.

  “Yes.” She gathered the wings of her coat and dropped into place beside me. “And no. Because then you wouldn’t be you, and that would be even worse.”

  “Are you sure? Being less of an idiot sounds like an improvement to me.”

  “You weren’t an idiot. You just weren’t a cynic. And despite my best efforts, we didn’t raise a cynic.” She nudged her shoulder against mine. “There’s such a lot of your mum in you, Ardy.”

  “Well, we did both get taken in by the same person.”

  “That’s enough of that.” Hazel could go from cosy to death glare faster than anyone I knew, especially on Mum’s behalf. “I can tell you want to self-flagellate about this, but leave Iris out of it. You’d been warned. She hadn’t.”

  I wilted. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just so scared, thinking I could have brought him here. After everything Mum’s already gone through.”

  “We’ve been prepared for him. For a long time.” She let out a rough breath that misted in the chill like a dragon’s. “But we hoped he’d never find her. Or you.”

  “I could have handled it a gazillion times better when he did.”

  She was quiet for a while. “You did the wrong thing, but I don’t blame you for doing it.”

  “I blame me.”

  “Blame him. He deserves it. You don’t. Mind you”—she was on her feet again, all five foot one of her primed for a fight—“if he comes anywhere near us again, I’m going full Fried Green Tomatoes on his arse.”

  And there went another of my loved ones threatening murder with too much conviction for my comfort. “He won’t.” It should have been such a triumphant declaration. But I just sounded tired. “When I realised what I’d done, I went to Caspian and he got his lawyer on the case. And it was horrible and ugly and scary, but…yeah. Caspian’s a very powerful man and there’s nothing Dad can do about it.”

  Hazel let out a low whistle, snatched away almost immediately by the wind. “That’s…that’s one hell of a happening.”

  “Tell me about it. Like…there are ways rich people can fuck you up that it never occurred to me you could fuck a person up. Which is, y’know, really socially problematic, but right now I’m just glad it’s over.”

  “You didn’t have to do this alone, Ardy.”

  “I don’t mean this in the macho High Noon way but”—I wiped my nose again, because the cold and the threat of tears weren’t bringing out the best in it—“I kind of did. And it was mostly Caspian anyway.”

  “I thought you and Mr. Billionaire were over.”

  “We are, but”—I tried to smile except it felt the same as sadness—“I knew he’d still help me.”

  She spread her mittens in a gesture of bewildered pragmatism. “Useful friend to have, that one.”

  “Yes, but I don’t want to use him. I wouldn’t have gone to him for anything less important.”

  “I’ve got to admit,” she said with a grim look, “I’m not wildly thrilled about strangers being up in our business either. But when it comes to Jonas, fuck my pride.”

  “That was my thinking too.”

  “I’ve got to say, I don’t quite know what to make of this.”

  I hung my head.

  “I’m angry, a little bit in your direction, but mostly at him. And I’m sorry he hurt you. But”—and here she fixed me with a look I couldn’t flinch from—“I’m also really proud of you.”

  I actually boggled at her. “Omigod, why?”

  “Because you made a mistake, and you did your best to make it right.”

  “I wouldn’t have had to make it right if I hadn’t—”

  “Don’t be daft, Ardy. You can’t expect to live a life you’re happy to look back on and not fuck it up occasionally. It’s not the fucking up that counts. It’s what you do after.”

  My fingers were probably about to turn blue and drop off, so I jammed my hands between my knees to warm them. “Even if you were warned and should have known better?”

  She gave me something like her usual grin. “Even then.”

  I…had no idea what to say. I did feel sort of better in some ways. Kinlochbervie always helped, through some combination of being literally remote, and also the place where I knew I’d always be welcome. Always be safe. Always be loved. Despite my best efforts to blow it up. But then I remembered what I was up here to do and everything was immediately terrible again.

  “How am I going to tell Mum?” I whispered.

  Hazel pulled a loose thread from her mittens with her teeth. “Not going to sugarcoat it for you, it’s going to be rough.”

  I whimpered.

  “But we’ll do it together.”

  “She…she’ll be okay, right?”

  That made her snort. “Don’t be such a drama queen. Of course she will.”

  She held out a hand and, when I took it, pulled me to my feet. We made our way back to the road, heading for Oldshoremore through the last shreds of the afternoon light.

  “Hazel,” I said, a few minutes later.

  “Yes?”

  “You know…you know I didn’t do it, didn’t let him get to me, I mean, because I was looking for…looking for something I didn’t think I had?”

  A slight tilt of her head in my direction. “Then why did you?”

  “Well, partly because, as you’ve pointed out, he’s a manipulative motherfucker. But mainly because I thought knowing who he was might help me know more about who I am.”

  “Did it?”

  “No.” A gust of wind came howling round the hillside, almost knocking me into Hazel. I grit my teeth against the icy blast of it, but it rushed through me all the same, sweeping clean the corners of me, and unfurling my clenched-up little heart like a flag. “He’s nobody to me. I’m Mum’s. And…yours and Rabbie’s.”

  “Damn straight, kid.”

  Hazel’s nose had gone pink, but maybe it was the cold. Then she slipped her arm through mine and we walked the rest of the way in silence, the crooked chimney of our cottage just visible against the darkening skyline—that ever-familiar finger beckoning us home.

  Chapter 37

  As ever, Hazel was right: Telling Mum was rough. But we got through it. To be honest, she probably handled it best of all of us. Rabbie was worried, which meant he started pacing, and the cottage wasn’t built to handle someone as big as Rabbie pacing, and Hazel was angry—though not at anyone present—and ended up breaking a plate in the general commotion, and I sat on the sofa, being incoherent and crying a lot. And it was while all this was going on that Mum signed the divorce papers. Later, though, we sat on the bed under the eaves, wrapped in one of her quilts, and Mum held me like she hadn’t needed to since I was little. We stayed up way too late, whispering to each other in the half-made-up language neither of us could remember inventing, and Hazel just closed the door quietly behind us, and didn’t even scold us for not g
etting enough sleep. And the next day—after slightly subdued pancakes—Rabbie drove me all the way to Edinburgh, so that nearly wrecking my family didn’t take too many days from my job.

  I got back to London by early afternoon, in a better state than when I’d left, but still possessed of a strong desire to pitch myself face-first into bed and not move for a good long time. First, though, I dropped the signed papers off at Gisbourne, Finesilver & King, then shambled back onto the Tube and off it again at Bank, arriving at Caspian’s building when it was actually open for once. I still had to get the receptionist to phone his executive assistant before they let me into the lift, but it was better than having to run through car parks and take on security guards.

  Caspian, of course, was in meetings, which I’d been expecting. I asked if I could wait, braving subtle discouragement from The Woman Who Was Not Bellerose, and was directed to a sofa. I probably looked terribly out of place, sitting there in clothes that hadn’t been much to write home about before I’d travelled twelve thousand miles in them, while workers and visitors alike passed to and fro in exquisitely cut suits.

  An hour or so later, I was allowed into Caspian’s office. He was in dark blue, stark and unalleviated but for the glimmer of a white shirt at collar and cuffs. It was a look that emphasised the remoter aspects of his beauty—his icy eyes, the graven symmetry of his face—and made me feel especially bedraggled.

  “Arden.” He stepped swiftly from behind the desk and came towards me. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. Everything’s been taken care of.”

  “I’m glad.”

  He was smiling down at me and I found myself smiling back, hopelessly dizzy on the sudden softness of his mouth, the familiar scent of his cologne, the way the generosity of his lashes gentled his eyes. “I came to say thank you. And also sorry.”

  “You owe me neither apologies nor gratitude.”

  “Well, you’re getting both. You saved my family.”

  And there it was—that sweep of pink across his cheeks. “You know, I thought only of you.”

  “Then”—I held his gaze as steadily as I could—“thank you. For thinking of me.”