by Holly Rayner
“Marketing people?” Zoey demanded. “Mother, what are you talking about? And what gives you the right to check up on my dates behind my back?”
For an answer, Melinda pulled out her smartphone and showed Zoey an image. When she saw it, her heart nearly stopped in mid beat.
Staring back at her was a photoshopped image of herself in Stelios’ arms that had been cropped to about shoulder level. There was a lovely sunset behind the pair of them, and a quote from Stelios, written in elegant white calligraphy. At the top of the image, in the center, was the silver MF in the outline of a heart that served as Melinda Forde’s logo.
Slowly, Zoey blushed with a level of rage that she had never known a human being was capable of. “No!” she roared, so loudly it actually pained her throat. “You delete that image immediately. You are not putting those up! You had no right to do that and you know it! What do you think he’s going to think if he sees that?”
“I…I…hadn’t thought,” Melinda replied, taken aback by her daughter’s sudden anger.
“That’s obvious!” Zoey cut in coldly. “Anyone can see that. You didn’t think about making your own daughter look like an opportunistic gold digger trying to use some rich guy to get ahead in life. You didn’t think about our privacy, or how I might feel when this dumb plan of yours destroyed our relationship…”
“Relationship?” Melinda sputtered. “What relationship, Zoey? You went out with him once, and I had to force you to do that!”
“That’s not the point!” Zoey screamed back, hot tears running down her blazing cheeks. She caught her mother in a steely glare that bore the renewed hatred welling inside her. “I don’t care what you paid them! You call the marketing people back this minute and tell them you’re not running that damn ad!”
“Zoey, I couldn’t do that if I wanted to. It’s too late for that now. The billboards have been going up all over the city all morning. Whether you want to believe it or not, there’s nothing I can do at this point.”
At those words, Zoey’s face began losing its color. The image she had seen had been all over New York for hours now. Stelios might have seen it already, and if he hadn’t, he was going to soon.
“You awful woman!” she wailed at her mother, scrambling for her smartphone with shaky hands.
She had to call him. It was her only hope. Stelios had to know she hadn’t been behind any of this. She struggled to unlock the thing, only succeeding on the fourth attempt because she forced herself to slow down. When her phone was unlocked, she gave Stelios a call, but it went straight to voicemail. She hung up and tried again.
After three more attempts, her heart sank like a stone. She was already too late. Stelios must have seen the billboards, accused her of treachery in his mind, and cut her off. Only that morning, Zoey had had someone who made her happy enough to sing to random children on the subway. And now, thanks entirely to her mother, he was gone. Probably forever.
“You can’t keep doing things like this and expect me to put up with it, Mother. I don’t care if I end up in the street, it would be better than working for you!”
“Calm down now, Zoey dear. I really think you’re overreacting—”
“I quit!” Zoey spat, storming out of her office with a bull’s ferocity.
Melinda called after her daughter, but neither she nor the receptionist did anything to stop her from leaving.
On the sidewalk, Zoey was surprised to discover she’d only been at work for thirteen minutes that morning. She wondered how anyone could ruin a life in so short a period of time.
EIGHT
Zoey didn’t sing a note as she sat on the subway, focused as she was on trying her damndest not to scream or cry. Her world had been as near to perfect as it had ever gotten, and then it had all been snatched away in less time than it had taken her to make her breakfast.
Her heart felt like a millstone. It seemed to grind against her insides and press against her lungs so that it was hard to breathe. A woman sat down beside her and asked for the time. Zoey delivered it with a vicious snarl.
After that, no one came anywhere near Zoey until the subway car carried her to the station nearest her apartment. When she reached the sidewalk, every person that saw her took pains to get out of her path. She didn’t look stable, and the gleam in her eyes did not look safe to anyone passing by her. When she reached her apartment, she slammed the door shut so violently she was surprised that it didn’t come off of its hinges.
She went to her bedroom, slammed that door shut, too, and let the tears flow freely while she assaulted her pillow. Zoey was unemployed and barely prepared for it. Her savings would only hold out for a few weeks max. After that, she was going to have to face some brutal choices. On top of that, her mother had suddenly become her worst enemy. Melinda had cut Zoey off from the only man she had any sort of connection with. All of her happiness, all of her plans for the future, had been dashed because of her mother’s greed.
“How could she do that?” Zoey wept angrily. “How could she do something like that without asking one damn question first?”
There was no reply, only the sound of her own sobs, and the sensation of the sheets getting hotter and wetter against her face.
Some time later, once Zoey had run out of tears and profanity, she picked herself up and tried to call Stelios again. When her call went to voicemail, she sighed and threw her phone down, shaking her head sullenly and trying not to think.
She went to the bathroom, washed her face, and tried to straighten out the tangle her hair had become, but it was just something to do. It didn’t feel like she was accomplishing anything. When seemingly every snag had been taken care of, she returned to her bed.
For the next few hours, Zoey distracted herself from the gasping pain in her heart as best she could. She started listening to music on her phone, but she gave up on that within minutes. Love was the most popular subject in music, and it was the last thing, absolutely the last thing, she wanted to hear right then. She tried YouTube videos next and was slightly more successful. After that, she turned to documentaries on the Civil War and the Old West. By nightfall, Zoey had become a glassy-eyed zombie, barely noticing what was on the screen before her.
Around eight o’clock, Zoey’s phone rang, and she rushed for it, her heart leaping. She was sure it was Stelios finally calling her back, and that now she would have a chance to explain everything. She answered the phone without looking at the ID and was utterly crushed to hear her mother’s voice on the other end.
“What do you want?” Zoey sniped, squeezing her phone tightly in an effort to corral her emotions.
“I want to know if you’re okay, Zoey. The way you left and all, I’ve been worried about you.”
“Now you’re worried? Not last weekend when it would have helped, but now you’re worried about me? Well, I’m fine, Mom,” she said in tones dripping with sarcasm. “I’m fine now, and I’ll be fine tomorrow and the day after that, too, so you don’t need to call anymore!”
“Look, Zoey, I keep telling you that we have to live. When your father left, he took everything that wasn’t nailed down. I was devoted to him heart and soul, you know that, and he took complete advantage. Nearly every penny I had went to that woman he was sleeping with. You’ll remember her from the court proceedings. The one with the airbags on her chest. I had to sell everything I had left to get Melinda Forde started. My car, my awards, every single thing I owned, Zoey! The agency is all we have. Why can’t you understand that? When I see a chance to make it profitable, I have to take it. Because we have to live.”
“No. It’s because you have to be a greedy mother that destroys her daughter’s happiness without a second thought. There’s more to living than making money, Mom. You used to know that, once upon a time.”
“It was one date, Zoey, for heaven’s sake, and he was using you the same way all men use women. They have their fun and then they find something new. I was just trying to make us a profit before that happened.”
Melinda called again, a few minutes later, but she ignored it.
Stelios wasn’t using me she thought to herself. If my mother had been there, she’d know that. But she was too busy pimping me out to try and turn a profit. Her phone rang three more times that night, but this time, Zoey simply silenced it. She was unemployed now; she could no longer afford to get angry enough to throw her smartphone against the wall.
NINE
The next day didn’t prove to be much better. Zoey woke up feeling the ache of loss in the pit of her stomach, and spent the morning moping on the sofa, trying, as ever, not to think, and avoiding daytime talk shows like the plague. Around noon, however, it occurred to Zoey that her rent simply wasn’t going to pay itself. If she wanted to continue living in her apartment for any length of time, she was going to need to find a new line of work.
Zoey went to her room and fetched her laptop and a blanket. When she returned to the living room, she got as comfortable as she could under the circumstances. Tossing the blanket over herself, she went online and headed for the first job site that sprang to mind.
In college, Zoey had studied communications so she began applying for positions with titles like Social Media Specialist, Marketing Assistant, and Event Promoter. She retooled her resume and drafted several cover letters, typing nonstop until her fingers began to cramp. When night fell, she still felt as crappy as she had when she’d woken up, but at least she could tell herself the day had been productive.
For the next two days, things followed the same pattern: Zoey spent half the day dreaming of what could have been and agonizing over what was. The other half was spent furiously typing, doggedly fighting to secure a new income source. She was fairly positive one of the scores of positions she’d applied for would call her in for an interview sometime before her supplies ran low.
Things might have gone on that way for the next week or two, but around four o’clock in the afternoon, Zoey received a call. She made sure to check the ID this time, and when she did, her heart gave a little leap. It was Stelios.
“Hello, Zoey,” he said in a neutral tone that Zoey didn’t like. She could hear what sounded like ocean waves in the background. “I just wanted to ask you a quick question: why do I find myself standing under a billboard for your mother’s company with both of our faces on it?”
Zoey was shocked to be hearing from Stelios at all, and none of her thoughts would take their proper form.
“Well, the thing about my mom is she’s cynical,” she began at a frantic pace. “You know, the dinner was excellent, and we were really getting on well, or at least I thought so, but my mother doesn’t believe in that sort of thing because of the divorce. And so she had the billboard made up, but she didn’t have any right to do that, so I had to quit. But I had nothing to do with it, I swear to God. I know you might not believe that, but…”
“Zoey, you’re babbling,” Stelios returned evenly. “We can discuss everything in person. I’m sending a car to pick you up. It’ll be there within the hour.”
“Stelios, I just want you to know—”
“See you then,” he finished.
With that, the line went dead, and Zoey leaped into full panic mode.
TEN
The longest it ever took Zoey to get ready for any outing was a half hour. That usually gave her plenty of time to clean up and find something to wear, but in full panic mode, she didn’t remember any such thing. She was darting through her closet at breakneck speeds, grabbing outfits, rejecting them, and tossing them out of her way.
At the same time, her brain was buzzing. Why in God’s name was Stelios sending a car to pick her up? Zoey was almost certain she was going to be dumped because of her mother’s billboards. What she didn’t know was why Stelios wouldn’t just do that over the phone.
Zoey was driving herself crazy trying to work out his motives and second-guess what he wanted to discuss, and she finally forced herself to focus because the Greek’s driver would be there soon. She decided to wear the cream-colored business suit she had worn the first time she and Stelios had met.
She peeled off her clothes and jumped into the shower, almost slipping and injuring herself in the process. She emerged ten minutes later, still panicked, but clean, and slipped on her clothes after she straightened her hair.
When she had finished everything, she checked the time and discovered she still had fifteen minutes to wait. She used the time to do the only thing she could focus on: applying for still more communications jobs.
She had just finished her second application when a knock rang out at her door. She opened it and found the same driver from before, whose name was Fulton, ready to lead her to the car.
This time, after another lengthy drive, Fulton pulled into a marina on Long Island. The boardwalk led into the open sea, which seemed to go on forever. Hugging the walkways were dozens of yachts, and Fulton led her down the jetty, stopping in front of a massive white behemoth that had the aerodynamic look of a military ship.
“We meet again, Zoey,” Stelios said coolly, standing near the gangway to his enormous yacht.
“Stelios, I want to apologize for all of this,” Zoey replied. “I tried to call you about it, but it went straight to voicemail every time. I promise you I had nothing to do with that,” she said, pointing contemptuously at the nearby billboard.
“I know,” returned Stelios in a surprisingly gentle tone of voice. “You’re not the type of person who would do something like that. Your mother on the other hand…”
“Well then, why didn’t you return my calls?” she asked, trying not to sound as surprised as she felt.
“I’ve been out on the yacht all this time. There’s no service out there.”
“So, just to be clear,” Zoey said, not daring to believe her ears, “you don’t blame me for this mess, and you aren’t mad at me?”
“Of course not,” replied Stelios cheerfully. “But I did miss you,” he added, moving in for a kiss.
Zoey hesitated for a moment and pulled away.
“What’s the matter, Zoey?” Stelios asked, sounding concerned. “Is something wrong?”
“You told me you were on a business trip,” Zoey replied slowly. “Why would you tell me that when you were out on the yacht with no signal for the past few days? Has there been someone else with you, Stelios?” she asked quietly, wearing a forlorn expression.
The billionaire shook his head. “Zoey, there’s been no one on that yacht except me and my staff. You’re right that it wasn’t a business trip, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, but what I was doing is difficult for me to talk about. The truth is, this week is the anniversary of my parents’ deaths. For the last few days I’ve been visiting the island that houses their memorial.”
The look in his eyes as he said those words told Zoey that they were perfectly true. Relief washed over her as Stelios wrapped his strong arms around her and kissed her with gentle longing. She could feel how affected he had been by her absence and how thankful he was to have her in his arms.
“Why don’t you come out on the yacht with me?” Stelios suggested. “I promise you’ll enjoy every second.”
She agreed, and together, they walked up the magnificent gangway, arm in arm, as if they would never be parted again.
The outside of the craft had caught Zoey’s attention, but the interior took her breath away. There were crystal decorations everywhere she looked, including an enormous chandelier in the ship’s dining area. In the living room, opposite a luxurious seating area, was an enormous cabinet that opened to reveal a well-stocked bar.
Stelios stood by the bar and made Zoey a drink while she told him everything she had been through over the past four days. How she had learned what her mother was up to, how she had quit her job, and how she had agonized over the thought that their relationship seemed to have ended. The Greek was remarkably sympathetic, comforting Zoey throughout, and grow
ing increasingly upset with Melinda’s antics.
Getting the whole story out proved cathartic for Zoey, and as time passed, her mother slipped from her mind altogether. She focused instead on the wonderful gentleman who was at that moment offering her a tour of the yacht.
She agreed, and he led her down a flight of stairs with walls that were covered with scalloped silver leaf.
“The carvings in this handrail are amazing!” Zoey commented, her voice full of wonder.
“Those were handmade in West Africa by a family of craftsmen that have been working with me for nearly a decade.”
“Well, they’ve done an incredible job here.”
“If you think that’s impressive, wait till you see what’s in here,” Stelios said, indicating one of the doors along a long hallway.