4 The Billionaire's Seduction All That He Requires

by Thorne, Olivia

  “By you or me?” I asked coquettishly.

  “Now you’re just fishing for compliments.”

  “Or you were congratulating yourself.”

  He grinned. “I prefer to think of it as a dance, and you need two highly skilled performers for it to be the best it can be.”

  “And how was it for you?”

  He leaned over and took my hands on the table. “The best. The very, very best.”

  My heart fluttered to hear him say it.

  14

  The dinner eased by in a sumptuous parade of dishes, things I’d never tasted – or even seen – before. I’m more of an onion rings kind of a girl than an haute cuisine chick, but I was so dazzled by the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes that I completely surrendered.

  If that sounds naughty… it kind of was. In a culinary way, anyhow.

  There was a strawberry soup to start, both spicy and sweet. Foie gras, which is definitely not my favorite food in the world – but the shavings of truffle scattered across the top quickly became my favorite (at least for the next fifteen minutes). A carpaccio of a delicate fish, followed by scallops served on half a scallop shell. A truffle tart with smoked bacon. A cheese soufflé. Abalone and leeks in a ginger broth. Roasted lobster with lemongrass. Grilled seabass with spinach. A tiny veal chop flavored with pesto. Three or four desserts, including a chocolate mousse with a Fuji apple compote. (I was in heaven with the chocolate.)

  Not only was the food astoundingly good, but the presentation was… how should I put this?… whimsical. There were tiny bits of gold foil over some of the food, like on a dish of wild grains prepared like risotto. (Now I know what money tastes like. And it’s not Goldschlager.) One course came with a little bale of hay, about an inch square and tied with strands of cloth, on the edge of the plate. Because, hey, what should you put next to a fancy plate of food topped with gold foil? Why, a miniature bale of hay, of course.

  I stopped trying to wrap my head around it after awhile, and just experienced it, like Connor suggested.

  Oh – don’t forget the wine. My God, the wine. There were different glasses, just an ounce or two, paired with each dish. I’m no connoisseur, but wow. My tongue was having orgasms.

  And yet, despite the culinary fireworks, what I’ll remember most about that evening was the conversation.

  “So, tell me…” I began somewhere around the third course.

  “What?”

  “What’s this mysterious business you’re here for?”

  Connor sighed. “Let’s not talk business right now.”

  “What do you want to talk about, then?”

  He took a sip of his wine and considered. “Something personal.”

  “We talked about personal stuff last time we ate out.”

  “I’m pretty sure we haven’t exhausted the subject.”

  “Okay, smart guy… but we talked about me last time. I think it’s about time we talk about you.”

  “Hm,” he said, noncommittal.

  I thought about his ex-fiancée – the woman who had broken his heart – but decided against bringing that up. The topic had gotten a slightly chilly reception last time.

  Instead, I went with a variation on something he’d said to me.

  “So… what did five-year-old Connor want to be when he grew up?”

  “A futures trader,” he said, entirely seriously, as he took a bite of scallops.

  I laughed and almost snorted wine up my nose. “What five-year-old wants to be a futures trader?!”

  “I did.”

  “Um… what’s a futures trader?”

  “It’s somebody who buys and sells commodities, like gold or soybeans or cotton, and tries to anticipate future changes in prices, either up or down, to maximize profit.”

  “You wanted to buy soybeans?” I asked, confused.

  “Not really – I wanted to bet on whether the price of soybeans would go up or down. It’s kind of like day-trading stocks, where you’re trying to buy low and sell high in a relatively short period of time.”

  “Oh. Well. Every five-year-old wants to do that.”

  Connor smiled. “My father had an employee who was especially good at it. Rajesh Sengupta. He was really nice to me. I think that’s why I wanted to trade futures – I wanted to be like him.”

  “Oh, that’s cute.”

  “Yeah. Mr. Raj… I haven’t thought about him in years…”

  “What about your dad?”

  “What about him?”

  “Wasn’t he nice to you?”

  “Haha,” Connor laughed. “Not particularly, no.”

  I stared at him. “Not at all?”

  “He didn’t have much use for children. Or for anybody who couldn’t make him money.”

  “But you saved his life in Mexico!”

  I was referring to a few years ago, when Connor had walked into a den of kidnappers and paid his father’s ransom, at great personal risk of being captured and killed himself.

  “I wasn’t five years old at the time,” Connor pointed out.

  “But… what did you do as a family?”

  “You mean, when I wasn’t in boarding school? Went to Fiji a couple of times. And France and Italy. Skied in Switzerland every Christmas break.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  “Well, it was, but not for the reasons you’re thinking. My parents usually left us with a nanny and took off for the black diamond runs. By the time I got good enough to go with them, I was a teenager, and there was no way I was going to hang out with them then.”

  “But… you spent time with them after skiing, right?”

  “No, they usually went out dining and drinking with friends. I’d see them in the mornings before we left for the ski lifts, and that was about it.”

  “What about on Christmas?”

  “Eh… I guess I saw them a little longer on Christmas morning, but then it was off to the slopes.”

  I sat there openmouthed. I knew that situations like this existed – where parents did little more than make guest appearances in the movies of their children’s lives – but I’d never actually met anybody like that.

  I had tons of friends whose parents had divorced, and a couple of them had rarely seen their fathers growing up. But that was different; they usually lived in different states. I’d never met anybody who had grown up like Connor, with married parents they never saw.

  I tried again.

  “But… what about as a kid?”

  “What about it?”

  “Didn’t you ever… I don’t know… play games?”

  Connor thought for a second. “My father and I played Monopoly a few times.”

  Finally.

  “That’s nice,” I smiled.

  “He would make deals with me and then renege.”

  “…he’d what?”

  “I sold him Park Place once to get money to buy hotels for another property, but with the promise that I could land on Park Place or Boardwalk twice and not have to pay. He agreed, then when I landed on Boardwalk the first time, he demanded payment. I told him he’d promised, and he asked if I had it in writing.

  “‘But I trusted you,’ I said.

  “He said, ‘Only a fool trusts another man’s word without anything to back it up.’

  “I started to cry. I told him that if I paid him, I’d go bankrupt.

  “‘Why should I care?’ he said. ‘That’s your problem, not mine. You should have thought about that before you sold the property to me.’”

  My mouth dropped open even farther. Besides parents outright abusing their children, and redneck dads leaving three-year-olds inside cars while they went inside strip clubs – which I had only ever read about in newspapers – this was the most insane thing I’d ever heard. “What?”

  “Oh, it gets better. The next time we played, I sold him a property and made him sign a contract, and he still screwed me over. When I pointed to the contract, he asked, ‘And who’s going to enforce it?’ So I
ended up going bankrupt again.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “That’s… that’s absolutely unbelievable…”

  Connor smiled grimly. “My father never loses. In Monopoly or in real life.”

  “Why did you keep playing with him?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t know any better. I just thought that was how the game was played. Plus, I was only eight years old. I guess I wanted him to play with me no matter what – to pay me some sort of attention – so I just kept on coming back for more.”

  “He did that to an eight-year-old?” I asked in horror.

  “Well… maybe I was nine. It’s hard to remember.”

  Connor kept on eating like nothing was wrong – and then he looked up and realized I had an expression on my face like I’d just heard about somebody killing puppies. He smiled consolingly. “It’s not that big a deal.”

  “Not that big a deal?! Connor, your dad’s a psychopath!”

  “I think you mean a ‘sociopath.’ And… yeah… probably. He definitely has sociopathic tendencies, that’s for sure. Love of power for power’s sake, and lording it over other people. Total lack of empathy for others. But… no matter how horrible all this sounds, I learned some of the most valuable business lessons of my life from those games with my father.”

  “Like what?!”

  “Like never trust another person’s word. Always be able to back up your agreements by some form of leverage. Always watch your back. Destroy your enemies when you have the chance, to make sure they don’t recover and destroy you later.”

  This was unbelievable. “You can’t live life like that!”

  “I said business lessons, not life lessons. It’s not the same.” Suddenly his face grew dark, and he stared off into the distance. “Unless you get involved with someone who treats your relationship like a business.”

  My stomach dropped. “I would never do that!”

  His eyes found mine as he came back to the present, and his expression lightened. “I wasn’t talking about you. I know you would never do that.”

  “Where was your mother in all this?”

  He shrugged again and returned to his food. “If she wasn’t running her charity balls and dinners, then she was telling me to stop being a whiner and beat my father if I was so upset.”

  “Jesus,” I murmured.

  “Poor little rich boy, right? Rich people problems.”

  “Child abuse isn’t ‘rich people problems.’”

  He frowned like I’d just suggested something incredibly outlandish. “My parents didn’t abuse me.”

  “Maybe not physically, but emotional abuse is still abuse.”

  He waved off my comment with one hand. “Lots of people have it way worse than I do. I turned out fine. No harm done.”

  I wondered about that.

  Then I thought of something else I knew about him: according to some E! show I’d seen on the Dubai, Connor was the youngest son of the Templeton family.

  “Don’t you have older brothers or sisters?”

  “One older brother. Vincent.”

  “How much older?”

  “Five years.”

  “What about you guys?”

  “What about us?”

  “Weren’t you close?”

  He made a face like Naaah. The way you might answer if somebody asked if you wanted ketchup on your hotdog. “Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I didn’t see much of him during the school year.”

  “He didn’t go to boarding school?”

  “Oh, yeah, he did. But he kept getting thrown out, so my parents kept shipping him around the world to new schools. So I only saw him during summers and Christmas. And not much then.”

  “Why’d he get thrown out?”

  “Sex, alcohol, drugs, bad grades – the usual.”

  “Um… don’t take this the wrong way… but I thought you were the black sheep of the family.”

  Connor laughed. “I am.”

  “If your brother did all those things and isn’t the black sheep, what the hell did you do?!”

  “Vincent shaped up after college. Well, law school, really.” Connor’s voice became tinged with the slightest hint of bitterness. “He figured out which side his bread was buttered on, and he buckled down and became a perfect little heir to the throne. Me… I was pretty much a good kid until my late teens, and then I really pissed off my family.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Well, I quit college my freshman year, for one. That didn’t go over well.”

  “Why’d you quit?”

  “The way I looked at it, the world was full of limitless opportunities, and here I was stuck freezing my ass off in boring classes, just like every other boring school I’d ever been in.”

  “Where’d you go to college?”

  “Harvard.”

  Of course.

  “What’d you do once you quit?”

  “Ha – there’s a fun story. I told my father I wanted out. He said ‘no, absolutely not.’ We had a big fight, I made some grandiose claims about how I could succeed better and faster than any of my ivory tower professors and clueless peers… and he made a bet with me.”

  “What was it?”

  “He’d stake me, to the tune of ten million dollars, and I could go out and have three years to make something of myself.”

  “Ten million dollars?!” I yelped.

  Connor smirked. “And here you were, thinking my father was such a bad guy.”

  “Well… maybe I misjudged him…”

  Connor shook his head. “No you didn’t. Ten million was nothing to him. It would be like you giving your kid the change under your couch cushions to go start a business.”

  “Oh.”

  My mind was spinning.

  That must be a hell of a couch in the Templeton household.

  “And for a mere pittance, he was buying my soul. It really was a deal with the devil. If I succeeded, then I owed him the original ten million, plus 75% of all profits as my primary investor. If I failed, then I agreed to go back to school. After graduation, I would enter whatever position in the family business that my father deemed fit.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I agreed, with the proviso that we cap the buyout at twenty million. Meaning if I could give him $17.5 million, that was it, we were done, and I kept the rest – plus my freedom.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He laughed – after all, remember, he thought I was going to crash and burn, and then he’d own me. But, being the consummate negotiator that he is, he wouldn’t do the deal for less than $30 million – meaning I would owe him $25 million to get out from under his thumb. The original ten, plus 75% of the 20 million in profit.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair,” I protested.

  “That’s another lesson I learned in Monopoly. In business, nothing is fair; you get what you negotiate for.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I took the deal.”

  “What happened?”

  “I crashed and burned spectacularly,” he grinned.

  “You lost ten million dollars?” I gasped. “In three years?”

  “No – in nine months. I gambled recklessly on several enterprises, all of which tanked.”

  “You?! But you’re, like, a business genius! How did that happen?!”

  “Well, I was trying to lose the money.”

  “WHAT?!”

  “It was my form of adolescent rebellion. Anyway, that’s what my mother’s shrink told me at a Christmas party one year.”

  “What did you do?!”

  “I told him to stick to analyzing my mother and leave me out of it.”

  “No, I mean – ”

  “I know what you meant. I went back to my father and told him I’d lost the money.

  “He said, ‘Well, now you’re going back to Harvard.’

  “And I said, ‘No I’m not.’

  “And he said, ‘We
had an agreement!’

  “And I said, ‘Do you have it in writing?’”

  My mouth fell open. “Did he?!”

  Connor burst out laughing. “No, he didn’t. I think it was the only time in his entire life he didn’t sign a contract – because he totally underestimated me. He thought I’d never learned a thing from him. You should have seen his face. Especially when I said, ‘And since you don’t, how are you going to enforce the agreement?’”

  I laughed in spite of myself. “Did he know what you were referring to? The Monopoly games, I mean?”

  “Oh, of course he knew. My father has a memory that’s a cross between a computer and a steel trap. He just didn’t think I remembered – or had enough balls to cross him.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He ranted and roared about suing me in court, then he threatened to disown me. I flipped him off and left the house.”

  “Oh my God,” I whispered.

  “It was pretty stupid, but – hey – I was twenty years old at the time. And it felt great.”

  “But…. what happened after that?”

  “Well, one thing I’d done with that ten million dollars was make a lot of contacts in the industries I targeted. And I had the family name backing me up, not to mention dozens of college and boarding school friends with rich fathers who had millions of dollars to invest. I secured a hundred million in seed money – with far, far better terms than my father had offered me, I might add. I buckled down and actually tried to make it work… and the rest is just boring details in a bank account ledger.”

  He toasted me ironically with his glass of wine.

  “You got people to give you a hundred million dollars right after you blew ten million?!”

  “First off, you’ve got to remember, we’re talking about people worth hundreds of millions of dollars apiece. Some of them worth billions. A couple of million for an investment – especially backing a Templeton – ”

  He said his family name in a hoity-toity, self-mocking way.

  “ – was a no-brainer to them. Some of them wanted to get closer to my father. Those guys, I let them have the impression that I was still in the old man’s good graces. And the ones who hated my father, well, I let them know exactly what I’d done. They usually roared with laughter and then asked how big a check I needed. They figured I had inherited my father’s business sense, and they could stick it to my dad by helping me succeed.”