No Dreams Allowed: A Billionaire Romance

by Sonora Seldon

  Dave didn’t cry. Dave barely spoke. He stood next to his sister, he accepted the sad regrets of strangers, and he played the part of a statue to perfection.

  I held his hand and I knew different. I felt his pulse galloping, the constant sharp trembling echoing through his body, and the fine sheen of sweat on his skin. I wanted to hold him, to wrap him up in my arms and make this right somehow, but I stood tough at his side and waited.

  The coffin was lowered into the ground, the last mourner filed past, the minister said his goodbyes and got out of Dodge, and we were alone. It was a few minutes past three on an ordinary summer afternoon.

  I let go of Dave to give Kristen a fierce bear hug, because I knew she’d never admit to needing it. “Are you okay? Or at least as okay as possible under the circumstances?”

  She held back a cry and nodded. “Keeping busy with the arrangements for all this helped.” Glancing around at the modest granite gravestone and the modest arrangement of white lilies and the modest number of mourners climbing into their cars and driving away, she added, “And I know it wasn’t much, but he didn’t want much – his exact words were ‘goddamn funerals are a shitty sentimental waste of good fucking money,’ as I remember. Right, Davey?”

  Dave stood over the hole holding his father. His back was to us, he didn’t look around, and his voice was as flat as Kansas. “That’s what he said.”

  We joined Dave beside the grave. Kristen stood at his left, I took station at his right, and I’m not sure he noticed us. He stood still and black in his full-length formal overcoat, his blond ponytail hung straight down his back, and he stared at the coffin resting in the earth.

  I jumped when he spoke. “I brought your dad’s watch.”

  He pulled the battered old silver pocket watch out of his coat pocket and held it up for us to see. It dangled from its chain, turning slowly in the breeze as sunlight flashed off the tarnished metal and scratched glass.

  “Between your black eye and this, it’s done a terrible job of holding your luck, huh? Sorry, it always seemed to work pretty well for Dad.”

  “That’s all right, it’s keeping time just fine.” He dropped the watch back into his coat pocket, and I was surprised.

  “It still runs? It hasn’t been wound in years –”

  “I don’t mean that kind of time.”

  I took his hand and now his skin was dry, his pulse steady. He held my hand right back and he no longer trembled, not one bit.

  Dave looked up, past the grave and the pile of dirt alongside it, to the bulldozer parked idling in a nearby grassy lane between rows of markers and monuments. A cemetery groundskeeper in faded coveralls sat in the driver’s seat, tapping at his phone and trying to look tastefully invisible while he waited for us to disappear so he could do his job.

  Dave raised his voice, speaking loud and clear and without a drop of hesitation.

  “Fill it.”

  The groundskeeper looked left and right as if searching for someone to back him up. When he spoke, he was all about hesitating. “Um, sir, actually, we, ah, usually wait until the family has –”

  “Do it now.”

  There was no arguing with that voice.

  The three of us backed away from the grave. Kristen and I traded worried glances and Dave looked on in silence as the earthmover’s scarred metal blade shoved the mound of dirt into the hole, burying the coffin for however long eternity decided to last.

  Dave watched and we waited as two more groundskeepers arrived. They raked the bare patch of dirt over the grave until it was neat and even, and then they laid down fresh sod to cover up the evidence that anything as unsightly and inconvenient and unavoidable as a burial had happened.

  Once they were gone and it was done and we were alone with the sparrows and squirrels, Dave came to life.

  “It’s time.” He thrust his hand deep into his coat pocket and I heard him restlessly turning my dad’s watch over and over, rattling and clinking the chain against the case as he spoke.

  “We don’t live in his world any more, and it’s time to make things right.”

  Dave walked away from his father’s grave and never looked back.

  The mountains of paperwork and the meetings with lawyers and all the endless formalities involved in the transfer of an empire from the dead to the living were accomplished in record time. It helped that Einar Dallstrom’s will was brief and to the point – his billions were split between his daughter and his son, but Dave was left in charge. My boyfriend and former fry cook was now the majority owner of Dallstrom Defense Systems, its new CEO, and the master of a war machine that spanned six continents.

  The world waited to see what he’d do with it.

  He did not keep the world waiting long.

  After conference calls and meetings and long nights hunched over his laptop researching who knows what, Dave asked me out of nowhere on a Tuesday afternoon to set him up with a limo ride across town to the headquarters of Boeing. He didn’t say what he had in mind, but as one of the world’s largest defense contractors and a leading manufacturer of military aircraft, Boeing was a longtime rival of Dallstrom Defense Systems – ooh, was I maybe going to witness some kind of Thunderdome death match to determine who got the next government contract to build shiny flying things that dropped exploding things?

  Dave disappeared into a conference room full of Boeing executives, and he didn’t come out for two hours. I heard raised voices, confused discussion, and puzzled questions echoing behind the closed door. One hour into whatever it was, while I sat in the hall and wondered what Dave was up to, a nearby elevator dinged open and two men dressed in suits whose price tags could have fed several small starving countries hurried out and ducked into the meeting. Just before the Door of No Admittance thumped shut behind them, one of the suits looked over his elegant shoulder at me.

  “Is that boy insane?”

  Probably, smart guy, but that’s part of his charm.

  At 4:00 p.m., the insane boy in question emerged from the meeting smiling like a man who’d scored the financial coup of the century. Handshakes were passed all around, the Boeing guys traded what-the-hell-just-happened looks, and at a press conference the following morning a sale was announced.

  Well, it wasn’t a sale so much as a game show give-away.

  The aeronautics division of Dallstrom Defense Systems was worth in the dizzying neighborhood of twenty billion dollars, and Dave had just sold every last manufacturing facility, research laboratory, wind tunnel, socket wrench, clipboard, and paper clip of it to Boeing for ten billion dollars. No wonder the Boeing executives flanking him on either side of the podium wore looks ranging from shocked to stunned to the impossible eye-popping joy of a little kid who was expecting maybe a Nintendo 3DS for Christmas and instead got the Nintendo and also a puppy, a pony, and the entire contents of Toys R Us.

  Had Dave lost his mind?

  I asked him that the day after the announcement. He smiled all sweet and dreamy, and simply said, “You’ll see.”

  Maybe Dave’s mind took a strange left turn with the sale to Boeing, but then it turned in every direction at once when he sold off three different overseas divisions of Dallstrom Defense Systems a week later, letting each chunk of the company go for less than half its value.

  Kristen had to know what was going on, right? I cornered her in the middle of one of her usual fifteen-hour work days, but she shrugged and said that Dave was keeping her out of the loop on this stuff, and she honestly had no idea what was going through his head – but it was our job to support him and if this all panned out right, we’d be fine in the long run. Poorer, but fine.

  She said all that in her Breezy Confident Executive voice, but she never met my eyes. She dropped her phone twice. Her pulse hammered in a tiny blue vein on her forehead, and why would she glance around and give the tiniest jump at a door slamming down the hall?

  More company divisions were unloaded. The stock market got nervous. Defense industry analysts chased
themselves in circles trying to figure out what he was up to, and I could hear Einar Dallstrom spinning like a top in his grave.

  Then Dave cancelled the company’s pending government contracts and returned all the sweet taxpayer dollars that had been paid in advance.

  The President of the United States was pissed. I know, because I took his call. Before I handed the phone off to Dave, the guy I didn’t vote for spouted some very un-presidential profanity as he asked me if I could talk some sense into “that batshit kid” before he “torpedoed the entire motherfucking Defense Department with his crazy-ass whims,” and did I have any IDEA of the impact this would have on our military obligations around the world?

  The heads of investments firms from up and down Wall Street called every day, asking if my cook had lost every last shred of his sense and was he trying to cause a financial collapse?

  Dave glowed brighter with each new spate of craziness.

  You might think none of this was all that nutty – after all, wasn’t it just a matter of company assets being converted from physical factories and storage facilities and product inventory into liquid form, from property into cash? And it was all being sold for bargain prices, but we still had the money, right?

  Then he started giving the money away.

  One night in the middle of eating take-out Chinese dumplings in Dave’s penthouse apartment, he asked me between gulps of fried goodness what my favorite charity was – just like that, out of nowhere, nothing to do with anything. I shrugged, and off the top of my head I said the ASPCA, because who wouldn’t love helping out adorable fuzzy animals who’ve gotten a sucky deal out of life?

  Two days later, the president of the ASPCA appeared on Good Morning America looking shell shocked as he thanked God and David Dallstrom and existence in general for Dave’s donation of one hundred million dollars.

  Chicago’s leading ballet company got sixty million dollars, and their artistic director had what I’m sure was a very stylish nervous breakdown.

  Every homeless shelter in the city received twenty million dollars.

  Three hundred million dollars went to Doctors Without Borders, and I could hear Einar Dallstrom shouting in the afterlife at the idea of a bunch of peace-loving pansy-ass doctors helping out refugees in war zones with HIS money, goddammit.

  I think Dave picked out half the recipients of his charity explosions based on how much they would have pissed off his dad. Street theater companies in New York, a nature preserve for forest bison in eastern Poland, a nonprofit group that took inner-city kids camping in the Montana backcountry, a guy who yodeled on a unicycle in Portland – they all got Dallstrom money bombs, and I’d never seen Dave so happy.

  One morning over breakfast, I did ask him where all this was going.

  “Dave, if you keep this up, aren’t we all going to have to go out and get real jobs?”

  Damn, he knew that crooked smile immediately rendered me helpless and incapable of logical argument. His grin widened as he reached over to pluck the last of the grease-soaked and delicious homemade hash browns off my plate, and he ducked when I pitched a slice of syrup-drenched French toast at him. It whizzed over his head and hit his kitchen cabinets with a squelchy plop, and he didn’t seem to think our possible future employment as actual working people would be anything like a real problem.

  “With her steely-eyed determination and experience and colossal work ethic, Sis could nail a job at any corporation on Earth, you know that – and the two of us would make the best ‘bartender and her adoring cook-slave’ team any bar, tavern, or kinky sex club in America has ever seen, I’d bet my handcuffs on it.”

  “You don’t own handcuffs.”

  “You mean like I don’t own a certain braided Italian leather whip with sterling silver tips on the lashes that I found hidden under our bed?”

  Oh shit.

  And maybe he’d just keep the whip for show, but did he have handcuffs around here somewhere? Because I had a feeling he might actually use those … a good, warm, all-through-my-body feeling, and when had this sweet nutjob turned me into a raging pervert?

  “Besides, I’m not selling off every last corner of the empire.” He forked himself up a mouthful of biscuits slathered in white gravy, he chewed and swallowed and smiled, and he added with a burp, “I’m keeping the non-killing-people sectors of the company, and between the fusion energy research labs, the industrial robotics division, and the nanotech facility in Palo Alto, I don’t think you and me and Sis will be begging in the street for pennies anytime soon.”

  Then he leaned over the counter and gave me a kiss that tasted of gravy. “And while we’re on the subject of the future, I talked to some people I know on the Board of Trustees at the University of Chicago, and they said that between the credits you already had from your community college in Kansas and the distance learning courses you’ve aced here, you’re looking at only two more semesters to finish out your undergrad degree and be ready for vet school.”

  I kissed him right back, because my man understood that dreams are worth so much more than money.

  Oh, and we may have skipped the rest of breakfast, after I called around to reschedule his morning meetings for a later and less sexy time.

  Dave’s phone wrenched me awake at three the next morning.

  We had four official phones between us, but this was the fifth phone, the one he kept hidden away but close. It was always on, but rarely rang. You wouldn’t even know it was there ninety-nine percent of the time, until that one percent when it woke up and played the theme from “Silent Hill.”

  Dave always left the room to use that phone.

  I yawned, still three-quarters asleep and grouchy about being awake but not having sex at such an indecent hour. He pulled himself free of my arms and legs, apologized, and took his Samsung knockoff mystery phone out into the hallway.

  He talked out there until I fell into another dream. When he came back to bed, apologizing again and wrapping his arms around me, I woke up and grumbled and kissed him and noticed it was now four in the morning.

  “Dave, who was that?” Well, semi-awake as I was, it probably came out more like, “Dave, whozwaszzat?,” but whatever.

  He hugged me tight. He wrapped his legs around me too for some reason, like he was afraid I was going to get away. “Somebody who’s having a hard time accepting the new reality that we aren’t doing things Dad’s way anymore.”

  I nestled up against him, breathed in his scent, and began drifting away again in his arms.

  “Cassie?”

  “Mmmmrphwhaa?”

  “We need to go to Dubai. Can you set up the flight and the hotel?”

  “Remind me in the morning, I’m sorta kinda not awake right now, ‘kay?”

  “Will do – sorry, I just need to meet some people there and remind them there’s a new Jedi in town, one doesn’t work for the Evil Empire and who doesn’t care for his girlfriend being woken up by bullshit at three a.m. And we may need to …”

  But I fell asleep about then, and the details of getting him on track for somewhere that I thought he said was Dubai had to wait until the morning. No big deal, though, because what was one more meeting?

  23

  Blinding light. An inferno of heat. A hot, flat scent in the air that was part asphalt, part sand, a trace of ocean breeze, and all money.

  We touched down in Dubai two days later, and it was like landing on an alien planet – a planet where they needed to fix the thermostat, because it was hot enough to make a blazing Kansas summer feel like Antarctica. Just leaving the gleaming Gulfstream with the Dallstrom Defense Systems logo long enough to walk a few yards to our waiting Hummer sent heat baking through the soles of my shoes, and the air I took in with every breath was like something coming off a blast furnace.

  And in case I haven’t mentioned the money and weirdness yet, did you know the cops in Dubai drive Ferraris?

  Oh, yeah – and Lamborghinis and Aston Martins too, all of which I know for a f
act because we got a police escort from the airport to the Burj Al Arab Hotel. On the way, I gawked out the Hummer’s tinted windows at the stupidly luxurious cop cars and the forest of tall buildings and the sand and the palm trees and the everything, while Dave held my hand curled in his and looked out a window on his side at something beyond what was actually out there. He was very quiet.

  The bodyguards were quieter. They barely seemed to breathe. One blank-faced security guy was driving, another filled the shotgun seat up front, and three more hulking men in I’m-not-even-here anonymous black suits sat in the back with us. They stared at the world outside, and they seemed suspicious of everything from the people to the sand to the atoms in the air. They were all armed – which I knew because they weren’t trying to hide the outlines of the pistols holstered under their jackets – and they all had those coily earpiece microphones, although they were about as communicative as alien monoliths.

  More bodyguards waited at the hotel. They formed a silent cloud of menace all around us as we crossed the opulent lobby. Two stayed behind to keep an eye on things down there, while the others crowded into the glass-walled elevator with us for the ride to the rooms waiting for us on the 25th floor.

  Once we were settled in the Royal Suite, Dave changed into a silk three-piece Caraceni suit of his own free will. That worried me almost as much as the over-the-top security – and it really creeped me out when he picked out a Roberto Cavalli tie and fastened it in a full Windsor knot all by himself, like a responsible adult.

  Who are you, stranger, and what have you done with my Dave?

  “I’ll be trapped in meetings all day, but we’ll try to go out and do something tonight, okay? They have water parks and mega-malls and night clubs –”

  “– and indoor ski slopes covered with powdered gold and a spaceport with nightly flights to Mars, got it. So what’s the deal with the obsessive security? I get that a few bodyguards are in order when we’re on the road, what with the fabulous wealth thing and all – but you brought about twice as many guys as usual, and they act like assassins are hiding around every corner. Are we expecting a visit from a platoon of Sith Lords, or all nine Ringwraiths, or maybe about a million Agent Smiths from the Matrix?”