I know his last name now, at least, I thought with a little bit of ironic amusement as I went to the front desk. “Hey everyone,” I called out, looking for my information on the duty board.
“Well if it isn’t Cinderella herself!” I frowned, confused, at the comment from Helena.
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, she doesn’t know,” Madge, one of the older nurses working at the hospital, suggested.
“I don’t know what?” Anton appeared from the locker room and grinned at me. “Okay, what the hell is going on?”
“You are an overnight viral star, that is what is going on,” Anton said. I stared at him, and then looked at my coworkers, still confused as to what they were talking about.
“You’re going to have to explain better than that,” I told Anton.
“Oh, you have been all over the news, Ms. Ross,” Anton informed me, as he moved to check his own duties for the first part of the shift on the roster.
“What the hell am I doing on the news?” I looked around me, bewildered, wondering how I’d managed to miss that fact. No one had interviewed me, had they? Had I done something in my sleep, that I ended up on TV?
“Don’t play shy about it, Cinderella,” Helena said.
“Oh, and I take back my offer to help find you a sugar daddy,” Anton said. “Clearly you have got everything it takes on your own.”
“Would someone please explain to me what you all are talking about, before I lose my mind?”
“According to the news last night, and again this morning, you’ve caught the attention of a certain local billionaire,” Madge said. I stared at her in confusion for a moment before realization dawned on me: they had to be talking about Bobby.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No, he just took a shine to my daughter, that’s all.” A scandalized whoop went around the entire crew and I groaned.
“If he knows you’re a single mother and he’s showing up to your place with teddy bears and all, then that’s someone you better land fast, Sienna,” Anton told me. I groaned again.
“It’s not like that!” I wanted to tell everyone that for very good reasons, Bobby Clawson was the very last person I wanted to get involved with on any level, but that would mean explaining why; I knew my coworkers well enough to know that they would want all the details and they wouldn’t stop pestering me for them until I gave in. Better to just not give them an opening at all.
“When a man rolls up to your place in the evening with a giant teddy bear, and likes your kid, that is an iron you need to pull out of the fire before someone claims it,” Anton said.
“You just know that in six months she’ll be announcing she’s leaving the profession, so she can go on her honeymoon in Barbados,” Helena said. “Remember us little people when you become Mrs. Local Billionaire Bobby Clawson, will you?”
“I’m not going to marry him, I’m not even going to see him again,” I protested. “He thought Tanya was cute, and wanted to make a gesture beyond taking the whole school to a water park. It isn’t like…” I stopped short.
“It isn’t like what?” Anton looked at me pointedly.
“It isn’t like he even knows me,” I said quickly. I’d been about to say “It isn’t like he asked me out,” but I would have been lying; technically he had.
“I hear he wants to give her a spa day,” Madge told the rest of the staff.
“How the hell did you hear that?” I felt my cheeks burning up and wondered if Bobby had somehow bragged to the press about me. If he had then I would see him again indeed: but only to chew him out for ruining my privacy.
“One of his friends told Local 10,” Madge said. I closed my eyes and let out a long, slow sigh.
“Yes, Bobby offered to pay for a day at a spa for me,” I confirmed. “But first of all, when am I likely to have the opportunity to even take him up on it? And second of all: it isn’t like that.”
“Oh, of course not,” Anton said, grinning. “A rich guy buying a spa day for a pretty woman is just standard rich guy behavior.” I rolled my eyes.
“It is, I think,” I said. “I mean, even if he were to somehow buy me every service a spa could provide--which I kind of doubt he would--it’s not like he’d even miss that money.” That had been my excuse to dismiss the present that he’d gotten Tanya, too, and I realized it sounded a little bitter, but I also realized that it was true. “I mean, what’s a spa day? Maybe at most, the most luxe you could get in Houston, like a thousand dollars? He probably loses a thousand dollars on his way to the gas station and barely notices.”
“Who here would be willing to make sure Sienna has a day off so she can be treated like a princess for once?” Anton raised his hand and most of my other coworkers did, too.
“Guys, it’s not going to happen,” I insisted. “Can we please just get on with the work day and forget about all this?”
They agreed to it and I thought I was going to be able to go about my extra-long day without having to think too much about Bobby Clawson. I had an extended break for lunch, since they’d scheduled it in the middle of the double shift, which gave me an extra thirty minutes. Anton sat down at the table with me while I waited for Mom and Tanya to arrive.
“So tell me more about this billionaire,” Anton said.
“I thought we were leaving me alone about that,” I said, raising an eyebrow.
“I never said anything to that effect,” Anton pointed out. “I’m curious.”
“Okay, so he offered to pay for a spa day and take me out to dinner,” I told him. It would probably get around to the rest of the nursing staff, with me telling Anton like this, but I figured that at the very least Anton would have the grace to keep them from badgering me about it.
“You have got to take him up on it, Sienna,” Anton said. “You have had entirely too little fun the past five or so years, and it’s about time you started living a full adult life again.” I shook my head.
“Taking a day off of work isn’t going to pay to get my car fixed, or keep the electric from getting shut off, or anything,” I pointed out.
“No, but having a billionaire boyfriend can fix those things fast,” Anton countered.
“Even if I go to dinner with him, I’m not going to have a billionaire boyfriend,” I told my friend firmly. “It’ll be an overpriced steak somewhere, a glass of wine, and talking to somebody who lives in an entirely different world from me.”
“A world where he could buy you a car pretty much as easily as a dinner,” Anton said. I snorted.
“I am not looking for a sugar daddy,” I said. “I definitely don’t want to let someone into my life who might think that the best way to solve any problem is to throw money at it.”
“Okay, but hear me out,” Anton told me after a moment. “You can have a great day of being massaged and pampered and treated like royalty, and a great meal, and you won’t have to spend a dime. I’d bet that if you really made a case about it he’d even give you whatever money you would have made working that day.” I cringed.
“He probably would, but I’d feel like a hooker,” I said. Anton chuckled.
“Girl, there is no shame in a hustling game,” he pointed out. “If nothing else, you deserve a day when you’re not being dragged in 50 different directions, and a night of eating things you can barely pronounce, with wine that’s probably as old as you are, just to have the story.”
I had to admit that the way Anton phrased it sounded kind of attractive. “And then the next day I’m back to being a pumpkin,” I said, deflating my own metaphorical balloon.
“But a pumpkin that was a four-horse coach the night before,” Anton countered. “When you’re fifty, or sixty, and Tanya’s only around for holidays, don’t you want to have a story like this to reminisce on?”
“I’ll think about it,” I promised him. “Tanya’s going to be here any minute with my dinner and I am not going to keep talking about this in front of her. Apparently all it takes to win a five-yea
r-old’s heart is a giant teddy bear.”
“Ah yeah, that’s fair,” Anton said, nodding. “No need in getting her thinking she might have a Daddy someday and then pulling the rug out from under her.”
The thing that I couldn’t tell Anton is that if I’d known Bobby’s last name five years before, my daughter might have had a daddy; at least, she might have had someone who occasionally sent checks to cover a better lifestyle than I could provide her on my own. But even though I’d wanted to find Bobby for about the first year of Tanya’s life, I had long since given up on the idea, and now that somehow he was back in my life by a twist of fate, I wasn’t really sure I wanted him there at all. I’d gotten so used to doing things my way, I was not at all prepared for the possibility of having to consult anyone other than maybe my mother about how I raised my little girl.
I pushed the thought out of my mind, but I couldn’t deny that Anton’s point about having a good memory of the day and the dinner was a pretty valid one.
Chapter 9
“Did it even occur to you to consult with me before you announced this plan to the whole world, Bobby?” Kara’s tone was perfectly reasonable and sounded like she was completely calm, but I knew better.
“It’s just a field trip,” I pointed out. “Besides, it’s not a huge deal. We’ll rent the place for the day, and make sure the insurances are all topped up, and get permission from all the parents. It’ll be fun for the kids.” Kara looked at me as if I were proposing to throw the kids into an active volcano instead of proposing to send them on a great day of sun and fun.
“Bobby, this is going to require meticulous planning,” Kara said. “We will have to have multiple checks in place to make sure that all the chaperones are appropriate, and we’ll have to make sure permission slips are phrased exactly right, and you are going to be on the hook for food and drink, the buses, all of it.”
“It can’t possibly cost more than I’ve already given to the school, can it?” I crossed my arms over my chest and met Kara’s gaze as steadily as I could. It wasn’t easy.
“No, it won’t cost a million dollars,” Kara conceded. “But if we do this wrong, the ensuing lawsuit from a kid getting injured could cost that much.” I rolled my eyes.
“They’d have to sue the park for that, not me,” I pointed out. Kara sighed.
“That’s not all,” Kara said. “You’ve been all over the news today.”
“Well, that was kind of the point of taking questions at the school yesterday, wasn’t it? To get the word out? Besides, it’s public documentation of the fact that I’m keeping to my uncle’s stipulations.” Kara shook her head and opened up her purse, taking out a phone that I was sure was probably even more high-end than my own; she’d told me about it when she first got it and how it synched up with all of her other electronics perfectly, so she could keep track of everything all in one place.
“That isn’t what’s in the news about you,” Kara informed me. “What’s in the news about you is that you’re treating some woman you don’t know to a spa day and dinner.” I closed my eyes and cringed. That was one thing I’d kind of hoped to keep away from Kara’s notice. I’d told exactly one friend about the idea, and I’d thought that I’d gone to Sienna’s apartment as inconspicuously as possible, but apparently one of the paparazzi had been tailing my limo, snatched pictures of me with the bear, and that had resulted in someone mining my friends for information.
“It isn’t like I have never hooked up with someone before, and that’s not even what this is about,” I said, feeling flustered. There was a part of me that always kind of felt like talking to Kara was a little like going to the Principal’s office when I’d been in school, or the Dean’s office when I’d been at Harvard. She’d been working for my uncle for a long time before he passed away, and she’d sort of defaulted to being my assistant; technically my employee, but I knew better than to fire her. My uncle had trusted her absolutely, and after a few years of working with her I understood completely why. But that didn’t make me feel any less like a kid sometimes.
“You have serious obligations you need to fulfill if you’re going to keep all that money your uncle left to you, along with the businesses that make it,” Kara said.
“I know, I know,” I told her. “I’m not just going to hook up with Sienna Ross or anything. It was supposed to be a nice gesture to a hardworking mom, that's all.” Kara tilted her head slightly and I thought to myself--not for the first, fifth, or even five-thousandth time--that it wasn’t fair for someone to be as beautiful and also as incredibly smart as Kara was. She was only maybe fifteen years younger than my mother would have been, ten years older than me, and hadn’t started showing any real obvious signs of aging yet; and at the same time she managed to keep all the details of my uncle’s business in her head all at once, constantly.
“Bobby, one of the important stipulations you have in your inheritance contract is that you must be married and with the prospect of an heir of your own by the time you’re thirty-two,” Kara said, and I could recognize from the tone of her voice that I was in for a lecture.
“Yes, I am aware of that fact, Kara,” I said, hoping I could forestall the longer version of the speech she was going to give me.
“That isn’t the only stipulation you have to fulfill, either,” Kara pointed out. “You have a lot of ground to cover, and something like this seems like you’re still just trying to stick with the fun parts of being wealthy, without facing any of the responsibility.”
“Kara, I appreciate how hard you work for me,” I said. “And I get that you have as your goal me keeping the billions my uncle left to me. But I have years before I have to meet that deadline for being married with the prospect of an heir. Why shouldn’t I enjoy myself as much as possible first?”
“How easy do you think it’s going to be for you to find a suitable wife at the last minute?” Kara crossed her arms over her chest and pinned me down with her green-eyed gaze, and I had to admit--privately, deep down--that she did have a point. But I wasn’t going to let her win so easily. “And before you make the joke: I am not going to marry you at the eleventh hour in order for you to keep the money. You are charming and handsome, but you are not my type at all.”
“Considering I’m a billionaire right now, it shouldn’t be that hard at all to find a wife,” I said with the best grin I could manage. “I mean, rich guys get trophy wives all the time don’t they?” Kara rolled her eyes and shook her head.
“And they get divorced from their trophy wives all the time, too, Bobby,” she said, taking on an almost sing-song voice. “And when they do, their trophy wives take them to the cleaners.”
“I trust you to come up with an iron-clad prenup for me,” I countered.
“Even with an iron-clad prenup, if you marry a trophy wife you’re going to lose out on a ton of money,” Kara insisted. “So if I were you, I’d be focusing a little more on finding Ms. Right and a little less on throwing parties and sending entire schools of kids to theme parks.”
“Look at it this way, Kara,” I said, hoping against hope for a final shot at a reprieve. “You know you enjoy planning meticulously put-together events. You might even get to use a few of the new functions on that fancy-ass phone of yours.” Kara scowled at me but I could see her lips twitching in the start of a smile.
“Just promise me that you aren’t going to make a whole scandal with this woman you’re taking to dinner,” Kara said. “And that you’re not going to be proposing a giant field trip for an entire school of kids for at least another month.”
“I promise you on both counts,” I said. “I have nothing but the best of intentions with Sienna. And on top of that I don’t even know if she’s going to take me up on it. She didn’t seem all that keen.”
“Wait a minute,” Kara said, frowning, and I felt my stomach twist in dread.
“What?”
“Sienna.” I shrugged.
“Yeah?” Kara’s frown deepened.
“You didn’t say ‘Tanya’s mother’, you didn’t say ‘her’, you didn’t say ‘Ms. Ross.’ You said Sienna,” Kara observed.
“Well, yeah, I figure I have the right to be on a first-name basis with someone I’m taking to dinner,” I pointed out.
“I’m not convinced you even know the actual first names of half the women you’ve taken to dinner,” Kara said dryly.
“I might have met Sienna before,” I told her. “Back when I was still in college, at a mutual friend’s wedding.”
“In that case, definitely do not get ensnared in a scandal with her, because there will be far too many people willing to tell tales,” Kara told me sharply. “But I would point out that if you already know her, it might be a good idea to see if she might be someone you can think about eventually getting into a relationship with.” She gave me a significant glance to emphasize her sarcasm.
“It’s nothing serious,” I insisted again. “In fact, like I said before, I don’t even know if she’s going to take me up on it.” Before I could say more, though, I felt my phone vibrating in my pocket. “Excuse me.”
I took my phone out and saw that the text message was from an unknown number, but that happened often enough that it didn’t set off any alarms in my mind. I opened the message after unlocking my screen. Hey Bobby, it’s Sienna. I guess I’ll take you up on that spa day after all, and dinner after. I have next Saturday off. I grinned to myself.
“Okay, so she is going to take me up on it,” I told Kara. “So I’ll just get to arranging a spa day for her next Saturday, and a dinner reservation.”
“Make sure you get her a dress, too,” Kara said. “And for god’s sake, make sure it’s the right size. At least, if you want to keep your eyes intact and not get them scratched out.” She grinned at me and turned to leave and I couldn’t help thinking that as much as I felt like I’d been given an invasive exam, it could have been much worse.
Reunited: A Billionaire Secret Baby Romance (Lost Love Book 2) Page 6