Shopping for a Billionaire's Wife

by Julia Kent

  Who is stone-faced, staring at her ear.

  Then he grabs his phone and types quickly in a series of text messages.

  “Did Mom text you, too?”

  “What?” He seems distracted.

  “My mom,” I repeat. “She texted me. Insists we need to talk.”

  “She’s right.”

  “I know she’s right,” I murmur as Andrew and Amanda start making out across the table. The shrimp cocktail is just close enough to their suckfacefest that I know I’ll be rude if I do a reach-over for another delicious piece, but—

  “We do need to talk. Marie needs to apologize to you.”

  You know that moment in the movies where the record scratches and everyone freezes, because the director has the creative license to make the world stop for dramatic flair?

  Yeah. That’s not what happens.

  Andrew and Amanda start laughing until tears fill Amanda’s eyes and she huff-snorts, “Good luck with that.”

  “Even I’m not that delusional,” Andrew adds.

  There’s that word again.

  Delusional.

  Declan takes it all well, a triumphant grin covering his face while I tear into a piece of filet mignon the size of a casino chip, covered in a tower of edible colors and woven pieces of white greenleaf lettuce that look like a group of fiber arts majors at the Rhode Island School of Design spent their entire semester-long internship in the kitchen for this single dish.

  I cut it mercilessly with a knife, the Godzilla of culinary design.

  Mmmm. Perfection in medium rare form. Nom nom nom. Sorry, RISD.

  “I don’t actually expect Marie to apologize,” Dec clarifies. “That’s like getting Dad to admit he’s wrong.”

  This time, it’s Andrew who laughs until he cries.

  The waiter appears, begins to ask about the food, finds four people in various states of apoplexy, and discreetly backs out, leaving a fresh bottle of white wine, which we devour in the next fifteen minutes. By the time the meal is over I am half drunk, stuffed silly, and blissfully happy to be among friends.

  Life is good.

  Even if we nearly required a SWAT team to escape my own wedding yesterday.

  “I thought I’d have a sister-in-law by now,” Andrew says after the bottle’s been drained and we’re smiling at each other.

  “You will.” Declan’s hand caresses the spot between my shoulder blades, making me arch and purr like a cat in a perfect spot of sunshine. “Soon.”

  “Are you eloping?” I can’t tell if Amanda’s question holds disappointment or excitement.

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Uh, oh,” Andrew responds to our mixed answers.

  “We’re still negotiating,” Declan says smoothly.

  “He thinks we’re still negotiating.” I wink at Andrew.

  Bad move.

  “Life is nothing but negotiation,” Dec answers, his jaw going tight. Whatever loose happiness we had a moment ago turns bleak.

  “Right,” I say, staying in neutral.

  “Nothing is immutable.”

  “Except for you,” I joke.

  Just then, the waiter arrives with a cake. Silver sparklers protrude from it, the center covered in frosting that spells out, I love you.

  He sets it in front of Amanda.

  Declan looks like he’s going to kill his brother with nothing but a wine cork and a demitasse spoon.

  “What’s this?”

  “A celebration,” he says as the waiter lights the sparklers. “To new beginnings. To us.”

  “To being outdoors at an orchid farm where there are loads of wasps,” Declan says under his breath. I jolt.

  “That is a new beginning, for him, Dec. Please don’t do this,” I plead as the sparklers light, go out, and Amanda kisses Andrew, shooting me a sorry look. I shake my head, making sure she knows it’s fine.

  And it is. I’m not jealous. The rest of them seem to think I should be, but I’m really not. Andrew’s over-the-top gestures are adorable. Amanda’s eating it all up. Good for them.

  “Don’t do what?” Declan hisses.

  “Get competitive.”

  “This isn’t about competition.”

  “It isn’t? Then what’s it about?”

  Before he can answer, the waiter has plated the cake and hey...cake.

  You know how some men have this thing about breasts because...breasts?

  Cake is breasts for women.

  Bzzzz.

  I’m halfway through my piece when I check the message. It’s not a text message, actually. Just a notification from an app Declan put on my phone, one that is for Litraeon, informing hotel guests of the day’s events.

  It turns out today’s the first day of a three-day “adult products” trade show being held in the convention center.

  I give Declan a hollow look and put down my fork, pushing the plate away.

  “What’s wrong?” Amanda gasps in alarm, looking at my plate. Failure to finish cake is a full-blown catastrophe in our world.

  I hold out my phone with the notification on the screen.

  “I don’t think we have to worry about my mom for a while.”

  Chapter Ten

  After zero debate, Andrew and Amanda leave lunch to head back to their room, their amorous intentions all over both their faces. Declan, on the other hand, looks about as eager to go find my mother in a sex toy convention hall as he is to have a vasectomy performed by a crack addict with Parkinson’s disease.

  “Timing is everything,” Dec jokes as he reads through his messages on his phone, following behind me just enough to make it clear he’s become a phone zombie, eyes tracking my feet so he can stay in line and multitask.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Did you know there’s a small rodeo convention and the adult products trade show here in the resort at the same time?”

  “Yee haw?”

  “Ride ’em, cowboy,” Dec says as the doors open and we walk slowly through the labyrinth of the resort. We haven’t even been here for a day. When you arrive at places by limo, you often miss the actual entrance. I’m spellbound as the elevator doors open and we go into the main common areas of the casino.

  This is nothing like any casino I’ve ever seen on television or in the movies.

  To be fair, I don’t watch the kind of movies featuring gambling. I’m more of a romantic comedy girl, and my action-thrillers lean more toward natural disaster movies and away from the mob or drug-smuggling features. I can handle tension if it’s so unreal I can’t imagine it really happening to me.

  So this casino puts me in a quandary. It’s sumptuous, more Monte Carlo than grungy gambler. Dad used to watch these old ’70s and ’80s television shows where the casinos were filled with smoke clouds, with people fishing around in cups of coins to shove in slot machines, ladies in muumuus all clustered around that one lever that was going to change their world while some mob boss stole their life savings and granddaughter behind their back.

  The casino at Litraeon is about as close to those plots as my mother is to being a Supreme Court Justice.

  “Wow,” I gasp.

  “What?”

  “It’s just...wow.” I slow down, my heels clicking on the marble floor, and as I look up at the Italian style of the hallways, all wide and tan, with beige and burgundy accents, I realize how much I really don’t know about the world beyond Boston.

  Declan beams with pride. “Pretty great, huh?”

  Cigarette smoke tickles my nostrils. “You can smoke indoors here? I thought that was illegal.”

  “In Massachusetts it’s illegal. You outlaw it here in Vegas and there would be riots.”

  Raised platforms with long, thick, velvet curtains dot the casino floor, private enclaves that don’t clarify who is allowed to gamble within those hidden spaces, because—I assume—if you’re allowed in there, you know. You don’t need to ask.

  The slot machines dominate, spread far a
nd wide like worker bees in a hive, drones designed to do the heavy lifting to support the larger operation. I imagine this business is like any other: while the largest profit margin comes from high-value, high-cost products, the sheer number of sales made from smaller-level profits on a mass scale means meeting the needs of the many in large quantities is worth it.

  Penny slots are example number one. My eye catches a Tarzan-themed machine and I pull away from Declan, wandering toward it.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Penny slots.”

  “I know, but...why? Why the branding?” As I look around, I see characters from television series’ long off the air, from movies that were popular in my teens, and from video games I know my ex-brother-in-law, Todd, used to play for hours.

  “Because it draws people in. Once they sit down, they feed their credit card or pre-loaded card into the machine and spend.”

  A cocktail waitress with mega-cleavage walks by on heels that might as well be knitting needles, smoothly carrying a tray loaded with drinks.

  “Are the drinks free?” I know enough about casinos to guess.

  “Yep. Get them drinking. Loosen people up. Help them have fun.”

  My eyes float over to the layered system for the machines. Pennies. Nickels. Quarters. Dollars. Higher value machines with twenty dollar and fifty dollar slots. It’s like a flea market, wares spread out in concentric ripples as far as the eye can see, except instead of selling old treasures, Anterdec’s resort is selling hope.

  “They sit here for hours and just push buttons?” Most of the slot machines don’t even have levers.

  “Mmm hmmm.” Declan seems distracted, eyes darting back to the marbled hallway where we originally were headed. “Is this what you want to do now? Gamble?”

  “I thought we were chasing down my mom in the sex toy convention.”

  “Right.”

  “Not that I want to do it. It’s just....” A nagging feeling pulls at me. This open-ended, unresolved tension between me and Mom shouldn’t affect me like this. Maybe it’s my full stomach. Maybe it’s the wine. Maybe it’s fatigue and stress from the last twenty-four hours. Whatever this tug inside me is, it isn’t going away until I have a long talk with my mother and father.

  I don’t think I can actually change anything. Mom is Mom. She is going to blame me and Declan for ruining “her” wedding. Between the media circus this wedding escape has triggered and her outrageous behavior, there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle.

  That hug this morning was heartfelt.

  Like hell I’m apologizing, though.

  We spin away from the casino floor, walking to the right, my eyes catching poker tables and, across the slot machines, a room that has a huge sign made of brass on mahogany that says “High Value Room.”

  “Is that where the big money goes?” I ask.

  “Ten thousand just to walk in.”

  I look back at the penny slots.

  More my style.

  The hallway widens and changes from Persian rugs to clattering marble, bright lights altering the scenery as I realize we’re leaving the casino and entering a mall. A series of high-end, designer-named stores dots the walk, with gelato and coffee shops interspersed.

  “An indoor mall? In a casino?”

  Declan laughs at my tone of wonder. “Where do you think people want to spend their money after a win? We aim to please.”

  “You aim to keep them penned in and contained in your little universe so you can mop up their sweet consumer dollars,” I scoff.

  “Of course,” he says with a charming smile. “That’s the point of this property, Shannon.”

  The gelato makes me want to part with some money, for sure, but I’m still full of filet and shrimp and that nagging feeling.

  Food will have to wait.

  The decor changes even more as we walk up a slight incline, the shops disappearing, the lighting going from artificially bright to a more natural, muted tone as wide glass windows frame the way, leading out to a courtyard dotted with three pools, two hot tubs, and a cabana bar. All of the swimming options are surrounded by giant palm trees and colorful flowers I can’t name, because they definitely don’t grow back home in cold-climate Massachusetts.

  It looks so finished. Polished. Like something out of a soap opera.

  An art gallery with works by Picasso, Matisse and Cezanne appears out of nowhere, the walls around it painted in Jackson Pollock style, an Andy Warhol print lighted by LEDs blinking in rapid-fire rhythm. We pass by and a security guard starts to ask us a question, takes a good look at Declan, and steps aside, murmuring, “Mr. McCormick. So good to see you.”

  Dec just nods.

  I’m in awe.

  And it’s not from the property.

  “How do they all know you?”

  “I told you.”

  “But—just like that?”

  “Security is paramount in a casino. It’s their job to know who the owners are.”

  “Do they know Andrew and James and Terry?”

  “Terry? What does Terry have to do with this resort?”

  “He’s part owner, right?”

  “You know Terry doesn’t work for Anterdec.”

  “Right. But he owns stock—”

  “No. They wouldn’t know Terry from a regular hotel guest. Not unless we notified them he was on the property.”

  “Has he ever been here?”

  “No.” I can tell by the way he answers me that Declan’s not happy about that fact, either. I drop the topic.

  Cordoned-off sections of hallway mark the point where the adult exhibition begins.

  “Badge?” the security guard asks. “Or ticket?”

  Declan gives him a smile. A muted sound of someone speaking in the guard’s ear makes his demeanor change entirely.

  “Mr. and Mrs. McCormick!” he says in a low, friendly voice, pulling the velvet-wrapped cord off the metal stand and gesturing for us to go in. “Please. Enjoy yourselves at the trade show.” His expression falters as I snicker at his words.

  Declan suppresses an eye roll.

  Booming music à la Magic Mike XXL pounds through the doors to the enormous convention hall. Bright lights, a computer-generated laser show from a DJ, flicker in the distance. The closer we get to the ballroom, the louder it gets.

  Greeters at the door hand us a goody bag.

  “What’s this?” Declan asks, holding up a purple shopping tote, the kind you get at grocery stores so you can cut down on plastic bag use.

  I look inside the bag and blush-laugh. “It’s a collection of marketing promotions swag from some of the companies here. Oh, my.”

  It’s a cornucopia of self-pleasure.

  Declan peeks in his and his eyebrows shoot up. “Wow.”

  Dec isn’t a “wow” kind of guy, so....

  “That is some swag. I didn’t know they put logos on pussy pockets,” he marvels.

  I frown. “How do you know what one of those looks like?”

  His turn to blush-laugh.

  My turn for eyebrows to raise.

  “Look! There’s Marie!” The relief in his voice is palpable, as if my mother’s presence is welcomed.

  There’s a first.

  “We’ll table this conversation for later,” I declare, marching off to talk to my mom.

  Except I can’t really march in high heels with points made of finely-sharpened pencils. I nearly tip over, but Dec’s strong hands catch me at the elbow, guiding me over to Mom.

  We stroll past booths devoted to pornography, but with a twist: this isn’t just about the visual. It’s about devices and products that enhance sexual pleasure. Bacon-flavored lube at the first booth. An iPad attachment that lets you, well...who knew they could attach a vibrator like that?

  Sex chairs shaped like gymnastics mats. Drugs for female ejaculation “approved in Europe but currently under FDA consideration.” A tantric yoga video series.

  And...there is Mom, right in the
middle of it all, pink-faced and glowing.

  She is among her people.

  All she needs is a crown and she’ll be set.

  As I approach her, she looks up and gives us a grin that makes my stomach flip-flop. Too late to back out now.

  “You don’t have to actually hash it all out here, Shannon,” Declan whispers.

  “What?”

  “Here,” he says again, nodding toward the convention floor. “Just talk to her long enough to schedule a real talk. Get it over with, but don’t try to do anything complex while you’re in here.” He sniffs the air. “I think they’re pumping pheromones in through a scenso-rama system.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s a trade show convention product. Use aromatherapy to influence buyer behavior.”

  “That’s a thing?”

  His mouth twists with a smile, his eyes going dark with lust. “Apparently.”

  Come to think of it, I am feeling really, well...

  “Shannon!” Mom calls out. “Come over here and see all these wonderful toys!”

  Libido killer. This time, I manage to march right on over, ignoring my ankles.

  “Mom,” I hiss, my eyes raking over the unending buffet of sexual devices that are on display like ham-wrapped scallops at a Costco sampler station. “Aren’t you mortified to be here?” She’s at a table called Edible Incredibles.

  They have Maple Bacon lube.

  “Says the woman who named her vibrator after a vampire.” Mom snorts.

  The salesperson, who is a plump, grey-haired woman wearing round spectacles and a saucy grin, looks me up and down. It’s like being sexually inventoried by Mrs. Claus. Her name tag reads, “Martha.” No kidding.

  “Edward Cullen?” she asks.

  I nod, my face on fire.

  “That trend is so 2012,” Martha says, grabbing a purple jelly vibrator with what looks like a long string of anal beads and...is that a USB port in it? “As long as you don’t name it after your favorite pet, you’re fine.”

  I shudder. “Chuckles the vibrator?” Even Mom has the decency to cringe.

  “People are perverted as hell,” Martha says, calmly pouring warming gel into a contraption that looks like a Star Wars character’s mouth, the opening where a man would slide in his—

  “Shannon! There you are!” Daddy appears behind me, hands on my shoulders. “How’s the chocolate show going....” His voice trails off as he looks at the item in the salesperson’s hand. “Huh. Some merchandising deal. Do people have to pay George Lucas a small fee every time they orgasm while using that thing?”