The Billionaire's Allure (The Silver Cross Club Book 5)

by Bec Linder

  “I propose a toast!” Tubs said. “To Beth having fun for once in her life!”

  “And many more!” Amy said nonsensically, and we drank.

  I didn’t stay long—only an hour or so—but it was fun. We had fun. I was glad I went. Tubs even cajoled me out onto the dance floor, but some drunk guy body-slammed me with his enthusiastic dancing, and I retreated back to the safety of our table. The girls were still going strong when I told them it was time for me to get home, and they protested and tried to convince me to stay, but I knew my limits, and my eardrums had had enough.

  “Thanks for coming out,” Binh said. “Really. You should do this more often.”

  “Maybe I will,” I said, and I actually meant it.

  It was after 3 in the morning by the time I left, and the night air had a bite to it. I turned up the collar of my coat as I walked to the nearest subway station. I could still feel the bass thumping beneath my feet. I was tired and glad.

  When my phone buzzed in my jacket pocket, my heart jumped. Maybe it was Max. But when I pulled out my phone to look at it, I didn’t recognize the number.

  I answered. “Hello?”

  Silence, a crackle of static, and then a quiet, plaintive voice. “Beth?”

  I closed my eyes. I recognized that voice.

  It was my mother.

  * * *

  I didn’t call Max that night. I wasn’t sure how to explain it to him, or even what to think. But I called him in the morning, because I needed help, and I didn’t have anyone else to turn to.

  “What a lovely surprise,” he said when he answered. “Is this a booty call?”

  “Be serious, Max,” I said. I was standing at my kitchen sink, looking out the window at the green leaves and a woman walking down the street with a little dog and toddler, both of whom stopped every five feet to smell or lick something. The world was alive around me. The universe proceeded as usual. Only my own small existence was out of kilter.

  “Oh,” Max said. “There’s a problem. Tell me.”

  “My mom’s being released from prison tomorrow,” I said.

  He was quiet for a while, and I chewed on my lip, unsure how he would respond. Then he said, “I didn’t even know you had a mother.”

  “Of course I have a mother,” I said. “Everyone does.”

  “You know what I mean,” he said. “I didn’t know she was alive. Or around at all. You said you were raised by your grandmother.”

  “I was,” I said. “My mom was always in jail, or trying to get clean, or relapsing. I didn’t see her a whole lot.”

  “Okay,” he said. “So she’s getting out of prison.”

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “She wants me to come get her, and I—God. I can’t. She’s going to want to stay with me, and I told her that she couldn’t do that anymore, because she always—she screws it up, and she starts doing drugs again, and it just breaks my heart, and I—I can’t.” I was losing control of myself. I drew in a deep breath, trying to calm down.

  “Beth, it’s okay,” Max said. “You don’t have to explain it to me. Isn’t there anyone else who can take her in? What about your father?”

  I shook my head, even though he couldn’t see me. “He died when I was a little kid. Heart attack. That’s why my mother started doing drugs, I think. Out of grief.” I wanted him to understand. She wasn’t just some junkie. She had a degree. She had been an accountant.

  “No other relatives?” Max asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think my mom has a sister in Kansas City, but I’ve never met her, and I don’t have any way to get in touch with her. So it’s just me. And I can’t—she needs a place to stay, and maybe a job, and I’m just tired. I’ve done this so many times. She makes promises, and then she never keeps them. And I can’t even be mad at her. She isn’t doing it on purpose. She has a disease. But I can’t help her anymore. I just can’t.”

  “It isn’t just you,” he said. “You don’t have to do it alone. I’ll help you.”

  “Oh, Max,” I sighed, because that was exactly what I had been hoping to hear in my heart of hearts. I wanted someone to help me shoulder this burden. It was a selfish desire, I knew. “I can’t ask that of you.”

  “And you didn’t,” he said. “I offered. Beth, I would be glad to help. Anything you need. Don’t turn me away now.”

  I hesitated. I wanted his help, but I was also ashamed—of my mother, and of myself, for being a crappy daughter. My mom couldn’t help herself. She wasn’t doing it on purpose to inconvenience me. And yet I resented her so much for putting me through this. I wanted a mother I could lean on when I needed help, not someone who had to be cared for like a child.

  But that was life. “She wants me to come pick her up,” I said. “From the prison, I mean. I’m planning to rent a car…”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Max said. “I have a car. I’ll drive you. Where is it?”

  I closed my eyes, grateful beyond words. Seeing my mother was always hard. Max would make it—not easy, really, but better. Less horrible. Maybe my mother wouldn’t cry as much, with a stranger there. I would take whatever edge I could get.

  We left that afternoon. The drive was painfully reminiscent of our trip to see Renzo, except instead of eager anticipation, my stomach fluttered with familiar dread. I had been through this rigmarole before. I knew exactly what to expect, and none of it was good.

  My mother was in the drug treatment program at Willard, upstate. It was a five-hour drive from Manhattan. We planned to get a hotel room in Ithaca that night and meet my mother in the morning. She wasn’t technically in jail anymore; she was in an intensive outpatient program after a few months of incarceration at the facility. But she was so closely monitored that she might as well have been in jail, and they wouldn’t release her unless she had a clear plan of where she would stay and what she would do. And I was, as always, that plan.

  We had a gorgeous trip west from the city and then north through the mountains. Max drove, and I looked out the window and tried not to worry. We stopped for dinner in Binghamton and ate at the sort of glossy, suburban chain restaurant that seemed like the last place on earth Max would eat a meal. And yet there he was, tearing into his mediocre ribs with a smudge of barbecue sauce on his chin.

  “You’re making a mess,” I told him.

  He smiled at me and licked his fingertips. “But you’re smiling, so it’s all worthwhile.”

  He wasn’t sweet, or charming. He didn’t make my heart pound, or my breath come faster.

  Not at all.

  The hotel he had picked was a bed and breakfast in a lovely brick home in downtown Ithaca. The smiling proprietress led us to our room and explained that breakfast would be served on the front porch starting at 7:00 the next morning. She told us to call the front desk if we needed anything at all, and then swept off and left us alone in the room.

  I sighed and set my overnight bag on the floor beside the bed. The room was wallpapered in a small floral print, and the bed looked soft and cozy. The adjoining bathroom was painted a cheerful coral and had a deep soaking tub occupying one corner of the room. I planned to take full advantage.

  Max, leaning in the doorway to the bathroom, said, “Everything to your liking?”

  “It’s really nice,” I said. “Have you stayed here before?”

  He shook his head. “I just picked the place that had the best breakfast.”

  How like him. “And on the porch, no less. I’ve always like dining al fresco.”

  “I can’t tell if you’re making fun of me,” he said, “but I’ll take it. Beth, are you going to be okay?”

  “What do you mean?” I turned away from him to examine the little bottles and soaps lined up beside the sink.

  “You’ve been quiet all day,” he said. “It isn’t like you. I know you’re worried about your mother. Will it really be that bad?”

  “Not at first,” I said. It always started out fine. She cried and told me how happy she was to see me,
how grown up I looked, how proud she was that I had turned into such a responsible young woman. She would look for work. She would find an apartment and a part-time job, and then something would happen—I was never sure what—and she would start using again, and then she would start dealing again, and then I would get a call at some random hour of the day or night and I would have to go down to the station and tell the officer that, yes, she was my mother, and that I wasn’t going to post bail. And then it started all over again. The whole miserable cycle.

  Maybe this time would be different.

  I always thought that, and it never was.

  I went back into the bedroom and unzipped my bag. I needed to make a list of everything I had to do.

  Max followed me. He lingered by the bed, watching me. “Beth, there’s something I need to tell you.”

  “What is it?” I asked absently. Once we got back to the city, I would need to unpack my mother’s things from where they were stored in my bedroom closet, and get in touch with her parole officer to see if she could have a case worker assigned. I needed to help her sign up for food stamps. I needed to see about getting her a work placement. God. I rubbed my face and looked up at Max. “Sorry. What did you want to tell me?”

  He hesitated. Then he smiled at me and touched my cheek. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Beth

  We drove to Willard in the morning. It was Friday. My mother had been taken back to the treatment facility for paperwork and final processing. We sat for a while in the waiting room, side by side in uncomfortable molded plastic chairs. Max held my hand. A little toddler, waiting with a man who looked just slightly too young to be her father, rolled a toy train along the floor and babbled to herself. The man met my eyes and we shared a weary smile, the kind of smile that said here we go again. I wondered who he was waiting for.

  Finally, a woman in uniform came to the door and said, “Patterson?”

  I rose. Max shifted his weight, but I put one hand on his shoulder and said, “They won’t let you in. Family only. I’ll just be a few minutes.”

  “Okay,” he said, although I could see he didn’t like it.

  I showed the guard my ID. She studied it narrowly, her eyes darting back and forth between the picture and my face. As if some random stranger would come here to take responsibility for my mother. But at last she was satisfied, and she led me down a short hallway to a room where my mother was waiting, a large plastic bag held on her lap.

  I stopped in the doorway. “Hi, Mom.”

  Her head lifted, and she saw me. Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Beth. You came.”

  She looked better than she had on previous pickup days. Her hair was neatly styled, and the whites of her eyes were clear, not tinged with yellow. Her clothes were clean and pressed. She didn’t look like a drug addict. She looked like a responsible citizen, an ordinary person, someone I would pass on the street without a second glance.

  I knew it wouldn’t last.

  We hugged, me a little tentative, her clinging to me and sniffling. “My baby, my Beth,” she said, patting at my face. “Oh, what a good girl you are, to come all this way for me.”

  What choice did I have? Who else would come? But I didn’t say it. “A friend drove me,” I said. “He’s waiting for us. Come on, Mom. We’ll be back in New York by tonight.”

  The guard let us back to the waiting room, walking close behind us, like she thought maybe my mother would bolt back into the facility at the last second, desperate for the security of prison and terrified of the world outside. I’d heard that happened, sometimes, to people who had been in prison for a long time. Not my mom. She was always happy to get out.

  Max climbed to his feet when we entered the waiting room. My mother glanced at me, silently asking with her eyes if this was him, the friend I had referred to. I told her with my eyes that he was. We looked at him as he walked toward us, and I saw him then as my mother no doubt did: tall, handsome, wearing a light sweater that looked expensive and probably was. White. Rich. Everything about him screamed money. Not flashy new money. Old money, the kind of money that had stopped thinking about money, that lived in a blissful state where money was no object and didn’t matter. But it still mattered to everyone else.

  And I loved him, money or not, fancy sweater or not. He couldn’t help being who he was, any more than I could, or my mother. He was just Max.

  “Mrs. Patterson,” Max said, and shook my mother’s hand.

  She gave me another look, like: Really? Him? But I could tell that she was impressed.

  “Mom, this is my friend Max,” I said. “He offered to drive up here with me.”

  “That was very kind of you,” my mother said. “Please, call me Donna. Mrs. Patterson makes me feel old.”

  I waited for him to say something smarmy, like how a beautiful young lady like her could never look old, or whatever, but he just smiled and said, “Donna it is. Would you like for me to take your bag?”

  We went out to the car, and I saw my mother take its measure: a nice sedan, expensive, but nothing out of the ordinary. “What a nice car,” my mother said.

  “It isn’t mine, I’m afraid,” Max said. “Just a loaner.”

  I shot him a look. Had he rented a car just to drive me upstate? He returned my gaze, very bland, and I knew then that he had.

  What a liar. But what else did I expect, from a former thief?

  “Don’t be mad at me,” he said in a low voice, the two of us standing beside the open trunk as my mother settled into the passenger seat. “I knew you would argue, and I wanted to do this for you.”

  “I’m not mad,” I said. “How could I be? Oh, Max. You do everything right. It isn’t fair for you to be so perfect. I’ll never measure up.”

  He made a face. “I’m far from perfect.”

  “False modesty doesn’t become you,” I said, and pushed up on my toes to kiss his cheek.

  We had a quiet drive back to the city. Max chatted with my mother in the front seat, and I sat in the back and tried to decide what I was going to do. I had to let her stay with me, at least for a few days. Until I could find her a place of her own. I would probably need to pay her rent for a few months, until her paperwork for housing assistance went through.

  This was always the hardest part. The hoping. The insidious thought that this time would be different.

  We stopped for lunch in a nondescript town in northeast Pennsylvania. When Max excused himself to use the restroom, my mother leaned across the table and said, “Beth, where did you find this boy?”

  I sighed, and set down my fork. “Mom…”

  “Not that I disapprove,” she said. “He is your boyfriend, right?”

  Worse and worse. “Mom…”

  “That’s fine, don’t tell me,” she said, putting on a hurt expression.

  I groaned and rubbed my eyes. The guilt trip worked on me every time. “Okay. Fine. Yes, he’s my boyfriend. I guess. We haven’t really talked about it. I met him, uh.” Landmine. My mom didn’t know that I had been homeless. “I’ve known him for a long time. We got to be friends after Grandma died. But we lost touch for a while, and we just reconnected about a month ago.”

  “Well, he seems very nice,” she said. “And rich, too, isn’t he?”

  I sighed again. “Yes, Mom, he’s rich. Tech money. He ran a few start-ups.”

  “Hmm,” she said, looking at me thoughtfully. “Well, just make sure you get married before you start giving me grandchildren.”

  “Mom!” I yelped. “I am not having babies anytime soon.” I really didn’t want to have this conversation. Over her shoulder, I saw Max coming our way, winding through the scattered tables. “We need to stop talking about this now. He’s coming back.”

  “Later,” my mother agreed. “Have you met his people yet?”

  He didn’t have any, but that was another conversation I wasn’t ready to have. “Not yet.”

  Max slid i
nto the booth beside me. “Are you ladies enjoying the meal?”

  “Delicious,” my mother said, beaming at him.

  I closed my eyes and prayed for death to take me.

  When my mother, a few minutes later, made her own trip to the restroom, Max rested one hand on the back of my neck and rubbed at the tense knots there. “You holding up okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Fine. She isn’t—this is the good part, you know? She’s happy. She’s glad to be out. She thinks everything is going to work out great, and that this time she’ll stay clean and be part of my life and—everything. But I can’t just relax and enjoy it, because I know it will all go to hell in a handbasket before too long.”

  “Not necessarily,” he said. “Maybe this time she will stay clean.”

  “That’s not how it works, Max,” I said. “You can’t just snap your fingers and make her quit being a drug addict. Money can’t fix everything.”

  “Can’t it?” he asked. I turned my head and stared at him. “Beth, you know I’ll do whatever I can. If she needs an apartment, a drug counselor, the best outpatient services money can buy…”

  I leaned against him, and he slid his arm down to wrap around my shoulders. I let myself rest there for a minute, taking comfort in him, the warm, solid heat of his body, the easy confidence of his approach to life. “I can’t ask you to do that.”

  “And you didn’t,” he said. “Haven’t we had this conversation before? I want to help you. Let me.”

  “Okay,” I said, and felt a weight lifting from me, a burden I had carried alone for too long. “Okay. You’re right. Thank you.”

  He kissed my temple, and we sat there together until my mother returned.