It all sounded so sordid now, like only an idiot would want to do ridiculous things like that. “It’s just a list. I don’t even know how many of those things I’ll be able to do, ever, in my whole life.”
“It also says that you should see the Louvre. You haven’t seen the Louvre?” He shook his head and raised one hand. “I forgot it’s your first time in Paris. Of course, you haven’t.”
“Yeah, I haven’t done anything.”
“Just as a fellow tourist in Paris, I might suggest you prioritize seeing the Louvre and the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and eating in some of the restaurants listed here before you check the various debaucheries off your list. You can sleep with men anywhere in the world, but only Paris has the Louvre and the Palais Garnier.”
Dree considered the one hundred fifty-two euros that were still in her wallet. Tickets to get into the Louvre were seventeen euros, and she needed to eat. “Well, I’m not going to be here for very long. I don’t know how many of these things I’ll be able to see at all.”
“When is your flight back?”
“Thursday morning,” she said.
His dark eyebrows rose. “That’s when I’m scheduled to leave, also. I believe I have an early flight.”
“You don’t live in Paris?”
He shook his head. “And no more questions unless you want me to lie to you, as you said. Of these restaurants listed here, may I heartily recommend Le Cinq. It’s the restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel George V.”
Dree muttered, “I’m kind of on a budget. I don’t think I’m going to be eating at any of those fancy restaurants my friends recommended. They’re a lot better off than I am.”
He looked up from the napkin. “Oh?”
Shame filled her. Some families were weird about money. Dree’s sheep-farmer family was ridiculously proud of how they’d made do for over a hundred years with the small income that shepherding their small flock provided. Dree had never owned any clothes that weren’t hand-me-downs from her siblings or cousins, and most of them had made a trip through the church’s poor box at some point, too. She could mend, darn, or patch anything.
In college, when the teaching hospital had provided her with scrubs for her student nursing rotations, that had been the first time she’d ever owned brand-new clothes.
Dree swallowed hard. Like everyone in her family, she’d always been too proud to admit her poverty, and they’d actively hidden and denied it.
But she was trying to change her life.
Since her family had adamantly denied their poverty, she wouldn’t. It was just a thing, not her fault. She was also blond, of average height, and a little plump. They were just things to neither take pride nor shame in.
And she had always been poor, and now she was destitute.
She sucked in a deep breath and used every bit of that air to tell him. “My people aren’t well-off. I don’t even know how to make a reservation at a place like that, and I don’t think I have enough money to go to the Louvre. I was just going to walk around Paris or something and do the free stuff.”
“Oh, but you have to see the Louvre. It’s truly worth the price of admission. Surely, you have a credit card or something.”
Dree steeled herself and said with no shame, “I don’t have the money for the Louvre. I had a problem.” Problem was a good way to put it. “Yeah, a problem, and I had a non-refundable plane ticket to Paris. I figured I could decide what I was going to do with my life in Paris as easily as I could in Phoenix, so I got on the plane and came here. But now I’m here, and I don’t have enough money and I don’t know what to do. I’m just a hard-working girl who got screwed over again.”
Augustine had been watching her quietly, almost without moving. When she finished talking, his thick, black eyelashes rose as his eyes widened slightly, and his lips parted. He was perfectly still for a moment, and then he shook his head just one time as he pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and thumbed the bills inside, counting.
Dree wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do at that point, so she didn’t do anything. Okay, whatever.
He removed a thick sheaf of bills from his wallet and placed them on the dresser beside where he was standing. Quite a lot of the currency seemed to be green, which meant they were one-hundred-euro notes, but at least two of them were yellow two-hundred-euro notes.
Weird. “What are you—”
He said, “I apologize. I didn’t understand the situation last night. That should cover my tab, right?”
Dree squinted at him. She had missed something. “Your—your tab?”
Augustine resumed tearing a pastry apart and slathering it with butter and jam. “For last night. I apologize for leaving without settling the bill, but all’s well that ends well.”
“Wait, the bill?” He thought—oh, there was no way he thought she was a— “Are you kidding me?”
He thumbed through his wallet again and added another green euro note to the stack. “Is that enough? Extra charge for the monster, huh? It’s fine. I’ve paid that before.”
Dree yelled at him, “Auggie, I am not a prostitute!”
He paused and swallowed the bite he was chewing. “I don’t understand.”
“I wasn’t telling you a sob story to get money out of you. I was being open and honest and vulnerable.” Anger swelled in her throat. “I am not a ‘temporarily inconvenienced millionaire’ who’s asking you for money. I’ve just been poor my whole life, and now I’m poor again. But that doesn’t mean I’m a wh—” She swallowed because she couldn’t quite say the horrible word. “A wh—A lady of the evening!”
“I apologize again,” Augustine said with one eyebrow arched high. “Should I take the money back?”
“Yes! Yes, you should take it back! I’m not a prostitute, and you shouldn’t try to pay me for what we did last night. I would never—I would absolutely never—”
And she stopped, blinking, and looked at the money lying on top of the dresser.
Augustine hadn’t moved to take it back yet.
When Dree was in nursing school, a lot of her friends had danced on tables a couple of times when they couldn’t quite make it to the end of the month on the pittance from student loans they lived on. They had joked about blowing guys for beer money, but she had thought they hadn’t actually done it.
Now she was less sure.
That was a lot of money up there. When she got back to Phoenix, she wouldn’t have enough money to make rent on the first of next month, and she didn’t have a bed in her bare apartment. She wasn’t sure Francis hadn’t broken her lease to get at her deposit, too. She might have nowhere to live when she got back. Francis had cleaned out all Dree’s bank accounts, even the one she shared with her sister, which was the most important one.
If Dree ended up bashing Francis’s head in with a fireplace poker or a branding iron, that would be why. Stealing money from her sister Mandi and Mandi’s kid was just frickin’ reprehensible.
And Holy Mary, Mother of God, Christmas was coming. People in her family depended on her cash Christmas presents to get them through because they’d used their food money to buy presents for their kids and other people. If she didn’t have that—
Her chest knotted.
Dree should take Augustine’s money.
She’d been stupid for protesting it. That cash he’d laid up there without a second thought could go a long way toward food for the next few days and then helping her start a new life.
He asked, “Should I take it back?”
Dree ran one hand up the side of her face, thinking about how much money was sitting over there. It looked like at least six hundred euros, which was somewhere north of seven hundred dollars, American.
She thought about what that money would mean to her sister.
But when Dree got back to Phoenix, she would still have her job. She could figure out some way to get a loan from somewhere, and then she could pick up extra shifts to make sure Mandi had enough money.
It just might b
e next month.
She finally said, “You should take it back. I’m not a prostitute, and I never meant anything I said that way. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Sex work is work.”
Augustine reached for the bills on the dresser. “Of course.”
Sex workers came into her ER all the time with anything from the problems you would expect to sprains and broken bones from abusive customers to ear infections and tonsillitis, and they brought their kids for the usual childhood complaints. There was one lady of the evening named Melinda Williams, her legal name was David Williams, who had three of the sweetest, cheerfullest, cleanest little kids you can imagine. Dree never saw normal childhood dirt on any of those kids. Yes, ma’am and no, ma’am and showing off how well they did in school and pictures from when Melinda chaperoned their school field trips with them, but she couldn’t afford health insurance and so ended up in the ER with them too often.
Dree said to Augustine, “Obviously, you were fine with it. You even knew the going rate.”
He shrugged and put his wallet back in his pocket.
“I mean, Jesus hung out with prostitutes, drunks, and tax collectors, right?”
Augustine reared back for a second, but then recovered. “That’s one interpretation, though I always thought misogynists were trying to smear the reputation of Mary Magdalene to reduce her importance in the New Testament. But that is one interpretation, and one could do worse than to emulate the Son of God, as best one can.”
His frown had turned sad as he stared at his breakfast.
Dree kept thinking about that money.
He finally asked, “You said you’d encountered a problem?”
She didn’t want to admit how stupid she’d been, but she was changing her life. Old-Dree would have hidden what had happened to her out of mortified embarrassment.
But she was trying to be someone else, someone better.
Someone strong enough to be honest, even when she was embarrassed.
Okay, here it went.
She said, “On the day before yesterday—I think it was the day before yesterday. I was on the plane for so long and with all the time zone changes, I don’t know what day I should call it. Anyway, I was on my way home from work after a fifteen-hour shift, and I stopped at a grocery store to buy milk.”
Augustine had set his next croissant on a napkin and was just listening, his dark eyes steadily watching her.
The ease with which he watched her and his open, compassionate expression with the hint of an accepting smile seemed so kind.
She hadn’t thought of him as having kind eyes, but maybe she’d been too busy obsessing about his muscular shoulders or his perfect washboard abs.
Because he totally had those, too.
When he smiled at her like that, she felt more comfortable and heard, somehow.
She went on. “When I went to check out at the store, my debit card was declined.”
Mortification filled her, but she pressed on.
Looking into Augustine’s eyes helped. She felt calmer.
She said, “It was weird. I should have had plenty of money in my checking account. I’d just gotten paid two days before. So, I tried to get money out of the store’s ATM to pay for the milk, but all of my accounts came up overdrawn. The ATM even ate my debit card and wouldn’t give it back. It was like I was in The Handmaid’s Tale or the Twilight Zone. Nothing that I tried would work. I thought maybe my bank’s computers had gotten hacked or something, and it would be fixed in a few hours. So, I left the store and went home.”
Her heart was knocked around in her chest at telling him this, and she swallowed hard. “I’m boring you. You don’t want to hear all this.”
He leaned forward and said quietly, “I’m listening.”
Dree sighed. “When I walked into my apartment, it was bare. I mean, there was nothing. All my furniture, my clothes, my jewelry and computers and kitchen appliances and everything were gone. You could see the marks in the carpeting where my couch and other furniture had been, and some crumbs on the kitchen counter where I needed to clean under my toaster. When I went outside to look, my car was missing, too. That really felt like the Twilight Zone. It was like I’d been erased.”
Augustine nodded. Dree absently noted the way the strong cords of his neck moved under the open collar of his white shirt.
Her hands were fluttering in the air with nerves. “So, I called my boyfriend, Francis, because I was freaked out. I mean, of course I called my boyfriend, right? I thought I’d been robbed and had my identity stolen, or maybe I’d accidentally slipped into another dimension where I didn’t exist. But he started screaming at me that he needed money, and did I have any other credit cards or bank accounts because he needed it all right then.”
Augustine frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t, either.” Her incomprehension had turned to realization and then horror on the plane to Paris. It had been almost a fifteen-hour flight. That was a lot of time to be tied to a seat alone with one’s thoughts. “My boyfriend stole everything from me. Everything. Like, a swindle. A con job. We were together for eleven months. Eleven months is a long time. We stayed over at each other’s apartments most nights for the last six months. I’ve met his parents and his brother, and we hung out with his friends all the time. I’m not rich. I didn’t have that much to steal. He knew that. We went and met my parents on their sheep ranch. It’s a sheep ranch. It’s not even cattle. It’s nothing, and I don’t even own it. He couldn’t get at that. This couldn’t have been a long con, not for almost a year. I mean, with all of it, everything he sold and all my bank accounts and the money he withdrew from my retirement account—”
“He stole from your pension?” Augustine asked, his voice rising in dismay.
“Yes, he called HR, told them to screw the penalties for early withdrawal, and sucked it dry for everything he could, and he did the same thing with our credit cards we had together. He maxed them out with cash advances. I found the ad on Craigslist where he sold my car. He negotiated online. He got a thousand dollars for it. That’s all. It was only eight years old! With everything he stole, my whole life, he couldn’t have gotten more than thirty thousand dollars, total, and now I’m probably in debt that much again from the credit card advances. He even took money from a checking account where I put money for my sister and her kid.”
Augustine said, “Tell me about your sister.”
Her family had kept this quiet for years because they might have gotten thrown out of their church if they’d just said it outright. “Mandi got pregnant in high school. She wouldn’t tell anyone who the dad was because then his family would be in trouble, too. We sent her to live with my aunt over in Flagstaff to have the baby, and then she ‘adopted’ the kid while she was there. Nobody believes it, but they don’t have to. It’s just what we say. When her kid didn’t start talking by the time he was four, we figured out he was autistic. He’s on the far end of the spectrum, too. He’s ten now, and he’s non-verbal. She lives in Tucson so she can be nearer to doctors and get him therapy at the medical school there.”
“And you give her money?” Augustine asked.
Dree shrugged. “Someone has to. She waits tables at Applebee’s. My parents try to send her twenty bucks a month, but money is tight around the sheep ranch, like always. Raising sheep in southern New Mexico is not like having a sheep farm up in Massachusetts where you can sell overpriced sheep cheese to the rich people.”
“What’s his name?” Augustine asked her.
Dree was confused. “The guy who knocked her up?”
“Your nephew.”
“Victor.” That was weird. No one asked what her nephew’s name was. Some people were cruel about it and said it didn’t matter what his name was because, like barn cats, he wouldn’t come when he was called, anyway.
“And his last name is—” Augustine asked.
“Clark. Like mine.”
“Ah, all right.”
Oh. “I didn’t mention my last name last night, huh?”
His smile lifted a little more, but it was still kind. “It didn’t come up.”
“It’s a really common last name. There are a thousand Clarks all over southern New Mexico. I mean, it’s in the top twenty-five most common last names in the U.S. and, like, number fourteen in Scotland. Over a million people in the U.S. have the ‘Clark’ surname, and then there’s a bunch in England, Scotland, and Wales, too. There’s a Clark University and a Clarks shoe store. It’s as common as mud.”
He smiled. “You’ve looked into this.”
“There is not a lot to do on a southern New Mexico sheep ranch on weekends at night, and my parents were always proud of their name. So, yeah.”
“Do you have any pictures of Victor?”
“Um, I suppose, if I can access them. I don’t know if I can get to my cloud storage.” She grabbed her phone from where it was lying on the countertop and turned it on. As soon as it powered up, she pulled up the main settings menu and turned off the Wi-Fi so Francis couldn’t call her again.
It took just a second to scroll through her pictures—swiping quickly past the hundreds of pics of her with Francis—to find pictures of when she’d driven down to Tucson last month. She did that a lot on her days off because, in addition to seeing her sister and nephew, she also went to Victor’s therapy clinic with them to talk medicine with his therapists. Medical practitioners can get impatient with people outside the discipline, so Dree went with Mandi to ask the hard questions and then interpret the answers later for her.
She found a decent one of her holding onto Victor and grinning. He was just a little blurry from thrashing around while Mandi took the picture. She turned around the screen to show it to Augustine.
He looked at it and reached for her phone. “May I?”
“Sure.”
He took the phone out of her fingers and studied it. Then, he tapped it once and scrolled by moving his finger up and down.
“Dude, privacy?” she said. “Besides, I’m lying to you about everything.”
“Right, you are,” he said and handed her phone back to her. The pictures app was still open. The top half was pictures of her with Victor and Mandi. Most of the pictures of Victor were less flattering than the one she’d chosen, with Victor striking out or running from them. Mandi usually had her mouth open and was reaching toward him. His thin limbs’ flaccid muscle tone due to autism was evident to anyone who knew what they were looking at.
A Billionaire for Christmas Page 24