Page 27 of Old Money

He smiles sheepishly, waving her off.

“I’m just glad you two get to be on the same coast for the holiday.”

I stare at him in awe.

“You did this?” I ask.

“He’s had it planned since you figured out you couldn’t fly back, honey,” she says. I feel a lump rise in my throat. She lets go of me, walking to him and throwing her arms around his neck. He hugs her back, looking at me. When he lets her go, I walk to him, following suit. I drape my arms around his neck, pressing up on my tiptoes so that my lips are next to his ear.

“Thank you, Julian,” I whisper, and I feel his hold on me tighten.

He sets me down then clears his throat.

“Well,” he says, “I’ll let you ladies get to it.”

“There is plenty of food if…” my mother starts to offer then probably realizes that she’s offering the third richest man in the world to stay for dinner.

“I’d love to,” he says, “but I want to let you two have some time together. And my father would kill me if I missed Thanksgiving.” He smiles, backing up toward the door. “I’ll check in tomorrow. , the jet is yours, so say the word, and we’ll get it lined up when you need to get back.”

She smiles and nods, putting her hands to her chest.

“Thank you, Julian,” she says.

And as happy as I am to be with my mom right now, I’m equally as sad to watch him walk out of the apartment.

JULIAN

Iwould have literally given anything to stay in that apartment. Even if I couldn’t have her to myself, just to be with her. Just to watch how happy she would be with her mom there. Just to see her laughing and smiling.

I’d give anything to be with her andnothave to have Thanksgiving dinner with my own family. I take in a deep breath as Tyler peels away from the building, laying my head back against the leather headrest.

I close my eyes and replay the last few hours in my head, taking her to Bedell House, which, despite my complicated relationship with my family’s legacy, is actually one of my favorite places in the world. It’s one of the only places where I felt love. Where I saw it.

I loved watching her face as she took it all in, but mostly I loved when she asked about its secrets. She asks things that no one else would ever bother, or ever dare, to ask me.

And God, did I fuckinglovelaying her down on that bed. Ravishing her lips. The things I wanted to do. The places I wanted to touch. The way I wanted to make her lose her pretty little mind.

And the fucking blue balls I got from stopping it all.

I’m in such a confusing place with her. I know our…friendship, for lack of a better word…is a bit unconventional and that it didn’t begin in the healthiest of ways. I know I’m sending her all kinds of mixed signals, and I know it’s not right, but I don’t know what the fuck is going on. I tell myself I need to keep my distance—if for nothing else than to spare her any unwanted attention from the entire fucking world after an extremely traumatic event. But I also know that I need to keep my distance forme.Relationships are complicated when you come from a family like mine. I learned young that no one sees you for you. They see you for your family name, for fame, for old money. They see you for your rich father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather. They see you for the things they can acquire just by being near you.

They don’t see you.

I’ve gotten close before. I’ve even put a ring on someone’s finger. And then I found the full boxes of her birth control in my trash can. I found the internet searches on alimony and child support and trust funds before we were even fucking married.

And it broke my fucking heart.

I watched the way my parents tore each other apart. I watched the way the world dragged my mother through the mud, because it must have been her. It couldn’t have been my dad. Not Cato Everett. It must have been her doing nothing but gold digging. Not her giving him everything she could, including two sons, for him to schedule his island getaways with twenty-somethings while she was in the same room.

It couldn’t be him.

I feel my blood pressure rise the closer we get to Bendmere, and to my father’s estate out on the island. The home he had built when I was five, where I was raised. Not by my father, of course, but by my mother and by the people my father paid to raise me after he kicked her out.

Tyler enters the code, scans his palm, and pulls through and up the long driveway that looks like a shorter version of the one at Bedell House. The house is as big and obnoxiously grand as one would imagine, and he’s had plenty of upgrades done to it as the years have passed. It sits at the farthest tip of the island, the only residence for three miles, as my father offered the state of Connecticut an obscene amount of money back in the eighties to purchase all the land in a four-mile radius for “privacy” reasons, which, in Cato language, just means he didn’t want any peasants disrupting his views.

I hate this house.

Just as Tyler puts the Escalade in park at the front circle, I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket. I open it to a text from the one person I really needed a text from.

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