Page 12 of Ten Beach Road

Five

Nicole Grant, dating guru and founder of Heart Inc., sat at a prime table on a two-story deck overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The restaurant was one of thirty owned by her new client Darios Thomolopolus, who had made his first fortune in shipping and was currently amassing another under the brand of Darios T, which included the thirty Mediterranean restaurants spread across America and a packaged food division that had brought Greek cuisine to grocery freezer cases everywhere.

Darios Thomolopolus was seventy-five years old. In addition to his massive fortune, he possessed a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, thick, expressive eyebrows, and bold, if slightly bloated, features.

A widower with little patience for dating, Darios was in the market for a new wife. And this time he wanted a tall blonde with large breasts, long legs, and what Nicole understood to be a brain large enough to handle herself in social situations but not so large as to question anything her future husband might say or do.

“And she cannot be a day over thirty-five,” he said adamantly. “I have noticed that after that the fruit becomes . . . less firm.”

Nicole nodded and made a note on her legal pad.Sellby date—35.She’d been in the matchmaking business for more than a decade, had a presence in New York and Los Angeles, and had a long string of successful and high-profile matches to her credit. She appeared often on the morning and noon talk-show circuit and had published one book of dating advice.

Despite all of this, she was still occasionally surprised by the laundry list of requirements and features each client demanded. Though these people negotiated every day in their business lives, they were unwilling to compromise in any real way when it came to their personal requirements. Long legs, big breasts, and moderate brain size were nothing compared to some of the things Nikki had been asked to deliver.

She herself was a decade beyond Thomolopolus’s expiration date and nothing about her was as “fresh” or as firm as it had once been. The Tina Turner song “What’s Love Got to Do with It” played in her head, but it had been years since she’d heard a client gush about falling in love. Which was probably a good thing. Because after two failed marriages of her own, Nicole could still deliver a laundry list of attributes, including brain size and personality; “happily ever after” was much harder to sell and deliver.

Her BlackBerry signaled an incoming message from her office, and Nicole frowned as she glanced down. Her assistant, Anita, knew not to interrupt when she was with a client. The message said simply,Call me.

Nicole took one last bite of the gooey sweet baklava Darios had ordered for dessert and a final sip of mud-thick espresso.

“So then, you make me a list or send me the pictures?” Darios asked as their meeting drew to a close. “And I choose who I am interested to go out with?”

Another bing from her BlackBerry.Landlord here. Wants to talk to you.

“Yes.” Nicole pulled her gaze from the text message and dabbed at the corner of her mouth with her napkin. She pulled on the jacket of her vintage three-piece Chado Ralph Rucci pantsuit and stood. “It’ll take me a few days to put together a potential list. Then we meet again to go over it. After that I can start setting up appointments for you to meet the women we select.” She made a point of being very involved in the process; no point letting the client think she wasn’t earning her hefty fees.

“Good,” Darios said. “Remember—only fresh and firm. Nothing too long on the vine.”

“Of course.” Nicole pushed aside the feeling that she was standing at the open-air market haggling over produce. The truth was there were plenty of women who would fit Darios’s requirements and not be at all put off by having to meet them. Darios’s immense wealth and lavish lifestyle would more than compensate for the fact that Darios himself was much closer to a prune than a plum. He handed her a sealed envelope with the first half of her fee and walked her through the restaurant to the exit.

From her car, Nicole called her office but got a recording that the number was no longer in service. She speed dialed Anita’s cell. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. The phone’s been disconnected. The New York office, too.” Her assistant dropped her voice. “The landlord’s sitting in the lobby. He says your last check bounced and he’s not leaving without a cashier’s check or money order.”

Nicole’s stomach clenched, and it had nothing to do with the moussaka Darios had chosen for their first course. She made her living by traveling in the right circles and attracted wealthy clients because she looked like she was one of them. Having one’s office phone shut off and the office padlocked were not business builders.

Unbidden, snapshots from her childhood flashed through Nicole’s brain. Their family belongings piled out on the curb after yet another eviction. Watching the ancient station wagon being towed down the street. Trying to shield her younger brother from the other kids’ taunts about their patched clothing and obvious home haircuts.

They’d made a vow that they’d never feel any of these things again. And they’d stuck to it. Both of them had been successful; if not personally, then at least financially. But she’d learned the hard way that earning money and holding on to it were very different things.

“I’m depositing Thomolopolus’s check right now. When I get in I’ll take care of everything, and we’ll . . . regroup.”

Nicole hung up. Even though she knew it was useless, she once again tried every number she’d ever had for her investment advisor. But none of them was in service. She had last heard from Malcolm Dyer a year ago just before his name had made headlines around the globe.

At the bank she confronted just how grim her situation was. She made good fees for her matchmaking services, and she still received sporadic royalties from her book. She’d created real wealth over the last ten years, stockpiling a sizeable nest egg she’d been proud of and had let herself count on.

But she’d invested virtually every penny of it in a fund run by the person she’d trusted most in the world. All of her operating expenses had been paid from the interest on that investment.

Nicole willed herself to calm down as she left the bank and drove toward her office. She had to think, had to figure out what to do. It took money to keep up the kind of appearances that were necessary to keep her business going. And at the moment she had none. There was little comfort in knowing she wasn’t the only one who’d lost everything to Malcolm Dyer.

Nicole parked in the building’s parking garage and went into the ladies’ room in the lobby, where she locked herself in a stall and vomited up her lunch. Leaning on the edge of the sink, she stared into the mirror as she blotted her mouth and face with a damp paper towel. Even the pale yellow of her vintage suit was too bright for the white, ravaged face and desperate eyes that stared back.

With great care, she added blush to her cheeks and applied a fresh coat of lipstick. Just as her mother used to do when the landlord came to collect. As if that had ever made one whit of difference.

But as she rode the elevator up to the twenty-first floor and strode into the tastefully appointed lobby of her West Coast office, she not only had to deal with the dismantling of everything she had built, she had to face the fact that the person who’d stolen her hard-earned savings was not some faceless stranger. The person who had taken her money and trampled her dreams was someone she had not only trusted but loved and done her best to protect. Malcolm Dyer was her brother.

Nicole had spent much of the fall and all of the winter completing her pending assignments, closing both her offices and satisfying the most insistent of her creditors. By March word of her financial difficulties had spread on both coasts and the flow of clients diminished to a trickle. In the middle of the month, she attended the wedding of Darios Thomolopolus to a genuine Georgia peach who’d decided that cruising the Mediterranean and sleeping with an older man beat teaching Pilates and coaching beauty contestants. Nicole wore one of her few remaining vintage gowns to the affair and used Thomolopolus’s final fee to pay the month’s rent on her New York apartment.

When she received the letter informing her that her claim against Malcolm’s seized assets had resulted in partial ownership in a beachfront mansion, the glimmer of hope it produced told her just how hopeless her life had become. Still, owning even a third of something at this point was . . . something.

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