Shopping for a Billionaire 4 (7 page)

“C’mon…well, anyhow, I’m not gay and Declan knows I’m not gay. He’s not upset about it. That’s a red herring. Mom keeps thinking it’s why he broke up with me and she’s wrong.”

“Then…why does he think you were only with him for the accounts?”

I retell his version of why he thinks that. By the time I’m done, Amy looks horror-stricken and Amanda is patiently picking lint balls off her cotton socks.

“Oh,” they say in unison.

“Ouch,” Amanda adds.

“Yep.” What else can I say? Other than confessing my need to throw myself into a bottomless pit and enjoy the ride forever while thoughts of Declan torment me, there isn’t much more I can explain.

“And then you saw him with Jessica Coffin at Smith College. Touching,” Amy says. 

Amanda waves a piece of chicken in the air and says, “But we figured that out. They’re both part of that charity. Her father and his father donated more than a year’s tuition at Smith to the project, so they’re just there.”

“Together,” I groan.

“But not
together
together,” Amanda insists.

“They watched me run into a garbage can and cover myself with slime.”

“There are worse things,” Amy says.

“Like what?”

“Being caught with your hand in a toilet in the men’s room?”

I hit her. Hard. With a piece of shrimp.

“That can’t be all there is,” Amy insists. She’s in her running clothes, tight knee-length Lycra pants and a tank top with a built-in shelf bra, two other sports bras underneath. The Jacoby girls aren’t just well endowed. We have so much breast tissue that if left unleashed, one good sudden turn to the right and we could knock out a small village.

She stretches. I reach for my ice cream. Both involve moving muscles, right? So I’m exercising right now, too. Hand, wrist, tongue, taste buds, sorrow-filled heart… 

“So the whole Twitter thing happens,” Amanda says in a contemplative voice. “Declan claims that he understands the lesbian thing was for work. But he says you told him in the lighthouse that you were only dating him for the account—”

“That was a
joke
!”

Amy holds up one hand to get me to pause. Amanda is deep in thought, eyes on the windowsill, staring so intently at a small basil plant that it might spontaneously turn into pesto sauce.

“—and he quoted Jessica, and then something about Steve’s mother?”

Ouch. “What I said to Monica about only dating Declan for money got back to him.”

“
I
said that!” Amanda protests.

“I confirmed it.” A sick wave of horror pours through me. Even at the time, when I said it, I had a premonition it was a bad idea.

Now I know it. And I can’t let it go. Over and over, the memories of everything I ever said to Declan that might make him think I was manipulative and not earnest in my intimate moments makes me cry. 

I couldn’t just own up to the truth and blow the mystery shop, could I? Most people would. Instead, I tap-danced to please all the different people I thought I needed to please.

And in the end I lost the one I wanted to please the most.

“Still doesn’t make sense,” Amanda says, brooding. “He’s not
that
shallow.”

“He’s
that
accustomed to being used by women for his money and connections, though,” I wail. “He told me I was special because I wasn’t trying to use him.” The memory of his vulnerability during that conversation makes me feel like I’m two inches tall and covered in excrement. He thinks I violated that. Violated his trust.

That is what hurts the most.

Amanda’s still shaking her head slowly. “I still don’t buy it. You guys weren’t together for that long—”

“A month.” I wish it could have been forever. 

“—but he’s an eminently reasonable guy. You’re a reasonable woman. He should have heard you out. Should have listened.”

“He’s overreacting,” Amy concurs. “And he was kind of weird at Easter. Uptight and shy. Mom said the butter lamb freaked him out. Maybe he has a dairy phobia?” 

I snorted. “No. It reminded him of his mother.”

“Hmmm,” Amanda says, stroking chin hairs she doesn’t have. “Perhaps that’s part of this.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Let me think this through.” 

I’m kind of done with this conversation and now am absent-mindedly reading work email. It’s the kind of day where I can get away with working from home. I don’t have any mystery shops today. Just 115 emails from the people I manage.

As I open emails and scan quickly, I see we have three new approved mystery shoppers. Amanda and Amy take over the Declan analysis, trying to understand his motives, while I check out. I’ve worried and wondered and analyzed this issue to death, and can only come to one conclusion:

When you date a billionaire and something goes wrong, it’s always your fault.

The next twenty minutes go by in a blur as I sit on the couch and process email, Chuckles eats a ficus leaf and then hairballs it up, and Amy and Amanda ignore us while strategizing.

“Earth to Shannon!” Amanda says.

“What?”

“How did Declan’s mom die?”

I halt. “I…I don’t know. I asked him twice and he never answered.”

All six eyebrows in the room shoot up. Eight, if cats have eyebrows.

Amanda snatches the computer from me and types furiously.

And then she gasps in shock.

“Oh, Shannon. Oh my God.”

“What?”

“Read.”

 The obituary Amanda pulled up on the computer screen has a breathtakingly lovely older woman’s photo front and center, a thick chain of pearls around her neck, her hair pulled back in a smooth updo. Lively, friendly green eyes so familiar my heart tugs at me stare back. 

Elena Montgomery McCormick.

Declan’s mother.

Born in 1956. Died in 2004. She had him when she was older, and that makes James in his late fifties, which makes sense. My eyes race over the words to get them all in, and then I come to a dead stop.

Stung by the words in front of me.

The obituary is tasteful, mentioning her three kids—Terrance, Declan and Andrew—and her loving husband, James.

It’s the link under it, though, that makes me hold my breath. Makes time stand still. Makes the air go thick.

The headline for a
Boston Globe
story reads:

Local business leader’s wife dead from wasp sting.

Oh my God.

Amanda’s hands are gentle on my shoulder as my eyes race across the page. “I can’t find more about it, yet,” she explains. “There isn’t a major news story to explain how it happened.”

“His brother had a bad incident around the same time,” I tell her, brain reeling. Declan’s mother died from a sting?
Died?
 

“I guess this explains why he knew exactly what to do with you,” Amy whispers, eyes glistening. My own throat goes salty and tight as tears I didn’t know I had in me spring to the surface. The memory of that picnic, how Declan was so calm and steady yet swift and immediate, reacting with perfectly orchestrated steps, how he ran with me in his arms so far, so hard, so fast… 

He saved my life and then he broke my heart.

“This can’t be real,” I choke out, but deep down I understand more. Suddenly. Like a clap of thunder and lightning that makes the landscape bright in a flash, revealing parts unknown, the sound echoing in a ripple of cacophony,
now
I get it.

I get it.

“He can’t date me because I remind him of his mother,” I say.

Amy raises one skeptical eyebrow. “You look nothing like her. For one, she has cheekbones more prominent than Heidi Klum’s.”

I wave my hand in the air between us. “No, not that I look like her. The sting. She had an anaphylactic allergy, I have an anaphylactic allergy. Declan can’t handle it. Maybe I’m a trigger?”

Amanda makes a noise that tells me she’s not convinced. “He would have dumped you right after the ER incident, then.”

“It’s a miracle he didn’t,” Amy adds with a snort. “You nearly decapitated his second head.”

I give her a look that shuts her up. “Maybe he was just being nice. Not breaking up with me when I was in a medical crisis.”

“That doesn’t explain Easter,” she declares.

We sit in brooding silence. Amanda takes action and starts googling furiously. I take action by searching through all the open mystery shops available at work to see if there’s one at a bakery. I have a hankering for muffins suddenly.

“What are you doing?” Amy asks, peering over my shoulder.

“Discovering my ex-boyfriend’s mother died from the same allergy I have always makes me crave baked goods, you know?”

Amanda ignores us both. “You two leave me alone for an hour and I’ll have an answer.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do for an hour while I wait to find out the one little piece of information that could put all the puzzle pieces together?” I demand.

“Eat ice cream,” she says.

“Okay.” Good answer.

“How about we go for a nice power walk?” says my sister, Richard Simmons. In about fifty years she’ll look just enough like him with that curly reddish hair…

“Power walk or ice cream. Power walk or ice cream. That’s like asking if you want to have sex with Sam Heughan or just use your vibrator, Amy.”

She blushes. “Some vibrators are pretty damn nice.”

“Like the one I got at the sex toy shop with Shannon last week!” Mom chirps from the main door. 

“You summoned her. Say the word ‘vibrator’ and if she’s within three miles, she just appears,” I hiss. To be fair, Mom came to my rescue at the sex toy shop. The trauma of seeing Jessica with Declan, then creating a minor traffic catastrophe that thankfully missed being covered on local news, meant I was completely useless by the time we’d reached the store’s parking lot.  

Instructions memorized, she went in and spent ninety minutes doing a fabulous customer service evaluation of the store, and came out with a lifetime of orgasms in a surprisingly compact shopping bag.

“Look at this puppy! While Shannon was having her breakdown in the garbage-covered car, I was a professional and handled everything for her,” Mom announces with glee. She fishes a pink and white vibrator out of her purse.

It is bigger than a compact umbrella.

“Jesus Christ!” Amy screams.

“No, he’s the butt plug.” Mom pouts. “I didn’t have enough in my budget for him.”

The three of us stare at him, mouths agape.

Make it four. Even Chuckles’ jaw drops just a little.

“They make a Jesus butt plug?” Amanda asks in a shaky voice.

“See why I wanted you to go with her?” I say with more viciousness in my tone than I’d planned. But it’s sincere.

“See why I blackmailed you?”

Fair enough.

“Let’s go for that walk while Amanda stalks your ex boyfriend to learn how his mom died,” Amy says in a shell-shocked voice.

Mom marches into the living room and searches through the coat closet.

“What are you doing?” Amy asks.

“I need to hide this,” Mom announces. 

“Oh, God, we don’t need to watch that!” I shout.

“Not in my body,” Mom says with disgust. “In your closet. It’s a surprise for your dad.”

“Oh, that would be a surprise in bed, all right. It’s basically a third partner.”

Mom brightens. “That was my thinking, too!” She frowns. “Why are you researching how someone’s mom died?”

“We’re making plans,” Amy whispers. “His mom came home with a giant vibrator one day and BAM!”

“I heard that.” She shoves the vibrator inside a bag with great effort, shoving once, twice, three times. 

“Give the poor thing a cigarette after all that,” I mutter. “You didn’t even buy it dinner.”

Mom makes a sour face at me, then brightens as she sees Amanda at the laptop. “Are you really researching how Declan’s mother died? Did James do it?” A bit too eager with that question, isn’t she?

“Hey, wait a minute. You never finished telling me how Declan nearly became my stepbrother.”

Amy does a double take. “What? Wouldn’t that make Shannon and Declan’s relationship incestuous?”

“No, more like Marcia and Greg on
The Brady Bunch
.”

“Ewwww,” Amy and Amanda say in unison.

Mom pretends not to hear us.

“Mom? James? You said you dated him.”

“When did I say that?”

“The day Steve appeared at the ice cream shop.”

She frowns, then grins like an idiot. “You were so commanding with Steve! So fem dom! I’ll bet if you got one of those strap-ons at the sex toy shop—it turns out they’re not just for lesbians!—you could have…”

Her voice trails off when she sees the looks on our faces.

“Walk!” Amy announces. “You’ll spill your guts while Amanda does her cybersearching.”

“Where are we walking?”

“Not where. What. The plank.” She shoves me out the front door. 

The big orange fireball in the sky is so interesting. I haven’t seen it for days, holed up in my apartment, and I’m tempted to wave hello, like it’s some neighbor I’ve known for years but haven’t chatted with for a long time.

“
Some vibrators are pretty nice
,” I taunt Amy. “You had to say that, didn’t you?”

“Sometimes it’s true.” She won’t back down. Sheesh. Little sister syndrome. When in doubt, dig in your heels.

“Something is very wrong with you,” I mutter, but we go for a walk. Because she’s right.

Not about the vibrators, but about needing to get out of the house.

“Tell the story about James, Mom. I can’t believe you let a real billionaire get away.” She misses the obvious sarcasm in my voice. 

She chuckles. It’s not a happy sound. “He wasn’t a billionaire back then. Far from it. I was an artist’s assistant in some crappy squatter’s building where we were all avant-garde painters and he was with the real estate company that was trying to turn our run-down warehouse into fancy loft apartments. If he could get the building, he could make his first fortune. Only one thing stopped him.”

“You?”

“Rats.”

“Rats?”

“Rats.” She says that single word like it explains everything.

Chapter Nine