RICH
Kira was frowning between Cade and me. He still stood at the top of the hill with a confused look on his face. I was still beside Kira with my heart in my throat and the taste of whipped cream on my tongue. I’d watched the goose bumps roll across her skin when I touched her, and I knew she was feeling the same electrical buzz in the air that I felt.
“What the fuck were you two doing down here?” asked Cade. “Is this some kind of food porn thing? You should’ve got a kiddie pool, at least. That way the grass doesn’t get all mixed in with the food.” He started walking down the hill toward us, still shouting. “And next time, take off your clothes, you idiots. It’s all fun and games until the cleaner tells you he can’t get honey stains out of your tie. Trust me. I’ve been there.”
He leaned down and plucked a chocolate-covered cherry from my lap. He stuck it in his mouth and made a kind of garbled attempt at speech while looking between us and smiling. I knew he was trying to tie the stem in a knot with his tongue, and I also knew he was too oblivious to realize Kira looked like she was on the verge of slapping me or laughing her ass off—I still couldn’t tell which.
He pulled the cherry stem out of his mouth, but it was just chewed in two. “Shit,” he said. “I swear I’ve done it before—oh, hey, Kira. Everything good?”
“You’re Cade?” she said slowly, pointing to him.
His eyes darted once to the left and once to the right, and he nodded slowly with a widening smile. “Me Cade. You Kira?”
“And you’re?” she asked my feet.
“Rich,” I said. Reality hit me full force in the stomach. She’d gotten Cade and me confused. This whole time she thought she was talking to my goddamn brother. “You thought I was him?”
“Your hair,” she said, finally looking up at me again. “It’s all . . .”
“Oh.” I touched my head and smoothed it out. “This idiot decided he was still a child and gave me a noogie right before I ran into you earlier, and I forgot to straighten it out.”
She stood suddenly. “I’m sorry. I need to go.”
“Can I see you again?” I asked.
“No,” she said softly. “No,” she said again, firmly this time. “I’m not even convinced you didn’t just trick me on purpose.” Her expression darkened. I could see her making up her mind, and it wasn’t a good conclusion. “Congratulations. You got to make me look like an idiot one more time. I hope it was nostalgic for you.”
She stood and let all the desserts in her lap fall to the grass. In seconds, I was left alone on the hill with Cade.
“Yikes,” he said. “I’ve never seen you fail in person with a girl before. That was fun, man. We should do this more often. Kinda like a double date, but not exactly. Next time, I’d go with a little less of the clueless idiot approach and maybe try to project confidence. Just spitballing here, but what if you’d said, Yeah, I know you thought I was Cade the whole time. But I’m basically the discount version of my brother anyway, so what’s it going to be? Deal or no dick?”
I got up and brushed off what I could of the mess on my clothes. I felt and looked like an idiot. “Deal or no dick? Does that kind of shit actually work for you?”
Cade scraped some chocolate off my shirt and ate it. “Everything works for me. It’s not about what you say. It’s how you say it. You’re an idiot,” he said with a big, goofy smile and a pat on my shoulder. “See? Didn’t feel so bad when I said it like that, did it?”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Yep. When you say it like that, it sounds like an insult. But when you say it the way I did, not so bad, right?”
I shook my head. “I forget. Did I give myself the power to fire you?”
“One, you couldn’t run the company without me. Two, I’m not the one who smeared chocolate and icing all over my clothes. I’m also not the one who got verbally ass blasted by a high school teacher.”
“I didn’t get ‘ass blasted.’ It was just a misunderstanding.”
He laughed. “Actually, no, this is better than an ass blasting. You realize she was only talking to you because she thought you were me.” He punched my chest. “Bad news, bucko. We’re identical. That means you can’t even blame it on your looks. It’s just you that sucks.”
“Are you done?” I asked.
He scraped some frosting from my leg, some strawberry compote from my sleeve, and some more chocolate from my stomach. He squished the mess together into an impromptu sandwich and ate it with a satisfied sound. “Yes. Now I am.”
I let him wander back to the party, but I had no interest in following him. I wasn’t even trying to date Kira in the first place. The entire reason I endured the fake courtship with Stella was to avoid getting pressured into relationships by my parents. The only thing they cared about was playing an antiquated power game of family names and politics among friends. Women from the right families carried certain status, and that status would trickle back up to my parents. Stella was a Cartier, and the Cartier family was one of the biggest of the big. It was that simple.
I thought about Kira and the way she had looked just minutes ago. I couldn’t say if nostalgia was clouding my judgment, but I had felt a kind of lightness with her. Some of the burdens I’d gradually taken on over the years didn’t seem as heavy. I didn’t feel like I had to choose every word with absolute care.
I refused to acknowledge the way my heart had been pounding when the thought of kissing her had crossed my mind—when I’d wondered if I would taste strawberry or chocolate on her lips first.
I wouldn’t think about that, because it had been a mental glitch, like when you can’t stop yourself from thinking about swerving into oncoming traffic on the highway. You know there’s no way you’d ever do it, but some twisted part of the brain wants to explore the option—no matter how self-destructive it might be.
No. It wasn’t romantic interest with Kira. I was competitive to a fault. I’d come to West Valley with a few goals, and one of the smaller goals was to apologize to Kira. She hadn’t let me do that, and it was getting hard to think about anything else. That was all. I wanted her to accept my apology, even if she didn’t forgive me. Her blatant refusal irked me, and I knew I wasn’t even close to giving up.
I stepped out of the limo and took in our new headquarters for the first time. I couldn’t help wondering if the massive structure was nothing but a monument to the folly of my brothers and me—like some misguided offering to the three women we’d all left a piece of our hearts with. Misguided or not, I knew we had to get it right. Our company wasn’t so big that it couldn’t fail if we botched this project.
We’d built a technology empire out in California. In a few short years, our business model had done exactly what it was designed to do. We cannibalized the competition, used our custom software and training programs to make them more efficient, and then turned around to do what they already did, only better. We slapped the Sion name on them and watched the profits soar.
It had been a wild stretch of years since we left West Valley. Everybody we’d ever met had always seemed so sure that my brothers and I would go on to conquer the world. Whether we realized it or not, I think the three of us had bought into it. We drove ourselves so hard because anything less than extraordinary success would’ve felt like a massive failure. I’d always been driven to a fault. I set a goal to make a billion dollars, and I didn’t stop until it happened.
That part had almost felt easy. I’d always known where I was headed. I had a target, and I had the combined capabilities of my brothers and me at my disposal. And then, two years ago, we reached our goal.
I never stopped to wonder what I’d do or what I expected when we made it. For so many years, the idea of a billion dollars had loomed in the distance. It stopped being a goal with a purpose. I didn’t want a billion dollars to buy a yacht or build a mansion. It wasn’t to impress people. I wanted it because I’d decided to chase it. Maybe that was what made me so good at chasing my goals down so relentlessly. I distilled them into their purest, most basic form. I let nothing cloud my vision. I never felt tempted to stop or that I’d done good enough, because the only thing that counted was the full realization of my goal.
After reaching a billion, I thought the next thing would materialize before long. Some new purpose and drive would strike me like inspiration, and the next cycle of blind pursuit would begin. Except it didn’t. A month passed, then a year, then two. I was just going through the motions, and even as our wealth continued to grow exponentially, I felt numb.
Until West Valley. I hadn’t realized it until now, but I already had my next goal.
Kira Summerland.
The thought made chills prickle across my skin. I knew myself well enough to know how dangerous it was to set my sights on a person—a woman. But maybe I could control it. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I might need only her forgiveness. With that dark chapter of my past closed, maybe then I could finally put my full energy back into the company and move forward. Move on.
My parents arrived a few minutes after me. They, along with a modest entourage of unrecognizable faces, arrived in a convoy of luxury supercars. Despite the heat, they all emerged wearing ridiculous outfits like we were going to walk the red carpet to an event instead of tour a construction site. A dozen or so local media members were already crouched around the parking lot and snapping pictures of everyone. I still couldn’t understand why there was a market for pictures of people like us doing nothing but coming and going from places.
I only distantly became aware of the snapping of camera shutters and the glare of flashing lights. It was the kind of thing you never completely got used to but learned to tolerate.
I cut a straight path through the media and my family toward the building. My brothers were just as eager to break away from the crowd and join me.
“Nothing like slapping down a giant-ass building to assert your masculinity, is there?” Cade asked once we’d put some distance between ourselves and the crowd still lingering around the curb.
“It’s not an exclusively masculine thing to do, though,” Nick said. “A woman could do it. I’d say it’s more about having money than having a dick.”
“He has a point,” I said.
Cade made a dismissive sound. “Nick always ‘has a point,’ but it’s a flaccid one. It’s simple. There’s nothing more masculine than having a dick, dumb asses.”
“That’s not even what we were arguing about,” Nick said. “You said—”
“Maybe you were arguing. I was making a point. And there’s no bigger point than my dick.”
I snorted and Nick shook his head in disbelief.
“The scary part is that he really thinks he just won,” Nick said to me.
“If ignorance is bliss, being Cade is ecstasy,” I said.
“Fuck,” Cade said with a huge grin. “Thanks for the pickup line. I bet girls will eat that up. Maybe I’ll change the last part to banging Cade is ecstasy, though.”
“Anytime. Just let me know how it goes after you try it.”
We were met inside by Mayor Summerland instead of the project manager I’d been expecting. Had it not been for the fact that he had Kira’s eyes, I could’ve forgotten he was her father.
“Mayor Summerland,” I said, reaching to shake his hand. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“No? The Beatles are in West Valley, and they’re building their mecca. You don’t think I’d want to see it in person?” He was smiling a politician’s smile. Wide, toothy, and artificial. He even looked like a politician. He was clean cut and inoffensive in every way. His hair wasn’t too long or too short, and it wasn’t completely brown or completely gray. He wasn’t ugly or attractive. He was a perfect, unassuming medium—the kind of guy the masses could settle on as a reasonable compromise. Yet there was a predatory glint in his eyes up close that would’ve stopped me from doing any kind of business with the man if I had a choice.
“We’re hardly the Beatles,” Nick said.
“He’s right,” Cade agreed. “We make the Beatles look like Bieber.”
I shot him a look. “You can’t even play a harmonica without getting a bloody nose.”
He punched my shoulder. “One goddamn time. I told you too. It was an allergy thing. There must have been silver in it, and you know how I get—”
“It’s quite all right,” Mayor Summerland said. He still wore that plastered-on smile. “I like the bravado, actually. And hey, for West Valley, maybe you guys are bigger than the Beatles, right? Our own homegrown billionaires. It’s quite the story.” He was looking at Cade, who was eating up the praise. “I get the impression you boys like making a splash. Am I wrong?”
“We’re not here to make a—” I started.
“Big-ass splashes,” Cade agreed. “Belly-flop-off-the-high-dive-level splashes.”
I saw Nick folding his arms beside me. He was probably the most perceptive of the three of us, but he was also the least confrontational, at least when it came to matters outside the family. I knew he was already reading Mayor Summerland like a book, but he probably wanted to wait and see how the conversation played out before jumping in.
Mayor Summerland winked and reached to shake Cade’s hand again. He squeezed Cade’s forearm with his free hand and laughed like he’d said something funny. “I’ll keep my ear to the ground. Who knows, maybe some opportunities to get your name out around town in a good light will pop up.”
“I think we’ll be fine,” I said.
“Oh?” he asked. “It’s just that I’ve heard some rumblings. People upset about all the construction or the road closures while they worked on this headquarters of yours. Anger about the secrecy until now. And this isn’t coming from me, mind you,” he said, holding up his palms in innocence, “but I’ve even heard some unrest about all the techies this place is going to bring in to our little town. You know, people like their front porches and their rocking chairs. They just don’t want to see farms getting turned into strip malls with computer stores and that sort of nonsense.”
“We had all our permits approved and run through the state, Mayor Summerland,” I said a little coldly. “So you can tell them we’re operating completely legal. The employees we bring to the area should help local businesses and give a big boost to the economy around here. Maybe people should think about that too.”
“Oh, sure,” he agreed. “All I’m saying is a little act of good grace would go a long way toward quieting down those whispers. West Valley has grown over the years, but it’s still a small town at heart, Mr. King. And a small town is like a pretty girl. You can’t just show up with money and expect to grab her by the ass. You’ve got to win her heart first. Take her on a couple dates, buy her something nice, you know?” He laughed and slapped my shoulder with the back of his hand like we were old buddies. His voice lowered, and I didn’t miss the menace there. “You wouldn’t treat my town like that, would you?”
I knew we weren’t just talking about West Valley anymore, but I wasn’t about to let this devolve into a personal squabble involving Kira. “And what would pass for buying this town of yours something nice, exactly?”
“It’s a bribe,” Cade whispered. “He’s asking for a bribe.”
“No shit,” I said.
“Easy now, boys. I’m no dirty politician by any stretch. I’m absolutely not asking for your money. I’m simply saying you fine young men have the resources to invest in a few projects here and there around town. Who knows, throw some money at the school football team, or the chess team, for all I care. I just think it’d go a long way toward getting the town on your side.”
“Sure,” I said. “You’re not asking for our money, but you’d like some of our money.” My hands were balled up tight with frustration. Just talking to the man felt like taking a bath in slime, and yet I knew on some level he had a point. It wouldn’t hurt for us to make a few donations around town and boost our public image. Besides, his idea about donating to the school already had my gears turning.
Kira worked at a school. Unless West Valley High was a miraculous exception to the rule, it probably had dozens of programs that lacked funding. I was willing to bet whatever programs Kira was involved in could use more money too.
“You know, Mr. King,” Mr. Summerland said. “A foolish man walks into a trap. A wise man avoids it. But a businessman? He takes advantage of it. Which are you?”
“A businessman,” I said. A wise one.