Page 10 of Billionaire Grump
Leah happens to thrive on match-making and she puts a lot of thought into her guest lists, hoping to entice me. She loves to joke about the Forbes article that named me and my brothers as “Manhattan’s hottest and most eligible bachelors.”
Occasionally I’ve gone with it.
Very rarely, I let my workaholic guard down and I surrender to my animal urges. I’m only human, after all. I’m not a fucking monk. But I have very strict rules. I provide the condoms to make sure they haven’t been tampered with. I tell the girls I’m unlikely to call them again and I always leave before morning.
See? Assholery is baked in. I know I’m an asshole and I’ve accepted that.
Blake’s wedding will be a minefield of women I’ve briefly hooked up with then never called again, eyeballing me coldly and/or trying their luck a second time, and new ones lining up. Women with visions of houses by the water in Connecticut and two point five kids who are probably already on the waiting lists of every exclusive daycare/prep school/college, even though they haven’t even been conceived yet.
It is what it is. Despite the asshole detail, women fucking love me.
In me they see their wildest dreams.
I have blue eyes and black hair. I’m six three and I work out a lot to relieve the sexual frustration that goes along with never really clicking with a single person I meet. So there’s that.
But most of all, they’re already practically in love with me for my name and—you guessed it—my money. Because of this, I have to be careful. I’m not joking when I say they try to get their hooks into me any way they can. If I give them an inch, they’ll take a country mile. Especially the heiresses and socialites, whose daddies expect them to marry up. Most of these girls have been around the block a few times and are starting to get desperate.
They all have dollar signs in their eyes and plastic pumped into their faces.
Maybe I should be grateful I’m in demand. But all I can think about is how shallow it all feels.
And how fucking lonely I am.
I’ve never, not even once, felt that magical spark you read about. The one where you just know. Like the connection is meant to be.
It’s hard to imagine.
I pull the card out of the unsealed envelope and read it. There’s a menu to choose from. And a space for a “Plus One.” Leah’s written, I can provide one if you want!!
It would make things a hell of a lot easier if I had a plus one, come to think of it. The problem is, I don’t. And I definitely don’t want Leah choosing one for me.
As I sit at my desk, thinking once again about that secluded beach on the other side of the planet, my phone rings.
“Hey, Noah.”
“Dude, don’t tell me you forgot we have a meeting here at IE. You’ve got fifteen minutes.”
“I had to come by my office first to deal with some paperwork.” I glance at my Rolex.
“Colton and I need big brotherly advice about something. Cash took the week off.”
“The whole week?” I’ve never known Cash to take even a day off in his life. Until he met Dusty, that is. I never thought I’d see the day that Cash the Cynic would fall in love, but the boy is whipped like nothing I’ve ever seen.
“Now that IE is free and clear of the SEC’s watchdogs, he decided to take Dusty back to Hawaii,” Noah tells me.
I shake my head. “I always thought you were the romantic in the family.”
Things have finally quieted down for my brothers at their company, Invested Enterprises. One of their employees was suspected of insider trading and it caused some major headaches for them, but the problem has blown over. I’m a shareholder in the company, so I sit in on the occasional meeting with them.
Noah’s a genius at what he does, but he also has a few blind spots. Of all of us, he’s the one who managed to dodge the asshole gene almost entirely. It’s because of this that he occasionally lets his empathy get the better of him, which is never ideal in business. So he calls on me now and then.
“Turns out I’m just as cynical as the rest of you.” There’s a note of gloom in his reply. Noah is—or was, until Cash fell—the only one of us who actually believes in the concept of true love. But he’s having trouble finding it.
“I doubt that. I’ll see you in fifteen.”
We end the call and I get up to grab my jacket as I leave.
“Did you see my note?” Esther asks as I walk past her desk.