The Player + The Pact = I Do (New York City Billionaires #2)

Chapter 3

THREE

Leo

As I message Bennett to tell him I’m coming over, I don’t mention that I’ve asked Worth to come too. In the lobby of Bennett and Efa’s building, I see Byron and Fisher. Apparently word has gotten around that I’m rattled.

“Hey,” I say, joining them by the elevators. I sign in at the huge reception desk, which apparently now involves an iris scan. Bennett’s still fucking paranoid about security. Byron holds the elevator doors open and Fisher and I step through.

“It’s not such a big deal,” I say. “Worth didn’t need to call you.” Granted, it’s unusual for one of us to reach out and request counsel. So when I sent that message to Bennett, I knew it would be a big deal. And it is a big deal. I need to find a way through this fucking awards ceremony, or I need someone to tell me not going is the right thing to do.

Bennett opens the door, and after exchanging hellos and hugs, we go through to the bar, which I swear has the same sectional from the hotel suite he stayed at when the paranoid fucker thought Efa was his stalker.

Until we found out it wasn’t Efa, but my girlfriend, Nadia. She was using me to get close to Bennett. I shake my head, trying to get rid of the image I have of Nadia in my head.

Wherever the sofa’s from, it’s comfortable and that’s all that matters.

Bennett hands out beers and whiskey and tequila. I take a neat whiskey because it’s the first thing offered to me. I down it, slide the empty glass onto the table in front of me, and take the beer Worth offers next.

When we’re all seated, the low chatter falls into a lull.

“Developer of the Decade is a big deal,” I say. I scrape my hands through my hair and tip my head back, staring at the ceiling. “I’m young to be getting that kind of award, and I want to turn up and accept it, you know?”

“Of course you absolutely should turn up and accept it,” Worth says. “You should also know that I bought a fucking table at the ceremony and we’re all coming. I’m going to be pissed if skipping it is even on the agenda.”

“That was supposed to be a surprise,” Bennett says.

“Surprise,” Fisher says, waving his jazz hands.

“You’re a bunch of dickheads, but thank you,” I say, nodding at Worth. He’s a good guy. It’s nice they’re going to be there. If I go, I’m going to need the moral support. And I definitely want to go.

“Why are you even considering not going?” Fisher asks.

I take in a breath. “Caroline will be there.”

It feels like nobody speaks for an hour and a half.

“Are you sure?” Worth asks. “Doesn’t she live in California?”

“Who the fuck is Caroline?” Fisher asks .

I sigh, resigned that we’re going to get into it. It feels like I’m about to reach into a barrel of rotting fish guts and sift through it looking for something I know I’m never going to find. I don’t want to do it. There doesn’t seem to be any point.

“She was the one Leo got engaged to,” Worth says, and in wafts the scent of two-week-old cod. “Way back.”

“Do I know about her?” Fisher asks.

My gut twists. Even after nearly fifteen years, what happened with Caroline still churns me up inside. Remembering myself as someone so gullible, so trusting, so completely blinded by love… the memories are physically painful.

I’d been in New York less than a year when I met Caroline Hammond, Upper East Side princess and heiress to the Hammond fortune. We’d come to America from the UK twelve months before, because my dad bought a German bakery over the phone from an eighty-two-year-old man who decided it was time to retire.

I was sixteen. Before school and at the weekends, I’d help my dad with deliveries. One stop we made each day was to the Hammond household on 79 th Street—one of my dad’s key accounts. I first laid eyes on Caroline as she hung out of an upper-floor window, watching us unload a tray of bread. I remember thinking she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.

“I was in love with her,” I say. “Or so I thought. I was sixteen. A kid. I just… don’t particularly want to see her again,” I confess.

The next time I saw her was a week later. She was in the kitchen, watching me. Saying nothing. She wore black leggings and an oversized Blondie t-shirt pulled off her shoulder. I’d been mesmerized by her bare skin and her lack of smile, the way she leaned her hip against the doorjamb. I’d found everything about her completely fascinating.

The third time I saw her, I’d been looking for her. And there she was, still entirely compelling, her light blue eyes fixed on me as soon as we entered the kitchen. It was Friday, the day my dad got paid, and as he was collecting his check, Caroline came up to me, boldly looked me up and down, and said, “I’ll be at Marquee tonight.”

“And you definitely know that she’s going to be at the ceremony?” Worth asks.

“Yes, her husband is taking over the running of her father’s agency. The entire reason they’re sponsoring the awards is to introduce him to the industry. He’s going to be schmoozing everyone in town. And Caroline’s going to be right alongside him. They’re going to want to present this as a continuity thing—a Hammond is still at the top of the tree, albeit someone who married into the dynasty.”

“Did you know she was married?” Worth asks.

I nod. “It’s been a few years.” It’s not like I have a Google alert set, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t keep tabs on her. Not because I’m still in love with her. I’m not. But because I don’t want to be surprised by her ever again. I wanted to be made aware if she ever moved back to town. But she never came back to New York after leaving for Berkeley. And thank god. I think I would have left Manhattan if she had.

“Okay,” Fisher says. “So this chick you had a thing for is going to be at some event with her husband. Do you still care? Really? After all these years? Fuck her. You’ve moved on.” He yelps, and I’m pretty sure someone, or maybe everyone, has either pinched him or thrown something at him.

“It’s a good question,” I say. “You’re right, Fisher, it was a long time ago.” He’s got a point. Why do I care so much? I’m no longer the boy who would do anything Caroline Hammond asked him to.

Who am I kidding? She didn’t even have to ask. I gave her everything willingly. But a lot has happened since then. I’m not the person I was when I proposed to Caroline just before she was about to start NYU. I’ve become the man her father would want her to marry now, not the one he got his minions to try to bribe to disappear out of her life. I’m not some bread delivery boy who doesn’t deserve an Upper East Side princess.

“Some things leave a mark,” Bennett says. “No matter how long since the initial hurt.”

And that sums it up. What Caroline did is scorched into me like a tattoo.

My father warned me that I was making a mistake when I told him Caroline and I were getting married, and I couldn’t help him in the bakery anymore because I was moving across the country to be with her. My mother cried as I left with my backpack and two hundred dollars, thinking I was about to start my life with Caroline in California. We loved each other, and not even the width of an entire country would keep us apart.

When I turned down his ten-thousand-dollar bribe to stay away from Caroline, Frank Hammond sent his daughter to Berkeley to tear us apart. But I knew we were stronger than all those external forces. We were in love. We were going to spend the rest of our lives together.

The first time I saw Caroline in California was also the last. I turned up at her dorm and she looked at me, amused. The image of her condescending smile, offered like I was some doll she’d outgrown, has never left me.

But the memories refocused and sharpened this summer when I discovered the woman I was dating was using me. Not to annoy her father, like Caroline had, but to try to bring down my friend. The deception sliced sharp into my skin just like it had all those years ago, and it opened the coffin of feelings I hoped were dead and buried.

“I want to go to this ceremony and look like I don’t give a shit, like I can’t even remember Caroline’s name let alone recall how she used me as a way to get back at her overly controlling father.”

“Hell yeah,” Fisher calls out. “Fuck them. You’re a good-looking dude who’s at least as rich as any of us. You rule Manhattan real estate. Any woman would be lucky to have you.”

“Right,” I say, grinning at my overenthusiastic friend group.

“So call Tom Ford, get a new tux,” Fisher says.

“I have a Tom Ford tux that’s almost brand-new,” I say. “The tux isn’t the issue.” Then what is? I don’t need Caroline to find me attractive. I don’t expect her to turn around and tell me how she realized rejecting me was the biggest mistake of her life. We were eighteen. She was never in love with me. I understand that.

“I don’t want her to think she’s had any impact on my life whatsoever,” I announce.

“You’re a goddamn billionaire,” Fisher says. “And you’re freakishly good-looking, or so my sister tells me.”

“She told you I was freakishly good-looking?” I ask. “She used the word ‘ freakishly ’?”

“I’ll bring up the text if you like?” he asks.

I shake my head. “You’re right. I have nothing to prove. So why does it feel like I do?”

Bennett pulls in a breath. “What you need is the right woman on your arm.”

Things slot into place in my head. He’s right. I can’t go to the awards ceremony on my own. I don’t want to. I don’t want there to be any aspect of my life Caroline can point to and think, “I did better than he did.”

I know it’s ridiculous. I was just a pawn in Caroline Hammond’s game. No doubt plenty followed me to the same fate over the years. She probably doesn’t even remember me. But if I’m going to see her again, I need every piece of armor I can gather. From the outside, I need it to look like I have the perfect life. Like I’m entirely grateful that she dropped me like a brick on fire because things are so much better without her.

Fisher pulls out his phone. “I can call Vivian Cross. She owes me a favor.”

“She’s married,” I reply. “The entire world knows she got married last year. Why would I want to take a married woman to an awards ceremony as my date?”

“She’s actually married to Efa’s brother-in-law,” Bennett says about his soon-to-be wife.

The entire group groans at the mention of another one of Efa’s brothers-in-law. She seems to have about three thousand of them.

“Of course she is,” Fisher says. “Someone else famous, then. What about Jada De Lune? I’m just about to sign her. She’s up and coming.”

I shake my head. “No, I don’t want someone flown in to be my girlfriend. That’s just weird.”

“So, you need a date who isn’t famous?” Fisher says. “This is easy.” He squints as he thinks.

“Wait—you want someone to pose as your girlfriend?” Bennett asks.

“I don’t want to go without a date. And I don’t have a girlfriend…” I see a couple of women semi-regularly. As soon as anything feels too familiar, I tend to withdraw. I’m no t interested in having a relationship. And I don’t want to ask one of them to come with me to the awards, because it will give them the wrong idea.

“He needs a knockout who can pose as his fiancée,” Worth says. “Girlfriend’s not enough. We’re trying to make sure Caroline Hammond knows that being a dick to Leo was the stupidest thing she ever did, and he hasn’t looked back.”

“Right,” I say. “She was a dick.”

“What about Efa?” Fisher says. “She’s pretty much the perfect woman from what I can see.”

“She’s about to be my wife,” Bennett says. “I’m not lending her to Leo.”

At that moment, Efa comes in with a pile of pizza boxes. “Didn’t you hear the door?” she asks, holding the pizza in the air like she’s a modern-day statue of liberty. “Anyone would think I’m your maid.” She shoots Bennett a look, and they both giggle like adorable teenagers.

“Anything else I can do for anyone?” Efa asks. “Drink top-ups? Shoulder massage?”

“You have any friends who’d want to pose as Leo’s fiancée?” Fisher asks.

“What do you mean ‘pose’?”

“For an evening. He needs someone to be his date. But they need to act like they’re really coupled up.”

“I can do it,” she says without missing a beat.

Bennett growls from the sofa. “Efa.”

She shrugs. “What? I’m not offering to sleep with him. I’ll stick on a dress and go to a party with him.”

“Thanks,” I say. “But your engagement is pretty high profile. After the Forbes article and everything.”

Efa grins, like remembering the way Bennett sacrificed everything for her is still fresh in her mind.

“It’s nice that everyone knows he’s my man,” she says. “But let me think if I know anyone.” Her eyebrows pull together in concentration. “I mean, Eira would do it if you were in a real bind. She’s over next weekend.”

I smile, but shake my head. “Thanks, Efa. I need someone single. Who lives in New York.”

“Okay, I’ll put my thinking cap on,” she says. “What about someone at work?”

“No. I don’t shit where I eat,” I say.

“Ewww,” she replies. “No one’s talking about shitting or eating. You’re asking someone to pretend to be engaged to you. Someone who works for you would at least have an incentive to say yes.”

“True. But I prefer to keep things separate.” I have a healthy appetite for sex. But the sex I like is casual, no-strings-attached, minimal-drama sex. I worked out pretty early on that sex with someone you employ is anything but casual or minimally dramatic, so I’ve always managed to avoid it. There are plenty of women in New York City who don’t work for me.

“Okay, so what about you guys? Any of the women you work with available?”

“No way,” Bennett says. “We’re not asking the women who work for us, because they might feel some kind of obligation to say yes if it’s their boss asking.”

“Good point,” Efa says. “You know you get me so hot when you say stuff like that?”

“I do know that,” Bennett says calmly. “We’ll deal with that later.”

Efa sighs and heads out.

“So not the women any of us work with. Not anyone famous. What about sisters? Worth?”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Worth replies. I don’t blame him. If I had a sister, I wouldn’t be hiring her out as a fake fiancée anytime soon.

“What about Mary?” Fisher says, suggesting Byron’s sister.

“She’s in college,” I say. “I don’t want to look like a dirtbag.”

“Even though you are a dirtbag?” Worth asks.

“We’ll think of someone,” Bennett says. “But given that’s the plan, do you feel better about things?”

“I suppose,” I reply. “I just want to get it over with. The sooner I see her, the sooner I’ll be able to be over it. And if my pretend fiancée is fire, that will help the medicine that is Caroline go down.”

It’s objectively ridiculous to pretend I’m happily engaged so the woman who ripped my heart out fifteen years ago doesn’t think she ruined my life, but I’ll feel so much better about seeing her if she thinks I have a perfect life. Without her.