My face flushed scarlet.
It didn’t faze Connor in the slightest, though.
“Oh – I’m being rude. Lily, this is my father, Augustus Templeton.”
Augustus. Just like Caesar.
Fits him.
Connor turned back and looked at me. His expression was slightly bemused. “Dad… Lily Ross.”
Mr. Templeton’s disdain suddenly became a lot less subtle. “Scraping the bottom of the barrel, are we?”
I was so shocked I couldn’t speak for a second.
Nobody had been that rude to me since –
Well, since Herr Klaus.
Maybe my last encounter with him had made me a bit more resilient, because when I spoke, I sounded furious. “Excuse me?”
But Connor had my back.
“Keep a civil fucking tongue in your head, Dad, or I’ll have you removed, friends of the owner or no.”
The old man smirked – a colder, meaner version of the expression I was so used to seeing on Connor’s face. He looked only at Connor, and not at me, as he spoke.
“Forgive me, young… lady…”
The knife-twisting pause he inserted before ‘lady’ let me know he didn’t consider me anything of the sort.
“…I have an unfortunate knack for speaking my mind.”
Connor gave a brief, unamused grunt. “Don’t worry, Lily – he’s an asshole to everybody.”
“Just not as crude as my son. Or as stupid.”
“So – what are you here for, besides trading insults?”
“To try to dissuade you from the utter idiocy of your current course of action.”
“What, you mean me continuing to listen to you?”
Mr. Templeton glanced at me before speaking. “I would prefer to continue this conversation in private.”
“No need,” Connor said, and I could hear the smile in his voice, even though I could only see his back. “Lily knows all about the desert. And my meetings with the governor and the congressmen.”
For the first time, Connor’s father looked surprised. Shocked, even – which is what I guess Connor was aiming for.
Mr. Templeton looked at me again, as though reassessing who I was.
As the lady on the GPS says, ‘Recalculating…’
Then he seemed to reach the same conclusion he’d had when I walked through the door.
“You really shouldn’t expose all of yourself to the… hired help,” he sneered.
At that, Connor lost it.
“That’s it. Get the fuck out, now.”
“Calm down. I was merely suggesting that she’s your… employee.”
By the tone of his voice, he most certainly meant hourly employee.
And one hired down on the street for something not legal, even in Las Vegas.
“I know what you’re suggesting,” Connor fumed. “Fuck you. Get out.”
“So she’s not your secretary? Or your personal… assistant?” Templeton asked, putting his own snide spin on the last word.
“Lily and I are dating.”
My eyes bugged out and my heart did a triple-flip.
I knew we were… well… I knew something was going on… but to hear him say we were ‘dating’…
It almost made it worthwhile to put up with his king jerk of a father.
The old man scoffed. “You’ve come down a ways since Miranda.”
Miranda?
I didn’t even care about the diss.
Who’s he talking about?
Connor shook his head angrily. “You know what? You can insult me – fine. You insult her? Fuck you and get out.”
At that, Connor strode towards his father.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw all four Secret Service agents move forward.
Johnny was even faster; he dashed past me in a blur.
“STOP IT!” I cried out, terrified for Connor and Johnny.
This was going to be horrible.
33
But then Mr. Templeton spoke.
“Wait.”
It was a commanding tone of voice. The voice of an emperor or king. The voice of someone who was never disobeyed, on pain of death.
I’d heard Connor use a similar tone of voice… but even he wasn’t this intimidating.
Everyone in the room froze – even Connor. But he was right up in his father’s face, less than a foot away from him now.
Johnny stopped, too, but he was right by Connor’s side, body tensed like a steel spring, eyes focused on the left two Secret Service guys.
Connor and his father stared each other down. It seemed to drag on forever, although it was probably no more than three seconds.
Then Mr. Templeton glanced over at one of the Secret Service guys, tilted his head, and half-closed his eyes.
Stand down.
All four bodyguards slowly retreated back to the walls.
Johnny stayed where he was, though he relaxed noticeably.
Mr. Templeton looked back at his son with a scowl… and then relented.
However, he never looked at me the entire time he spoke – only at Connor.
“Ms…. Ross, is it? As my son can tell you, I’m not the most pleasant of men at times. Especially when he’s deliberately flouting me. My apologies.”
Though his lack of eye contact was dehumanizing, and there was no warmth in his voice, there was no sarcasm, either. I figured this was about as straight-up an apology as he’d ever given in his life.
The guy was a raging jerk, there was no doubt about that. But, when a multi-billionaire apologizes to you – no matter how insincerely – it’s not something you brush off lightly.
Though I considered my options for a brief second.
Be a bitch back at him, or take the high road?
No matter how much I disliked him, though, he was still Connor’s father.
And I was uncomfortably aware how… um… bedraggled I looked at the moment. I didn’t want to come off as having a ghetto personality, too.
More than anything, though, I just wanted to decrease the tension level in the room. For Connor and Johnny’s sake.
“Apology accepted,” I said in as dignified a tone as I could muster at the moment, looking the way I did. And lacking panties.
He still never looked at me as he continued to speak to Connor. “So, can we continue this conversation in private?”
“No. You can state your business, or you can leave.”
“Alright.” Mr. Templeton raised his head slightly and looked down his nose, like he was a king giving out a death sentence. “You really thought you could get away with it?”
“‘Away with it’? You make starting a new company sound like a crime.”
“In this case, it is.”
“Actually, no, I’m not following your normal business plan.”
“You’ll never succeed. We have the politicians in our pocket.”
“Turns out, they tend to jump out of one pocket and into whoever’s are deeper.”
“They’ll see reason.”
“They already have. I have several of them – the most important ones, anyway – locked down tight.”
Mr. Templeton’s right eyebrow arched up. “Blackmail?”
Connor didn’t say anything. He just stood there.
I didn’t like the idea that Connor would resort to blackmail to get his way. And I especially didn’t like his silence when confronted. But it was the first thing that had impressed Augustus Templeton so far. “And here I thought you said you weren’t playing by my rulebook.”
“When I know my opponent’s dirty, occasionally I play dirtier.”
“We’ll support the opposing candidate. First in the primary, and if they make it out of that, then the general election.”
Connor sounded positively gleeful. “Then it’s going to be a very expensive election season in Nevada next year.”
Mr. Templeton’s blue eyes flashed with cold fire. “You’re doing this deliberately to spite me.”
“No. As I explained to Lily, that’s just one of the many, many side benefits.”
“What, destroying our family?”
“‘Destroying our family’? That’s a bit grandiose, don’t you think?”
“You’d cost us billions of dollars.”
“And save hundreds of billions of dollars for everyone else on earth.”
Mr. Templeton sneered. “Now who’s being grandiose?”
“At least I’m thinking about somebody other than myself.”
“Just not the people you should be thinking of.”
“Oh, come off it, Dad. Just cancel the order on the 500-foot yacht, and don’t get any more Van Goghs for your private collection. And tell Mother she can only buy two Tuscan villas this year.”
“You can tell her yourself.”
And then, from the dining room area of the penthouse, came a woman’s regal voice:
“Hello, darling.”
34
Mrs. Templeton entered the room like she was walking onstage in a Broadway drama.
She was thin and tall – taller than me, anyway, though that’s not saying much. She was a ‘woman of a certain age,’ and fighting it mightily. Her face had the slightly too-tight look of someone with plastic surgery, though it was top-notch, I have to say that for her. Her neck was smooth with very few wrinkles, and her forehead was flawless. Either she’d had Connor when she was sixteen (I’m going to say ‘no’), or her surgeon had worked wonders on her. So had her stylist: not a gray strand in sight, just frosted blonde hair cut in a long-ish bob, Anna Wintour-style.
Like her husband, she reeked of money and prestige. Her aristocratic tone was forged, no doubt, by the best prep schools and colleges that Old Money can buy. She wore a grey, business-like dress with a slim-cut matching jacket. Conservative enough to match her station in life, but obviously a designer label to show off her money. She wore a beautiful double strand of pearls around her neck, ostentatious without being over-the-top. She wore only a couple of rings on her hands, but the diamond on her engagement ring rivaled an ice cube in size. (Okay, a small ice cube.)