Billionaire Bad Boys of Romance 1(63)

“Would you? Would they be like the party you organized for the auction?”

I glanced at him sharply, but his head was tilted to the side, and he seemed merely curious. “No,” I said. “We'd be out in international waters. We'd totally get drunk and high and shove the deck chairs into the sea.”

He arched a brow at that. “Those deck chairs are awfully expensive,” he said.

“Really? They're deck chairs. How expensive can they be?”

“Oh,” he said, “three thousand dollars at least.”

I choked and coughed on my drink. Alcohol burned in my nose. “What?” I exclaimed. “You could buy, like, thirty deck chairs for that cost!”

“Ah,” he said, “but then they would not be three thousand dollar deck chairs and I'd be a laughingstock of the yachting club.” He smiled while he said it and I scowled.

“Are you joking with me? Do you actually belong to a yacht club?”

His smile widened. “Of course I don't. The chairs came with the boat. I just bought it and it came with all these fine things in it, it seemed silly to change it.”

That sort of thinking was totally foreign to me. “What, you mean you didn't want to make it your own or whatever?”

He shrugged. “I own it,” he said. “It's already my own.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “And what do you use it for?”

He shrugged again. “Getaways,” he said. “In the summer it is a fine thing to cruise around the islands off the coast of Croatia. They are beautiful and it is very warm and relaxing.”

“Yeah,” I said. “About that... why Croatia? It's hardly the place I'd expect a rich guy to go.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Because...” I trailed off. “Well, because it's not the French Riviera or... or a private island in the Bahamas or something.” I had no idea where rich people went for fun.

“I used to frequent the livelier of European countries,” he replied. “But you grow out of that thing when you get older, I think.”

“So now you just want to float around in a boat?”

“And start a farm in the French countryside. I would dearly love to own some sheep.”

“And yet,” I said, “you won't be able to do any of that once you kick the bucket.”

Ah. An abrupt turn of conversation, sprung like a trap. I'm so clever.

His lips tightened. “I know that,” he said. His words were clipped. “Some things are just dreams, after all.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but for you they could be reality. You're fucking rich. You have one problem and it's a person. Do you know how many people would kill to have your problems? They don't go around offing themselves the first time someone betrays them.”

I took a sip of my drink, watching him from the corner of my eye to gauge his reaction. His handsome face, so many sharp planes, became sharper at the suggestion that his problems were trivial. Which, you know, they kind of were. Not to him, obviously, but compared to being unable to eat, or keep the heat on, or stop drinking or shooting up or afford cancer treatments or any number of problems that people faced every damn day, his problem was a few angry emails, some public snubbings, and a humiliating episode of Judge Judy away from being satisfactorily resolved.

It made me kind of angry, now that I thought about it. He just wanted to throw all this away for no good reason. He had the money to buy a shrink. To literally put a shrink on-call twenty-four seven, and he just wanted to take the easy way out instead of facing his issues.

What a cock. I glared at my drink, swirling it around so that it splashed over its few ice cubes, then drained it. It burned and warmed me up, and my cheeks heated with it.

“Would you like to know how I met Dominic?” Malcolm asked me suddenly.

I jumped, and then looked at him, surprised. Why would he bring up our restaurateur? I doubted I would see him again as long as I lived. Still, anything to get him off his stupid suicidal high-horse. “Uh,” I said. “Sure.”

He smiled, but it lacked warmth. “That was the right answer,” he said, and I had the impression I had passed some sort of test. Malcolm slid off the bed and stood up, shoving his hands into his pockets. Leisurely he began to pace, but I was attuned enough by now to his moods that I realized he was quite agitated. What he was about to share was personal. I set my drink down, lowered myself into one of the plush, luxurious armchairs, and turned my full attention on him.

He continued to pace. “I met Dominic in Paris,” he began, “where he was staying after the war. He worked as a bartender in an... exclusive club.”

Sex club, I thought.