The Last Eligible Billionaire

It turns out pawning a twenty thousand-dollar dress doesn’t make me happy, but it does give me enough breathing room in my bank account to afford gas, food, and dog supplies for Marshmallow and me to do what we should’ve done in the first place for my finding-myself post-divorce retreat—borrow Jerry’s parents’ Outer Banks condo.

And the condo gives me a small degree of privacy too.

I’m a little famous in Richmond right now.

And not for good things.

More for things that have put me on administrative leave from the high school.

I’ve told Hyacinth that I’ll come work for Jerry’s company if my new Etsy shop with grief art doesn’t pay off.

And considering I haven’t been able to bring myself to do any art while I’ve been grieving here on the beach, there’s a high likelihood I’ll be donning conservative professional clothes and fetching someone’s coffee by the end of July.

No way am I ready to sell Great Grandma Eileen’s dildo collection.

Not that I can.

People would figure out that I was the listing person on eBay, associate me with Hayes, and they’d twist the truth to say I sculpted the dildos myself after his penis even though the dildos are like eighty years old.

People are dicks.

And I don’t like to think of people as dicks.

But I can’t help myself.

Not even when I’m sitting on the beach under a giant umbrella that I paid seventeen dollars to rent for the day, hiding my eyes behind the least-gaudy, big, over-priced plastic sunglasses that I could find in the tourist shop while Marshmallow dances in the surf.

It’s only six in the morning and the sun’s barely up, so I’m pretty sure we can stay anonymous this way for at least another half-hour.

Possibly forty-five minutes.

Except just as I’m getting comfortable, all of the hairs go up on the back of my neck.

And two seconds later, Giovanna Rutherford plops herself down next to me, right on the sand, in this shimmery pink-ivory pantsuit. “You’re a difficult woman to track down when your hair isn’t glowing brighter than the sun. The black is striking, but I oddly think I prefer the neon burgundy. It fits you.”

I have not had enough coffee or heartbreak healing time for this, and I can’t do much more than gawk.

Until reality kicks in.

“You’re here to deliver a massive lawsuit, aren’t you?” I whimper.

Yes, whimper.

A lawsuit is not an adventure.

It’s a cold splash of ice water straight off a glacier, and not a pretty glacier either. A big, mean, dirty, ice-spewing, demonic-laughing glacier.

I try to picture it.

And I fail.

Glaciers are really pretty. Even the pictures I’ve seen of the glaciers in Iceland coated with volcanic ash are pretty.

But lawsuits are not pretty.

“Begonia.” Giovanna sighs, and it sounds so much like Hayes sighing when he doesn’t think I know that the weight of the world is sitting on his shoulders that my eyes get hot and my throat clogs and my sinuses burn. “No, my sweet. I’m here because I owe you an apology.”

“This is not helping,” I whisper.

“You know about Trixie, I presume.”

I nod and try to swipe my eyes without making it obvious that I’m swiping my eyes. I know it’s okay to cry.

But I don’t want to do it in front of Giovanna.

“You probably don’t know about Melinda, Cricket, Elizabeth, Victoria, Emma, Sophia, Emma, Emma, Sophie, Emma, Ella, Odette, and Leah.”

I shake my head, something green and ugly growing deep inside me as the list of names gets longer.

“I thought by the fourth Emma, he would’ve learned,” Giovanna says dryly, “but he put his heart out there for every last girl in high school to see, and for so long, he kept insisting that not every woman only wanted to be near him for his family connections, to get closer to Jonas, to ask about a job or an internship with the company, to get a ride to school in our family car every morning, to get flowers delivered weekly, or sometimes diamonds and pearls and exotic chocolates, or whatever in the world her little heart would tell him she secretly yearned for from a store. He even sent a girlfriend a hand-crafted German grandfather clock once. That young man put every ounce of his heart into every relationship he had, especially once that awful Sturgis boy decided to make his life a living hell in high school. He just wanted to believe that there was good in the world and that he could find it in relationships.”

“Hayes?”

She nods. “Hayes.”

A massive gaping hole opens in my heart for the teenage boy looking for love.

For the boy who believed in love.

“He’ll tell you now that he saw that three of the Emmas and Cricket and Leah flirted more with Jonas than they did with him, and that he kept dating them to give them something no one else could. That Ella and Odette were only in it for the gifts, and that the rest of them got off on dating the weird Rutherford with the big trust fund and Razzle Dazzle Village season tickets. But he didn’t at the time. He took a long time to grow into his looks, he didn’t have the societal advantage of Jonas’s natural charm—and I say that as his mother who thinks he’s utterly perfect exactly the way he is—but he’d cut his teeth watching Razzle Dazzle films, and that child believed in the power of love. He believed so hard in the power of love.”

“You remember all of their names.”

“You will too one day, Begonia. If not for your own children, for Hyacinth’s.”

I pull my knees to my chest. “A little kid named Aiden shoved my niece Dani on the playground two months ago,” I mutter.

She smiles at me. “You’ll remember.”

“Why are you here? Not to be rude, but—Hayes dumped me, and then he told the whole world we were fake, and—”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Then who—”

She tilts a brow at me, then shifts her focus to the ocean, where Marshmallow is still dancing about, trying to catch waves in his mouth.

“No,” I whisper.

“Begonia, that dog brought me your signed contract the first night that I was in Maine. I put it back in your luggage for you.”

“You knew,” I whisper.

“I suspected from the minute I laid eyes on you. I knew a few hours after that. What I didn’t know was what you were hoping to get out of the proximity to my son and my family.”

I shake my head, but that doesn’t stop my eyes from burning again. “Something new. Anything but my old life. I didn’t want to fall in love. I just got out of a relationship that was—well, it was lacking. I wanted an adventure. I wanted to live without being told I couldn’t do the simplest things that sounded fun. I wanted to find myself. Not lose myself again.”

“Are you lost?”

I shake my head. “No. I’m not lost. I’m sad.”

“Hayes was never the same after Trixie and Brock,” Giovanna says quietly. “I thought he’d come back out of his shell. That I’d see my boy again, the one who believed in the goodness of the world, who had hope, who had so much love to give, but he closed himself off so hard. It was three years before he dated anyone again, and the minute he so much as suspected someone wanted him for anything other than himself, she was out the door. He’d bring the occasional date to an event, but I always assumed it was more to give meddling family members or the press something to talk about than it was because he truly enjoyed his date’s company. He was keenly aware that if he was spotted in public with a woman, he’d be labeled a playboy if he was spotted with a different woman anytime in a six-month window after that. He used it to his advantage.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you gave me back my little boy. You made him believe in love again. I have never—ever—seen him laugh with another woman the way I’ve seen him laugh with you. Or stick up for another woman the way he sticks up for you. And I don’t want what happened to him to happen to you merely because he’s terrified to love you back.”

“Stop.”

“Thomas’s death shook him. It shook all of us. But then Mathias and Jonas both got married too, leaving Hayes as the world’s most prominent single man in possession of such a large fortune, if you’ll forgive the reference—I was worried he’d do something drastic. I followed him to Maine with Amelia because I didn’t want him to do something he’d regret.”

“Or something you’d regret.”

“Antonio showed up at his house with an eligible bachelorette in tow two years ago, and Hayes retreated to Maine and started dating the mayor there without a fake relationship contract.” She purses her lips. “Kristine is a lovely woman, but Hayes wouldn’t have been happy with her, and he wouldn’t have been fair to her either.”

“Fair how?”

“She deserves to be loved. We all do.”

I twist and bury my head in my knees. She said it herself.

Hayes is terrified to love anyone.

And I can’t fix that for him.

God knows I tried to do whatever it took to make Chad love me for me for years. I can’t spend another eternity trying to make Hayes not afraid to love me too.

Am I truly that hard to love? “You’ve made your point. You can go.”

“Oh, Begonia, he could so easily love you.” She squeezes my shoulder, and I want to tense, but I can’t, because she feels safe and kind and she’s giving me hope in a way I never would’ve expected of Giovanna Rutherford. “And he wants to. He does. But big feelings—he hasn’t let himself feel them in so long, he just needs time.”

“Please don’t give me false hope,” I whisper.

“You love him.”

“What difference does it make? I deserve love. I do. I deserve to be loved back, to not be the one doing all the loving. I don’t want to be the woman that a man only appreciates once she’s gone.”

“Why do you love my son?”

“Because he pays attention and he believes in me.” It’s such an easy answer. “We were fake. He didn’t have to join me for breakfast when we were the only two people in the house. He didn’t have to skip that dinner cruise with you to join me for an awkward picnic on the beach. He didn’t have to make me tea. He didn’t have to tolerate my dog. With his allergies. He didn’t have to set my phone up on wifi so that I could talk to my sister. He didn’t have to fly her in to see me. He didn’t have to set up an art studio in his house so that I could make terrible pottery. But he listened. He paid attention. He didn’t mock me. He looked at me like I was beautiful, flaws and all. And it wasn’t about the money. It was about the thought. He’s the first man I’ve known in my adult life who thought. And who cared enough to act on the thought. And I want—I want him to feel as much love as he made me feel with the simplest little things that no one else has ever done for me before. I want him to know how very much he deserves to be loved and adored.”

I swipe at my nose with my shirtsleeve, but I don’t try to stop the tears.

I’m not stoic. I’m not upper-crust. I’m not fancy.

I’m me, and I’m a mess, and I’m okay with this.

Giovanna pulls me in for a hug. “No matter what happens between you and Hayes, I hope you know you can call me for anything, anytime. And that’s not an offer I’ve made to any of his other former girlfriends. Ever.”

“We were pretend.”

“No, Begonia. My sweet child. You most definitely were not pretend.”