The Billionaire's Heart (The Silver Cross Club Book 4) (17 page)

My mouth watered. I rolled my chair back from my desk, instantly starving. “Is that dinner?”

Elliott came around the low divider that blocked the elevator from my sight, a big paper bag in his arms, his cheeks red from the cold. “It’s dinner,” he said. He set the bag on his desk and began pulling out plastic containers of food. “And. A bottle of wine.”

“Drinking at work?” I asked. “Human Resources won’t be too happy about that.”

“Oh, I’ve done far worse,” he said, which was entirely too intriguing.

We sat at his desk and ate. I was too hungry to care about good manners, and I spent the first several minutes shoveling food into my mouth at a rapid clip without making any attempt at conversation. When the worst of my hunger was satisfied, I slowed, drank a few sips of the really quite good wine, and studied Elliott’s profile as he worked on his ribs.

He was a bad idea, the worst I’d ever had, and I was still a mess over Ben. I needed to get my house in order before I invited anyone inside.

But I wanted him.

Impulsively, I said, “Can I ask you a question?”

He finished chewing, swallowed, and said, “Apparently you can.”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s just a figure of speech, Elliott.”

He gave me a thin smile and poured some more wine into his coffee mug. “I know. Yes, you can ask me a question.”

Well, I didn’t really want to ask him after all that, but I was still curious, so I bit the bullet. “How did you end up in Uganda?”

He wiped his fingers on a napkin and leaned back in his chair. He gave me a long, narrow look, and I half-expected him to tell me to mind my own business, but he only said, “It’s a long story.”

“I’m not in a hurry,” I said. “Indulge me.”

He frowned. I knew I was pushing him, especially when things between us were still so raw and unsettled after the silent auction. But I wanted to know. I held his gaze, refusing to look away or admit defeat, and after a few moments he shrugged and said, “I dropped out of Harvard partway through my junior year.”

I leaned closer, already entranced. I still knew so little about him. “You went to Harvard?”

His mouth twisted. “Of course. Only the best for my father’s only son.” His voice had a dry, hard edge to it that I didn’t understand. He took another sip of wine. I thought maybe that was all he was going to say on the subject, but then he shrugged again, like he was making a decision, and said, “We traveled a lot when I was a kid. Mainly in Europe. I saw all the sights. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the world. But then I took an anthropology class on a whim, just to fill a requirement, and we read an essay by a man, a medical doctor, who opened a hospital in rural Haiti. He treated a lot of people with tuberculosis, and he talked about the barriers to treatment, how the medicine cost more than an entire extended family made in a month, how his patients would spend ten hours on a bus to get to the clinic, and most of them died anyway. I didn’t know anyone still got tuberculosis. I thought it was something tragic young poets died of in the 1800s. I realized that I didn’t know anything about the world at all.”

“So you dropped out,” I said, a little awed, at least in part by Elliott stringing that many sentences together in a row.

He nodded. “I backpacked for a while and gazed at my navel. I felt very sorry for myself for a long time. Then I decided that even though I had no actual skills, I was smart and could follow directions, and surely there was something I could do to make a difference. I started volunteering with various international aid organizations, and after a few years I got a job with MSF.”

“What’s MSF?” I asked.

“Médecins Sans Frontières,” he said. I kept looking at him blankly, and he sighed and said, “Sorry. Doctors Without Borders.”

“Wow,” I said. “They won the Nobel Peace Prize, right?”

“Several years ago,” he said, nodding, and then shrugged. “I was involved with clean water work for several years, and I spent a lot of time digging wells that caved in a year later. It seems to me there must be a better solution.” He glanced at me from the corner of his eye. “I don’t mean to bore you. I don’t talk about this very much, so I don’t have my one-minute summary perfected.”

“I don’t want a summary,” I said fiercely. “I asked you because I’m interested. I think it’s really cool that you’ve been so many different places, and that you’re so determined to help people. I’ve never been anywhere, and I’ve never helped anyone, except maybe my downstairs neighbor who can’t figure out how to use the internet.”

“Hmm,” he said. “You’re helping me.”

“That doesn’t count,” I said. “You’re paying me.”

He looked at me, and I looked back, studying his face in the dim lamplight. I felt like we were the only two people alive in the whole world, safe and warm in our cocoon, in the warm glow of the light, with the wine and food settling in my belly and making
me
glow. I didn’t care about the conference or the website. I just wanted to be alone with Elliott.

“What’s your family like?” I asked. If he’d answered one invasive question, maybe he would answer another.

“Rich,” he said. “Complicated.”

I smiled. “Isn’t everyone’s? I mean, not the rich part, obviously.”

“Obviously,” he said, dry as the desert.

“My family’s pretty complicated,” I said. Give a little to get a little. “My brother’s gay, and my parents still haven’t really accepted it. They’re trying, and my dad’s really making an effort, but my mom keeps acting like he’ll grow out of it and settle down with a nice girl.”

“That must be hard for him,” Elliott said.

“I think he’s used to it,” I said. “They haven’t stopped inviting him for Sunday dinner, so he’s just waiting them out. Sooner or later they’ll have to admit defeat.”

“What does your brother do?” Elliott asked, so polite, so carefully interested, and I wondered who had taught him these social graces. I was sure he had been taught: he was too abrupt and taciturn to have an innate gift of small talk.

“He teaches high school math,” I said. “In East Harlem. He’s getting pretty fed up with the administration, though, so I’m not sure how much longer he’ll last.”

“I imagine that’s a challenging job,” Elliott said, smooth as the surface of a still pond, and I realized he was doing this on purpose: getting me to talk about my own family to avoid having to talk about his.

Very sneaky.

He finished his ribs and poured the rest of the wine into my coffee mug. “We need another bottle,” he announced.

I would be on the floor if we finished another bottle, but maybe the alcohol would help ease the strange tension crackling between us. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll have a little more wine.”

He went out again, bundled into his coat, and I made some final tweaks to the website’s style sheet. The wine made me feel blurry, as if some great invisible hand was taking an eraser to my edges. We
would
finish tonight, somehow, miraculously, if Elliott finalized the coding as he said he would.

The elevator doors opened again, and Elliott came toward me, bearing wine.

“Great,” I said, holding out my mug. “Let’s do this.”

We did it. I worked, took a quick break to eat a little more, worked again, drank another mug of wine, and finally, close to midnight, I cropped a few pixels from the last image file and was done.

I sat back and rubbed my eyes. Elliott was still typing. I was tired, but also full of unexpected energy, the adrenaline rush of finishing good work. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep anytime soon.

I stood up and took my wine mug over to Elliott’s desk. He typed for a few more seconds and then looked up at me, a question in his eyes that I didn’t know the answer to.

“I’m finished,” I said instead.

His smile was a slow burn. “Then we’re done. I’ll finish this coding. You should go home and sleep.”

“I can’t sleep,” I said. “I’m too wired.”

“Hmm,” he said. He closed his laptop and gave me a searching look. “Then we’ll just have to finish the wine.”

He made it a ritual: arranging my chair beside his desk, pouring the wine into our mugs, toasting solemnly and drinking. “To our success,” he said.

“May it be long-lasting and, uh, fertile,” I said.

He laughed. “What an odd thing to say.”

I couldn’t think of a reply. We sat in silence, drinking our wine. Outside, a siren blared and faded into the distance.

“My father wants me to make something of myself,” Elliott said.

I looked at him, too surprised to speak. Elliott, volunteering information about himself? What next: planetary invasion by tiny green men from Mars?

He wasn’t done. “He cut me off. No money, no support. If I can’t get this company off the ground—well. He thinks that I’ll go crawling back, duly chastened, and take over the company. I’m afraid he’ll be sadly disappointed.”

“What would you do instead?” I asked, taking the risk, hoping my question wouldn’t shatter this fragile intimacy.

“Go back to Africa,” he said. “My old boss would be happy to give me a job.”

“That’s why you’re doing this,” I said, realizing. “You care about your father’s approval. You want him to be proud of you.”

He nodded tightly. “Yes.”

He was ashamed, I saw. “There’s nothing wrong with that. You shouldn’t have to
earn
his approval. He should already be proud of you.”

“He never will be,” Elliott said. He took a sip of his wine. “It was a great source of tension between my parents. My mother thought he was too hard on me, but he said it was the only way to turn me into a man.”

“What does your mother think about all of this?” I asked.

“She doesn’t,” he said. “She’s been dead for ten years.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I could hear the pain in his voice. An old wound, but one that still ached.

“Ovarian cancer,” he said. “By the time they found it, it was too late. I was in Laos. She told me not to come home, that there was plenty of time. There wasn’t. I flew home for the funeral.”

I nodded, hands curled around my mug. I knew all about funerals, and grief.

I drank my wine.

“My fiancé died,” I heard myself say.

A mistake. The adrenaline rush was immediate. I flushed hot and heard a roaring in my ears. Elliott’s startled glance compounded my sense that I had betrayed myself. After a year of sucking it up, of keeping quiet and forging ahead, all it took was a little wine and a few unguarded confessions for me to throw all caution to the wind.

“Oh, Sadie,” Elliott murmured.

Why had I said it? I would cut off my own tongue if it kept me from blurting any more unpleasant revelations.

I sat frozen, hoping for the ground to swallow me.

Elliott’s chair scraped across the floor. His hand touched my arm, just above the elbow, and then settled on my shoulder. “Sadie,” he said again.

“It was cancer,” I said, all in a rush, the words tumbling over each other as they spilled from my mouth. “Leukemia. He died a year ago. A little more than a year.”

Elliott squeezed my shoulder, firm and reassuring. “This explains a lot about you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, more reflex than genuine offense, habitual belligerence that I couldn’t shake.

“Exactly,” he said, like I had given him any sort of answer. His hand moved from my shoulder to cup the back of my neck, his fingers sliding into my hair. “I’m glad you told me.”

“I haven’t told anyone,” I said. Not said: choked it out. “I haven’t talked about it at all.”

He made a wordless noise, soothing.

I fought the pressure building behind my eyes. I wouldn’t cry. I wouldn’t.

I raised my head and looked at him. His expression, for once, was open and sincere. He wasn’t trying to hide anything. And there was so much sympathy and kindness and
care
in his gaze that the tears I’d been fighting welled up and over.

“Oh, you sweet thing,” he said. He spun my chair to face his, our knees brushing, and cupped my face in his hands. I bit my lip, feeling tears stream down my face, embarrassed and vulnerable, afraid to let him see me like this.

He leaned in and kissed me, gently, carefully.

He said my name.

I rested my face against his shoulder and wept.

SEVENTEEN

Elliott

“You’re late.”

I looked at Carter and sighed. “Only ten minutes. Traffic was terrible coming through Midtown. I’m sure Regan will forgive me.”

“You brought flowers, so I’d bet on it,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder, and stood aside to let me into the house.

Regan was in the kitchen, tossing a salad with the baby strapped to her chest in a tangle of fabric. She looked up as I entered the room, and smiled as she saw what I was carrying. “Elliott, you didn’t have to,” she said.

“Of course I did,” I said, and bent to kiss her cheek. She took the flowers from me, exclaiming over their color and variety, and climbed onto a footstool to take a vase down from above the sink.