Opal looked up from the page she was reading. “No paid promiscuity? Really?”
I shrugged. “You will be staying in my family home, not a brothel. I don't need that dirt on my family name.”
“I just -” She sighed. Shaking her head, she resumed her reading.
She signed it and gave it back to me. “I’d like a notarized copy of this please.”
I smiled. “Someone knows big words. You don’t trust me.”
She snorted. “Not even a little.”
I nodded. “That’s fair and likewise.”
She smiled too much and hers missed the bitterness mine had. “I hadn't expected anything less.”
“Questions?”
She shook her head.
“Okay, let’s go. Take the child,” I jerked my head toward the car seat he was already asleep in. “I'll take your bags.”
The entirety of their belongings fit inside only three medium-sized travel bags. It would have been sad if I didn't know she had chosen to spend any money she ever made on drugs.
"His name is Timothy or Timmy. He is not ‘the child’.”
I waved my hand dismissively before picking up the bags and exiting the apartment.
She followed me down silently and settled the child in the backseat, checking three times to make sure it was secure.
She sat beside him and remained silent as we exited the city.
I glanced at her a few times as she seemed lost in her own head. I was still uncertain about why she had signed the contract. She was going to come out with nothing in the end - a druggie was a druggie.
This woman sitting beside me in my Porsche was really not at all what I had expected one of Edward's messed up girlfriends to be. How was that even possible?
“Why do you keep looking at me?” she asked, breaking me out of my thoughts.
“What?”
“You keep looking at me. I’m wondering why?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I just can’t help noticing how thin you are - just like Eddie was. The druggie diet, is it? How you two managed to have a child, albeit a defective one, baffles me.”
She gasped and turned toward me. “Timmy is not defective! He has a heart defect like millions of other babies are born with every year. I don't mind you disrespecting me, calling me names -” She waved her hands as if my words truly didn’t affect her, and maybe they didn’t. Oddly, I found that that bothered me. “But you leave him out of it. He’s the best baby there is and he has been through enough.”
“Thanks to whom?” I bite back.
She sighed. “Oh and also one more thing - the ‘druggie diet’ is not the reason for my looks. It’s what I call the ‘no money diet.’ Apparently, a woman can’t live exclusively on ramen noodles…who knew?"
I glared at the road, wanting to unleash my wrath on the woman beside me. But I knew it would not be productive to do that while driving and especially not with the baby in the back.
She was a complication I didn't need in my life. I wanted to take the child from her and let her try to fight me on it, but she had been infuriatingly right. If I could have taken the child from her, I would have done it in a heartbeat.
Unfortunately, Beaumont Enterprises was just starting to recover from the scandal caused by our former Finance Director. He’d left his dying wife and run away with his assistant, leaving in his wake a file full of sexual harassment complaints.
How that file had found its way to the media, I was not sure. But in one day, our shares had plummets twenty-one percent, losing us nearly two billion dollars. Nobody had believed that higher management had not been aware of their Finance Director's actions. And truthfully, I had known; I just hadn’t cared. The company was turning a profit. He was good at his job. His character hadn’t mattered - but maybe it should have.
Beaumont Enterprises had just started to recover from this - after an extensive PR maneuver, a women rights campaign, a new woman CFO, and the financing of numerous sensitivity programs across the country.
Taking a sick child from an addict pretending to be on the path of recovery would have been a blow to the company's still recovering image. “Billionaire Magnate Stealing Child from a Poor Mother" - that would have been mediatic suicide.
After she had fought me this morning, I'd gone to speak with our head lawyer, Phil. The man was in his mid-fifties and looked like a defenseless older man with his short frame and imposing gut, but he was as cunning as he was smart and he had saved us in more ways than I could count. He had been in place when my father had been on the decline, and he'd helped me keep the pretenses.
When I'd gone to him today, I'd told him we needed to come with a plan B and as usual, I hadn't been disappointed.
‘You know that given the right circumstances, druggies always fail. Take her in, just do your thing, and when she falls off the rails? You swoop in, get custody of the child, and look like a hero doing it. You took it upon yourself to help the mother of your nephew, but she wasn't ready to be helped, so you are keeping her son safe. The selfless uncle. That’s PR gold, Dean. Just do it.’
It had been cunning advice that I’d been eager to take. I wouldn’t even need to set her up to fail. Druggies were druggies. Edward had relapsed too many times to count.
One time too many, I thought bitterly. And she would too. Given the time and the opportunity, she would too. I was just forced to suffer her presence in the meantime.
I sighed.
“You didn’t have to do that, you know. I never asked for your help.”
I threw her a look. It was true, she hadn't. “You said you didn’t know Edward was a Beaumont.”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Even if I'd known, I wouldn’t have come.”
“Yes, you would. You people always do.”
“Wow, a way to make a generalization there.”
I chuckled, but it lacked humor. I knew she couldn’t be that naive, not with the life she led. She literally made money using her body. No, she was just a skilled liar. I needed to be more watchful.
“This is where you live?” she asked with awe looking at all the greenery, spotless streets and big expensive houses in the distance.
“Yes,” I replied curtly as I pressed the button for the iron gates, which were adorned with the B of Beaumont. This house was nice, yes, but it wasn’t even the biggest in the area despite us being the richest family in the town - hell, in the state and quite possibly on the east coast.
‘Live’ was also a bit of a stretch. I barely came here anymore. There were too many memories, too many nightmares.
This was the first time I had been back in over eight months. Staying here for an extended amount of time was something I looked forward to about as much as spending some time with the woman sitting beside me.
My parents had visited this house for a fundraiser when my mother was pregnant with me, and she'd fallen in love with the gardens. My father could never refuse her anything and so had purchased it for her.
If she could see the gardens now...
“This is magnificent,” Opal whispered, her eyes opened wide in awe.
“For you, evidently,” I replied after parking in front of the six-car garage.
“Yes, evidently.” She turned toward me and the winter sun lit her eyes, showing that they were not the dull brown I'd thought they’d been under the poor lighting of her dump-of-a-studio apartment. Rather, they were a rich honey, eerily quite similar in color to my signature drink - honey bourbon.