Accidental Billionaire Plus-One (Billionaires of Manhattan #9)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

KELSEY

My sister, Danielle, always lines up her pens parallel with table edges. I forgot that about her. I forgot so much about her.

I missed so much about her.

But now here she is—here we are, sitting at a coffee shop together, addressing invitations for her upcoming wedding as though the last three years of estrangement didn’t happen.

I’m thrilled.

And also a little confused.

She’d texted me six weeks ago.

Hey, what are you doing June tenth? Would you want to come to your big sister’s wedding? And help do some boss calligraphy on the invites? I could come down to the city...maybe that first weekend in January?

I’d read the text over and over, wondering if she’d meant to send it to somebody else. But who else knows calligraphy? Calligraphy was Danielle’s and my thing. We took classes as teenagers. We were into it.

I drafted my response text elsewhere so she wouldn’t see the dots going forever. I finally landed on:

Hey! Big congratulations. I’d love to!

And here we are.

This morning, I’d carefully asked her what had changed, and she’d just said, “It needs to be over.”

I’d waited for more. I really wanted more, but I hadn’t wanted to rock the boat, so I’d just told her I agreed.

People come in and out. The espresso machine erupts behind us now and then, followed by the whine of milk being steamed. Cups knock, spoons clink, someone laughs too loudly near the register. Everything so normal.

Except for us. Just us sitting here is earthshaking!

I keep sneaking glances at her. What shifted things? Was there new information? Or did my family wake up one morning and realize I would never ever ever in a zillion years do such a thing?

So...do they see how wrong they were about me, and they feel shitty?

The last words my mother said to me were, “We have nothing to say to each other unless you come forward with what you did.” And Danielle and Dad were right there with her.

The still-unaddressed cream-colored envelopes sit in a stack between us.

“You sure you’re scone-crumb free over there?” she asks, and for a second, I’m thrown back to childhood, to her fussing over my messy ways.

“Definitely!” I say, maybe too brightly. “If one single crumb lands on an envelope, I’ll personally mail it to the bottom of the Atlantic where vengeful shrimp will feast upon its shame!”

She doesn’t quite smile, but she doesn’t quite frown either. She starts in on the next invite.

“I’ve been brushing up,” I tell her. “L’s were always my weak suit but behold...” I show her my latest creation.

“Not bad!” She concentrates on her own. “I sadly have not improved my Q’s.”

I bite back the impulse to make a joke. Tone it down, I tell myself. Danielle hates when you’re a lot.

But then I can’t help it. “Hopefully you aren’t inviting Quiston Q. Questerbury.”

She smiles faintly, and suddenly I can’t bear it any longer.

“Dani... I have to know, though...did some new clue about the true culprit come to light or what? Because you know I would never...”

She pauses, her pen hovering over thick paper. “We are choosing to believe you. You’re my sister. Mom and Dad’s daughter. And I’m getting married, and what would that be without you? You say you didn’t do it, Kelsey.”

Choosing to believe. What does it mean?

“And we are indeed inviting Quiston Q. Questerbury.”

I snort and focus on the next invite.

Choosing to believe. The phrase replays in my mind.

It’s not believing. Or is it?

I can’t sit here interrogating her about it. I’m going to be present. The more they’re around me, the more they’ll remember who I am.

I’m innocent, and they have to know that deep down, because they know my heart—that’s the bottom line.

I think I deserve an apology, but this is a first step toward one. And I’ve missed them so much.

I focus on the next envelope. We complete another stack and I put on my coat and carry them to the mailbox across the street.

“So how’s the dancing?” she asks when I get back inside.

I fill her in. She seems surprised I’m in a big Broadway production—the Anything Goes revival. I tell her about my teaching gigs. She tells me about a Caribbean cruise she and her fiancé took over this past holiday season.

“Wait, you skipped the family hoedown at Aunt Mae’s?

I was just telling my friend how it’s the perfect holiday place, like enchanted on every possible level, and our games...

” I trail off. My voice is so full of longing—even I hear it.

“Of course Christmas in New York can’t be beat.

When the snow falls?” I smile brightly. “Perfection.”

I don’t include my little New York tradition of how I used to pretend I had somewhere to go on holidays so my friends wouldn’t feel sorry for me. They busted me eventually and made sure I wasn’t alone going forward.

I also redact my habit of waking up at night with a hole in my heart the size of a New York bagel, or this burning sense of injustice at being wrongly blamed for something I didn’t do.

“I’ve always heard Christmas in New York is amazing,” she says. “The magic of it.”

Danielle slides an invitation across the table. There’s my name, complete with a giant K. She always did make her initial caps extra giant. “This one’s for you.”

I make a surprised face. “Whatever could it be?” I joke. “Oh wow! And a plus-one!”

“Might there be a plus-one?” she asks slyly.

I mumble something about schedules and logistics. Because like a dork, I want her to think I have this amazing life and an amazing boyfriend.

“Sounds like your plus-one is a busy and important person!”

Through the sister universal translator, it comes out as “You are so full of shit, you don’t have a boyfriend, do you?”

No, I don’t. And I don’t want one. Men have been a disaster zone for me lately.

Or kind of always.

“We’ll hold it open,” she assures me with the confidence of somebody who knows they definitely don’t have to hold it open. “We’ve built in flexibility with so many people traveling.”

“Awesome!” I dive back into the calligraphy trenches. I pepper her with questions about Mom and Dad and all of the Oakfield gossip. I cannot believe how much I’ve missed over these past three years.

We start on the last pile of invitations. “If we have extras, what do we do with them?” I ask.

“Toss them.”

“I have all these wedding TikToks in my feed, and there is this hilarious trend where people—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. No offense but I won’t be taking any wedding advice from TikTok.”

“No, no, it’s funny! People send invitations to celebrities and fabulously wealthy personages, because sometimes their assistants automatically send gifts without really checking out who they are—”

“Wait, what?” Danielle frowns. “Send invites to rando celebrities in hopes of a present? You know who does that? Losers.”

I look down at my pen. “I mean it’s kinda funny though.”

“If you’re a loser. This is a wedding, not a caper to get free stuff.”

“It’s not about getting free stuff,” I say too quickly. “It’s just...a silly thing...”

Another silence threatens, but then I spot a woman waiting up at the counter wearing tight leggings and giant legwarmers like marshmallows. “1980s on, dude!” I say, reviving an old joke from our past where we’d add the phrase “on, dude!” onto any random noun for maximum sisterly snark.

She follows the direction of my gaze and snorts. Then she points to a guy holding a puppy, and women from the line are petting it. “Puppy trap on, dude!”

And then she really laughs.

I smile so wide my face hurts.

We go back to writing the invites.

I glance uneasily at the blue mailbox across the street.

And I swallow hard.

Gulp.

Because somewhere inside that mailbox, mixed amongst the bills and postcards and regular mail, are three wedding invitations—one addressed to Ryan Gosling, one addressed to Harry Styles, and one to Bruno Blackwood, the reclusive billionaire watchmaker I recently read about in the Sunday Ledger.

Apparently, he’s been famous in the watchmaking world for some years, but recently, some enterprising magazine writer realized, hey, he’s a hot billionaire watchmaker who lives on a yacht and shuns society. Clickbait!

And from then on, he’s been a subject of intense interest. Today on my fave gossip subreddit, somebody put up a rare photo of him scowling out from a lectern where he was giving a talk on some nerdy watch topic.

And apparently hating every minute. A very hot hater of the audience. Scowl incandescent.

So he got a wedding invite.

I’d screwed up the calligraphy on those envelopes anyway, and I didn’t know what to do with the screw-ups. And then I imagined Danielle’s delight unwrapping a crystal bowl from Ryan Gosling. What a fun surprise!

Ugh, what was I thinking? My friend Noelle is a letter carrier, and I have talked to her about her job enough to know there is no way to get those invitations back now that they’re in that blue mailbox. There is just zero chance.

I have to pray they never send gifts.

Danielle can never find out. Because she’s right, it’s what you do when you’re a loser. What was I thinking? It seemed just... funny, I guess, but it’s not funny at all. Not when things are maybe finally getting better with my family.