CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
(Charlotte)
While I hadn’t been living in the city for long—and I certainly wasn’t someone to ask for directions—I knew enough to know that Matt was driving us in the wrong direction.
“I think we might be headed to the wrong site,” I said, trying not to let my disappointment show.
I’d wanted to see Ascend Manhattan situated closer to downtown than the East Side.
Sure, our clientele would probably be from the ritzy, legacy buildings neighboring Central Park, but it wasn’t an area that screamed modernity and decadence like the ever-changing, eye-catching midtown.
Maybe that was my naive, new-in-town sensibility, though. Matt and most of the people at his company knew the place better than me. I’d just thought the site had already been decided, and that I’d been a part of that decision making.
“Nope,” he responded, and my heart fell further into my stomach. “I know exactly where I’m going. And you should probably memorize the route, princess. You’ll be taking it a lot.”
I gave him my best hiding-my-tears smile. Maybe if I forced myself to look on the bright side, the change of venue wouldn’t be so bad. And since when had I gotten so invested in this job?
Since Matt had believed in me enough to trust me with it. I wanted everything to be perfect, and I’d already lost some perfect locations.
And as we drove, things looked less and less perfect. When we pulled up to the curb in front of a brick office building, my chest ached.
This was going to be Ascend Manhattan? What had happened to the boutique hotel and all the glamor? Was I being selfish and elitist for mourning that aspect of my vision? Did Matt not trust my ideas and abilities as much as he’d said he did?
“This is it, huh?” I asked and heard the tremor in my voice.
“This is it. I know it doesn’t look like much...” His voice died away. Then, with forced cheerfulness, he pushed open his door and said, “Come on. Let me show you inside.”
It wasn’t much better on the inside. We entered a fluorescent-lit foyer with a cracked tile floor and two elevators with lumpy coats of paint.
“It’s going to take a lot to get this place...” I abandoned the thought entirely. I couldn’t hold back, anymore. “This isn’t going to work. I have no idea why you chose this over the site we recommended, but I can’t see how this matches the vision, at all.”
His eyebrows rose nearly to his hairline, and an expression of horror washed over his features. “No! Oh my god, no, no, this isn’t that building. You thought I was going to turn this place into Ascend Manhattan? It’s only five stories, there isn’t nearly enough room.”
The weight of my relief made my shoulders sag.
He went on, “I wouldn’t screw with your project like that without you knowing. This is my own thing. This is where my foundation will be headquartered.”
“Your foundation?” It was the first I was hearing about any foundation.
“For childhood epilepsy,” he explained as the light above his head flickered.
“Free testing, meds, specialists, the whole deal. I’m throwing down the initial costs and funding it independently for ten years, but Catherine is helping to set up an endowment that will enable it to keep going in perpetuity. ”
“Catherine?” My voice went high and thin. Since when had they been able to be in a room together long enough to even sign the form?
“Turns out my ‘meddling’ in her life didn’t have the disastrous outcome you anticipated, huh?” He didn’t disguise his self-satisfied grin. But it was quickly replaced with the excitement over this news. He hit the elevator button and said, “Come on, I’ll show you my office.”
“You already have an office? How long have you been working on this?” Without telling me, I mentally added.
“Oh, about a month.” He gestured for me to enter the elevator ahead of him, then hit the button for the fourth floor. “I wanted everything to be set in stone before I told you, so you wouldn’t think it was a pipe dream I wasn’t going to follow through on.”
“Why would I have thought that?”
“Because I’m a billionaire. And as you’ve pointed out several times, billionaires don’t do things that don’t make them richer.
I wanted to be sure this was all going to work out before I told you about it because I didn’t want you to be disappointed in me if we hit a roadblock.
I didn’t want you to think it was an excuse or.
.. here we are,” he said as the doors slid open.
As much I wanted to hear more about this foundation, I needed to make something good and God damn clear between us.
I took his hands in mine to stop him as we stood in what appeared to be a vast warehouse of empty cubicles.
“Why would I have doubted your follow-through? You jumped through about a million hoops to pay all those medical bills off. You finished that project. If you’d told me about this, I would have been your biggest cheerleader. ”
“I didn’t need a cheerleader, though,” he said, and lifted our joined hands to his lips to kiss the backs of my knuckles.
“I needed some tough love. I needed reality. And you gave that to me. If you’d never called me out on my rich guy bullshit, told me about how the actual world works?
I would still be running around spending money on a needlessly lavish lifestyle, trying to please people who can damn well please themselves, and fucking everything that moved. ”
“Let’s not stop doing that last part,” I interjected.
“Never,” he promised. “But I don’t need to make people’s fantasies come true. I need to make their realities not suck as much.”
My heart ached at his excitement over the project, over his new direction. His enthusiasm was almost childlike.
“So, this is your new hobby, then?” I joked. “Not making people’s fantasies come true, but making people’s lives measurably better?”
He shook his head, dead serious. “It’s not a hobby. It’s my mission.”
I gave his hands a squeeze and released him to wander a few steps into the space. “So, the location is intentionally close to the hospital.”
“We’ll be working with them on referrals for clients in need. I thought about making it open to anyone, but Catherine pointed out, rightly so, that rich people can take care of their own medical issues.”
“Rich people,” I reiterated. “Not middle-class people.”
“Exactly. The income limit is going to be set a lot higher than Catherine would have liked.” He walked with me, peeking into a few of the cubicles. “Hey, free pen.”
“You’re already reaping the rewards of your good deed.” I paused in front of another one. “Ooh, a calendar with puppies on it. And it’s from 2020, so it will be good again in, what, eight years?”
“Better hang on to that,” he quipped. “Come on, over here.”
Matt’s office was behind a plain door with a wood grain surface that seemed suspiciously plastic.
He opened it and clicked on the light. His headquarters weren’t sprawling or impressive at all.
The single window started at waist height to make room for an ancient radiator, and there were still indents where a desk’s legs had made round impressions in the generic gray carpet.
There was an unoffensively blue-gray sofa along one wall, and an abstract watercolor print in a thin gold frame above it.
It was the kind of place styled to look like every other office building.
“We’re going to give it a makeover, obviously,” he said, watching my expression. “But I’m not gonna knock down walls to expand it to prove that I’m powerful and important.”
“Because the mission is what’s important,” I finished for him. “Fuck... Matt, this is such a shock.”
“I wish it wasn’t. I wish it was the way things were.
I wish I’d been raised to see people as more important than money.
But I’m grateful someone finally spoke up about it.
” He looked down, and I thought it was a gesture of shame.
I was about to reassure him when I realized he was reaching into his jacket pocket.
He said, “I hope you don’t mind that I’m not getting down on one knee,” before I even saw the signature blue of the ring box.
I covered my mouth and backed up.
“But I know your first instinct is to run, and by the time I manage to get back up, you’ll already be at the airport.” He opened the box and held it out.
Inside, the clearest, most colorless diamond I’d ever seen in my life winked up from a simple, thin platinum band.
“Don’t run,” he said in a pleading near-whisper, closing the already negligible distance between us. Maybe it was a test, to see if I would step back. To see if I would literally pull away before I did it figuratively.
I gazed up into his eyes, lost myself in the love and fearful hope there. I couldn’t speak, at first, so I shook my head slightly. Then, realizing how disastrously that could be misinterpreted, I managed to rasp out, “I won’t.”
He took the ring out and tossed the box over his shoulder with a slanted smile. “What do you say, princess? Wanna get married?”
I giggled through a sudden burst of furiously happy tears.
But as quickly as that euphoria took me, it died away under the weight of doubt.
No, not doubt.
Reality.
He picked up on my change in emotion immediately, the ring poised at the tip of my finger. “What’s wrong?”
“Your mom.” Would she even come to our wedding after the way I’d reacted the last time I’d seen her? She still hadn’t spoken to me or to Matt.
“Okay. Some unresolved issues. But you’re not marrying my mother, and she’s not in charge of me. Was what you said nice? No. Was it true? Yes, and I agreed with it. Next?”
“You’ve been engaged before. I’m your sixth fiancé.” It wasn’t that far off from being the sixth spouse.
His brow furrowed; his eyes went pained. “That’s... true.”
“Did you give that any thought before you bought the ring?” I asked, as gently as could when my heart was on the line.
He nodded. “I did. Maybe not as much as you would find appropriate, but I did think about this.”
“And?” I had to know what conclusion he’d come to that made me different from the others.
“And I realized that I’m proposing to you because I want to spend the rest of my life with you.
Not because I’m afraid I’m going to lose you.
” He shrugged, as if he were helpless in the face of the truth.
“This is the first time I’ve bought an engagement ring that didn’t feel like an insurance policy.
Every other time, whether I was proposing or accepting a proposal, that I didn’t do it because of a gnawing in the pit of my stomach that convinced me that if I didn’t legally bind someone to me, I would lose them forever. ”
“You don’t feel that way about me?” I needed him to clarify that. I needed to know that this time, it would work.
Because I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to love anyone else.
“No.” He shook his head firmly. “No, Charlotte. I knew that this time, I wasn’t doing this to keep you. I was doing this with the full knowledge that you were more likely to run away than to stay, ring or not.”
In other words, “You know that if I wanted to say no to you, I could.”
“Exactly.” He let out a relieved exhale. He still held the ring and my hand, one little push away from finality.
I could say no. I could run.
I didn’t want to.
“To be one hundred percent clear: I wouldn’t be afraid to say no to you.
You’re not binding me to you. Even if you wanted to, it wouldn’t work.
If I were going to run, I would,” I warned him.
I let the realization sink in. He had to know that I meant it.
Then, I added, “But I’m not going to run.
My answer is yes. I will totally fucking marry you. ”
He pushed the ring onto my finger; it didn’t quite fit as snuggly as I’d like something so expensive to fit.
I would be on high ring alert until we got it sized.
It didn’t matter. He took my face in his hands and his mouth covered mine, and we stood there in that ugly office, losing ourselves in each other.
He could have done this in a fancy restaurant. He could have made some grand, elaborate gesture. But he’d done it in a place that was already important to him, in a new part of his life he was excited to start. What better place to start another new, exciting phase?
His tongue tangled with mine and I moaned, gripping his shoulders and practically climbing him. Married. We were going to get married. Happily ever after, till death do us part.
I almost couldn’t believe it.
He lifted his head and placed a hand at the small of my back, jerking me tight against him. “I hate to tell you this, but our first fuck as an engaged couple is going to happen very romantically on this second-hand couch.”
I laughed breathlessly with anticipation and pushed his jacket off his shoulders. “Is there a lock on the door?”
“The entire building is empty.” He nibbled at my jaw.
“Then why do we have to do it here?”
He straightened and gazed down at me, questioning.
“There are all sorts of naughty options,” I pointed out. “I mean, some of those cubicles still have desks. We could really break this place in.”
He laughed. “Desk sex in a cubicle is how you want to celebrate our engagement?”
“It would be a good start.”
He considered a moment. “I have a better idea.”