Chapter 10
Penelope
The early morning sun warmed my back as I knelt on the beach in front of an almost complete sandcastle. The sound of the waves
crashing mingled with the graveled crunch of sand as I scooped it up.
When a pottery wheel wasn’t available, a sandy beach was an excellent alternative to channel busy hands and ease a busy mind.
Last night, after leaving the party, Xander and I walked the beach wordlessly for a while. An uncomfortable silence followed
us back to his beach house and I immediate excused myself to a guest room.
I hadn’t seen him this morning, but when I got downstairs there was coffee and banana muffins waiting on the counter. I wouldn’t
blame him for rethinking what he agreed to in the spur of the moment.
“Is that Chateau de Chenonceau?” His voice came from behind me, warm and inviting.
A shadow fell along the western face of the sandcastle. I held a hand above my eyes and squinted, looking up to see Xander.
His athletic body blocked the sunlight. He was holding two mugs.
He offered one to me. The sand beneath my knees shifted as I wiped my hands against my shorts and reached up for it.
“Thank you. And yes,” I said, pride filling my chest. What started as five large shapeless mounds became the sweeping curves of turrets, the delicate contours of the windows, and the angular heights of the roof.
He took a seat next to me and examined the castle more closely. Then he rested his elbows on his knees and looked ahead at
the horizon. “All that work for high tide to wash it away in a few hours?”
I cradled the mug in my hands, the warmth seeped into my cold fingers. “Permanence is time’s prison.”
The moments we’d had alone together since we’d met were usually on drives and the brief spaces between parties or other gatherings.
In those instances, there was a seriousness about him. Not a menacing or off-putting one. But he was different when he wasn’t
masked behind an array of snarky remarks or witty comebacks.
Real.
I often found myself looking forward to that time.
“Poetic,” he noted.
“I’ve had some time to think on it.”
“Permanence can be nice,” he offered so quietly it was nearly muted below the sound of the crashing waves.
He looked over to me and his eyes lingered on the ring.
Guilt snaked through me. “I’m sorry. I’ll go into the city tomorrow and—”
“It’s fine. My mom had an interesting sense of humor.” He chuckled and looked up, glancing around the morning sky. “Maybe
this is her return fire for you putting on her ring without permission.”
I smiled so wide I could feel my cheeks tightly against the bottoms of my eyes. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but
the joy in his voice was contagious.
“Is that where you get it from?” I asked.
“Probably. She was the one who started the prank war tradition between me and Sloan.”
I could feel that recognizable pull. The one I imagined everyone felt when they were around him. The urge to know more. To hear more outlandish stories. To be a part of his world.
“Speaking of Sloan.” I cleared my throat, remembering the conversation I had this morning. “She called me.” It was a short
call. Sloan being her typical, well-meaning, busybody self. She wanted to help get everything sorted, fix it. It was endearing
and very much in character for Sloan. Maya called minutes after we hung up; she’d been summoned by her mentor to act as my
counsel. She’d be working in the Hamptons all summer as well, and now she was assigned to my case. “We’ve been summoned to Amari Manor.”
Amari Manor, Henry Amari’s home in the Hamptons, also happened to be next door to Sloan and Marcus’s beach house.
“Yeah. She called me, too.”
A couple of waves crashed closer to the shoreline, sending a salty mist against my skin. He turned his mug in his hand and
shifted a bit. The sun bathed him in warmth.
It was reminiscent of that morning. The one a year and a half ago before I left for London for work, before everything changed.
It was the first time I believed the attraction, the playful banter, all the things I quietly ignored might be more and maybe
not one-sided.
The deep, luxurious scent of coffee woke me. Sitting up on my plush couch, still in my evening gown, my eyes adjusted to the
early morning light.
I looked around my living room then to the clock. Nine A.M. New Year’s Day.
It was quiet. I blinked away the sleepiness and I looked ahead at the coffee table. A to-go container of coffee sat next to
a banana muffin.
Last night had been the Hightower New Year’s Eve party. Before I got to the ballroom, I made the mistake of picking up a phone call from Maddox. He was going to be in London for some time while I was there with Sloan on assignment for the firm.
The rest of the night felt like vertigo, and I decided to leave the party early.
As I did, I ran into Xander. He looked dazed, almost haunted. Neither of us were in the mood for a party, but were in need
of a stiff drink, so we ended up at my house.
I stood and wandered to the counter, taking my muffin and coffee with me. My evening gown trailed along the floor.
Xander and I talked for most of the night, and I guess I fell asleep on the couch. I enjoyed those hours in my kitchen more
than any party I’d attended in years.
I took a bite of the muffin, then placed it on the counter as I walked down the hall toward the sound coming from the entryway.
Xander sat on the floor in front of my potted poppies. The morning light poured over him. He was in his tux from last night,
minus the tie and jacket. Next to him was a to-go coffee and a bucket of soil. He gently tilled it over and around the stems.
“What are you doing to my poppies?”
He paused for a moment, then looked over at me, an entertained smile playing along his lips. “They’re almost dead. When is
the last time you watered them?”
I couldn’t remember. That was probably a bad sign.
“Where did you get soil?” I wondered, taking a sip of the coffee he’d clearly run out for. It was from a bakery near my house.
My fingers tapped along the paper cup.
“They need water.” Xander ignored my question and clapped his hands against each other, brushing off the potting soil, then
picked up the entire planter. “And sunlight.”
I followed a few steps behind him as he placed it in the corner of the nook where my breakfast table sat. He turned it so
the flowers were in the sunlight.
“And make sure someone takes care of them when you’re in London,” he instructed warmly.
“Water. Sunlight. Caretaker,” I counted off as the butterflies in my stomach kicked up a whirlwind. “Understood.”
A few days after that morning, Sloan and I were off to London for six months for work.
By the time I came back, everything had changed. My family told me about the plans for me to marry Maddox and for a while,
I was resigned to it.
And Xander, well, he’d gone about his life like that morning never happened. Weeks after returning and sharing the news, the
society section was littered with pictures of Madison and Xander; he was very much still in his pattern of short-lived relationships.
I thought I felt something , but it was probably nothing. My intuition was spotty at best.
“Penelope.” The serious timbre in his voice roused me from the memory. “What exactly did I sign up for?”
“Nothing,” I blurted before thinking. Maybe I messed up. Maybe all this was too much, a step too far. A tremor ran through
my hand as I backpedaled what I’d decided the day before. “I... I’ll talk to Selena. We can stop all this now.”
“Hey.” Xander’s gentle voice steadied my nerves. The reassuring look in his eye felt like a guiding light, promising me I
wasn’t lost. “If you want your inheritance this way, we’ll do it. I just need the details. I’m part of this, too, now.”
“Right.” I looked at my feet as my heels dug into the sand a little deeper. I also remembered that all of what happened last
night happened in front of half of high-society Manhattan. And important members of Dawn Capital’s portfolio. It sort of sealed
things unless he planned to have awkward conversations with everyone in attendance. “I’m sorry. I know commitments aren’t
really your thing.”
“It’s not a real commitment.” He gave me a tilted smile, though it seemed to waver at the corners. “Really, Penelope, it’s not a big deal.
I want to help. Just tell me what we need to do.”
I envied him for that, the ability to make a decision in a moment and feel assured in it. A lifetime of being told I was wrong in wanting things that felt natural robbed me of that confidence and riddled me with self-doubt when it came to making personal choices. Like now, when I waffled over if I’d done the right thing.
“You signed up for a year,” I explained, giving him the details he asked for. “I’ll get my inheritance a year from the date
of my marriage. The only stipulations are: I need the marriage to happen by the end of this summer and I need to purchase
a home in Singapore.”
“Buy a property, get married,” he counted off on his hand. “Simple.”
I nodded.
We could do this. It would ensure my mother would be cared for in perpetuity. The taxes on that country estate she lived on
alone were higher than my annual bonus. The shares in Astor Media were not only rightfully hers, but the dividends would provide
my mother financial security for the rest of her life. And maybe loosen the pressure that caring for her always bore down
on me.
Xander was silent and looked back at the water. The waves lapped gently at the shoreline, inching closer to my castle; the
sound filled the quiet between us.
“I would have walked away from it, the inheritance,” I told him, hoping to abate the shame I felt for dragging him into this.
“I planned to. But that night, during the masquerade, Maddox told me about my family’s plans to tie my mother’s shares in
Astor Media into that inheritance as well. And add a timeline for this summer.”
Something flared in his emerald eyes. “That’s why you left with him?”
I nodded and regretted the way I snapped at Xander that night for being a good friend.
“I needed to figure out what I was going to do. I hadn’t really decided until right before we left for the Hamptons and”—I
looked at the ring—“This.”
“Why does your dad’s family have control of your mom’s shares in her family’s company?”
“On paper, my father said he was concerned that my mother would misuse them. Truthfully, she isn’t the best with responsibility,”
I explained. Even now, my mother relied on me to take care of everything. “He promised them back to her through me and in
turn, he let my mother have the custody arrangement she wanted.”
My mother only agreed to that because she was twenty-five and terrified that he’d take away her only child. She assumed she
could live on her settlement, something she’d nearly run through by now. She had no idea the shares would one day be used
as a means to control me.
“That way they keep you in line and honor a marriage to Maddox,” Xander surmised quietly. “What do the Xus get out of it?”
“My mother doesn’t have siblings,” I explained, “so her title passes to me. I’m the last Astor.”
To the Xus, I was something of a rarity. Born with a Western title, but raised in Singapore, I was a bargaining chip into
every high-society family.
“Tying you to Maddox, using your mom as emotional blackmail, and no one seems to care how you feel about it.” He ran his hand
along his jaw, frustrated. Then he looked back to me and smiled. One of those smiles that always seemed to make my stomach
flip. “Maybe we should use our invisibility for evil.”
My heart felt lighter.
He had a knack for doing that, chasing away the heaviness with humor.
“This may not be a simple favor, Xander. My half brother, Silas, may want to fight me on my choice, or be treacherous,” I
warned.
He stood and dusted the sand off his legs.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he assured me with an impossible confidence. “Xander Sutton doesn’t lose.”