I stare at that number for a long beat. All those zeroes. I’d never take that money from Neil. How would I even look him in the eye afterward? But now that number is sitting here on the sofa between us, like a hand grenade.
God. I feel a flare of anger at Neil, even though I know this wasn’t his idea. He’s still reading, easing the sheaf of papers out of my hands and flipping to the next page.
He makes a noise of pure disgust and folds the pages in half, like he’s shielding us both from what’s written there.
“Hey! I was reading that.”
Ignoring me, he makes a move to get up. I sense the window of opportunity closing, so I dive for the pages with the same one hundred percent commitment that I bring to each lunge for the puck.
And guess who’s the number-two scorer on her team? It was Neil’s mistake to try to be casual about his exit. Because I get my hands on those papers and clamp down with a vise-like grip. Then, with a forceful jerk, they’re mine.
“Charli,” he cautions, the tone of his voice uncharacteristically beaten.
“What?” I turn my body slightly away from him to protect my prize. He too is a professional athlete with top-notch reflexes.
He tries a different tactic. “Just don’t read that.”
“Why?”
“You’re not signing it.”
“Well, the financial part is garbage. But can’t we just cross out that number? We can write in ten dollars as a joke. I’ll let your family buy me a premium beer.”
“Just don’t,” he whispers.
I glance at him over my shoulder, and he honestly looks distraught. A nicer girl would hand back the documents. But I’m not that girl. I’m the desperately curious one with poor impulse control. I flip open to a random page.
Furthermore, Charlotte Fern Higgins will not reside within three miles of Cornelius Harmon Drake III. She will not approach him nearer than 200 yards. She will not call, text, email or otherwise contact him in any method either extant or invented in the future.
“Holy. Crap.” I read that paragraph three more times just to make sure I’m not dreaming. But it’s right there in black and white. The Drakes want me so far away from their precious son that I’m not allowed to contact him at all. “Invented in the future?” I sputter as my famous temper ignites. “Who knows what future ways there might be for me to get at your fortune! Robots? Attack drones?”
“Charli, don’t read it,” he begs.
But now I have to. I skim the whole damn thing, and it’s horrifying. “There’s a paragraph whereby I agree never to give a quote to a journalist about any member of the Drake family, living or dead. There’s one where I agree never to supply my likeness to any news organization for any purpose. So I guess if I win MVP this year, we can’t take a photo?”
Wow. That’s just mean.
On one level, I know this isn’t really about me. But it’s still cruel. These people want to write a fat check and then erase me from their son’s orbit. “This doesn’t even make sense. I could never comply with—” I wave the papers around. “—this atrocity. Do they even care that we work in the same building?”
“They don’t,” he says in a low voice. He parks his ass on the sofa, then plants his elbows on his knees and buries his forehead in his palms. “You know this isn’t personal, right?”
I make an angry noise. I do know what he’s saying, but this isn’t my first brush with crazy rich people. “They’re terrified of me,” I say, as the realization dawns.
I’m not sure how I feel about that. I spent my teenage years trying to become so fearsome that I could incinerate everyone who’d bullied me with a single glance. I learned how to fight. I learned how to support myself, even in some pretty grim ways.
I learned how never to take any bullshit from anyone. And definitely never to cry. I thought by now I knew a lot about how the world worked, and maybe I do.
But I’ve always been an outcast. The kid from the wrong side of the tracks who won a sports scholarship to the same prep school Neil’s sister and ex-girlfriend attended. The girl nobody ever brought home to meet the parents. I’d been cast in that role since I was fifteen, and after a while, it wears on a person.
“This is not about you,” Neil says quietly. “It’s actually about my mother.”
“Wait, what?” I’m totally lost. “Your mother?”
“Yup. It’s an old family rift. Uncle Harmon always thought my mother was a gold digger, and my father was an idiot for marrying her.”
I try to make sense of that. “Because she wasn’t rich, too?”
“Possibly. She was also twenty-five years younger than my father, and his second wife. My uncle doesn’t need reasons to dislike people, though. He doesn’t trust anyone. He never liked my mom, and ever since my father died, it’s worse.” He rubs his handsome chin. “He controls my mother’s inheritance. Hers and Paisley’s.”
“Wait—but not yours?”
Neil’s smile is thin. “The estate was set up in a complicated way. I got control of my share when I turned twenty-five. Paisley will, too. But my mother’s money is under Harmon’s control for life. He gives her an allowance, and she has to petition him for any unusual expenditures. She wants to sell her apartment and buy another one, and he’s making her write a proposal. It’s humiliating.”
“Yikes.” On one hand, I’m starting to get the picture—Neil’s family is all twisted up about money, and it doesn’t have a thing to do with me.
On the other hand… don’t these people know they don’t have any real problems? Jesus.
“I’m sorry you are tangled up in it, too,” Neil says quietly. “You can’t sign this document. I can find another attorney to handle this.” He flings the pages at the coffee table, where they land at the feet of the bronze horse.
One page goes skimming off the table, and I lean over to pluck it off the floor. I hadn’t noticed this page before. It’s separate from the post-nup. “Hey, what’s this?” The letterhead is different, too. The Drake Family Foundation.
Neil takes the page from my hand and reads it, a deep furrow forming in his forehead. “Huh. I’d forgotten about this provision.”
“What?” I let out a huge yawn. This has been the longest day. Literally, since I woke up in another time zone.
“When a Drake gets married, his spouse automatically claims a seat on the board—not of the company itself, but of the family foundation…” Neil trails off, but he’s still staring at the page. “So they’re asking you to give up your seat voluntarily.”
“I don’t need any new hobbies, so that’s an easy decision.” I reach up and pat his cheek. The stubble scratches my palm in a satisfying way.
Okay, stop touching Neil. Bad things happen when you touch Neil.
He hasn’t noticed. He’s still staring at the paper. “You’d change the vote,” he says slowly. “We’d control the foundation.”
“So what?” I lean back, trying to get more comfortable on this awful sofa. My limbs are weary. I need this to be over, so I can go home to bed.