Jennifer Greene - The Billionaire’s Handler

“Yeah. That was exactly where I was hoping you’d go. Not letting anyone define stuff for you. Defining what you want and need for itself.”

“And I get it. You’ve been a fabulous mentor.”

“Good.”

“But what about you? ” she whispered. “How come you’re alone? You’ve never wanted a wife, kids, that kind of personal life? What do you do in your free time that makes you happy?”

He shot her a familiar look of impatience, even as he stroked the curve of her shoulder. “When you’re ten years old, you worry about what’ll make you happy. When you’re an adult, I’m not so sure that “happy” is a meaningful criterion of anything.”

“Okay. We’ll use a different word. You, being you, need to feel productive at the end of a day.”

He glanced at her. “Yeah, I do. If I haven’t accomplished concrete things at the end of a day, I feel off kilter.”

She nodded. “You have to make a difference. You have to behave by your own high standards-whether anyone else is looking or not. You have to live by what you believe in, no matter what anyone else says or thinks.”

He rolled his eyes, as if that evaluation were true of everyone. “Okay, so where are you going with all this?”

“Here’s the point. Have you ever done what you asked me to do? Make a list. A list of things you’d like to do or see. Then go after those things. Name them. Protect them. Get them on your life agenda.”

“I’ve got what I need,” he said impatiently.

Yeah, she thought. And she wasn’t on the list.

How could she expect otherwise? They’d known each other for the briefest of times, under only extraordinary circumstances. Their backgrounds were different, their families, education, everything. When it came down to it, they had nothing in common except for Tommy.

And that she’d fallen hopelessly, helplessly in love with him.

“Okay, you,” she said. “No more talking. You have what you need. I got it. But…”

“More talking?”

“Nope,” she whispered. “I was just going to show you one eensy-teensy thing that you might still need tonight.”

“No. Not that. Anything but that.”

“Shut up and take being seduced like a man, Maguire,” she said gruffly, and then, gently, “although, you can offer a suggestion here and there if you feel like it. I’m a believer in making rolling readjustments.”

“Are you now?”

Her man was thirsty and hungry. Not for water or food. For sustenance of the heart. But…

She was about to give him a second helping. Something to hold him for a while.

Because she was leaving after that. She knew it. He knew it.

And she had absolutely no way to stop it.

A day had never passed so fast. Maguire never specifically said, “That’s it, back to real life now”-and neither did she. Carolina didn’t need to talk about an elephant in the living room to know it was there.

Chores followed chores-the MG had been returned, the messes from their overnight in the tree house dismantled and taken back to the lodge, then the lodge tackled. She put her belongings together, cleaned the fridge. Maguire made heaps of phone calls and worked to make the lodge “turn key,” prepared for an absence.

At some point, the schedule went on the table. At ten in the morning, Henry would fly her directly to South Bend, and see that she was settled back at her place. Maguire had a temporary business thing in Denver, after which he was disappearing back to wherever else he lived, whatever else he did.

There was only one way she could handle this, Carolina determined, and she bounced down the stairs a few minutes before ten the next morning. She was wearing her red shoes, old jeans, new sunglasses, her hair all flyaway and her cheerfulness out front, brassy and brazen.

With only minutes left, she wanted him to see exactly what she wasn’t. A princess. A well-mannered, well-bred, perfect type of rich man’s wife. She was what she was-a teacher who came from a blue-collar background. Who was going to love her red shoes until the day she died. Who loved sleeping with owls. And pigging out on lobster. And who was always going to have to work at certain flaws in her character, because they were pretty close to unchangeable.

“Okay, let’s get these goodbyes over with and this show on the road. Kiss,” she demanded of Henry. Who pecked her properly, even as he stood in the door with her luggage.

She pranced over to Maguire, her cheerfulness beaming even brighter. “Kiss,” she demanded.

He held her by the shoulders, his grip just a little too tight, his eyes just a little too dark. “Listen,” he said.

“No. I’ve listened to you until I’m blue in the face. You’ve taught me all you’re going to teach me, big guy. But I’ve got advice for you. Don’t kidnap any other women, okay?”

He grinned, but the smile faded away, and still he held on to her shoulders. “When you were a kid, I’ll bet you read a book by Shel Silverstein. The Giving Tree. ”

She blinked in surprise. “Well, yeah, who hasn’t? I adored it.”

“That’s what you need to guard for, Carolina. Your nature is to be that giving tree. But you can’t do that-give and give and give-without stripping yourself bare. You put up your boundaries. You get tough.”

“Yes, sir. Are you going to give Tommy a big hug from me?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to let me visit him sometime? And vice versa?”

“Absolutely yes.”

“So where’s my kiss goodbye, Maguire?”

She was trying to sound saucy and sassy and fun. But he didn’t want to kiss her. She could see it. She could feel it, like a knife twisting in her heart, a sharp ache of awareness. He might want her. He might like being with her. He might even love her, to a point.

But he didn’t want to.

She was just a project for him. A responsibility. A problem he had to fix.

“Okay, okay,” she said teasingly. “No kiss for you. Just know, I’m not about to forget you.”

She made it inside the plane before she started crying. Henry didn’t see her, nor did the copilot up front. Both were locked in the front cabin, while she had the whole fancy back to herself. A down blanket and poofy pillows were set up for her to nap, a gourmet lunch with cold shrimp and lobster dripping ice whenever she wanted it.

All she wanted was to find some Kleenex.

The trip was around four hours, and by the time the jet landed, her eyes were over-dry, but she’d tidied up everything in back-washed her few dishes, folded up the blanket, nothing out of place, as if she’d never been there. Henry came through from the front and took one narrow-eyed look at her face.

“Are we doing okay?” he asked tactfully.

“Of course we are.”

“Mr. Cochran set up a car waiting.”

“Of course he did,” she said hollowly.

Henry drove her from the airport to her old apartment. Carolina thought the short drive was a little like landing on Mars. All the familiar landmarks seemed to be someone else’s landmarks. She knew the roads, the restaurants, the gold dome of Notre Dame, the infamous Grape Road-but none of them gave her a feeling of being home.

Her apartment was the worst, although Henry kept up a steady patter to fill her in. “We had your car checked out, tires, gas, oil, all that, because we didn’t know what shape it was in when you left.”

“Thanks, Henry.”

“It was Mr. Cochran who did it all, really. I wouldn’t have thought of all the specifics and details, not the way he did. In the meantime, your regular email and phones have been turned back on. I’ve got a folder of contacts-who we contacted, so they’d know you were all right. And who was trying to reach you. You realize we’d have given you the communications before if there’d been any kind of emergency-”