A Billionaire's Secret Baby - Chapter 14

“You know something?” said Zeke. He looked up from the book he was reading.

“What?” I said.

“Shame you aren’t married,” said Zeke before he looked down again.

“Zeke, what are you talking about?”

It had been a week since the interview at the police station. And two days since Lola and I had gone to bed together. Since that day, I’d been feeling increasingly grim. But I showed up to the office each day, and Zeke and I went through everything. City licensing laws, all our documentation. Looking for something that could save The Blue Orchid. Something that could prove my innocence.

“Well, you know Frances DeVerge?”

“Sure,” I frowned. “Fancy lady. Lives on Park Avenue. Runs that awful bar downtown, what’s it called? Da Terro’s?

“D’Amigo’s,” Zeke said, correcting me. “Anyhow. You know Frances was married?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Isn’t her husband in jail now?”

“Louis DeVerge. He was a real scumbag. Couple of guys I know used to work with him. Now there was a crooked guy.”

“What did he do?” I said. My recent brush with the law had led me to become obsessed with crime. I was alert to it, and read the back pages of the papers, looking for notes about people who’d gone to prison or those going to jail. I was trying not to think about it. But it was a real possibility and one I’d have to face up to at some point or another.

“Fraud. He ran a telemarketing scam. Stole thousands, I hear.”

“Is he in for a long time?”

“Fourteen years. Maximum penalty. And he had to pay back all that money. Bankrupted him in the end.”

“That’s not what I was hoping to hear,” I said. Fraud was one of the crimes I’d been accused of.

“Well, here’s the thing. Louis owned a bar which he gave to Frances as a wedding gift, I guess. Both their names were on the deed. And when Louis got charged, they were going to take the properties away.”

“But?”

“But,” said Zeke, “because Frances was co-owner, and they were married, she got to keep the bar. Because they couldn’t prove criminal liability. It’s this loophole. If you’re married, then you can legally pass your properties to your spouse if they’re listed as a co-owner. And even if something happens to you, they can’t touch it, see?”

“I see,” I said.

“Now, you’ve been handed your Section 12-B because you’re accused of fraud. But whether you get off or not…”

“Then the Section 12-B only applies pending my fraud case,” I said.

“So if you were married, and you passed on the properties to a spouse, who you were married to…”

“Then they’d get to keep them,” I said. “If I got sent down.”

“But more than that,” said Zeke. “They’d get to reapply for the liquor license’s renewal. And it would legally be prejudiced if they discriminated against your spouse on the basis of your trial.”

“I see,” I nodded. “Well, thanks for that, Zeke. I guess I should have gotten married to Katherine Ziegler after all.”

“Well, every cloud,” said Zeke. We chuckled. But it was Dutch courage, and we knew it. The pair of us were staring down the barrel.

“What have we got to do after lunch?” I said.

“Hm,” said Zeke. “We could go through this.” He reached down onto the floor, which was scattered with legal books and photocopies of documents, and pulled an enormous black tome onto the desk Property Law and Legal Dispute, Volume 6.

“If it’s gotta be done, it’s gotta be done,” I said, staring at the huge book in front of us.

“You know, if you want, I can look through it,” said Zeke.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“You haven’t been getting a lot of sleep these last few days, Alex.”

He was right. From dawn to midnight, I was looking into the charges laid against me, hoping there was a way.

“I’m fine,” I said, even though my eyes were red around their rims. “But I could stretch my legs,” I said. “Mind if I take a walk?”

“Be my guest,” said Zeke. “Want me to have something sent up from the kitchen for lunch?”

“Not hungry.” I grimaced, and got up and went down the stairs. I went through my empty restaurant.

Oddly enough, I used to like The Blue Orchid when it was empty. Sometimes I came in after the cooks had left on Sunday night, just to be there for the end of the week. Something about the quiet building felt good. I knew it would be crammed full of customers by Tuesday night.

But now it felt awful. An empty, cavernous space where the battle for my life’s work was being fought.

By now, we’d realized that Luca must be behind the fake birth certificate. Who knows how he’d forged my dead mother’s signature so well, or how he’d managed to plant the birth certificate for the police to find. But there was no doubt in my mind that Luca had done it. He certainly stood to gain from being the second-biggest shareholder in my businesses. I’d been trying to find out if there was any record of my parents having lived in the tiny apartment in Fairhill where I’d grown up. But the building had been demolished years ago, and it was taking an age to even find out where the documents would be stored, anyhow.

I pushed through the door and walked onto the street. Was it possible that somehow I’d made a mistake? That my mom had lied to me about something, about my dad, about their marriage? I couldn’t believe it.

Even at the end of her life, my mom had been honest and kind. She did her best to look after me. Not that I felt like I deserved it, looking back.

I closed my eyes and tried not to think about the past. But the past has a funny habit of catching up to you. Lola Ryder proved that.

Lola. The sound of her name stirred up something inside of me, a sweet and wonderful feeling. As I walked around the block, it was a warm day. Spring was just around the corner, but it didn’t feel like that. Where was she now? Probably at home, with her kid, Macy. The little girl with the blue eyes.

I hadn’t asked Lola about the father of her child—it wasn’t my place, and I got the feeling she wasn’t going to tell me anyway. But when she did, I was ready to hear.

I wanted to get close to her, wanted to get close to Macy. But we hadn’t called or spoken much since that night in the hotel. Besides, I was too wrapped up in my thoughts right now to consider what I might do.

I felt a strange tug of emotion inside me. She was beautiful, kind, and never gave up on me. Lola Ryder, always there when you least expected her. Always smiling, always cheering me up when I was at my lowest ebb.

Shame you aren’t married. I’d never even thought about getting married as an adult. I thought it might happen to me—I knew plenty of people back in Philly who’d been married young. I felt sure it was something I could have if I wanted.

And there had even been opportunities. When I dated the actress Katherine Ziegler, she’d asked if it was something I was interested in. I’d made a flat refusal, and that had spelled the end of our relationship. It wasn’t that I was opposed to it. It was that I hardly understood what it would mean to be married to someone else.

When my mom died, I’d been completely alone, with no one to tell me what to do, or who I could see.

Eventually I guess I’d just given up on the idea completely.

Shame you aren’t married, I thought again. Who would I even get married to? Someone like me? A man who worked eighty hours a week, and never had time for anyone else? Marriage was supposed to be about relying on someone. In my world of luxury suits, skyscrapers and fast cars, who could I rely on? I preferred to put my trust in the stock market than in another person. What did that say about me?

I rounded the corner, and shielded my eyes from the sun. And then, slowly, the possibility revealed itself to me.

There was one person I knew, who I felt I could truly rely on. A woman who filled my thoughts, who distracted me from whatever I was doing. She annoyed me, she irritated me with her constant cheeriness. And yet, she was the only woman I’d met who could ever make me laugh.

A woman I’d met on a rainy night in Bali, six years ago.

A woman whose haunting, pale beauty and glimmering green eyes seemed to follow me everywhere I went. I pictured her now, just the way she’d been the other night. Sensual and beautiful, her body made me feel emotions I barely understood.

Lola Ryder.

I quickened my pace, and began to stride back to the restaurant. A plan was forming in my mind. It would be dangerous. A fraud cop was on my case, and I couldn’t slip up. I’d have to be careful. And how would I even begin to convince her that it was a good idea, that she should jump into bed with me?

But if I really cared about my businesses and about my empire. About everything I’d built, and everything I’d carved out of thin air with my own bare hands, I wasn’t going to let it be taken away. Not without doing everything I could.

“Hey,” said an old man on the street as I came up to the front door of the restaurant. He was dressed in shabby clothes, with a beard. “It’s me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said quickening my pace. “I don’t know you.” The man just stared at me as I walked quickly away. I was wrapped up in my thoughts, in the thought of what I could do. If I played my cards right, there was a way. A way to save everything.

I went back inside the restaurant, running now, and sprinted up the steps to Zeke’s office. I didn’t think about the old man who’d called out to me on the street. I left him there, on the sidewalk.

In New York, that kind of thing happens all the time.