Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 103530 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103530 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
“Forty?” Wouldn’t that be a weird and awful coincidence?
“No, no.” He paused. “Forty-one.”
“Jesus.” I’d heard often enough that I was too young to understand how short life is, blah, blah, blah, but I wasn’t so consumed with my allegedly careless youth that I didn’t know that was a young age to go.
I didn’t ask how it happened—I would have guessed car accident, at that age—but he told me, anyway. “He had cancer.”
“He was sick for a long time, then?” Why did my brain think that would somehow make it easier to lose a parent?
“He was, but he wasn’t doing anything about it. He waited until he was in too much pain,” Matt said grimly. “One day, he went to the doctor and then he never came home. Two weeks between his diagnosis and his death.”
“I’m so sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“To be clear here, I don’t look at my father’s death as the worst thing that could have happened to me.” He winced. “That makes me sound awful.”
“No, it…” I wasn’t sure whether or not I should say the rest of my thought. To hell with it. “It makes him sound awful.”
“He was. He was a shitty, worthless person.” Matt shifted his gaze off at nothing in particular. His jaw was tight. “He loved my mom. It devastated her when he died, but still… Who spends four months in agonizing pain and doesn’t mention it or do anything about it until it’s that late?”
“People who can’t afford to go to the doctor?”
“And my father could. He could have afforded an entire round-the-clock team of doctors. But he felt it would interfere with work.” Matt shook his head with a bitter smile. “He chased dollar signs straight into his grave.”
My brain stacked up all sorts of responses. I could have told him that his father was probably in denial, afraid to face his own mortality. That maybe the man probably had known he was dying and worked himself to death faster out of a fear that it wouldn’t be enough to see his family through after he was gone. But all of that was stuff Matt would have probably thought of, or heard, before.
“Is that why you have this place?” I asked, nudging my toes against his under the water. “You recognize the value of relaxation?”
He laughed. “No, I have this place because I’m a pervert who inherited a hospitality empire.”
“So...your dad…” My brow furrowed as I pieced things together. “Your dad worked himself to death running a business that’s all about making other people relax?”
“That is an accurate summation, yes.” Matt nudged my toes back. “And that’s why I try not to work too hard. I know I get described as this lazy playboy, but I do get the things done that need to be done. But I don’t work nonstop, like a lot of billionaires my age.”
“There aren’t ‘a lot’ of billionaires your age,” I said wryly. “There are too many billionaires, but definitely not ‘a lot’ of them.”
“Put away the guillotine, Robespierre. I’m just saying, I look at some of these guys who didn’t inherit an already thriving empire and I see how they’re awake twenty hours a day, constantly looking over their shoulders because they think if they slip up once, everything is gone. I’m not willing to be like that. I don’t need to grow my family’s wealth. They’re already wealthy. Even if we lost every single Ashe-branded property, we would still be wealthy for generations. Why die at forty-one to make my nonexistent kids richer?”
“Fair enough.” And far less despicable, when couched in those terms. “No kids, then?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Don’t plan on any either.”
“So, the Ashe dynasty ends with you?”
“No, my sister has kids.” He gave me a smile that was far less haunted than before. “The legacy is safe. I’ll hand my shares off to them.”
“If I had a glass, I would toast to that.” Maybe we should have brought something to drink. It might have prevented us from falling into such a dark subject.
“What about you?” he asked. “What deep thinking have you done that has shaped your feelings about your inevitable death?”
My jaw dropped. “Uh…I…”
“I’m fucking with you.” He grinned. “I would rather know…the top five things that make you happy.”
“Um…like sex stuff?” That’s what we were there for. Even if I had overdone it.
He shook his head. “No. In general.”
“Okay…” It would have been easy to throw out generic answers like getting surprise flowers or seeing a baby smile. But if I couldn’t be honest with Matt, who could I be honest with? “In no particular order…” I realized that they were all a little bit mean. “Wait, you’re not going to judge me, right?”
He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “I can’t promise that. I don’t know what you’re going to say.”