Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 83699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 418(@200wpm)___ 335(@250wpm)___ 279(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 418(@200wpm)___ 335(@250wpm)___ 279(@300wpm)
Stop it stop it stop it, she wanted to scream. Concentrate on the story of that last night.
The anger she’d harbored for years was now only grief.
“Then he asked me if I’d come along with him on his trips, that he’d find me a job, make one up if he had to. That we had so little time together between our work and my classes, but that he wanted me with him.”
“But he never seemed to consider your dreams,” Fernsby said wisely.
“That’s what I told him. I was going to night school, and I wanted to get my degree.” She’d needed that degree even after her parents died, as if somehow they would know she’d done it. But there was so much more. There were people she wanted to help. “I wanted to manage nursing homes and make life better for the residents. Even then, I wanted to own those nursing homes. I wanted to make them places that people would choose over anywhere else.” And she’d done it. Despite him. “He told me I could do all that later, after he’d established his career, when he would be home more. And he would help me do it. But for now—” She thought of his words, of how they’d hurt. “He said I’d get so much more life experience seeing the world, that I could step back into my education later.” She turned her champagne stem on the white tablecloth, stared at the tiny bubbles still fizzing to the top. “But I’d already given up my education once before, when our parents died.”
“You gave it up to take care of us,” Gabby said, her voice tremulous. “Then he wanted you to give it up to take care of him.”
Ava looked at her sister, awed at her insight. “He wanted me to give up my dream to help him attain his. He wanted me to trail after him like a groupie. Even worse, like a mistress who had a job title, but what she really did was crawl into bed with him every night. And everyone would know what I was. I told him he was treating me like Vivian, where everyone knew she wasn’t Edward’s niece or his ward or whatever the hell he called her. That she was just a kept woman he took to his bed every night.”
Fernsby, with his usual stern countenance, said, “He pretty-womaned you.”
Ava gaped. Gabby did too. And Fernsby, nose in the air, said, “It’s a butler’s job to keep up on all the latest movies, Broadway plays, and TV shows. In case their employer should need a recommendation.”
Good God. Fernsby had actually watched Pretty Woman.
Chapter Twenty
Ava cut off a gasp. She’d already gaped once. “But you weren’t even with Dane when that movie came out.”
“I didn’t simply spring from God’s green earth,” he drawled, “the day I began my employment with your brother.” His lips worked in either a smirk or a smile. “Nor was I hatched.” He said the word with emphasis, as if he’d heard them all pondering his origins over the years.
Ava had the good grace to blush, as did Gabby, all the way to the roots of her blond hair.
Fernsby breezed right past that. “May I surmise that you told him to stick it where the sun does not shine?” He blinked, maybe even smiled. “If you’ll excuse the crass phrase, it is quite apt.”
Totally apt. “I told him there was no way I’d give up my education or my dreams.”
“And may I presume also that he did not relate to your Pretty Woman reference?”
Ava, still reeling from thirty glorious, mind-blowing minutes in her office, and now Fernsby’s revelations, said, “He didn’t get it at all. He actually said something like, what the hell did a movie matter?” Or maybe that’s what she’d heard rather than what he’d said.
“After which, when the young—” Fernsby stressed the word. “—man didn’t get what he wanted, he walked out.”
“Uhh,” was all Ava managed at first. “It wasn’t exactly like that.”
Fernsby seesawed his head. “We must know exactly what happened if we are to advise you, my dear.”
“I left first. It was his apartment,” she said, adding a shrug. “He couldn’t walk out. So I did.”
Fernsby let out a long, “Ahhh,” as if it were a sigh. As if suddenly he had a complete understanding of the entire situation.
She added quickly, “Then he never called me, never texted, nothing. I didn’t hear from him at all.”
“May I glean from this information that you didn’t call him either?”
He made her feel churlish. He made her feel… What was the right word? Sort of responsible? “I just figured that if he wanted to apologize and rescind the offer, he would call me. He never did. And I assumed that meant he was done with me.”
Fernsby once again drawled, “You know what they say about the word assume.”