The Billionaire Gets His Way(28)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

She nodded at that, returned her gaze to his, and smiled. “Good.” Then she sighed halfheartedly. “Now if only I could convince everyone else in the world that I’m not Roxanne,” she said of her book’s protagonist. “That I’m not even Raven French. I’m Violet Tandy. I’m just like everyone else.” She lifted her shoulders and let them drop. “Oh, well.” Okay, that wasn’t true. No way was Violet Tandy like everyone else. She wasn’t like anyone he’d ever met before. But just who was she? And why did he suddenly want so badly to find out?

“That is going to be a problem,” he said. “For both of us.”

Her head reared back a bit at that. She studied him for a moment, then said, “Why would it be a problem for both of us? I mean, it’s really not even that big of a problem for me. Annoying, yes, but not a problem.”

He expelled a single, humorless chuckle. “Well, I can’t have my friends thinking I’m dating a call girl. Especially now that it isn’t true.”

Her head did that rearing back thing again. She opened her mouth to reply, even inhaled a breath before speaking, then seemed to think better of whatever she had intended to say and shut it again.

“What?” he asked.

She did the open-then-close-the-mouth thing again, only this time, she began to tap her finger restlessly atop the stack of papers, too. Finally, she said, “Um, I guess I forgot.”

“Forgot what?” he asked, his confusion mounting.

She sighed heavily, and the finger began tapping even faster. “I forgot how important image is to you. Tonight… There were times at the party tonight, and here, when we…” She dropped her gaze to her lap. “You just seemed a little different tonight, that’s all.”

“Different from what?”

Now she looked up at him again. “Different from the guy who’s so worried about what other people think of him,” she said levelly. “Tonight, at least for a little while, you only seemed to care about what I think of you.”

“I do care about that, Violet. I—”

“But you care more about what other people think, Gavin. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a problem for you that so many people still think High Heels is a memoir, not a novel.”

He couldn’t quite halt the incredulous sound that escaped him. “Oh, and I guess it doesn’t bother you that so many people think you used to be a prostitute?”

“It only bothers me because it’s frustrating to keep having to defend myself,” she said. “Or when someone threatens to sue me.”

“You honestly don’t care that there are people out there saying—believing—that you used to have sex with whoever was willing to pay you the most money?”

“What other people think of me is none of my business, Gavin. Why should I waste time and energy on something like that?”

“Because image is everything.”

“No, substance is everything,” she immediately countered.

“No one ever gets to the substance unless they get past the image. If you don’t present a flawless image, if you’re not perceived as the right kind of person, you’ll never get anywhere. You’ll never count for anything.”

She nodded at that, jerkily, angrily. “Right. Gotta have that blue-blooded pedigree to be somebody, don’t you? Gotta be a part of the right society. The Gold Coast society. Can’t be seen running around with riffraff like call girls and poor people.”

“Violet, that wasn’t what I—”

“Wasn’t it? You’re so worried about people finding out you started off poor and disadvantaged, not even caring that it’s perfectly acceptable to have come from that—”

“There was nothing acceptable about the place I come from,” he interjected coldly. “It went beyond disadvantaged. Beyond poor.”

“So what?” she asked, echoing the question she’d asked that day at his office. “You’re not that person anymore, Gavin. And you’re never going to have to go back to that place. And even if you did end up there, it wouldn’t change—”

“I will never go back there,” he said vehemently. “I’ll do whatever I have to do to make sure of that. And I’ll do whatever I have to do to make sure not even the slightest whiff of that stink pollutes the life I have now. I don’t want anything to do with the people who live in that world. People who live in that world, Violet, they’re…”

He wasn’t sure, but her back seemed to go up at that. Literally. “They’re what?” she asked.

“They’re not like you and me.”

Now her chin seemed to rise a notch. “Oh, aren’t they?”

“No. They don’t care about anyone or anything. They’re uneducated, they’re lazy and they’re totally content with their lousy lot in life. They don’t work hard. They don’t have dreams. They don’t rise above. They don’t count for anything in this world.”

She gaped at him. “I can’t believe you just said that. How can they not count for anything?”

“Because they’re invisible. Nobody wants to acknowledge they exist. People like that, the rest of the world wants to sweep them under the rug or hide them behind a door.”

“Then it’s the rest of the world who has a problem. Not the people you grew up around. People always count for something,” she stated resolutely. “Except for the ones who are mean and intolerant. Those are the ones who don’t count.”

Gavin said nothing in response to that. He wasn’t mean or intolerant. He was simply calling it like it was.

“Maybe some of those people you knew in your old world weren’t as well educated as you are now, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t smart. And what you saw as laziness might have been planning—or even dreaming. How do you know what goes on inside anyone’s head? You’re not psychic.”

“You don’t have to be psychic to know when people have given up.”

She shook her head again. “You don’t get it, do you?”

Gavin felt his own back going up now. Why was he letting her put him on the defensive when he had nothing to be defensive about? He knew what he was talking about. She didn’t. He’d come from that world and knew it firsthand. She knew nothing of it. Tersely, he replied, “Get what?”

“Not everyone has to have buckets of cash to be happy,” she said, with even more vehemence than before. “A lot of people find happiness wherever they can. Like in a blue, sunny sky after days of rain. Or finding out at school one day that there’s going to be a surprise trip to the Field Museum, a place you’ve always wanted to visit but have never seen. Or having your parents stop screaming at each other long enough to hear a song you love playing on the radio. Or finding a dollar bill stuck in a street grate that you can spend any way you want, like on a Hershey bar because you never get to have those at home. In even having a home. A real home where you’ll finally be able to—”