Lie to Me: A Contemporary Billionaire BWWM Romance (11 page)

Nick scoffed again. “Sad? More like awesome! Do I seem sad to you?”

Zoe watched him with pity. “Yes, Mr. Rothberger. You really do. And I think you’re doing everything you can to hide just how desperately sad you are. Because you’ve done everything right. You followed your heart, you didn’t worry about money or the corporate ladder, you got your dream job – and yet you’re still unhappy. And you don’t know why. And I think now you’re scared that if you can have everything you ever wanted and still be unhappy then maybe you never will be happy. So you’re doing everything (and apparently everyone) you can to force yourself into a happiness you don’t feel because otherwise it’s just one more thing you’ve failed at.”

Perhaps Zoe wouldn’t have said as much as that or used those words exactly if not for her cousin’s home brew, but they were out now. Certainly Nick’s reaction would have been different if not for the home brew. He would have shouted or fired her on the spot. Instead he just stared.

“For what it’s worth,” Zoe continued, taking a deep breath, because once you’d started saying something like this you had to see it through, “I don’t think you’re unhappy because you turned out to be bad at your dream – although you clearly are – it’s because you’re still trying to be something you’re not. And that can be tempting – believe me, I know. This last week I’ve been enjoying more and more all the things you’ve introduced me to. It’s easy and comfortable and, dammit, it’s actually sexy to be someone else. It’s thrilling. But there’s a void at its center. It’s weird – I’m enjoying it, and yet it doesn’t make me happy. I don’t know if you wanted to own a bar, but I’m pretty sure you never wanted to run one – it’s not you. What you wanted was to work behind one. That’s who you are and it’s something you’re good at. But you’re a Rothberger, and however much you think you might have rejected your family’s legacy, there’s enough of it in you that the idea of interviewing for a job in a bar never even occurred to you as an option. You had to
own
the bar, you had to run it, you had to have your name on the front. Then you could just work there occasionally and enjoy those snatched moments of freedom. And that was a plan doomed to failure because, like I said: you suck at it. You’re not a businessman. I get that being a Rothberger who’s not a businessman can’t be easy, but the sooner you accept this basic truth about yourself, the happier you will be.”

Again, Zoe had said more than she had initially intended, but there wasn’t a word of it she would take back. She waited to see how Nick might respond.

He looked at her and it was hard to tell if he was dead serious or dead drunk. “I am still your boss, you know?”

“I know.”

“Just saying; most people don’t talk to their boss like that.”

“Well, I think the world would be better if more people did.”

“It’s not as easy to be the boss as it sounds you know.”

“I know.”

“Rothberger isn’t just a name or a family, it’s a lifestyle into which you’re born.”

“I get it.”

“And you’re wrong -- sort of. I
do
want to own a bar and I do want to run it and I do want it to make huge amounts of money and prove what a business genius I am because I’m a Rothberger and that stuff is coded into my DNA. That stuff is my life blood. That stuff is oxygen. That stuff…”

“Doesn’t make you happy?” suggested Zoe, as kindly as she could manage.

Nick deflated. “It might. I don’t know. I’ve really no way of knowing, cause none of it is happening. I’m sort of working on the premise that financial success will make me happy cause financial failure has been a bit of a bummer, to be honest.”

“Well,” Zoe admitted, “I suspect you’d rather make money than lose it. And it might get Adam off your back. But I don’t think that’s what’ll make you happy.”

“It’s weird,” slurred Nick, who had – against all good advice Zoe tried to give him– continued to swig home brew throughout their conversation, “how you can enjoy stuff but it doesn’t leave you feeling happy. Take sex.”

“Maybe we should leave the conversation there?” suggested Zoe, who was happy to get closer to her employer but preferred to draw the line at discussions of his rapacious sex life.

But Nick had gone back to tuning out her responses. “I
definitely
enjoyed myself with those girls last week…”

“Nice to know, but let’s not dwell on…”

“But I’m happier right now, here with you,” Nick concluded.

Zoe had been about to say something but found herself oddly short of things to say.

“And we’re not even having sex!” Nick laughed.

“No,” Zoe agreed, her skin oddly hot and prickly. “No, we’re not.”

“Weird huh?” said Nick again.

Their eyes met, and for a moment the bleary drunkenness seemed to go out of Nick’s and they refocused, sharp and clear on Zoe’s.

“Don’t ever change,” he said. “I mean there’s so much about you that needs changing. So, so, so much. So much that’s wrong. But it all works together. Somehow. All your imperfections make a perfect whole. You’re better than Vanessa. Actually you’re even better than Sabrina.”

“Who’s Sabrina?” asked Zoe. Her heart was in her mouth at hearing these words.

Nick stared at her a long while, his eyes drifting back into glassiness. “I’m sleepy,” he declared. He looked at his empty glass. “I’m starting to think that there might have been some alcohol in this.”

And with that insightful observation, he slumped into a drunken stupor and began to snore.

Zoe stared at her boss: an inebriated, snoring mess who was now starting to drool from the corner of his mouth.

He had been right: it was weird what sort of things could make you happy.

* * *

T
he train
of thoughts that passed through Nick’s head when he awoke made for a little Odyssey all of their own.

Where was he?

Why was he here?

Was there a glass of water nearby?

But chief among these thoughts was: what was I drinking last night?

And this thought was accompanied by a hangover that bored into his skull and proceeded to apply a pneumatic drill to his nerve endings. He lay very still and hoped that the room would stop spinning. As he did this he tried to piece together the rest of his life; starting with his name and working his way up from there. He seemed to have woken up alone – always disappointing, but you couldn’t win ‘em all. Despite this, and despite his current fragile state, he found an odd sense of well-being suffusing those bits of his body that were not stricken with related agony. He had no idea why that might be but apparently he had had a good night.

Perhaps the girl had left already. That was considerate. He liked girls who left before he woke, thus avoiding the awkwardness of finding out their name and getting them to leave without seeming rude.

As the jigsaw pieces of his brain gradually fitted back together he started to remember that he was at Zoe’s parents’ house, and that there had been a birthday party last night, and that there had been some deceptively delicious drink that had taken him by surprise and then thoroughly kicked his ass. He had a vague memory of talking to Zoe but no more than that. He hoped he had not done or said anything stupid – he had enough problems to deal with.

He would have liked to remain there in bed for another hour or so at least but his bladder was full of home brew and there seemed no way to remedy that other than going to the bathroom (or at least not one that would have left any good impression of him as a guest).

Slowly and gingerly, Nick went through the process of getting up, visiting the bathroom, drinking his bodyweight in cold water, dressing and heading downstairs. He found the rest of the family in the kitchen, far more noisy and boisterous than he would have liked them to be given his current state. No one else seemed to be showing any effects of the festivities from the night before.

“Morning,” he said, his voice grating slightly over his sandpaper vocal cords.

“Morning,” Zoe smiled pleasantly at him. Being in the country seemed to take the anxious edge off of her for some reason.

“You had a good night’s sleep,” said Olive Blanchard, ushering Nick to a chair and setting a cup of thick, coffee in front of him, black as tar.

“The boy’s a barman,” said Davis, who still seemed to regard tending bar as some sort of sacred calling, akin to the priesthood. “He’s used to late nights and late mornings.”

Nick had been about to confirm this and use it as an excuse for his dragging his sorry body out of bed so late, but decided on the spur of the moment that the truth was the better option. “No,” he said ruefully. “Just too much home brew.”

He had been prepared to lose the respect of Zoe’s father but instead Davis threw back his head and laughed. “I guess you don’t get many drinks like that in your bar.”

“I’d have more customers if I did,” said Nick. “At first, anyway. And then suddenly less.”

“Then you’d get shut down by the Department of Health,” said Zoe’s brother, Byron. “That’s what happened when the bar where I used to work started serving cousin Tee’s home brew.”

“They tried to argue that they were using it to clean the toilets,” said Davis, shaking his head. “But the bureaucrats wouldn’t buy it. Even though it does make the bowl sparkle.”

Nick grinned. “Well it’s not making me sparkle, but it was great at the time.”

“You did drink a lot of it,” Zoe commented. “Do you remember much about last night?”

There was something about the way she had asked the question that caught Nick’s ear. Had something happened last night? She seemed too cheery for him to have said something stupid or offended her. Was it possible that they had… No. He would have remembered that.

He would
definitely
have remembered that.

He had, after all, been contemplating what her ass and breasts would feel like for way too long. There was no way he would forget it if he’d actually been able to put his hands all over her.

“Not as much as I would like,” he finally answered.

“Maybe that’s just as well.” She was smiling as she said it, but once again, Nick detected that certain something in her voice that suggested that maybe there was more that was remaining unsaid. He wracked his brain to try to think of what had happened last night, but found that brain-wracking in his current state was not a good idea.

“I hope I didn’t do anything dumb.”

“The dumbest thing anyone does when drunk on Tee’s home brew,” said Zoe’s sister, Karina, “is to keep drinking it.”

“Not the quite the dumbest thing,” said Davis, shooting a sideling glance at his son.

Byron rolled his eyes. “You go on
one
naked tractor ride and no one will ever let it go!”

Family breakfasts had ben rare in the Rothberger house when Nick was growing up. It was not that they had not been a loving family (they had been and still were), but there was always something else to do, always so much more going on. The Rothberger household had not just been about business, it had been about busy-ness. And when you put the two together they did not make for relaxed family meals.

That said, Nick had a hunch that, even had the family not been too busy, their breakfasts would still not have been like this. It was not just the plentiful food – grits, cornbread, cobbler and other stuff Nick had heard about only via rumor and the dire warnings of his cardiologist and personal trainer– it was not just the chatter, which was as plentiful as the food. It was an atmosphere of good cheer that hung in the air. There were no edges to the Blanchards; they simply were who they were, take them as you find them. It was all so…
easy.

Nick wondered how much Zoe must miss this comfortable life, and how much she had been forced to change since moving to the big city. And now he was forcing her to change still more. Worse than that, he was suggesting that she needed to change, that she was better for it. That she wasn’t fine the way she was.

He was actively implying that the world she came from—the world of this welcoming breakfast, which he was enjoying so much -- was in some way less than the world in which he had been brought up.

He felt a little ashamed.

Not that there was anything wrong with the way he had been brought up or the life he led, but the idea that one was superior to the other was clearly nonsense, as he was coming to see. A person could be happy in either, or in both if they chose. Forcing Zoe to fit into the constricting mold of Vanessa Reese was like trying to put and elephant in a hamster cage. While trying to change her into Sabrina was selfish and… to be honest, it was wasteful; she was amazing the way she was.

He hadn’t really noticed before, but Zoe was a pretty great at being Zoe, and right now that seemed to Nick like the best possible thing that she could be. When they got back home, there would be some changes in how he went about teaching her. No longer would he be trying to change her for good, trying to convince her that his way of being was better than her way of being -- he would just show her how to fake it for a week. Then he could win his bet in good conscience.

The bet…

He was suddenly reminded of how much he wasn’t telling her. That he was, in fact, lying to her.

Should he be guilty over that too? No. It was just a bet. It wasn’t hurting Zoe or anyone else. It was fine. He returned to eating, forcing the pricking needles of conscience to the back his mind, where could safely ignore them.

“Have you kids got plans for the rest of the day?” Olive still believed Zoe and Nick to be a couple – or at least, she was trying to speed the process along (she had even tried to put them in the same room).

“Why don’t you show Nick round town?” suggested Davis.

Zoe’s wide brown eyes turned to Nick in question.

Nick nodded. “Sure. Why not.”

“Perfect!” Olive clapped her hands together and gave the two of them a beaming smile.

* * *

“
D
o
you mind if I ask you something?” said Nick, as he and Zoe strolled down Main Street (pretty much ‘only street’) in the nearby town.

“Go ahead.”

“How do you grow up out here and not learn to ride a horse?”

Zoe rolled her eyes. “I can’t lasso a cow either. Hasn’t a visit here been enough to get some of those stupid preconceptions out of your head?”

“Apparently not.”

“After all, you grew up in the city but you
do
know how to ride a horse.”

Nick shrugged. “I had lessons. I had lessons in everything. I can still read basic Latin, I can row, play tennis, and dance the waltz. It’s like being prepared for the world’s most random game show.”

“That’s exactly what you’re preparing me for in a way,” said Zoe. “Who knows what might come up in the final exam.”

“Latin seems unlikely.”

“Good. Cause I’m not learning that.”

Nick looked about him. “This is a nice town. I can’t imagine why you’d ever want to leave.”

As they strolled down the street Nick saw people throwing them curious glances. Zoe waved to people she knew as they walked. The hominess of small town life was starting to grow on him.

“That’s because you don’t live here.”

“It’s not a good place to live?”

Zoe shook her head. “Oh no, it’s a great place to live. That’s half the problem. It’s such a great place to live that you never want to leave. And, assuming you want to do something interesting with your life - something different to what your Dad and your Grandad and his Grandad did – you gotta leave. And the longer you stay the harder it gets.” She shrugged. “I think I’ve found a pretty good balance. I visit often to see my folks and that works. Keeps me grounded. It’s a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live her. It’s just too easy.”

‘Easy’ was a word that troubled Nick a lot in relation to his own life, although in a very different way. His whole life had been easy, his path through it greased by money and position. And that was great, not something you would ever want to complain about. But if everything is easy then you never get any real sense of accomplishment. Which, again, was a tough thing to bitch about – if the worst thing about your life was that you never got a sense of accomplishment then you were generally considered pretty lucky and to be envied. But still, the void remained. If everything you had ‘achieved’ in life had been achieved solely through money then life was hollow. And if what you had achieved was a failing bar then the problem was suddenly worse. Nick was aware that he had bought his only achievement, and somehow he had still managed to fail!

They moved on through the town. Zoe pointed out her school, the place where she had got her first job, and the bar where she had sneaked in with a fake ID to try and get her first drink.

“Didn’t work,” she reported with a sigh.

“How come?”

“Look at this place,” Zoe indicated the town in general. “Everyone knows everyone. I came in the door, ready to introduce myself as Claudia Washington and order a beer, and Gus behind the bar says, ‘Hey Zoe, how’s your Pa?’.”

“You didn’t think of that before getting the ID?”

“Well you don’t, do you?” said Zoe, shaking her head at the stupidity of youth. “Damn ID cost me a fifty dollars.”

“That’d be a bargain in the city.”

“It may not have been that high quality,” admitted Zoe. “I think it was printed on cardboard.”

“My first fake ID cost five hundred dollars.”

“They saw you coming.”

“At least it worked,” Nick continued. “I bought a bottle of peppermint schnapps.”

“I bet that got you in with the cool kids.”

“Not like I’d hoped,” recalled Nick. “I thought it would be better the beer. It sounded fancy and it cost more than beer but it turned out that everyone preferred beer. I ended up getting drunk on my own and watching Road Runner cartoons. And then throwing up. Even today, when I hear ‘Meep, Meep!” I taste minty vomit in my mouth.”