I had just gotten a clean bill of health from my new doctor, but was unsurprisingly told that the pregnancy test was negative. It had only been three weeks, so neither Aiden nor I had even considered it a possibility yet. The good news was that he and I had fallen into a rhythm. We had a familiar routine that had begun one morning not long after the night I’d gone to bed without him and he’d stood at my door and stared at me for the longest time, watching me sleep. I hadn’t been asleep, I’d known he was there, but I’d made up my mind that any moves beyond the stipulations of our contract would be up to him from now on. I had emotions running rampant through my heart and my brain. It was likely if I acted on them, other than late at night when we were both in the throes of passion, that I would regret it. So I’d forced myself to pretend like this was only a job and that I was fine with it only being temporary.
I think Aiden had noticed my retreat and I don’t know if it was due to emotions of his own, or a fear that I was going to give up and leave, but he’d begun being more attentive on his own. He wasn’t overly so, he didn’t whisper terms of endearment in my ear when we shared a meal or took a walk, but he started not leaving so early in the mornings, having coffee or breakfast with me on the terrace, sometimes having his driver bring me to different restaurants to meet him for lunch, and almost always making it home in time for dinner, or taking me out to eat.
I was enjoying my new life. It was definitely the polar opposite of my old one. But the truth be told, I’d begun to feel so strongly about him that I’d gladly trade the luxuries for him to feel the same way about me. The fact that I still had so much time and he was beginning to open up and talk to me about things gave me hope.
As I took my walk this morning I thought back on the conversation we’d had the night before. We were watching a documentary on the Discovery Channel about beaches and conservation and out of the blue he said, “I haven’t seen the beach or felt the sand since I was in high school.”
I thought that was strange. He was obviously wealthy enough to go anywhere in the world that he wanted to. Didn’t wealthy people take regular vacations and wouldn’t some of those vacations inevitably land him on a beach or an island somewhere?
“Why not?” I’d asked him.
“Too busy with work,” he said.
“Why do you work so hard?” I had asked him. “So many hours that you have no time for yourself?” Then without thinking about how it might sound I added, “When is enough money enough?”
He looked at me with a hard expression. I was afraid that I’d made him angry. The silence was awkward and when he broke it he said, “When I was a kid, we lived like normal, middle-class people. My father worked on Wall Street and my mother was a stay-at-home mom. I had no idea what our financial status was really, but I would have never guessed rich. After my parents were killed, and I was staying with my aunt she told me that her father, who was also my mother’s father was a billionaire. She said that he had accounts set up for me all over the world, and that it was likely I was a multi-millionaire myself. I asked her why I never met him and why my parents never told me about the money. I guess when my mother and her sister were kids, my grandfather left them and his wife for an eighteen year old girl that he married and began a new family with. Out of his guilt, the girls and my grandmother were all given a large amount of money. My grandmother refused to touch hers so my mother and aunt did as well. They didn’t want anything from him since he’d been incapable of giving them what they had needed the most before he’d walked out. My mother didn’t have any further contact with him, as far as I knew. She never talked about him in front of me anyways. My aunt says he never tried to contact them. It was as if he thought giving them money was sufficient to make them disappear. My mother died with all of her money in an account and it reverted to me. She and my father weren’t poor in their own right. I didn’t realize how wealthy I was for a long time. When I was 25, the rest of the accounts my grandfather secretly set up became mine too.”
“So that’s what you used to start your business?”
“No,” he said. “Like my mother, I didn’t want anything from that man. When she died, he didn’t even come to the funeral. He called me and said he was out of the country and wouldn’t be able to make it. That was the last time that I spoke to him. I tried to arrange for my attorney to return all of the money to him, but he refused it. I only used the money my parents left me to live on while I started my business on my own. That’s a big part of why I work so hard to keep it flourishing. It means something to me, not the money but the fact that I succeeded on my own. I also want the old man to know that I don’t want anything from him. I want that to be his last thought before he dies old and alone.”
“Wow.” I hadn’t known what to say other than that. It helped explain a lot of his quirks like his emotional unavailability, his strong hold on his private issues and his fear of any kind of commitment. It also made me a little concerned about what his views on family bonds might be like.
“Let’s go to the beach, Holly,” Aiden said, out of the blue.
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. How long has it been since you’ve gone to the beach?”
“Quite a long time,” I admitted.
“Then we both need to get away. I can only go for the day but let’s say we’ll leave around ten tomorrow and go out to the Jersey shore.”
“That sounds great,” I told him, trying not to sound quite as excited as I felt.
“I’d take you to my Island but we’d have to take a boat and it’s not really doable in a day.”
I had to remind myself to close my mouth.
“You have an Island?”
“Yeah, it was a guilt present from the old man. He deeded it to me the day of her funeral. Another thing I wasn’t aware of until years later.”
“A whole island?” I was having trouble wrapping my head around it. Who owns an entire island? I wondered if even Aiden knew how wealthy he actually was.
~
Chapter Eleven
~