Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 108905 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 545(@200wpm)___ 436(@250wpm)___ 363(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108905 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 545(@200wpm)___ 436(@250wpm)___ 363(@300wpm)
I wasn’t going to think about that tonight. This evening wasn’t about my arms, or my dress, or me, in general. It was all about Neil and his amazing accomplishment. I wasn’t going to let myself bring both of us down.
Mom and our driver, Tony, were away on a romantic ski trip to the Berkshires. Tony had a timeshare at a resort, and his week had overlapped this reception. I think Neil was kind of relieved. He and Mom clashed on a lot of things, and many of them were, unfortunately, related to differences in their upbringing. While I had learned to adapt to a lot of what I thought of as “rich people life”, Mom was living in our seven-million-dollar guest house but doing her shopping off QVC. It wasn’t that Neil was a snob, but he had no experience with people who weren’t born with silver spoons jammed in every possible orifice. My mom made him extremely nervous.
Since we didn’t have a chauffer tonight, Neil decided to drive us. He grumbled about how he shouldn’t have brought the flashy supercar, because high performance tires apparently weren’t that “high performance” in snow. And it was really coming down. We rode the short distance to the center in the… I couldn’t remember the name. Keurig? Something with a K, slipping around the corners a little.
“I hope no one runs over a valet,” I said as we pulled up, and I was only half-joking. My phone peeped from within my purse.
As I scrambled to answer, Neil echoed, “And I hope you don’t plan on answering your phone all evening.”
Ugh, he had such an attitude about how I was allegedly “tethered” to technology. I ignored him. “It’s Emma.”
“Tell her to give me an early birthday present and show up on time,” he said, only half-serious.
I answered the call as we stepped out of the car. “Emma?”
“Don’t be mad,” she said. I heard Olivia fussing close to the phone. “We’re on our way, right now.”
“It’s a party. You can be fashionably late.” I shot Neil a recriminating look when he made an impatient noise. “I have to get off the phone, because your father doesn’t want me to have any communication with the outside world.”
“You answered my call at the party?” Emma asked, her tone withering. Almost as withering as her father’s could sometimes be.
“Look, you both need to get off my back. I can’t help it if I’m in constant demand.” But they were both right. Guests were already arriving; I couldn’t walk through the front doors on my phone, like I was running in to shop at Barney’s. “Okay, going now.”
I hung up and slipped my phone into my clutch.
We weren’t early, but we weren’t the last to arrive. Neil didn’t like the idea of “making an entrance” and diverting the attention from the center to himself, which was pretty stupid, in my opinion. His name was on the side of the freaking building.
A black awning stretched across the sidewalk for arriving guests. Reporters and photographers crowded behind velvet ropes. Enough of Neil’s celebrity acquaintances had RSVPed that we’d expected this. As soon as we stepped out of the car, a few flashes popped, but nothing compared to whoever had gone in ahead of us. I thought it might have been Khloe Kardashian.
Oh, my gosh. I might get to speak to an actual Kardashian tonight.
Most of my job for the evening would be to stand beside Neil, smiling and nodding, and answering the occasional question. The answer was usually something along the lines of, “I’m very proud,” or “This is only the beginning.” They started to sound mind-numbingly similar before we even made it out of the press line and into the building. And, though my face was going numb from holding my smile and my brain was leaking out of my ears from mindlessly repeating myself, I truly was proud of Neil. He knew it, though he did seem amused as the questions became more and more redundant. I swear he liked watching me squirm.
At least it was warm enough for that kind of nonsense. There were outdoor heaters making wet little holes in the snow piling up on the sidewalk, and the crush of reporters helped block the January wind and blowing snow. I thanked a few of them for taking one for the team, before I realized how bourgeois I sounded.
As we neared the doors, Neil took my hand. I looked up at him. Nine years ago, I’d met the sexiest man I’d ever seen. In a single night, he’d changed who I was, and who I had planned to be. And, now, standing beside him at what was arguably his biggest triumph, I realized that I’d done the same for him.
When we finally made it into the atrium, I almost went blind from the bling. This room would never see so many diamonds again. At least, not until the next high-profile event. Everyone had dressed to impress, and in a crowd like this, with people with bank accounts in the eight digits and up, impressing was a difficult feat to pull off.