Money to Burn Read Free

said Ivy, coughing on her rum runner.
    “You know what I’m trying to say,” said Shannon. “It’s that town in Connecticut with the same name as the disease.”
    “You mean Lyme?” said Ivy.
    “Yes, that’s it!”
    The other women laughed, and Shannon was clearly embarrassed that she’d drawn a blank on Lyme. Ivy hated to be mean, even if Shannon did deserve it, but she was feeling the effects of her rum runner and couldn’t help singing to the tune of the old Jimmy Buffett song: “Wastin’ away again in Gonorrheaville.”
    “Very funny,” said Shannon.
    “Searching for my lost blood test results.”
    The laughter continued, but Shannon was getting pissed.
    “Some people say that there’s a pool boy to blame.”
    “Okay, enough. Who died and made you sorority president?”
    Shannon was glaring. The other women fell silent, unable to believe what they’d just heard. The tropical breeze blowing across the deck suddenly felt ice cold.
    Ivy could have stood her ground—hell, she could have shattered Shannon’s jaw with a 540-hook kick worthy of Bruce Lee—but the mean girl wasn’t worth the effort.
    “No one died,” said Ivy, leaving her final thought unsaid:
    Yet.
    She turned and walked away, absolutely certain that Shannon and her troop of character assassins would spend the rest of the cocktail hour gossiping about the bitch Michael Cantella had brought along this year.
    Ivy went to the portside rail and gazed toward the magenta-orange afterglow on the horizon. With her back to the gossip, and as she soaked in the last vestiges of a spectacular Caribbean sunset, it was hard to argue that this wasn’t paradise. The three-hundred-foot private yacht—one of three “boats” owned by Saxton Silvers’ CEO—was totally pimped out with a wave pool, a seventy-five-foot dining table custom made by Viscount Linley, and a Sikorsky S–76B helicopter with a landing pad that doubled as a basketball court. Ivy had yet to see all the toys, but the vessel was supposedly equipped with a retractable beach resort, which slid out over the sea from just below the starboard side deck, complete with sand, palm trees, and deck chairs. A crew of fifty served the passengers’ every need. Their first stop would be the Exumas, followed by Harbor Island, and then an undisclosed destination that catered to British royalty, Grammy-winning rappers, and every multimillionaire in between. Wall Street certainly knew how to reward its winners. Despite the pampering, however, the thought of so much structure to her week with Michael left Ivy wanting. Five days in the islands could have been perfect—without the Saxton Silvers crowd.
    Her frozen rum runner was melting in the warm night air and losing its kick. Ivy poured the remaining half overboard, watching the wind catch the potent slush and turn it into cherry-red vapor before it could fall into the sea. Then she smiled to herself, a brilliant idea coming to mind. She turned quickly, her flats squeaking on the polished teak stairway as she climbed up to the promenade deck, that tune still stuck in her head.
    Wastin’ away again in…
    She found Michael with six other guys, each of them exhibiting the kind of athletic good looks that were almost a cliché at Saxton Silvers. The entire investment banking world was in many ways a cliché: elite firm No. 1 dominated by humorless grinds, No. 2 by straitlaced rich kids, No. 3 by backslapping Irishmen, and so on. Even before meeting Michael, Ivy had regarded Saxton Silvers as the Duke lacrosse team of Wall Street frat houses. She loved Michael anyway, this grandson of a blue-collar Italian immigrant made good—even if he was plainly playing the game tonight, pretending to care as one of the boys waxed on about an exceedingly rare Super Tuscan that he’d scored in Hong Kong last week.
    “Michael?” she said.
    The men kept talking, but a woman in a nearby cluster of superstars threw her a not-so-subtle look, as if to say, Please go