The Billionaire's Heart (The Silver Cross Club Book 4) Read Free Page B

asked. “I’m intrigued. Tell me more.”
    “His name’s Elliott,” Carter said. “He’s terrific. We grew up together. He’s one of my closest friends. I think you’ll like him. He’s a little… what’s the term? Crunchy.”
    “Crunchy,” I repeated. “Like—wait a minute, are you telling me this guy’s a hippie ?”
    Carter laughed. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
    A rich hippie. Oh God, what if he had white boy dreads? I wouldn’t be able to take him seriously at all. “What kind of work would he need me to do?”
    “General branding, I imagine. Web design, that sort of thing,” Carter said. “I’m not entirely sure. We haven’t discussed it in depth. He’s only been back in New York for a few months. He was in Uganda for almost a year, and he came back in October to launch his company.”
    Well, working for a clean water hippie would be immeasurably better than working for some amoral corporate behemoth. “Sure,” I said. “I’m game. Give me his number and I’ll call him tomorrow.”
    “Great,” Carter said. “I’ll text you his number as soon as we’re done. He’ll be thrilled. The company’s very new, so he’s looking for good people to help him grow it. I’m not sure he’ll have a full-time position to offer you, but it will be steady contract work, at the very least.”
    “That’s fine with me,” I said. “I’m sure I can rustle up some more freelance work.”
    “I’ll be sure to let you know if I hear about anything else,” Carter said. “And don’t make that face. This is how the world operates, Sadie. It’s not a meritocracy. It’s about who you know. I know you hate it. I hate it, too, but there it is.”
    “If you can’t beat them, join them, I guess,” I said.
    “You and Elliott are going to get along great,” he said. “I should probably be worried. Put the two of you in a room together, and you’ll be overthrowing the capitalist bourgeois within six months.”
    “That means you’ll be out of work and probably laboring away in a gulag somewhere,” I told him.
    “That’s a risk I’m willing to take,” he said. “And now I have a meeting to attend, and you have a couple of phone calls to make.”
    “Yeah, yeah, I’ll call Regan right away,” I said. “This afternoon. Definitely.”
    “I know where you live, Bayliss,” he said, and hung up.
    I rolled my eyes.
    Shit. He hadn’t told me Elliott’s last name.

 
     
     
     
     
     
    THREE
    Elliott
     
    I looked up from my laptop, eyes dry and aching, and glanced at my phone. No wonder my head was pounding: it was almost 9:00 in the morning, and I’d been at the office since the previous afternoon.
    And had accomplished essentially nothing. Nice going, Sloane. What a productive all-nighter this had been.
    I had what was colloquially referred to as “a problem.”
    Or, as my father would call it, “an opportunity.”
    Well. My father and I had somewhat different ideas about certain fundamental aspects of life.
    Part of the reason he wasn’t currently speaking to me.
    On cue, our last conversation re-played itself in full Technicolor glory, complete with visuals of the disappointment writ large on my father’s face. You’re a dilettante, Elliott. A dabbler. I funded all of those trips abroad because I hoped they would help you realize how important it is to make something of yourself.
    The implication, of course, being that I had not and never would serve as a useful cog in the industrial machine. That was what mattered to my father: money, and then more money, and pay no mind to anyone you stepped on during your climb to the top.
    Anyone who couldn’t rise to the top of the heap didn’t belong there. Social Darwinism at its finest.
    His words stung so much because they were, in part, true. I had dropped out of Harvard and spent most of my twenties backpacking around the world. I had abdicated from my expected position as heir to my father’s empire. And I had failed, at the