Corrupting My Billionaire Boss's Heart novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Section

Ramsay un-fires her and gives her his own holes. A key in her father's old locker opens nothing she knows.

Birdie Fenn found me sitting on the cart path with my coffee-soaked polo stuck to my ribs.

"I heard you poured water on Stanford Lorring's daughter," she said.

"I poured it on her skirt."

"Same thing, in this county." She sat down next to me with a groan, a sixty-three-year-old woman in a club windbreaker and a gray braid.

"He fired me, Birdie."

"I know. Then he un-fired you in front of three witnesses, and I got the call on my radio before you finished crying."

"I wasn't crying."

"Your daddy never cried either. He just got quiet and mowed something."

I laughed, and it came out wet.

Birdie put a hand on my knee.

"Listen to me. Mr. Branwell has run this place with a ruler for eleven years. He has never un-fired anybody.

"He has never even hired a cart girl himself."

"Then why did he do it?"

"I'd like to know that too."

Her eyes slid toward the boarded-up building on the ninth fairway, and then away.

"Come on. You've got a new section."

The new section was his.

Holes one through nine, Tuesdays and Fridays, 6:00 to 8:30, with a cart that now had a working brake.

Birdie had put a note on the dashboard in his handwriting, small and square and neat.

"Ms. Ketterman will serve the Branwell round. No other member is to be on holes 1 to 9 during these hours. HB."

"He wrote me a schedule," I said.

"He wrote you a leash." Birdie's mouth twitched. "Same thing, with that man."

"What are the rules?"

"Keep the cart off his tee. Bring black coffee at 6:40. Don't talk."

"What happens if I talk?"

"I'd like to see it," Birdie said.

She walked me down the cart path and pointed at the ninth fairway.

Beyond the green sat a low white building with plywood over every window and a chain on the door.

"The old pool house," she said. "Nobody goes near it. Nobody."

"Why not?"

"Rules."

She said it too fast.

I let it go, because I was twenty-four and I needed this job, and a stranger's boarded building was not my business.

I spent the rest of the morning learning the club.

I learned that members tipped in cash and complained in whispers, and that the snack bar's pimento cheese was famous.

I learned that Zara's friends had already told the entire clubhouse about the water.

Three older women smiled at me in the bar.

At two, Birdie took me down a back corridor behind the caddie shed.

"Your daddy's locker," she said.

I stopped.

A narrow gray door had been painted over a dozen times, and the bottom hinge had my father's last name scratched into it with a nail.

I'd never known he scratched his name into things.

Birdie handed me a small brass key from her windbreaker pocket.

"They cleared this one out eighteen years ago, when he left. I kept the key. Nobody ever wanted the locker."

"Why did he leave?"

"Ask me when you've been here a month."

"Birdie."

"Open it, honey."

My hands were not steady.

The lock turned with a dry little click.

Inside there was a hook, a shelf, and nothing else.

Except, taped inside the door at eye level, a faded photograph of a six-year-old girl in a too-big groundskeeper's cap.

She was holding a hose and laughing so hard her eyes were shut.

It was me.

I stood there with the door in my hand and my throat closed up.

"He used to bring you on Saturdays," Birdie said quietly. "Right up until the day the pool house burned."

I turned my head.

"The pool house burned?"

Her face did something I'd never seen it do.

She looked afraid.

"I shouldn't have said that."

"Birdie, what burned?"

My radio crackled on my hip.

It was a man's voice, low and controlled and without any hurry in it at all.

"Ms. Ketterman. My office. Nine o'clock tonight."

Birdie closed her eyes.

I pressed the button with my thumb.

"Is that an order?" I asked.

There was a long, careful silence.

"It's a request," Ramsay Branwell said. "Please."

Then the radio went dead, and I understood that nobody had ever heard him say that word before.

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