The Lowest Maintenance Sugar Baby novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: Bought and Paid For
By eight the next morning there were eleven photographers on my front steps and a man with a boom microphone in the dead tomato plant on the roof next door.
"They found the building," I said, looking down through the blinds.
"They found the building in two hours," Carlton said. He was buttoning his shirt wrong. "Vera had it ready."
"What do they want?"
"A reaction."
"Then they're going to be disappointed. I haven't had breakfast."
I made him a bowl of oatmeal and ate half of his, which was a deal we had never discussed.
Then I put on the gray blazer again, because it had held up so far.
"Where are we going?" he asked.
"The lobby of your hotel."
"Millie, they'll eat you alive."
"They'll eat a woman who's sneaking out the back. They won't know what to do with one who walks in the front."
He looked at me for a second.
Then he took my hand.
We went down my four flights together and out the front door, into a wall of flashes.
"Millie! Millie, did you buy him?"
"Is it true you're worth eleven billion?"
"Carlton, how much is she paying you?"
"Miss Pennock, are you a gold digger in reverse?"
I stopped on the top step.
The shouting went on for a second, and then trickled out.
"Good morning," I said. "I'm going to answer all of these at the Rainsford Grand. There's parking. Follow me."
Carlton made a sound next to me that I think was a laugh.
We walked.
It was fourteen blocks and I wasn't going to take the car.
The reporters kept up, backing down the sidewalk in a crowd with their cameras up, and a woman in a green coat fell into a hedge.
By the time we reached Wilshire the crowd had doubled.
The doorman held the lobby door for us with the look of a man who wanted to be anywhere else.
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