The Gold Digger's Ledger novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Page Forty
Lydia reads Miranda's ledger aloud on the Pemberton yacht, Miranda takes it back, and Tristan offers her thirty days and thirty thousand dollars to stay.
My friend Lydia read my ledger out loud on the deck of a yacht, and I still don't know how she found it.
Two hundred guests in linen and diamonds stopped talking.
"March ninth," Lydia read. "Dinner at Alder and Rye, two hundred fourteen dollars. Paid by him."
Someone near the bar laughed.
"March eleventh. Camel coat, twenty-four hundred dollars. Paid by him."
I stood at the bottom of the stairs in a dress that wasn't mine, and my feet would not move.
My name is Miranda, I'm twenty-eight, and I tend bar at a hotel in midtown.
I have kept that book since I was nineteen, the winter the bank took my mother's house and we ate crackers for a week.
I write down what a man spends on me. I never ask for anything.
When his page reaches forty thousand dollars, I leave.
It's not a nice habit. It's the only thing that lets me sleep.
Twenty minutes earlier, Lydia had zipped me into this dress in the cabin below.
She was the first person in the rich man's world who was kind to me.
She had taken me to lunch four times and lent me three dresses, and she never once asked where I came from.
When I'd said the little book in my bag was for my tips, she squeezed my arm.
"Whatever you write in there is safe with me," she said. "Mine's a diary. Nobody ever reads the good parts."
Then she carried my bag to the powder room so the strap wouldn't crease the silk.
She handed it back with the clasp turned the wrong way.
I turned it around and thought nothing of it.
Now she held page forty up to the lights.
"The total is thirty-eight thousand, nine hundred and forty dollars," she said. "And the last line says: The number is forty thousand. Leave when it's reached."
She turned to the crowd with wet eyes.
"I'm so sorry, everyone. Somebody had to tell Tristan."
The man whose money it was stood at the rail beside his mother, a drink in his hand.
He didn't look at me. He looked at the water.
His left cuff had slid back, and there was a pale band across his wrist where a watch should have been.
He'd told me he lost it, the same as he'd lost the last one.
His mother, Honor Pemberton, stood beside him in her pearls, and she was smiling.
I'm not brave. I've been scared of being broke for nine years, and that is a different thing from brave.
But I knew one thing for certain: I had never taken a dollar nobody offered me.
So I walked up the deck and took it out of Lydia's hand.
Nobody stopped me.
"Her math is right," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. "Every line in here is true."
I held the book up so they could see the cramped little handwriting.
"I wrote down what he spent, and he spent it. Nobody forced a single dinner on him. I never asked for one."
A woman in the front row put her hand over her mouth.
"I'm leaving," I said. "Enjoy the party."
I picked up my bag from the chair where I'd left it and went down the gangway in borrowed heels.
The pier was cold and smelled of diesel and river.
I was halfway to the street when I heard him behind me.
"Miranda."
Tristan Pemberton came down the gangway two steps at a time and stopped in front of me.
He was thirty-three, tall, dark-haired, and grey-eyed, and he had been looking at me across my bar since March.
Up close he looked sick.
"You stood there," I said. "She read my life out loud, and you looked at the water."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Not tonight."
I laughed, because it was that or cry in front of the whole city.
"Then move," I said.
He didn't. He took a long breath.
"Thirty days," he said. "Thirty thousand dollars, cash, on top of what you've already got. You stay at my house, you stand next to me at every Pemberton event, and nobody ever reads your book out loud again."
"My number is forty."
"Then it's seventy."
I'd like to say I hesitated.
I did the sum in my head instead, and the sum was beautiful.
"I keep the book," I said. "You never read it."
"Agreed."
"Cash, every Friday."
"Agreed."
"And I sleep in your bed only if I say so."
His eyes dropped to my mouth and came back up.
"Agreed," he said again, slower.
Above us on the deck, Honor Pemberton's voice carried across the water, perfectly pleasant.
"Thirty days, darling. Then you sign for Lydia, or you sign for nothing."
Tristan didn't turn around.
In the cab, I opened the book on my knee and wrote the first line of day one.
Under it, I wrote a second line: His mother's hand was shaking on the rail.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend