Baby Trapped by the Billionaire novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Check

Spencer slides a $60,000 check across her diner counter at lunch, and Vera tears it up in front of every regular.

Spencer Brennick sat down in my section at 12:40, in the middle of the Tuesday lunch rush.

He asked for a menu he didn't need.

I knew who he was before I turned around.

Nobody else could make a quarter-zip look like an insult.

"Coffee," he said. "Black. And a moment of your time."

"I have nine tables."

"This won't take long."

I poured the coffee because the whole counter was watching, and I set the pot down.

The retired mail carrier on the end stool had stopped chewing.

Two nurses in the corner booth stopped talking.

Spencer slid a cream envelope across the table with one finger.

"It's a cashier's check," he said. "Sixty thousand dollars, made out to you. That's more than you'll make here in three years."

I didn't touch it.

"I don't know what you think I did," I said.

"I know exactly what you did. You found a lonely man with a trust fund and a sick-kid story, and you've been working him since spring."

"We met in May."

"Which is why I'm offering you a graceful exit. Take the check. Tell my grandfather you got cold feet. Nobody has to know about the sister."

I felt the room go cold around me.

"What about my sister?"

"Nineteen. Lymphoma. Bald, according to the file." He smiled. "I looked into you, sweetheart. It's what families do."

My hand closed on the check.

I picked it up, held it to the light so the whole diner could see the number, and read it out loud.

"Sixty thousand dollars. Payable to Vera Hruska."

"That's right."

"From Spencer Brennick, personally."

"Keep your voice down."

"Sir," I said, in my loudest tray voice, "did you just try to pay me to leave your cousin?"

The mail carrier set down his fork.

"Because I would remember that," I said.

I tore the check in half, then in quarters, then in eighths.

I dropped the pieces into his coffee cup, where they floated.

"There's your tip," I said. "Keep the change."

Somebody at the counter started to clap.

It was the mail carrier, with big slow hands.

Then one of the nurses joined in, and then the whole diner.

Spencer's neck went the color of a ham.

"You'll regret this," he said.

"I regret I didn't charge you for the coffee."

The bell over the door rang.

I knew from the way every woman's head turned that it was Gavin.

He'd come straight from the plant, in a grey suit with his tie pulled loose.

He stopped just inside the door, breathing like a man who had run up three flights of stairs.

His eyes went to the cup, then to Spencer, then to me.

"Spencer," he said. "You're in my girlfriend's section."

"We were just talking, cousin."

"I can see that."

Gavin walked across the diner and put his arm around my waist.

He did it carefully, and I did neither.

I leaned into him because forty strangers were watching, and my knees were suddenly not very reliable.

"She tore up sixty thousand dollars," said Spencer. "Your waitress. It's an act, Gavin. A girl like that doesn't turn down money unless she's playing for more."

"She's playing for a pie," Gavin said. "Cherry, with a scoop of vanilla. Vera, can I have the pie?"

The mail carrier laughed so hard he coughed.

I got a slice with my hands shaking.

Gavin sat at the counter in his good suit and ate it where everyone could see him.

He did it with a fork and no expression at all.

Spencer put a ten on the table for a coffee he hadn't drunk.

At the door he turned back, and he wasn't smiling anymore.

"Eighty-eight days until Founders' Day, cousin," he said. "I'd start counting."

The bell rang behind him.

Everybody exhaled.

I sat down next to Gavin on the stool I'm never allowed to sit on and finally let my hands shake.

"He knew about Mila," I said under my breath. "He knows everything."

"I'll find out how."

"You should have told me he'd do that."

"I didn't think he'd do it this fast."

"You didn't think."

"I thought," he said carefully, "that you wouldn't have to hear it from him."

I looked at his hand on the counter, the burn scar white under the diner lights.

"You ate my pie," I said.

"It was very good."

"It was seven dollars."

He took out his wallet, and I put my hand over his before he could open it.

"No," I said. "That one's on me."

He looked down at my hand.

I took it away fast.

I had signed his contract at the lawyer's office on Thursday, and nothing in it explained why my face was hot.

"Clause seven," I said, to the pie plate.

"I haven't broken it," said Gavin, very quietly.

"I know."

"Neither have I."

We sat there for a second too long.

Then my boss called my name from the pass, and I got up and went back to work.

At six o'clock a photo arrived on my phone from a number I didn't know.

It was Mila in her yellow beanie, pushing through the glass doors of the cancer institute, taken from across the street.

The caption said, "Count with me."

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