The Billionaire Next Door

“I’ll handle him,” Elena whispered. “You, go now.”

Sean nodded and took off, heading for the back exit while trying to dodge all the people who wanted things from him. As he fought through the crowd, he felt as if he couldn’t breathe and a curious panic set in.

When he finally burst outside through a fire door, he had to lean down and put his hands on his knees. Drawing the sultry summer air down his throat and into his lungs only made the suffocation worse and he wrenched at his tie.

Dead. His father was dead.

He and his brothers were finally free.

Sean forced himself to stand up like a man and pushed a hand through his hair to try and clear his brain. Yeah…freedom had come with that phone call.

Hadn’t it?

Tilting his head back, he measured the lack of stars in the sky and thought about the inflection in the nurse’s words, the sadness and the regret.

How appropriate that the person mourning his father was a stranger.

God knew, his sons would never be able to.

Chapter Two

Lizzie hung up her cell phone and stared at the thing. Through the din of what sounded like a party, Mr. O’Banyon’s son had been totally detached, his voice giving away no emotion at all. Then again, she was a stranger and the news had not been good or expected. He was no doubt in shock.

She’d wanted to find out when and where the funeral would be held, but that hadn’t seemed like an appropriate thing to bring up. Worst came to worst she could always call him later.

An ambulance went by her, its lights flashing red and white, its siren letting out a single squawk as it left the Mass General complex and headed out onto Cambridge Avenue. The sight of it got her moving and she started for the parking garage. Part of her wanted to stay here and wait for the son to arrive, but it would take him hours to get into town. Plus it appeared that he was the type who’d rather deal with things on his own.

Besides, it was time to go to her second job.

Lizzie jogged across the road and took two flights of concrete stairs up to the second story of the garage. When she found her old Toyota Camry in the lines of cars, she unlocked it with a key as the remote no longer worked, and put Mr. O’Banyon’s things on the backseat. Getting behind the wheel, she figured she’d leave the bag by the upstairs apartment’s door for the son along with a note that if there was anything she could do to help she was always available.

The drive from Beacon Hill to Chinatown took her on a straight shot up Charles Street, then a jog around the Commons, followed by a scoot past Emerson College. Down farther, opposite one of the Big Dig’s gaping mouths, was Boston Medical Center. Affiliated with Boston University, BMC was a busy urban hospital and its emergency department saw a lot of action. Particularly, and tragically, of the gunshot and stabbing variety.

She’d been moonlighting in the ED three nights a week for the past year because, though she worked days at the health clinic in Roxbury, she needed the extra income. Her mother lived in an artist’s world of color and texture and not much reality, so Lizzie helped her out a lot, covering her expenses, paying bills, making sure she had enough money. To Alma Bond, the world was a place of beauty and magic; practical matters rarely permeated her fog of inspiration.

The extra income was also for Lizzie, however. Earlier in the year, she’d applied and been accepted into a master’s program for public health. Though she couldn’t afford to start this fall, her plan was to save up over the next few months and matriculate in the winter session.

Except now she wondered whether she needed to find a new place to live. Would Mr. O’Banyon’s son hold on to the duplex? If he sold it, would her new landlord ask for more in rent? How would she find something equally inexpensive?

After driving through BMC’s parking garage, Lizzie squeezed the Toyota in between two mountain-size SUVs and took a last look at Mr. O’Banyon’s things. Then she got out, locked the car and strode toward the bank of elevators.

As she waited for the metal doors to slide open, Sean O’Banyon’s hard tone and emotionless words came back to her.

Maybe that hadn’t been shock. Maybe that had been genuine disregard.

God, what could cause a father and son to lose touch to such a degree?

It was 3:16 in the morning when Sean stopped his rental car in front of the Southie row house where he and his brothers had grown up.

The duplex looked exactly the same: two stories of nothing special sided in an ugly pale blue. Front porch was a shallow lip of a thing, more a landing than a place to sit outside. Upstairs was all dark. Downstairs had what looked like a single lamp on in the living room.

He wondered who was staying in the bottom unit now. They’d always rented it out and clearly that was still the practice.

With a twist of his wrist, Sean turned the engine off, took the key out of the ignition then eased back in the seat.

On the flight from Teterboro to Logan, he’d made two phone calls, both of which had dumped into voice mail. The first had been to his younger brother, Billy, who was traveling around to preseason games with the rest of the New England Patriots football team. The second was to an international exchange that was the only way he had to get in touch with Mac. The oldest O’Banyon boy was a special forces soldier in the U.S. Army so God only knew where he was at any given time.

Sean had told them both to call him back as soon as they got the message.

He looked up to the second story of the house and felt his skin tighten around his bones and muscles. Man, Pavlov had been right about trained responses to stimuli. Even though Sean was a grown man, as he stared at the windows of his childhood apartment, he felt his ten-year-old self’s terror.

Dropping his head, he rubbed his eyes. The damn things felt as if they had sawdust in them and his temples were pounding.

But then stress’ll do that to you.

He so didn’t want to go into that house. Probably should have stayed at the Four Seasons, which was what he usually did when he was in town. Except on some molecular level, he needed to see the old place even though he hated it. Needed to go inside.

It was like peeling back a Band-Aid and checking out a cut.

With a curse, he grabbed his leather duffel as well as the two bags of groceries he’d bought at a twenty-four-hour Star Market, then opened the car door and stood up.

Boston smelled different than New York. Always had. Tonight, the brine of the ocean was especially heavy in the air, buffered by the sweet sweat of summer’s humidity. As his nose ate up the scent, his brain registered it as home.

He followed the short concrete walkway up to the house then long-legged the five steps to the shallow front porch. He didn’t have a key, but as always, there was one tucked behind the flimsy metal mailbox that was tacked onto the aluminum siding.

The door opened with the exact same squeak he remembered, and, hearing the hinge complain, his blood turned into icy slush.

That squeak had always been the warning, the call to listen hard for what came next. If it was a door closing underneath them, he and his brothers would take a deep breath because it was just the tenants coming home. But if it was footsteps on the stairs? That meant pure panic and running for cover.

As he stepped inside the foyer, Sean’s heart started to jackrabbit in his chest and sweat broke out on his forehead.

Except, damn it, he was thirty-six years old and the man was dead. Nothing could hurt him here anymore. Nothing.

Uh-huh, right. Too bad his body didn’t know this. As he went up the staircase, his knees were weak and his gut was a lead balloon. And God, the sound of the wood creaking under his soles was awful in his ears. The dirge of his approach was the same as when his father had come home, and hearing his own footsteps now, he remembered the fear he had felt as a boy as the thundering noise grew louder and louder.

At the top of the landing he put his hand on the doorknob and the key in the lock. Before he went in, he told himself this was only a door and he wasn’t stepping back into his past. The space-time continuum just didn’t work that way. Thank God.

But he was still in a cold sweat as he opened up and walked in.

When he turned on the lights, he was amazed. Everything was exactly the same: the tattered Barcalounger with the TV tray right next to it; the rumpled couch with its faded flower print; the 1970s lamps that were as big as oil drums and just as ugly; the crucifix on the wall, the yellowed, exhausted lace drapery.

The air was stuffy in spite of the air conditioner that was humming, so he cracked open a window. The place smelled of cigarette smoke, but it was the kind of thing left over after a four-pack-a-day addict stops. The stench lingered, embedded in the room’s paint and flooring and fabrics, but wasn’t in the air itself.

As the breeze came in, he walked over to the TV tray and picked up the Boston Globe crossword puzzle that was mostly done. The date in the upper right-hand corner was from the previous Sunday, the last time his father had sat in the chair with a pencil in hand filling in little boxes with wobbly, capitalized letters.

Going by the script, it seemed as if his father had had hand tremors. Odd, to picture him as anything other than brutally strong.

Sean put the paper down and forced himself to walk through every room. It was about halfway through the tour when he realized something was different.

Everything was clean.

The cramped kitchen was tidy, no dirty dishes in the sink, no trash collecting in the Rubbermaid bin in the corner, no food left out on the counters. The room he’d shared with Billy had both beds made and a vacuumed rug. Mac’s bedroom was just as neat. Their father’s private space was likewise in wilted but tidy condition.

Back when Sean had lived here, there had been cobwebs in the corners of the rooms and dirt tracked in the front door and beds with rumpled sheets and dust everywhere. There had also been a lot of empty bottles.

With a compulsion he couldn’t fight, Sean went through all the closets and cupboards and dressers in the apartment. He looked under each bed and the couch. Checked behind the TV and then went into the kitchen and moved the refrigerator out from the wall.

Not one single booze bottle. Not one beer can.

No alcohol in the place.

As he threw his shoulder into the fridge and forced the thing back into place, he was flat-out amazed. He’d never have thought their father could kick the sauce. The drinking had been as much a part of him as his dark hair and the hard tone of his voice.

Sean stalled out, but then went into the living room and figured it was time to score some shut-eye. First thing tomorrow, he was going to make arrangements with Finnegan’s Funeral Home for the cremation and the interment. After that, he’d have to pack up the apartment. No question they would sell the duplex. There was no reason to come back here ever again.

He glanced around. God, how long had it been since he’d stood in this room?

As he went through the years, he was surprised to realize it had been all the way back when he’d gone away to Harvard as a freshman. Made sense though. College had been his ticket out, and once he didn’t have to sleep under this roof, he’d made damn sure he never showed up again. It had been the same for Billy when he’d gotten a football scholarship to Holy Cross. And for Mac, who’d joined the army the very month Billy went off to college. They’d all left and never returned.

Go figure.

Sean went over to his duffel, stripped down to his boxers and grabbed his toothbrush. After he hit the bathroom in the hall, he picked a pillow off his old bed and headed for the couch.

No way in hell he was sleeping in his room.

Lying flat on his back in the dark, he thought of the penthouse he lived in down in Manhattan. Park Avenue in the seventies, a perfect address. And everything in that showstopper of a place was sleek and expensive, from the furniture to the drapes to the kitchen appliances to that million-dollar view of Central Park.

It was about as far away from where he was now as was humanly possible.

Sean screwed his lids down, crossed his arms over his chest and concentrated on going to sleep.

Yeah, right.

He lasted not even ten minutes before he was on his bare feet and pacing up and down over the knobby area rug.

Lizzie parked the Toyota in front of the row house and got out with the bag of Mr. O’Banyon’s things. Her feet were killing her and she had a headache from having had too many coffees, but at least she didn’t have to be at the clinic until noon today because she was working the later shift.

As she stepped onto the duplex’s concrete walkway, she stopped and looked up. No lights were on upstairs, but that wasn’t because someone was sleeping. It was because no one lived there anymore.

Tears stung her eyes. It was hard to imagine her cranky old friend gone. Hard to internalize the fact that there would be no more blue glow from his TV at night, no more sound of him shuffling about, no more trips to buy him the chocolate ice cream he liked.

No more talking to him the way a daughter talked to a gruff father.

She tightened her grip on the bag’s handles and hoped he hadn’t struggled at the end, hadn’t felt horrible pain and fear. She wished for him a peaceful slide as he passed, not a bumpy, frightening fall.

As she went up to the house, she felt as if there was a draft licking around her body, as if the night had turned frigid though it was in fact balmy.

It was just so hard to come home this morning. To her, there was only empty space above her now. The man whose life had animated the furniture and the objects in the other apartment was gone and the silence overhead was only going to remind her of what had been lost.

After Lizzie let herself into her place, she put her keys in a dish on her little painted table and shut the door. She was setting down the plastic bag when she froze.

Someone was walking around upstairs.

Her first thought was totally illogical: for a split second, she was sure that someone had made a mistake with Mr. O’Banyon and he’d been discharged because he was perfectly healthy.

Her second thought was that a burglar had broken in.

Except then she realized whoever it was was pacing. Back. Forth. Back. Forth.

The son had come into town.

She started for the door, but then stopped because going up to see him was ridiculous. Though she’d been close to the guy’s father, she didn’t know the son at all and it was just before dawn, for heaven’s sake. Hardly the time for a sympathy call.

After she took a shower, she sat in her living room with a bowl of corn flakes in her lap. Instead of eating the cereal, she played with it until it turned to mush, and listened to the man above her wear out the floorboards.

Twenty minutes later, she put on a pair of jeans and went up the stairwell.

The moment she knocked, the pacing stopped. Just in case he thought she was a burglar, she said, “Hello? Mr.—ah, Sean O’Banyon?”

Nothing could have prepared her for who opened that door.

The man on the other side of the jamb stood about six inches taller than her and wore nothing but a pair of boxers and a whole lot of muscle. With a gold cross hanging from his neck, an old tattoo on his left pec and a scar on one of his shoulders, he looked a little dangerous…especially in the face. His hazel eyes were sharp as razors, his jaw set as if he was used to being in charge, his lips nothing but a tight, hard line.

She could totally imagine the cold tone she’d heard over her phone coming out of that mouth.

“Yeah?” His voice was very deep.

“I’m Lizzie—Elizabeth Bond. I talked to you today—yesterday. I live downstairs.”

All at once his face eased up. “Ah, hell. I’m making too much noise, aren’t I? Worse, I’ve been at it for a while.” His South Boston accent flattened out his vowels and sharpened his consonants. Funny, she hadn’t noticed the intonation over the phone, but it was clear as day now. And she’d seen him somewhere. Then again, it was probably because he looked like his father.

“Anyway,” he said, “I’m sorry and I’ll cut it out.”

“Oh, that wasn’t why I came up. And I just got home from my shift so I missed most of the pacing.” She took a deep breath and smelled…whoa, a very nice cologne. “I’m truly sorry about your loss and I—”

“Hey, you want some breakfast?”

“Excuse me?”

“Breakfast.” As he pushed a hand through his thick dark hair, his bicep flexed up and the gleaming cross shifted between his pecs. “I’m not going to sleep anytime soon and I’m hungry.”

“Oh…well…that’s not necessary.”

“Of course it isn’t. But you just got home from work, didn’t you?”

“Ah, yes.”

“So you’re probably hungry, too, right?”

Come to think of it she was.

“And I’ll even put my pants on for you, Elizabeth.”

Absurdly, a rush went through her. And she had the illicit, inappropriate thought that while he was making love to a woman, his voice would sound fantastic in the ear.

God, how could she even think like that?

“Lizzie,” she said, walking in. “I go by Lizzie.”

Sean tracked the woman as she went by him, very aware of her smooth, gliding stride. Tall and lean, she was wearing an old pair of blue jeans and a four-sizes-too-big Red Sox T-shirt he was willing to bet she’d be sleeping in later. Her shoulder-length blond hair was pulled back in a no-nonsense way and the ends were damp as if she’d just showered. She smelled of Ivory soap.

Which he liked.

“Lizzie it is, then,” he said as he closed the door. “And you can call me Sean, of course.”

As he spoke, he realized his Southie accent had resurfaced and it was strange to hear the speech pattern of his childhood back in his words again. During his years at Harvard, he’d assiduously tamed the telltale rs and learned a different, less regional way of talking.

Less regional. Ha. Try more upper-class.

Lizzie stopped in the middle of the room, her pale green stare going over everything as if she were inspecting the place. She had smart eyes, he thought.

“So you’re a nurse?” he said.

“I am, but I wasn’t treating your father. I was a friend of his.”

Had he heard that right? “A friend.”

“Yes. I’ve lived downstairs for the past two years so we got to know each other. He was lonely.”

“Was he.”

“Very.” As she nodded, she ran her hand over the back of the Barcalounger. “We had dinner together a lot.”

For some reason, the sight of her touching his father’s chair creeped him out.

“Well, then, I guess you know the way to the kitchen.” Sean reached into his duffel for some jeans. “You mind if I don’t put on a shirt? Damn hot up here.”

He was surprised when she blushed. “Oh…no. I mean, yes, that’s fine.”

As she headed out of the room, he pulled on his pants and thought of his father.

Lonely. Yeah, right. Not with this tenant around. Eddie O’Banyon had been a loner by nature, but it was funny how a pretty young woman could get a man to feeling sociable.

And she’d obviously spent a lot of time up here. Not only did she know where the kitchen was, but along the way, she shifted the edge of a cheap picture that had tilted off center and straightened a pile of mail. He had the feeling she was the reason the place was so clean.

While Sean worked his way up his button fly, he was willing to bet she was also the reason his father had gotten off the booze, too. Nothing like love or some serious attraction to the opposite sex to turn a guy around. At least temporarily.

Except what had she seen in him?

Sean cursed under his breath. Like he had to even ask that? On impulse, he removed his gold watch and tucked it into his duffel. If she’d been attracted to what little cash his father had had, there was no reason for her to know he was swimming in the stuff.

As he went into the kitchen, he wondered if she knew who he was. He figured chances were fifty/fifty. His face had been in the newspapers often enough, but it was the kind of thing that, unless you were into the world of high finance, you’d probably overlook. Although maybe his father had mentioned something.

Not that Eddie had known much.

“So cop a seat and I’ll cook for you,” Sean said, nodding to the table in the center of the room. “All I got are eggs and bacon, but the good thing is that’s hard to screw up.”

“Sounds perfect.”

He went to where the frying pan had always been kept and what do you know, the thing was still there. “Scrambled okay?”

“Fine.”

As he got the bacon going and grabbed the eggs out of the fridge, he kept his tone casual. “So you knew my old man well, huh?”

“He was very kind to me.”

I’ll bet. “You lived here two years, you said?”

“Since I got out of nursing school. I wasn’t around much as I work at a clinic in Roxbury and I moonlight at BMC a lot, but we spent some time together.” A sad smile lifted her mouth. “Your father always said I worked too hard.”

Did he? What a prince. “And you took care of this place, too, didn’t you? I mean, it’s pretty obvious. He never was into housekeeping when I knew him.”

“Well, at first he wouldn’t let me. But after a while, he needed help.” She cleared her throat. “When was the last time you saw him? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“A while. He told you not to call me until it was over, right?”

As she stayed quiet, he cracked eggs into a bowl and started to beat them with a fork. The choppy, liquid sound cut through her silence.

He looked over his shoulder. “Didn’t he?”

“Yes. It felt wrong not to, but I respected his wishes.”

When her green eyes lifted to his, he stopped dead.

Check out that stare, he thought. So compassionate. So…kind.

As he looked at her face, something popped in his chest, like a lid being released. And what came out of his inner soda can was a yearning that unsettled him. He literally wanted to dive right into those warm eyes of hers.

“I think the bacon is burning,” she said.

He cursed and got back with the program. As he transferred the strips onto a paper towel–covered plate, he asked, “So where are you from?”

“The north shore. Essex. My mother is still up there.” Lizzie laughed a little. “I was hoping to introduce your father to her. Maybe they could have been friends. But your father liked to keep to himself.”

Or maybe keep Lizzie to himself? “You got a husband or a boyfriend there, Lizzie?”

As she blushed again, he became absorbed in the pink tint on her face. To the point that when she dipped her head, he found himself leaning to the side so he could keep measuring her cheeks.

Man, the women he knew in Manhattan did not blush and he realized he liked it. Or hell, maybe he just liked this particular woman turning red.

“Lizzie? Was my question too personal?”

“Not at all. I don’t have a husband. Or boyfriend. Too busy.”

Good, he thought. Then frowned.

Wait a minute. Not good. Doesn’t matter. None of his business.

Besides, maybe she’d been saving herself for his father. God, what a cringer that was.

“What about you?” she asked. “Are you married?”

“Nope. Not my thing.”

“Why not?”

Well, there were a whole bunch of why nots. The first of which was prenups could be broken and he had no intention of someone in stilettos walking off with his hard-earned cash. More than that, though, you had to trust your wife wouldn’t play you. And he’d long ago lost the illusion that faith in lovers or business associates could be justified.

Hell, maybe he’d never had it. His two brothers were really the only people on the planet he believed in.