The Billionaire Next Door

“No particular reason,” he said, dumping the eggs into the pan. As a hiss rose up from the hot iron, he tacked on, “Other than I’m a loner.”

She smiled. “Like your father.”

He whipped his head around. “I am nothing like my father.”

As she recoiled, he didn’t apologize. Some things needed to be stated clearly and he was not like that abusive, drunken bastard on any level.

“You like a lot of pepper in your eggs?” he said to fill up the silence.

Chapter Three

Sean O’Banyon might be a little touchy about his father, but he made a very good breakfast, Lizzie thought, as she put her fork on her clean plate and eased back in the chair.

Wiping her mouth on a paper towel, she glanced across the table. Sean was still eating, but then again he had twice the food she’d taken to get through. And he was slow and meticulous with his meal, which surprised her. He seemed like the kind of tough guy who wouldn’t bother with good table manners. But his were beautiful.

And…boy, yeah, the way he ate wasn’t the only beautiful thing about him. That chest of his was sinfully good to look at. So were his thick eyelashes. And his mouth—

Lizzie cursed in her head. What was her problem? The man asks her in for breakfast right after his father dies and she’s checking him out as if he were an eHarmony candidate?

Then again, it was probably biology talking. After all, when had she last been alone with a man? As she counted up the months, then hit the one-year, then two-year mark, she winced.

Two and a half years ago? How had that happened?

“What’s wrong?” Sean asked, obviously catching her expression.

Yeah, like she was going to parade her Death Valley dating life in front of him? “Oh, nothing.”

“So what was I about to ask you? Oh…your mother. You said she’s still up in Essex?”

“Ah, yes, she is. She’s an artist and she loves living by the sea. She keeps busy painting and sketching and trying out just about every kind of creative endeavor you can think of.”

To keep her eyes off him, Lizzie folded her paper napkin into a precise square—and thought about her mother’s origami period. That year, the Christmas tree had been covered with pointy-headed swans and razor-edged stars. Most of them had been off-kilter, mere approximations of what they were supposed to be, but her mother had adored them, and because of that, Lizzie had loved them, as well.

For no particular reason, she said, “My mother is what they used to call fey. Lovely and…”

“All in her head?”

“Precisely.”

“So you take care of her, huh? She relies on you for the practical stuff.”

As Lizzie flushed, she murmured, “Either you’re very perceptive, or I’m quite transparent.”

“Little bit of both, I think.”

As he smiled, her heart tripped and fell into her gut. Oh…God, he was handsome.

“How long are you in town?” she blurted. And then couldn’t believe she’d asked. It wasn’t that the question was forward on the surface, but more because she was angling to see him again in a situation just like this. The two of them alone.

Can you say desperate, she thought.

“I’m going back to the city tomorrow—well, that’s today, isn’t it?” He wiped his mouth and took a drink from his glass of orange juice. “But I’ll be back. I’ve got to clean out this place.”

“Are you going to sell?”

“No reason to keep it. But I’ll make sure you’re in the loop.”

“Thank you. I really liked living here.”

“Hopefully you won’t have to leave. I can’t believe anyone would want to turn this into a one-family.”

“I think I’m going to want to move, though.”

“Why?”

She looked around. “It won’t be the same without him.”

Sean frowned and fell silent so she got up and took both their plates to the sink. As she washed them with a sponge she’d bought a week and a half ago, she tried not to think that Mr. O’Banyon had still been alive back then.

“So you and my father were real tight, huh?”

She held a plate under the rushing water. “We used to watch TV together. And we always ate dinner up here on Sundays. We also looked out for each other. It was nice to think someone wondered whether or not I made it back from my night shifts. Made me feel safer.”

And cared for.

With her mother, Lizzie had always been the watcher, the worrier, the keeper…even when she’d been young. For the time she had known Mr. O’Banyon, it had been really nice to be something other than a ghost on the periphery of someone’s artistic inspiration.

Feeling awkward, she asked, “So do you live right in Manhattan?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve always wanted to go there,” she murmured as she put the plate in the drying rack. “It seems so exciting and glamorous.”

“City’s not far from here. Just drive down some time.”

She shook her head, thinking of the time she would have to take off from work. “I couldn’t really afford to. With two jobs, my hours are long and my mother needs the money more than I need a vacation. Besides, who am I kidding? I’m a homebody at heart.”

“And you were happy being a homebody here. With my father.”

She picked up a towel and began to dry what she’d washed. “Yes, I was.”

“Were you lovers?”

“What?” She nearly dropped the skillet. “Why would you think that?”

His eyes were cold and cynical as he said, “Not unheard-of.”

“Maybe to you. We were friends. Good Lord…”

She quickly put away the dishes, hung up the towel and headed for the exit. “Thank you for breakfast.”

He rose from the table. “Elizabeth—”

“Lizzie.” She stepped around him pointedly. “Just Lizzie.”

He took her arm in a firm grip. “I’m sorry if I offended you.”

She leveled her stare on his hard face. His apology seemed sincere enough; though his eyes remained remote, they didn’t waver from hers and his tone was serious.

She reminded herself that he was under a lot of stress and it was four—well, almost five in the morning. She cleared her throat. “It’s all right. This is a hard time for you right now.”

“Hard time for you, too, right?”

“Yes,” she said in a small voice. “Very. I’m going to miss him.”

Sean reached out and touched her cheek, surprising her. “You know something?”

“What?”

“A woman like you should have someone waiting up for her, Lizzie.”

In a flash, she became totally aware of him down to the details of his beard’s dark shadow and the hazel of his eyes and…

And the fact that he was looking at her mouth.

From out of nowhere, an arc of heat supercharged the air between their bodies and Lizzie had to part her lips to breathe.

Except just as she did, his face masked over and he dropped her arm. “I’ll walk you to the door.”

He turned away as if nothing had happened.

Okay…so had she just imagined all that?

Apparently.

Lizzie forced herself to walk out of the kitchen and found him standing next to the apartment’s open door. As if she’d overstayed her welcome.

As Sean waited for Lizzie to come from the kitchen, he figured he either needed to put his long-tailed button-down shirt on or get her out of here. Because his body was stating its opinion of her loud and clear, and he didn’t want to embarrass the poor woman.

He was totally, visibly aroused. And the quick rearrange he’d done as he’d walked through the living room had only helped so much.

Then things got worse. As she came over, he started to wonder exactly what was under that baggy shirt of hers—and his “problem” got harder.

“Are you going to have a funeral for him?” she asked.

Well, at least that question slapped him back to reality.

“No. He’ll be cremated and interred next to my mother. Told me ten years ago he didn’t want any kind of memorial service.” Man, that had been an ugly phone call. His father had been drunk at the time, naturally, and had maintained he didn’t want his three sons dancing on his coffin.

Sean had hung up at that point.

“That’s a shame.” Lizzie tucked a piece of blond hair behind her ear. “For both of you. People should be remembered. Fathers should be remembered.”

As those green eyes met his, they were like looking into a still pond, gentle, calming, warm. Teamed with the heat that had sprung up in his blood, the impact of her compassionate stare was like getting sucker punched: a surprise that numbed him out.

Unease snaked through him. Stripped of defenses and vaguely needy was not what he wanted to be, not around anyone.

His voice grew harsh. “Oh, I’ll remember him, all right. Good night, Lizzie.”

She quickly looked away and scooted past him. As she hit the stairs at a fast clip, she spoke over her shoulder. “Goodbye, Sean.”

Sean shut the door, crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the wall. As he thought about his arousal, he reminded himself that there was nothing mystical or unusual at work here. Lizzie was attractive. He was half-naked. They were alone. Do the math.

Except there was something else, wasn’t there?

He thought back to the past. Though his memories of his mother were indistinct, he recalled her as warm and kind, the quintessential maternal anchor. From what he’d learned about her, she’d come from a very good family who’d disowned her when she’d married a blue-collar Irish Catholic. Her parents had even refused to come to her memorial service.

Back when she’d still been around, their father had been relatively stable, but that had changed after she’d died when Sean was five. After they’d buried her, all hell had broken loose and hard drinking had moved into the apartment like a mean houseguest. Turned out Anne had been the glue that had held Eddie together. Without her, he’d spiraled fast, hit bottom hard and never resurfaced.

Sean stared at the Barcalounger.

Dimly, he heard the water come on downstairs and he imagined Lizzie brushing her teeth over a sink. When the whining rush was cut off, he saw her stripping off those jeans and sliding between clean white sheets.

She looked like the kind of woman who had sensible sheets.

She hadn’t been his father’s lover, he thought. The outrage on her face had been too spontaneous, the offense too quick. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t been stringing Eddie along for money.

God, one look into those green eyes and even Sean had been hypnotized.

Picturing her face, he was surprised that he wanted to believe she was a well of compassion and goodness. But the Mother Teresa routine was tough to buy. That talk about wanting to go to Manhattan, but needing to hold down two jobs to help out her fey, artistic mother? It was almost Dickensian.

He went back over to the couch and lay down. As he put his arm under his head, a small voice he didn’t trust told him he was reading her wrong. He ignored the whisper, chalking it up to the fact that he was off-kilter because he was back in his father’s place.

When his cell phone went off at 6:00 a.m., he was still awake, having watched the sun rise behind the veil of the old lace drapes.

Sitting up, he grabbed his BlackBerry and checked the number. “Billy.”

His brother’s low voice came through loud and clear. “I was crashed when you called and just woke up for practice. Are you okay—”

“He’s dead, Billy.” He didn’t need to use any better word than he. There was only one him among the three O’Banyon brothers.

As a long, slow exhale came over the phone, Sean wished he’d told Billy in person.

“When?” Billy asked.

“Last night. Heart attack.”

“You call Mac?”

“Yeah. But God knows when he’ll get the message.”

“Where are you?”

“Home frickin’ sweet home.”

There was a sharp inhale. “You shouldn’t be there. That’s not a good place.”

Sean looked around and couldn’t agree more. “Trust me, I’m leaving as soon as I can.”

“Is there anything I—”

“Nah. There’s not much to do. Finnegan’s will handle the cremation and he’ll be interred next to Mom. I’ll go back and forth until I’ve packed everything up here and put the house on the market. I mean, I don’t want to keep this place.”

“Neither do I. Mac’ll agree.”

In the long silence that followed, Sean knew he and his brother were remembering exactly the same kinds of things.

“I’m glad he’s gone,” Billy finally said.

“Me, too.”

After they hung up, Sean felt exhaustion settle on him like a suit of chain mail. Stretching out on the sofa, he closed his lids and gave up fighting the past, letting the memories fill the space behind his eyes. Though he was six foot four and worth about a billion dollars, in the dimness, on this couch, in the apartment that had been a hell for him and his brothers, he was as small as a child and just as powerless.

So he was not at all surprised when two hours later he woke up screaming and covered in sweat. The nightmare, the one he’d had for years, had come for another visit.

Jacking upright, he gasped and rubbed his face. The summer morning was bright and cheerful, the light barging into the living room through the windows like a four-year-old wanting to play.

Amid the lovely sunshine, he felt positively elderly.

In a desperate, misplaced bid to cleanse his mind, he took a shower. Didn’t help. No matter how hard he worked his body with soap, he couldn’t lose the head spins about the past. It felt as if he were trapped in a car on a closed track, going around and around without getting anywhere.

As he stepped out of the water and toweled off, he knew his best hope was that his mind would run out of gas. Soon.

Man, he couldn’t wait to get back to Manhattan tonight.

Chapter Four

Two days later, Lizzie lost her job at the Roxbury Community Heath Initiative.

It was the end of a long Friday and she was in the medical-records room when her boss came to find her. “Lizzie? You have a minute?”

She glanced up from the patient charts she was pulling. Dr. Denisha Roberts, the clinic’s director, was in the doorway looking exhausted. Which made sense. It was almost five in the afternoon and it had been a week full of challenges. As usual, finances were very tight and their waiting room busier than ever.

Lizzie frowned. “What’s wrong?”

“Can you come down to my office?”

Lizzie hugged the chart in her hands against her chest and followed Denisha to the back of the clinic. After they’d gone into the office and Lizzie was in a chair, the director took a deep breath, then shut the door.

“I don’t know how to say this so I’m just going to come right out with it.” Denisha sat on the edge of her desk, her dark eyes somber. “I’ve been informed that our funding from the state is going to be cut substantially for the upcoming year.”

“Oh, no…don’t tell me we’re closing. The community needs us.”

“We’ll have enough to stay open and I’m going to put some grant applications out there, which hopefully will generate some funds. But…I need to make some staffing changes.”

Lizzie closed her eyes. “Let me guess, first in, first out.”

“I’m so sorry, Lizzie. You make a tremendous contribution here, you really do, and I’m going to give you my highest recommendation. It’s just that with everyone else doing such a good job, seniority is the only thing I can base the choice on. And I have to make the cut now, before the funding shrinks, because we need that new X-ray machine.”

Lizzie smoothed her hand over the patient file in her arms. She knew exactly the person it detailed. Sixty-eight-year-old Adella Thomas, a grandmother of nine, who had bad asthma and a gospel voice that could charm the birds to the trees. Whenever one of Adella’s granddaughters brought her in for her checkups, she always sang for the staff as well as the patients in the waiting room.

“When’s my last day?” Lizzie asked.

“The end of this month. Labor Day weekend. And we’ll give you a month’s severance.” There was a hesitation. “We’re in real trouble, Lizzie. Please understand…this is killing me.”

She thought for a moment. “You know…I can line up moonlighting work easily enough. Why don’t we say a week from today so you can get me off the books? I’ll still have a month after that to find a day job.”

“That would be…the best thing you could do for us.” Denisha looked down at her hands then twisted her wedding band around and around. “I hate doing this. You can’t know how much we’ll miss you.”

“Maybe I can still volunteer.”

Denisha nodded her head sadly. “We’d love to have you. Any way we can.”

When Lizzie left the office a little later, she thought she was likely losing the best boss she’d ever have. Dr. Roberts had that rare combination of compassion and practicality that worked so well in medicine. She was also an inspiration, giving so much back to the community she’d grown up in. The joke around the center was that she should run for governor someday.

Except the staff really meant it.

Lizzie walked down to the medical-records room and finished pulling charts so that the Saturday-morning staff would be ready for their first five patients of the day. Then she grabbed her lunch tote from the kitchen, waved goodbye to the other nurses and headed out into the oven that was your typical early August evening in Boston.

On her way home, she called Boston Medical Center and asked her supervisor to put her on the sub list so she could hopefully log more hours in the ED. She would need a financial cushion if she couldn’t find another day job right away and she might as well prepare for the worst.

When she pulled up to the duplex, she told herself it was going to be fine. She had an excellent job history, and with the number of hospitals in and around Boston, she would secure another position in a week or two.

But God…wherever she ended up it wasn’t going to be as special as the clinic. There was just something about that place, probably because it was run more like an old-fashioned doctor’s office than a modern-day, insurance-driven, patient-churning business.

Lizzie’s mood lifted long enough for her to get through her front door, but the revival didn’t last as she hit the message button on her answering machine. Her mother’s voice, that singsong, perpetually cheerful, girlie rush, was like the chatter of a goldfinch.

Funny how draining such a pretty sound could be.

“Hi-ho, Lizzie-fish, I just had to call you because I’ve been looking at kilns today for my pottery, which is critical for my new direction in my work, which as you know has recently been drifting away from painting and into things of a more three-dimensional nature, which is really significant for my growth as an artist, which is…”

Lizzie’s mom used the word which as most people did a period.

As the message went on and on, Lizzie put her purse and her keys down and leafed through the mail. Bill. Bill. Flyer. Bill.

“Anyway, Lizzie-fish, I bought one this morning and it’s being delivered tomorrow. The credit card was broken so I wrote the check for two thousand dollars and I had to pay more for Saturday delivery….”

Lizzie froze. Then whipped her head around to stare at the machine. Two thousand dollars? Two thousand dollars? There wasn’t that kind of cash in their joint account. And it was after five so Lizzie couldn’t call the local bank to stop payment.

Her mother had just bounced that check good and hard.

Lizzie cut off the message and deleted it, then sat down in the quilt-covered armchair by the front bay windows.

The credit card was not “broken.” Lizzie had put a five-hundred-dollar limit on the thing precisely so her mother couldn’t charge things like kilns, for God’s sake.

At least this situation was repairable, though. First thing tomorrow morning, she’d call the bank and cancel that check, then she’d get in touch with the one art-supply store in Essex and tell them the purchase was off. Hopefully, she’d catch them in time.

A thump drifting down from above jerked Lizzie to attention. She looked at the ceiling then out the window. Another rental car was parked at the curb, this time a silver one, but she’d been too caught up in the drama over her job to notice when she’d arrived.

Sean O’Banyon was back.

Sean stood in his old bedroom and wondered how many boxes he’d need to clean out the space. On his way into Southie from the airport, he’d hit U-Haul and bought two dozen of their cardboard specials, but he was probably going to need more.

He went over and opened up the closet door then tugged on a white string that had a little metal crown at the end. The light clicked on and the dusty remnants of his and Billy’s high-school wardrobe were revealed. The two of them had shared clothes for years because Billy had always been so big for his age, and when Sean had left for college, they’d divvied up the best of the stuff. All that was left now was a wilted chamois shirt with a hole under one pit and a pair of khakis they’d both hated.

His cell phone rang and he answered it offhandedly, distracted by thoughts of his brother. It was the team of analysts from his office about the Condi-Foods merger, and he started to pace around as he answered their questions.

When he got off the phone with them, he looked back across the room at the closet and frowned. There was something shoved in the far corner of the upper shelf, something he’d missed on the booze hunt that first night he’d been here.

A backpack. His backpack.

He went over, stretched up and grabbed on to a pair of nylon straps. Whatever was in the damn thing weighed a ton, and as it swung loose from the shelf, he let it fall to the floor. As it landed, a little cloud of dust wafted up and dispersed.

Crouching down, he unzipped the top and his breath caught. Books…His books. The ones from his senior year in high school.

He took out his old physics tome, first smoothing his palm over the cover then fingering the gouge he’d made on the spine. Cracking the thing open, he put his nose into the crease and breathed in deep, smelling the sweet scent of ink on bound pages. After tracing over notes he’d made in the margins, he put it aside.

Good Lord, his calculus book. His AP chemistry. His AP history.

As he spread them out flat on the floor and arranged them so the tops of their multicolored covers were aligned, he had a familiar feeling, one he used to get in school. Looking at them he felt rich. Positively rich. In a childhood full of hand-me-downs and birthdays with no parties and Christmases with no presents, learning had been his luxury. His happiness. His wealth.

After countless petty thefts as a juvenile delinquent, these textbooks had been the last things he’d stolen. When the end of his senior school year had come, he just hadn’t been able to give them back and he hadn’t had the money to pay for them. So he’d marked each one of the spines and turned them in as you were supposed to. Then he’d broken into the school and the gouges he’d made had been how he’d found the ones that were his. He’d gathered them from the various stacks, put them in this backpack and raced away into the night.

Of course he’d felt guilty as hell. Strange that palming booze from convenience stores had never bothered his conscience, but he’d felt that the taking of the books had been wrong. So as soon as he’d earned enough from his campus job at Harvard, he’d sent the high school three hundred seventy-five dollars in cash with an anonymous note explaining what it was for.

But he’d needed to have the books. He’d needed to know they were still with him as he went off to Harvard. On some irrational level, he’d feared if he didn’t keep them, everything he’d learned from them would disappear, and he’d been terrified about going to Crimson and looking stupid.

Yeah, terrified was the right word. He could clearly recall the day he’d left to go to college…could remember every detail about getting on the T that late August afternoon and heading over the Charles River to Harvard. Unlike a lot of the other guys in his class, who’d come with trunks of clothes and fancy stereos and TVs and refrigerators—and BMWs for God’s sake—he’d had nothing but a beat-up suitcase and a duffel bag with a broken strap.