“I don’t know if I can find out a way to productively spend five hundred thousand dollars today,” Danielle said. Victor laughed.
“Obviously you need lead time,” he pointed out. “The goal is five hundred thousand a day, and then a million a day. But for the first few weeks—maybe even the first month—I’m going to expect you to come up first with a plan for locating the right sources for it, and how it’s going to work.” Danielle looked slightly away from his face, and Victor could see that she was thinking—thinking hard. After a moment she met his gaze again.
“Do you have any particular causes you want me to look at in particular?” Victor raised an eyebrow in query to that question. “I mean—do you want me to focus on kids, or on poverty, on drugs…”
“Oh! Well that’s another thing I am going to want you to figure out,” he said. “At this point, I want you to find the best ways to spend my money to give back. If you have a different place every day getting five hundred thousand dollars from me, then that’s fine. The endgame is to spend the rest of my life giving away at least half of my wealth, if the US Government doesn’t intend on taxing it out of me.” Danielle smiled slightly, and Victor saw the devil in her eyes.
“So, if they make a major tax reform and start taxing you 90% over 500,000, I guess I’ll be out of a job?”
Victor chuckled. “I’ll still be a billionaire. Nobody needs this kind of money—especially not to hold onto.”
Danielle looked a little skeptical. “I can’t believe someone who worked hard to become a billionaire doesn’t want to be a billionaire,” she pointed out.
“I can spend a million dollars a day for years and still be a billionaire when I die,” Victor countered. “Just based on how much money I have right now—and I’m going to keep on making money.”
“So why keep on making money if it’s not fair to have so much of it?” Danielle raised an eyebrow. “I mean, I probably shouldn’t be arguing you out of this, since I just quit my job—but it seems a bit…” Victor chuckled again.
“What’s life without work?” Victor shrugged. “People want to give me money to make things happen, I’ll take the money—but I’ll funnel as much of it as possible right back into the world. It doesn’t make sense to do otherwise.”
“I guess I can get that,” Danielle told him. She thought for a moment longer, and then nodded again. “So, spend the first few weeks making plans, and then we’ll start spending your fortune making things better, I guess.” Victor smiled and nodded.
“And of course, there’s the other aspect of it too,” he said. That—that was what was making him anxious. He’d never been the type to have someone there “on demand,” more or less, to have sex with. He’d been clear with Danielle that he didn’t expect having sex with her to be part of her actual job—she wasn’t there to have sex with him, she was there to spend his money. But that was a major “perk” of the job for both of them; at least, he hoped that Danielle saw it as much as he did as a perk.
“Obviously, I read and signed that contract,” Danielle said, her voice taking on a cautious note. Victor felt the little flutter in his chest as he watched her, knowing that she would be available for him—knowing that she wanted to be available for him—at random hours in the day when they needed the stress relief of getting each other off.
“I want to make it clear to you that the sex isn’t part of your job,” Victor said. “If I send you a text or an email—or whatever—and you’re not into the idea of having sex, I’m not going to get pissed at you for telling me no.”
“I do like that you included in the contract that this has no bearing on my employment,” Danielle said with a little grin. “Made me feel a bit better about agreeing to it.”
“I’m serious when I say that I want this to basically be a perk—and for both of us, not just me,” Victor said, meeting Danielle’s gaze. He smiled slowly. “We can both turn to the other one for sex during the day—as long as our schedules are free, and we both want it. Either one of us can say no.” Danielle nodded, still looking a little dubious at his reassurances but not entirely rejecting the idea.
“I guess you’re going to need me to do some paperwork and all that, right?” Danielle asked. “Unless you were hoping to get in our
first session on the clock?” Victor chuckled.
“We have all day,” he pointed out. “And there is paperwork you’re going to have to do—a lot of it.” He sighed, knowing just how much of a pain it was going to be for his lawyer, his accountant. Technically Danielle would be working for him directly, not for the company; but her office was going to be there, next to his, a little alcove where she could work privately doing research and making proposals. There was—he would show her later—a little door in her office, unmarked, that led not only to her private bathroom but also to a hallway linking her space with his.
But all that would come later; for the moment he had to get his new assistant legally under the auspices of his personal corporation and make everything airtight from the standpoint of the government.
“I’ve got my lawyer and my accountant ready for you to go over everything, and I’ve got a meeting to get to,” Victor added. “But I’ll be back before lunch. Pick a place for us to order from, and we can have a meeting of our own then—just to get you oriented, so to speak.” He smiled at her and Danielle returned the grin with more than a hint of heat in her eyes. It was—Victor thought—going to be very good indeed to have her working for him.
Chapter7
Danielle sat back from her desk and looked around the little office that Victor had given her, shaking her head slightly in disbelief. Even after a week of working for him, she still couldn’t quite credit the fact that she was, legally, making one hundred thousand dollars a year plus almost as much in a clothing allowance, all for the job of spending a billionaire’s money on charity and community development projects. Just the fact that she had her own office was a thrill in itself; she had never had an office, private to herself, ever before.
She hadn’t felt even slightly guilty giving her former bosses her letter of resignation; it had been something of a risk, considering she hadn’t actually started the job—but she had a contract, had signed it and seen Victor’s signature on it, stating that she had the job. She had been able to buy the clothes on Victor’s accounts without anyone so much as batting an eyelash. It had definitely begun to dawn on Danielle that wealthy people lived in an entirely different world than the one she’d inhabited her entire life.
The women at Nordstrom and at Sak’s, had been so eager to help, asking what style she wanted, asking if she wanted to look at “foundation garments” too, talking to her about her choices—it was a level of care and concern that Danielle had never experienced in her life. They were, she thought, willing to spend as much time with her as she might have felt like taking, confident in the possibility of her spending money.
And those same women would be happy to see her again when she went back the following month to take advantage of her clothing allowance; they had given her their cards and told her how to schedule her own shopping appointment with them. Of course, if they’re getting a ten percent commission on two thousand dollars, that’s a good $250 on their next paycheck, Danielle reminded herself. That was nothing to sneeze at.
And since she was making three times what she had been earning before, she would be able to—maybe once in a while—visit them on her own, buy a few things for her non-work life, as well. Danielle smiled to herself, remembering the pair of boots she’d tried on but decided not to buy, since they would have been more suited to going out than the office.
She had gotten a firm hold on how her actual job worked in the week since she’d started with Victor, in between their in-office flings: most of the day, she sat at her computer, researching different fundraising campaigns, community projects, and charities. She made notes about what looked likely, and looked deeper into the circumstances of each one, so that she could add them to what she mentally called “the list.”
Already, Danielle had developed a kind of system, a schedule that she intended to follow, just to make sense of things and make her work a little more routine and less scattered. She decided that for each day of the week, she would have a theme: Mondays were for individual need-based fundraising drives, like people who were trying to get out of debt from hospital bills, or from student loans, or who needed funding to get out of an abusive home—things like that.
Tuesdays, she would look at scholarship funding opportunities, not just for colleges and universities but also for preschools and grade schools, starting in Philadelphia.