Survival of the Richest (The Trust Fund Duet 1)

I know what men want from women; I’m only surprised that a man like Sutton wants it from me. Does he think I have more experience than I do? It might be a disappointment when he finds out I can paint a siren better than I can be one.

Sutton reclines on the armchair in the corner, scrolling through his phone. There are probably a hundred emails in his inbox. Phone calls to return. Or maybe he’s looking at his bank balance, counting the money. That seems like something an ambitious man would do.

He looks up, and nothing about his expression changes. At least not that I can discern, but there’s a sense of amusement glinting in his eyes. “You are the most interesting woman I’ve ever met, Harper St. Claire.”

“Oh good,” I say, picking up the coffee he brought me. It’s infinitely stronger than whatever the hotel has in that silver carafe. “I thought you wanted me to be sexy, which was nerve-racking. The interesting thing I’ve been doing for years.”

His lips press together like he’s holding something inside, which I’ve already figured out is an unusual look for him. He says what he’s thinking.

“What?” I say, looking down at my shirt. “Too much?”

He barks a laugh. “God, woman. You’ll be the death of me.”

“Now you’re just being cruel.” I grab my clutch from the nightstand. “Let’s go.”

He follows me, muttering to himself and shaking his head. “Not sexy? If you were any more sexy, I would come in my goddamn boxers.”

I expected a hollowed-out building, maybe one of those abandoned spaces where the earth has started reclaiming the land with ivy grown over cracked concrete. There are enough old places in the west side of Tanglewood for that to be possible.

Instead I find a grand old building with cornices and ionic columns and a wide bank of brass doors set in thick wavy glass. Inside there’s a marble entranceway and a dome stained-glass ceiling. Only a few panes are broken, petals in the flowers that let in shards of sunlight, illuminating a wealth of dust floating in the air. The whole place is done in an art deco style, original work with brass cage light fixtures and stylized roses in the marble floors.

High wooden countertops line the entrance, where intrepid old Tanglewood citizens would go to ask questions before you could ask Alexa anything on your Amazon Echo. Behind the counter is the focal point, a wall carving that’s two stories high—a collage of waves and sky, square-faced men wielding tools and working with the land. It’s a story of triumph, that carving. Even an inch deep in dust and with a bird’s nest hanging loosely off one of the men’s eyebrows, it takes my breath away to look at it.

And through a great curved hallway, shelves and shelves of books.

“Oh my God,” I whisper.

“It’s something, isn’t it?” Sutton says, sounding reluctantly impressed. “Apparently they ran out of funding to pay the librarians, so they just shut the doors one day. Didn’t bother to sell off anything inside or use the building for something else.”

I wander over to a circular file which has little printed cards where people could write requests. There’s one sitting with a half-sized pencil, the words Crossing the Rubicon written on it. They really had locked the doors without any notice or closure.

One day there was a functioning library. A center for knowledge and community.

And the next day, nothing.

I whirl on Sutton, remembering what he told me. “‘This is more of a teardown and rebuild.’ That’s what you said. Are you insane?”

“There’s no money in a library,” he says, his voice gentle.

It makes me think that maybe he mourns the loss of this place, too. Not enough to go easy on him, though. “No wonder Mrs. Rosemont was pissed at you. This is a travesty.”

“That woman has enough money to have restored the library herself if she cared about it that much. It’s convenient that she’s worried about it now that I own the deed.”

“You and Christopher,” I remind him. “You own it together.”

He laughs. “If Christopher had his way, we would have had a wrecking crew already through here. He doesn’t see anything of value between these walls.”

There’s an uncomfortable symmetry between this old building and me. “And what about you? Do you see any value here?”

He looks up at the broken stained-glass windows, his handsome face in silhouette, revealing a place in his nose where it once must have broken. “It’s a beauty, that’s for sure. I thought it would be enough of a tribute to build something grand in its place.”

“That’s not a tribute. That’s—that’s—”

“A travesty,” he says, his voice dry. “You mentioned that. There was an option in the construction plans, an idea I had once to keep the walls and the doors. Even the old style, but most of this would still be cleared to make way for the stores.”

“The stores.”

“It’s going to be a mall. We may not understand the way society ladies work, but we know enough. If there’s a Jimmy Choos over where the picture books are, they’ll come shop.”