Chapter One
Was she desperate enough to stand on a barstool in a crowded pub and ask for money? Finley Cartwright sipped her second Midori Sour and considered the state of her desperation and the amount of courage that was contained in a green cocktail.
She hadn’t meant to overspend on their new Dollars for Daughters website, or be the cause for her stressed business partner, Lenny Bradshaw, showing up for work that morning with her shirt on inside out.
Now they had to choose between paying for their gorgeous, new, electronic home or the rent on their pokey, made-of-old-bricks office.
The charity was supposed to be Fin’s way out of waitressing and sweating on her agent finding her a TV commercial or getting a callback after an audition for patient in coma or woman’s legs.
The seed funding for D4D had come from Lenny’s filthy rich, Wall Street dad, and they’d expected it to keep coming. Enough money to rent an office and start saving the world one microloan at a time.
It’d been a good plan until he was arrested and charged for insider trading, racketeering, and money laundering and sent to prison for a wicked long time.
So yeah, Fin was desperate and in need of courage, because Lenny’s family was melting down, and for once, her superbly well-organized best friend was all out of solutions.
She took in the talent in the crowded pub. It was wall-to-wall suits, people in good jobs who could afford to make a charitable donation.
The barstool option was looking good.
She toasted herself, “Here’s to nothing,” downed the last of the drink and climbed on the stool, yanked her T-shirt down and gave the room her biggest smile—the one that regularly failed to get her into a second-round audition—and with arms thrown wide, began.
“Ladies and gentlemen.”
There were catcalls of siddown you’re drunk and show us yer tits.
“A moment of your time.” She used her hands to signal for quiet. She knew what she looked like to her audience—an embarrassment of free entertainment—and she was just tipsy enough not to care. “I wonder if you fine, upstanding patrons of the Blarney would settle a bet for me?”
“Take your shirt off, and I’ll settle between your legs, darlin’.”
She popped her hip and weathered the bawdy laugher.
“I bet my good friend, Liam”—she pointed at the bartender—“I could get fifty of you to give twenty bucks to charity tonight. I told him you look like generous people with your good suits and your fancy lifestyle watches and your sharp haircuts. I told him you care that one in ten people survive on less than two dollars a day. But Liam told me you were a bunch of miserable, stuck-up bastards who wouldn’t put your hands in your pockets for your own destitute mother. Is he right?”
Cheers, jeers, but no one was turning away. She pulled the band from her hair and shook it out to make sure they paid attention. There were murmurs. They liked the hair.
“My charity makes small loans available to women in need, so they can raise their families and send their kids to school. It’s called microfinance, and your donation can help to change lives and make the word a better place.”
“Siddown before you fall down, babe.”
Heads were turning away. She was losing them.
“Please don’t destroy my faith in you. Pick up your cell phone.” She took hers from her pocket and held it up. “Google Dollars for Daughters. That’s my website.” The old clunky one. “You can donate there, get a tax-deduction, and change someone’s life.”
She repeated the details, waving her phone. But the noise level of the bar had risen, people going back to what they were doing before her commercial. “Whatever small change you can give makes a real difference.”
A few men had their cell phones out, a couple of women. Maybe, just maybe, this had been bold enough to work.
“Thank you. Thank you.” She went to her knee to slip her butt back on her stool and knocked her elbow against the man next to her.
“How do you think you did?” he asked.
The guy was one of the power suits, but he’d lost the tie and had a weary air about him. He had dark hair and blue, swimming-pool-lit-at-night eyes. They made it hard not to stare at him. He had a touch of a young Josh Hartnett or Sam Claflin about him. “Did you donate?”
He angled his phone her way. “Your site crashed.”
“Shit.” She could see a little wheel spinning, spinning. That had to mean it had been hit hard. “It wouldn’t be doing that if a lot of people hadn’t tried to donate.” She wouldn’t know how many donations she’d gotten until she checked the bank account.