Cruel Money (Cruel 1)

“What are you doing over here?”

“I was thinking.” He shifted his gaze back out to the sea and seemed to disappear for a moment. The look was so familiar from our brief time in Paris that I sucked in a breath in surprise.

“About what?” I whispered, entranced by that faraway look.

“Do you know what eudaimonia is?”

My eyes narrowed. “You-da-what?”

He shifted to the side and laughed at my comment. “I’ll take that as a no.”

“No,” I agreed. I couldn’t figure out why in the world he was even talking to me about this.

“It’s a Greek term for happiness or well-being. It’s more accurately translated as human flourishing or prosperity. In ethics, we use it to describe Aristotle’s idea about how ethics contributes to happiness and that the goal in life is to reach eudaimonia.”

I stared blankly at him. “You lost me.”

He nodded. “I’ve seen that look on my students’ faces. There aren’t a ton of us anymore for a reason.”

“Is that what you teach? Aristotle?”

“Ethics mostly. That’s where my research interest lies.”

“Interesting.”

I surprised myself by leaning against the rail next to Penn. I should have stepped back and ignored this conversation. I didn’t need a philosophy lesson in the middle of an incredible day. I could just walk away from this. But, somehow, I couldn’t. I wanted to know more. I wanted to hear him speak about his passions. It was what had enticed me in the first place. And even knowing how this had ended before didn’t get me to back up.

“So…happiness?” I prompted.

“See, for some people, the past is a dark place. It’s everything you knew you shouldn’t be but were anyway. Until you find a way to achieve happiness and then abandon your past. To achieve a happier, more fulfilled life.”

His eyes bored into mine when he said it, and I read him loud and clear. Who he’d been before in Paris wasn’t who he was now. He was trying to be different, better than he had been. Of course, I had no proof of that fact. But he wasn’t trying to force his opinion on me here. He was giving me a lesson.

“Are all of your classes like this?” I asked with a hesitant smile.

He laughed and shook his head. “No, my job is much more boring than being with you.”

I opened my mouth to respond but then closed it. I didn’t know how to respond to that. I didn’t even know how I felt about that…or Penn. This trip had been confusing.

Before I had to come up with something to say, Katherine appeared then. “Natalie! There you are. Come on. We’re all in the hot tub.”

“Sure,” I said.

My eyes darted to Penn, who looked solemn and reserved. Charming one moment and blank the next. Which one was an act for my benefit, and which one wasn’t?

“You coming, too, Penn?” Katherine asked with a quick, vicious smile.

“Yeah. I’ll be there in a minute.”

I looked back at him one last time before following a chattering Katherine to the hot tub and trying to forget about her talk with Penn. And how easily I had slipped into such deep conversation with him. And how irritated it made me that I’d fallen for it…again.

Penn

9

“Do you concede yet?” Katherine asked.

She draped her lean body across my bed back at the cottage. She had changed out of her bathing suit but was only clothed in a red silk nightie. She was clearly trying to woo me to her side with all of this display, but I’d never liked things that weren’t a bit of a challenge.

“Hardly,” I said. I turned my back on her, snatched up my notebook, and then sank into a chair. “We’ve just begun.”

“She disappeared with Lewis down below for, like, a half hour. What do you think happened?”

“I think she looked at his library.”

“Oh, is that what they’re calling it nowadays?” Katherine quipped.

I rolled my eyes. “She’s a writer. She actually had an interest in the library, Ren.”

“Whatever.” Katherine twirled her left hand in the air. The diamond caught the light, and she frowned at it. “I think she’s not going to let her little heart out on the line again.”

“And is that why you have Percy’s ring on your finger?”

She rolled over onto her stomach and smirked. “Jealous?”

I ignored her and turned to my latest entry. I scratched notes in the margin as the idea I’d had on Warren’s yacht about Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics finally came together.

“Are you writing about me?”

“Uh-huh,” I murmured.

“What does it say? You never let me read your work.”

“It says you’re a bitch.”

Katherine scoffed. “Liar.”

I grinned up at her. “You haven’t read it. How would you know?”

“Because I know you, Penn Kensington.”

I added another note with a sentence reminder about the treatise I wanted to decipher. Then, I stuck the pen in the notebook and tossed it onto the table.