The Intern: The Billionaire's Successor

When she breaks eye contact with me, I know that I’m going to have to fight for this. For her. “I mean it,” I insist. “I want to show the world that we’re together. I want to take you places—Boston, Europe, the world. I want to spend time with you and Charlie. For the next year, I want to call you in the middle of the night when work sucks and when you’re sick of business school. I want to go to your graduation and I want to take a thousand more pictures than even the proudest parent there. After that, I want you to come to the city and I want us to both work at D-R and be the most terrifying and successful people there. I want it all. All of it, Olivia. All of you.”

To my dismay, Olivia shakes her head. “I’m sorry, but no,” she states. Her green eyes connect with mine and this cold feeling begins to pass through my arms. It’s that same cold feeling I got when I picked up her phone eight years ago and saw the notification from my brother for a five-thousand-dollar transfer. It’s the feeling of harsh reality and my own foolishness colliding, and it stings as badly, if not worse, than it did the first time.

“What?” I manage to utter, but the word comes out pathetic—so pathetic. I’m left staring at her—practically gaping at her with this stupid look of confusion forming on my face.

“I don’t want that,” she continues, her tone even as she swallows hard. “Anything beyond this summer, I’m not interested. This was fun. It was kinky and exciting, but I don’t want to be your girlfriend, Davis.”

“Why not?” I ask, going for broke. I already feel half my size; another pitiful comment can’t change much.

She raises both shoulders, but the gesture looks half-hearted. “Because you’re not…”

“I’m not what?”

Olivia tightens her brow. “Look, you’re not what I want. I have a right to make that decision, don’t I?”

“Not without an explanation,” I push back. “You owe me that. You owe me at least that, after I—”

“After you paid me seventy-five thousand dollars? I held up my end of the bargain. I fucked you. I let you say every horrible thing you wanted and I let you play out your revenge fantasy. I don’t owe you anything else.”

Her words cut me so much deeper than anything that she’s ever said or done before. This time, her words feel like a scalpel: precise and engineered with the sole intention to cut through skin. To draw blood.

Still, I refuse to let this go. “If you’re trying to convince me that you felt nothing for me this whole time—that all of those moments this summer were faked—you’re going to have to try a hell of a lot harder, Olivia Nolan.” I fold my arms. “I’m not twenty-two anymore, and you’re not half as callous as you pretend to be.”

“If I wanted to be your girlfriend, wouldn’t I just say yes?” she counters, brow raised with challenge. “Stop prolonging the inevitable. We both got what we wanted, and now we can forget about each other.”

I force myself to nod, to make the words go down as easy as I can. “So you just did this for the money? Is that what this is all about?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Why not? What in our history together tells you that I wouldn’t do what it takes to make ends meet?”

“Because at some point, it stopped being a contract and we both know it. Maybe it was in London when we couldn’t keep our hands off each other because we were such an unstoppable team at FundRight. Maybe it was in Amsterdam when you absolutely refused to be separated from me and couldn’t stop kissing me in public. Hell, I don’t know, maybe it was when you offered to pay me ten thousand dollars to sleep with you like I did the night I lost my virginity. I don’t know exactly when, Olivia, but we both know that where we are today is bigger than money.”

“Stop it,” she says as she turns away from me.

“No.”

“Stop it.”

“No.”

“Davis, just stop—”

“No, Olivia,” I object, raising my voice for the first time in front of her. “Did you forget what you agreed to? The contract is over, but I’m still allowed to say whatever I want to you. Right now, I want to tell you that I care about you. That I want to be with you. That I think it’s insane that you have the nerve to pretend that you don’t feel the same way about me after everything that we’ve been through.”

“What the hell have we been through?” she counters, raising her own voice to meet my tone. Her eyes widen as she takes me in. “I mean, seriously? What the hell is so special about this? We’re just two sad people who have spent their whole adult lives faking it until they make it. What do you think is so special about us?”

I’m battling a potent urge to back down because the look on her face is so frustrated and so irate that my inherent urge to please her nearly takes over. I could easily accept her lies. I dealt with it once before, and I could do it again. But my need to be with her wins out in the end. I take a deep breath and ask, “What’s so special, Olivia? It’s that neither of us has been playing, have we?” I finally say.

Olivia is quiet, her eyes now the tiniest bit glassy. She blinks twice, forcing out a tear, but it doesn’t fall. She continues to watch me in tense silence, her slow inhales softly punctuating the moment.

“And it’s been so…nice, hasn’t it. Just so damn nice to be with someone and to be honest for once,” I go on, speaking slowly and softly now as I make this confession.

All the while, Olivia keeps watching me with her steely gaze unwavering.

“I forgot what it was like to be myself,” I continue. “Sweet Davis Ridgeway. Reliable. Considerate. Maybe even a pushover. I put all of that aside and I became hard and harsh and commanding. I became everything that I wasn’t and everything that people expected me to be. Then you came back into my life and I remembered how easy it was to just be myself.”

“You could do that with any woman,” she whispers.

“But I only want to do that with you. That’s the difference, Olivia. Deep down, I think you miss being the scrappy, unbothered woman that you were when I met you eight years ago. You were her again—you were every time you threw my words back in my face and convinced me to put aside this stupid vendetta. That’s who you are.”

The exhale that she releases is slow and controlled. She shuts her eyes briefly, allowing her breath to escape before she tightens her expression once again. When she opens her eyes, she’s looking at me with heartache clear on her face.

I can’t take it anymore. Without a word, I drop my cloth napkin on the table and weave around so that I’m kneeling next to her. I take both of her hands in mine and squeeze them, trying hard to read past the pain in her expression.

“Davis…”

“What?” I question, moving my hands to her cheeks so that I can wipe away a tear that finally falls with my thumb. “What is it? Just tell me the truth. Please.”

“Kieran,” she says, the word hitting the atmosphere like an expletive.

I freeze, watching as her eyes begin to well even harder. “Did you say Kieran?”

Soundlessly, save for a sharp gulp as she tries to hold back tears, she nods.

At that moment, I realize that I’ve never been so close to having literal steam blow out of my nostrils. “What did he do? What the hell did he do?”

“He came to see me at work on Monday. He said that you told him about our deal.”