A Billionaire for Christmas

In college, when the teaching hospital had provided her with scrubs for her student nursing rotations, that had been the first time she’d ever owned brand-new clothes.

Dree swallowed hard. Like everyone in her family, she’d always been too proud to admit her poverty, and they’d actively hidden and denied it.

But she was trying to change her life.

Since her family had adamantly denied their poverty, she wouldn’t. It was just a thing, not her fault. She was also blond, of average height, and a little plump. They were just things to neither take pride nor shame in.

And she had always been poor, and now she was destitute.

She sucked in a deep breath and used every bit of that air to tell him. “My people aren’t well-off. I don’t even know how to make a reservation at a place like that, and I don’t think I have enough money to go to the Louvre. I was just going to walk around Paris or something and do the free stuff.”

“Oh, but you have to see the Louvre. It’s truly worth the price of admission. Surely, you have a credit card or something.”

Dree steeled herself and said with no shame, “I don’t have the money for the Louvre. I had a problem.” Problem was a good way to put it. “Yeah, a problem, and I had a non-refundable plane ticket to Paris. I figured I could decide what I was going to do with my life in Paris as easily as I could in Phoenix, so I got on the plane and came here. But now I’m here, and I don’t have enough money and I don’t know what to do. I’m just a hard-working girl who got screwed over again.”

Augustine had been watching her quietly, almost without moving. When she finished talking, his thick, black eyelashes rose as his eyes widened slightly, and his lips parted. He was perfectly still for a moment, and then he shook his head just one time as he pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and thumbed the bills inside, counting.

Dree wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do at that point, so she didn’t do anything. Okay, whatever.

He removed a thick sheaf of bills from his wallet and placed them on the dresser beside where he was standing. Quite a lot of the currency seemed to be green, which meant they were one-hundred-euro notes, but at least two of them were yellow two-hundred-euro notes.

Weird. “What are you—”

He said, “I apologize. I didn’t understand the situation last night. That should cover my tab, right?”

Dree squinted at him. She had missed something. “Your—your tab?”

Augustine resumed tearing a pastry apart and slathering it with butter and jam. “For last night. I apologize for leaving without settling the bill, but all’s well that ends well.”

“Wait, the bill?” He thought—oh, there was no way he thought she was a— “Are you kidding me?”

He thumbed through his wallet again and added another green euro note to the stack. “Is that enough? Extra charge for the monster, huh? It’s fine. I’ve paid that before.”

Dree yelled at him, “Auggie, I am not a prostitute!”

He paused and swallowed the bite he was chewing. “I don’t understand.”

“I wasn’t telling you a sob story to get money out of you. I was being open and honest and vulnerable.” Anger swelled in her throat. “I am not a ‘temporarily inconvenienced millionaire’ who’s asking you for money. I’ve just been poor my whole life, and now I’m poor again. But that doesn’t mean I’m a wh—” She swallowed because she couldn’t quite say the horrible word. “A wh—A lady of the evening!”

“I apologize again,” Augustine said with one eyebrow arched high. “Should I take the money back?”

“Yes! Yes, you should take it back! I’m not a prostitute, and you shouldn’t try to pay me for what we did last night. I would never—I would absolutely never—”

And she stopped, blinking, and looked at the money lying on top of the dresser.

Augustine hadn’t moved to take it back yet.

When Dree was in nursing school, a lot of her friends had danced on tables a couple of times when they couldn’t quite make it to the end of the month on the pittance from student loans they lived on. They had joked about blowing guys for beer money, but she had thought they hadn’t actually done it.

Now she was less sure.

That was a lot of money up there. When she got back to Phoenix, she wouldn’t have enough money to make rent on the first of next month, and she didn’t have a bed in her bare apartment. She wasn’t sure Francis hadn’t broken her lease to get at her deposit, too. She might have nowhere to live when she got back. Francis had cleaned out all Dree’s bank accounts, even the one she shared with her sister, which was the most important one.