A Billionaire for Christmas

If Dree ended up bashing Francis’s head in with a fireplace poker or a branding iron, that would be why. Stealing money from her sister Mandi and Mandi’s kid was just frickin’ reprehensible.

And Holy Mary, Mother of God, Christmas was coming. People in her family depended on her cash Christmas presents to get them through because they’d used their food money to buy presents for their kids and other people. If she didn’t have that—

Her chest knotted.

Dree should take Augustine’s money.

She’d been stupid for protesting it. That cash he’d laid up there without a second thought could go a long way toward food for the next few days and then helping her start a new life.

He asked, “Should I take it back?”

Dree ran one hand up the side of her face, thinking about how much money was sitting over there. It looked like at least six hundred euros, which was somewhere north of seven hundred dollars, American.

She thought about what that money would mean to her sister.

But when Dree got back to Phoenix, she would still have her job. She could figure out some way to get a loan from somewhere, and then she could pick up extra shifts to make sure Mandi had enough money.

It just might be next month.

She finally said, “You should take it back. I’m not a prostitute, and I never meant anything I said that way. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Sex work is work.”

Augustine reached for the bills on the dresser. “Of course.”

Sex workers came into her ER all the time with anything from the problems you would expect to sprains and broken bones from abusive customers to ear infections and tonsillitis, and they brought their kids for the usual childhood complaints. There was one lady of the evening named Melinda Williams, her legal name was David Williams, who had three of the sweetest, cheerfullest, cleanest little kids you can imagine. Dree never saw normal childhood dirt on any of those kids. Yes, ma’am and no, ma’am and showing off how well they did in school and pictures from when Melinda chaperoned their school field trips with them, but she couldn’t afford health insurance and so ended up in the ER with them too often.

Dree said to Augustine, “Obviously, you were fine with it. You even knew the going rate.”

He shrugged and put his wallet back in his pocket.

“I mean, Jesus hung out with prostitutes, drunks, and tax collectors, right?”

Augustine reared back for a second, but then recovered. “That’s one interpretation, though I always thought misogynists were trying to smear the reputation of Mary Magdalene to reduce her importance in the New Testament. But that is one interpretation, and one could do worse than to emulate the Son of God, as best one can.”

His frown had turned sad as he stared at his breakfast.

Dree kept thinking about that money.

He finally asked, “You said you’d encountered a problem?”

She didn’t want to admit how stupid she’d been, but she was changing her life. Old-Dree would have hidden what had happened to her out of mortified embarrassment.

But she was trying to be someone else, someone better.

Someone strong enough to be honest, even when she was embarrassed.

Okay, here it went.

She said, “On the day before yesterday—I think it was the day before yesterday. I was on the plane for so long and with all the time zone changes, I don’t know what day I should call it. Anyway, I was on my way home from work after a fifteen-hour shift, and I stopped at a grocery store to buy milk.”

Augustine had set his next croissant on a napkin and was just listening, his dark eyes steadily watching her.

The ease with which he watched her and his open, compassionate expression with the hint of an accepting smile seemed so kind.

She hadn’t thought of him as having kind eyes, but maybe she’d been too busy obsessing about his muscular shoulders or his perfect washboard abs.

Because he totally had those, too.

When he smiled at her like that, she felt more comfortable and heard, somehow.

She went on. “When I went to check out at the store, my debit card was declined.”

Mortification filled her, but she pressed on.

Looking into Augustine’s eyes helped. She felt calmer.

She said, “It was weird. I should have had plenty of money in my checking account. I’d just gotten paid two days before. So, I tried to get money out of the store’s ATM to pay for the milk, but all of my accounts came up overdrawn. The ATM even ate my debit card and wouldn’t give it back. It was like I was in The Handmaid’s Tale or the Twilight Zone. Nothing that I tried would work. I thought maybe my bank’s computers had gotten hacked or something, and it would be fixed in a few hours. So, I left the store and went home.”