“No,” I scoffed. “Your mother had four gimlets and I had a bottle of wine. It was junior-varsity time.”
James shoulders shook in silent laughter next to me. “I can’t believe you can out day-drink my mother. You really are the perfect woman.”
His words sent shivers through my body, which I ignored. “She didn’t get anything out of me. I told her that we were happily dating, but that you and your gazillions of dollars were totally out of my league.”
James snorted at me and grabbed my hand. “The opposite is true—you’re out of my league,” he said. “Gorgeous, kind, and young like you are.”
“Ha,” I said, but I felt myself blushing from the compliment. “You’re all of those things, too.”
“Except for the kind and young parts, yeah—I guess I am,” he said, still laughing.
I shook my head at him. He was in a playful mood, which was a first. Maybe he should take more days off and eat ballpark hot dogs more often. If I had all of his money, I certainly would.
“Your mother even asked me if I was pregnant, or trying to get pregnant,” I said, snorting. “I wanted to explain to her that I was a working girl, not some sort of gold-digger.”
“She asked you that?” His voice was like ice.
I shrugged, trying to hold onto the happy mood we’d shared just a second ago. “It’s not like it surprised me. She’s been pretty direct with me from the start.”
All the amusement had drained from James’s face. He let go of my hand and turned toward the window.
“I f**king hate her,” he said. The violence in his voice stunned me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, desperately wishing I could back-pedal. “Should I not have told you that?”
He sighed and shook his head. “It’s not like it surprises me. She’s always been ruthless about it.”
“About what? What do you mean?” I asked.
“All she cares about is the family name and the family money,” he said.
He turned back to me. “My children and Todd’s children are set to inherit an enormous amount of money from my mother’s side of the family. It’s in a generation-skipping trust. My mother is very protective of its future.”
I sat there, not understanding.
“Audrey—any children I have are going to inherit so much money that it’s going to make my fortune look like an allowance. My mother’s family owned coal mines. They were loaded up to their eyeballs. My mother and her siblings got some of that money, and so did Todd and me and our cousins. But the way the trust is set up, it’s the next generation that will inherit the corpus of the trust.”
“The what?” I asked.
“The corpus—that means the bulk of the trust.”
“So she thinks I knew about that?” I asked. “She thinks that’s why I’m dating you? So I can get knocked up and have a super-gazillionaire baby?” I was starting to get pretty pissed at Mrs. Preston and her puffy, chemically-refreshed face.
“I don’t know what she thinks,” James said. “But she’s been very clear, since I was a boy, that I need to have kids with the ‘right’ person. One who has the right background. Not some graphic design student from New Hampshire, whose father owned a main-street shoe store.”
Or a real-life bastard escort, I thought, but said nothing.
“She wants my children to have a pedigree,” he said. “So you’re fine for the wedding, but you’re not good enough to be the mother of her grandchildren. And she just wanted to know if that was your long-term goal.”
“What would she have done if I said that it was?” I asked.
“Something, I’m sure,” he said darkly.
“What about Evie?” I asked, a curious mixture of envy and sadness running through me. “Is she approved?”
“Evie is unfortunately approved,” James said. “Her family’s wealthy and from Wellesley. From a long line of wealthy people from Wellesley.”
“And her cousins are all investment bankers married to investment bankers,” I said.
“Something like that,” he said. He went back to staring out the window.
This was more of a story than I’d bargained for. Now that I knew the truth, it was surprising how swiftly that hope I’d been clinging to just drained away. Not only was I not good enough for James, I was really not good enough. In a way that could never be fixed, could never be overlooked or hidden.
I took his face gently in my hands and turned it back toward me. “I hope you meet the right girl someday,” I said to him, and I meant it. I would shed tears over this later, about the fact that I would never be that person. Still, I meant every word.