Billionaire Behind the Mask (Texas Cattleman's Club: Rags to Riches 5)

Sutton was a little flummoxed by her response. Most people jumped at the opportunity to visit the exclusive Royal location. “Um, well, we’ve run out of places to go in town. At least until that amazing new restaurant of Chef Roberts opens downtown. Why not go to the club?”

She sighed and rolled toward him, resting her head on his chest. “Let’s just say it isn’t my favorite place in the world. I’d basically rather go to a drive-thru to celebrate than to step foot in the Texas Cattleman’s Club again.”

He wrapped his arm around her, ignoring her morning grumpiness. “Remind me. We met there, didn’t we? Am I remembering it wrong?”

“Yes,” she replied with a tone obviously unamused with his question. “But that was different. I won the contest and Amy made me go, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. I hadn’t stepped foot in that club in years.”

Lauren had made several curious comments about the club, but never elaborated on why she had such negative feelings about the place. Today, he wasn’t going to let her squirm out of the discussion. “Why?”

“It’s just not my kind of place,” she said.

“Nope. Try again.”

She tried to pull away, but he held her tighter. She squirmed for a moment, and then eventually relented with a heavy sigh. “I don’t like to talk about it.”

“Do you think I like talking about what’s going on with my family? It can’t be more embarrassing than what I’m going through.”

“You wanna bet?”

“Just tell me, Lauren. I need to know. Don’t keep something like this a secret from me. I need to understand what happened. You seem to hate the club and everything about it. I’m a member, so it makes me worry that in your mind I’m lumped in with the rest of it.”

He felt her relax in his arms, although surrender was probably a better term for it. “Fine. So, you’re a few years older, so you didn’t go to the high school when I was there. If you had, you would’ve heard this story for sure. But anyway, I’d never been to the club before. My parents just got by, so while we might have been middle class anywhere else, we were basically poor in Royal. So suffice to say, I wasn’t popular throughout school. Amy was one of my only friends, and we got through the hell of junior high and high school together.”

Sutton lay silently holding her, waiting for the rest of the story. He knew it wouldn’t be good, and his heart already ached for the teenage Lauren, struggling to fit in. He’d never had that problem. He and Sebastian had always been at the top of the food chain in school. He had a great time, but he also never really gave any thought to the people at Royal High that weren’t enjoying their teen years. He worried that perhaps he had even made it worse for some of them, even without meaning to.

“Like most teenage girls, I had a crush on the most unobtainable guy in school. His name was Jesse. Jesse Wilde. We had chemistry class together junior year and I thought he was the most handsome guy I’d ever seen in my life. And he was nice to me. He was assigned to be my lab partner and sometimes we’d work on our chemistry homework together.” She sighed. “I knew I didn’t stand a chance with him—he was on the varsity basketball team and was dating the cheerleader that made my daily life hell—but I felt seen for the first time in a long time when I was with him.”

Sutton noticed a sinking feeling start to swirl in his gut. He knew Jesse Wilde before he left Royal to go off wherever he ended up. He was young, handsome, cocky and, frankly, kind of a dick. Sutton never really had anything to do with him, but he did run into him at the club from time to time. This story wouldn’t end well and part of him wanted to stop her from telling him any more. But he held his tongue.

“Our senior year came around and we ended up in the same English class. He ended up sitting behind me and would lean up and talk with me every now and then. Just enough to make my heart flutter when I felt his breath on my neck and imagined if he were to kiss me there, too. It was a stupid infatuation, but I couldn’t shake it while he was still around me, making me think that I stood a chance somehow.

“About a week before the homecoming dance that year, a pipe burst in the gymnasium and it flooded over the weekend. They had to rip up all the floors and couldn’t have the dance there the way they’d planned, so someone volunteered the Texas Cattleman’s Club. I wasn’t going, so I didn’t care, but it was exciting for those who weren’t members to have the chance to visit, like you’d said. Then Jesse broke up with his girlfriend a few days before the dance. It was a huge news story around the halls, with everyone speculating as to what happened and if he was into another girl.”

She shook her head. “I never dreamed it would be me, but that Friday in English class, Jesse asked me to stay back after

it was over because he wanted to talk to me about something. I thought he needed help with our homework on Hamlet, but it turned out that he wanted to ask me to go to homecoming with him.”

Lauren sat silent for a moment before she continued. “I was over the moon. I barely slept that night. My mom even took me to Dallas that next morning to get me a dress at the last minute. My crush had asked me to homecoming and I thought everything in my life was going to change for the better.” A pained expression crossed her face. “I was such a dumb, young girl. Naïve to the core. I’d never even kissed a guy before, but I thought I knew how it was all going to play out.”

She chuckled bitterly. “Everything started out just the way I’d hoped. Jesse picked me up in his sweet new truck and bought me a white rose corsage for my wrist. He looked so handsome in his suit I wanted to just die. We drove to the club and went inside. Everyone was stunned to see the two of us there together. Especially his ex-girlfriend, Kaylah, who was there with some other guy I didn’t know.” She cleared her throat. “I didn’t pay much attention to any of that, though, because I was just starstruck by the whole place. I’d always dreamed of seeing the inside and here I was, with the boy I thought I loved with every adolescent breath I took.

“So Jesse went to get us some punch and I went into the ladies’ room to check my hair. I was so nervous about messing up my hair or makeup and him changing his mind because I looked bad. And when I was in there, I ran into Kaylah and a few of her friends. I expected the worst. Like I said, Kaylah seemed to take pleasure in torturing me for some reason and I figured since I was there with her ex, she had even more motivation to rip my hair out or something... But they were super nice to me. They complimented my dress and asked what I thought of the club so far.”

Sutton bit back a hiss as he sucked in a wary breath. He knew girls like Kaylah and they were never suddenly nice to a girl they’d picked on without a reason. Usually a catty, awful reason.

“I thought that maybe because I was dating Jesse, I was being accepted by the popular-girl clique at last. Kaylah even offered to take me on a tour of the club since it was my first time. She managed to get me to let my guard down completely. We went into a couple different rooms and then she told me that this next one would be my favorite of them all. She opened the door and told me to go on in. It was completely dark, but I could tell the room was huge from the echoes of their voices.

“The next thing I know, I get shoved hard from behind and go flying forward. To my shock, instead of falling to the ground, I hit water. Deep water. I fought in the dark back to the surface, only to catch my breath in time for the lights to turn on and see the entire school standing around the edge of the pool laughing at me. Taking pictures on their phones. Including Jesse.”

Lauren shook her head, the line of frustration deepening between her eyebrows. “He was in on it, too. He never liked me, it was just a rouse to get me to the club. I wanted to die, I was so embarrassed. I was soaked head to toe, my dress was destroyed. My hair was dripping and my makeup was melting down my face.”

“What did you do?” Sutton finally spoke up, his hands curled into fists with no one to hit. He secretly hoped that Lauren could climb from the pool and punch Kaylah in the nose. But he knew that’s not how these kind of stories ended. The rich, entitled Kaylahs and Jesses of the world—people he considered his friends in the past—rarely got what was coming to them.

“I did the only thing I could do. I hauled myself out of the pool while everyone laughed. And I just kept walking. I walked all the way home, dripping wet. The next day, I found out that Kaylah was jealous of Jesse talking to me so much, even though he was basically using me to pass English and not get kicked off the ball team for academic suspension. When she found out I had the audacity to have a crush on him, too, she came up with the whole idea. She convinced him to fake a breakup before the dance so he could ask me to go and she could exact her revenge. While they took me around the club on a fake tour, everyone at the dance snuck into the indoor pool room and waited for her to lure me in and push me into the pool.

“I didn’t know how I would ever face going to school again. The other kids certainly didn’t make it easy. But I made it through, then left immediately for culinary school in the hopes that everyone would forget about Dunk Tank.”

“Dunk Tank?” Sutton perked up.