Penthouse Player

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  To Stephen. When I told you about the people in my head that wouldn’t stop talking, instead of sending me to the psych ward you sent me to the library with my laptop. Thank you.

  CHAPTER ONE

  @BettencourtBets: Anyone betting against IVy emerging from his father’s shadow is having a bad day. His fund numbers r in & they r as hot as he is!

  Reina

  It took me a long time to realize I was broken. Maybe that’s why I’ve always loved Manhattan, a city celebrated for its potholes and jagged edges. I have them too, except—with enough makeup, the right clothes, a body kept slim by too much stress and not enough french fries, and a smile that shines but never illuminates—I’ve managed to keep mine hidden. Almost.

  Even as a kid, the glistening skyscrapers towering high above my head beckoned to me like trophies in some unknown contest. What would it take to win? I wanted to be on the other side of the shiny glass windows stretching into the clouds, envisioning a glamorous corner office and a staff that looked to me because I had all the answers.

  Back then I wore shiny black Mary Janes and a starched drop-waist dress. But in my mind, red-soled stilettos click-clacked along the pavement, a sleek suit accentuating the curves I prayed my baby fat would become.

  On occasional Sundays and holidays, my mother brought me to the Four Seasons for lunch or, as a special treat, to the Plaza Hotel for tea. Both the train ticket from our small Long Island row house and the restaurant bill were more than we could afford, and I knew it. Not that I ever dared voice my concern. My mother was a pretty woman, beautiful even, but on these days she glowed. Who was I to darken her happiness?

  A Midwestern girl, she’d been lured to Manhattan by promises of making it big as a top fashion model. She was tall, taller than I’d ever become, and a natural, icy blond. She and another aspiring model lived in the Barbizon Hotel for Women. By day they pounded the pavement, rushing to go-sees and casting calls, booking the occasional paying job. By night they attended New York’s swankiest clubs, often on the arm of the most eligible bachelors in town.

  I know this because our lunches were filled with her stories, my attention only slightly distracted by the delicious food and glamorous setting. Groups of powerful men always seemed to sit nearby, their talk of business punctuated by captivated stares at my mother. She knew it, too, could feel the eyes of an interested male on her from one hundred paces. It was a skill I would inherit.

  Without ever being told, I knew these men controlled much of what went on behind the smoked glass of the city’s skyscrapers. Power exuded from their bespoke suits, shiny Patek Philippe watches, and Hermès ties. In a low whisper she told me about them, many of whom she recognized from her short stint as a model, occasionally chortling merrily when she remembered something particularly juicy. These moments were a bright spot in her mundane days as the wife of an aspiring novelist who spent more time reading than he ever did writing.

  A year or so before she left us, both of us, I felt particularly drawn to a man sitting at a table nearby. Something about his face was immediately familiar; I couldn’t take my eyes off him. My mother chided me for staring, then turned, probably planning to apologize to the object of my rudeness. Instead she swiveled back toward me, so quickly a hairpin fell onto her plate. Her eyes were bright and she looked sick, feverish.

  “We have to go,” she hissed.

  I thought she was teasing. We were at the Four Seasons—there would be cotton candy for dessert. A delicate, cloud-like whorl of spun sugar, it melted on my tongue with just the slightest crunch when I bit into it. We never left before the cotton candy arrived, and I’d looked forward to it all week.

  “But why, Mommy? They haven’t brought dessert yet.” I tried hard to keep my voice even. My mother hated when I whined.

  She didn’t answer, fumbling in her purse for a handful of bills and scattering them onto the table. Unceremoniously, she reached for my hand and dragged me out of the dining room, moving more slowly than I would have expected. Before we could walk outside, a waiter flagged us down and led us to the coat check. I thought it was because my mother had forgotten her coat, but the man from the table was waiting for us there. My mother didn’t seem at all surprised.

  Nervous, yes. Contrite, maybe. But surprised? No.

  My mother’s lips naturally turned upward, as did mine. When she was angry, most often with my father, they thinned to a horizontal slash of red lipstick. But that afternoon, the pull of her lips told me she was working hard to suppress a smile. That she was happy about this situation, but didn’t want to show it.

  Eventually I realized that all of our lunches had simply been preparation for that one chance meeting. Because it hadn’t been chance, not on her part anyway. My mother had made the same gamble over and over, hoping the odds would turn in her favor just once.

  Once was all she needed.

  The man waiting for her in the coat closet, however, was very distinctly not happy. The girl who’d taken my mother’s secondhand mink an hour ago made a half-hearted attempt to distract me, but their heated exchange lodged in my ears.

  It was only much later, after I’d nearly cried myself to sleep, when my mother bent to deliver a kiss to my forehead, that I asked again, “Who was that man?” I already knew, though, because I’d overheard them talking. I just didn’t want to believe it.

  She sighed and walked away, but before the door closed, I heard her mutter something beneath her breath. Confirmation. The exact words came to me the next morning as I broke through the haze of sleep into consciousness. “Your damned father.”

  Except I already had a father. True, he’d always been more interested in fictional characters than me. And while I was practically the spitting image of my mother in the pictures she’d shown me from her youth, I didn’t have a single feature in common with the man I called “Dad.” But until that almost inaudible sentence, left lingering in the dark like the sweaty, smelly sneakers I was forever forgetting to leave on the back porch, I didn’t allow myself to believe it.

  If I had heard right, if what my mother said was true, what other lies had she told me? If the man I’d stared at in the dining room of the Four Seasons, so close I could have touched him, could have hugged him, was really my father—who was the man sleeping down the hall?

  And as for the stranger who was really my father, why hadn’t he wanted to hug me? Why had he glared at me like I was a Doberman on a threadbare leash? My mother had told him I was his daughter, I’d heard her.

  He’d called me by a different name. Bastard.

  I didn’t rush to confront her, not that morning anyway. Who knew what kind of story she would spin? But I was determined to find out the truth.

  And so I began spending recess in the library rather than on the playground. For the rest of that school year and into the next, I pored over every page in the Wall Street Journal, knowing that one day I’d see his familiar face staring back at me. That’s probably where I developed my passion for business. After a quick glance
through all the photographs, I would go back and read the stories that piqued my interest. Tales of mergers and takeovers and leveraged buyouts—these were my interests in middle school, not boys. My persistence paid off eventually, and on the day I finally saw his face staring back at me, I raced home to confront my mother.

  But instead of surprising her with my pilfered newspaper page, I was greeted by a Post-it taped to the blue and white Entenmann’s box I’d opened just that morning.

  Smile, Beautiful! I’ll come back for you soon!

  Through the clear cellophane, the round crumb cake was missing the triangle I’d eaten for breakfast, and the sugary sweet Pac-Man confection taunted me.

  Smile? Cryptic note in hand, I raced to her bedroom, flinging open the door of her closet. It wasn’t empty, but I spotted several missing items immediately. The mirrored jewelry box she occasionally allowed me to sift through, piling on rings and bracelets and necklaces, pretending to be a princess. Her prettiest heels, the ones that would inevitably accompany my royal fantasies. And the suitcase that had always sat on the top shelf.

  Not long after, the only father I’d ever known arrived home. There was no Post-it addressed to him, so I can only assume he was notified through some other means. He entered the house quietly, as if bracing for a meltdown of epic proportions. But what he found was a smiling tween. Perhaps more reserved than usual, but smiling.

  I didn’t cry, not that night or the next. Instead I plastered that smile on my face every day as if it were just another step in my morning ritual. Wash face, brush teeth, get dressed. Smile.

  But she didn’t come back for me. Not that night. Not ever.

  Tristan

  As the latest tweet from @BettencourtBets flashed across my screen, I groaned. Ever since some shithead had the horrific idea to start up a Twitter account based on conversations he’d supposedly overheard in the Goldman Sachs elevator, similar clichéd accounts had popped up at every financial firm in Manhattan. And now there was one at Bettencourt. Did it piss me off? Fuck, yeah. But what infuriated me even more was that I hadn’t figured out what to do about it. Yet.

  “As hot as he is?”

  Not only had my name, Tristan Xavier Bettencourt, admittedly the fourth, been reduced to IVy, all the hard-ass work I put into making the Millennial Fund successful over the past year was being compared, not to the S&P 500, but to the reflection I saw in the mirror every morning. Who wrote this crap? And didn’t they have anything better to do with their lives—like actually work for a living?

  Yes, it’s true that I come from a long line of bankers, the fourth one to carry the same name. But I’m not a plant, certainly not a climbing, invasive species. And if IVy was a snub to the school I graduated from, let BettencourtFuckingBets try to manage a Harvard course load while leading Crimson’s D1 hockey team to NCAA victory. IVy, my ass. If they had the balls to insult me on the ice, I’d send them off in a stretcher. Wouldn’t be the first time, either.

  Until today, I’d taken the ridiculous tweets with a grain of salt. It hadn’t bothered me when the secretaries called me IVy with a flirtatious glint in their eye, but now even my traders were using the derogatory nickname.

  Since @BettencourtBets was too much of a pussy to throw down using their real name, I was itching to shut up an overweight, overconfident trader or two. Satisfying as that would be, though, it still wasn’t going to solve my current problem. Shit.

  It had taken nearly a year to scrape together $50 million, which was chump change on Wall Street. But now that I’d proven I knew what to do with it, investors were knocking down my door to give me their money. And I’d be damned if my double-digit returns were going to be trivialized by some anonymous asshole hiding behind a Twitter account.

  I would’ve preferred to go for a long run in Central Park or along the river to blow off steam, but instead settled for the ease of jumping on the treadmill in the spare bedroom of my penthouse. I didn’t have time to brood. Tonight was yet another in the endless parade of charity fundraisers dotting the calendar of anyone with a bank balance above seven figures. I would have skipped it but my stepmother was chairing the Board, and my father (whose shadow I was apparently struggling to emerge from) had asked me to go.

  After a quick shower, I reached for the nearest of three tuxedos hanging in my closet, a Prada that my (now ex) girlfriend insisted I purchase earlier this year. Like all of my ex-girlfriends, she wanted more than I was willing to give, specifically a diamond with a carat size in the double digits. And a prize worth more than any pressurized carbon rock—the Bettencourt name.

  Tonight’s fundraiser was at the Four Seasons. The hotel, not the restaurant. I brought my wallet, of course, but purposely left my phone at home. I’d already received at least a dozen texts about today’s offensive tweet, and I didn’t need any more aggravation tonight.

  Getting a drink was first on my evening’s agenda, although the bar was even more crowded than I expected it to be. Didn’t these damn event planners know that they would get more money out of the poor sods packed into the ballroom if they had enough bartenders to get everyone drunk before the bidding began? I had yet to discover if tonight’s auction would be silent, Chinese, or the kind run by an auctioneer poached from Christie’s or Sotheby’s for the evening, but I did know that I needed a scotch on the rocks. Immediately.

  I also knew that money always speaks louder than words. From my inside pocket, I grabbed a crisp Benjamin and held it aloft. Within seconds it had the desired effect. “What can I get for you, sir?”

  “Any Macallan 18 back there?”

  “No sir, not here. But if you’d like, I bet they have it downstairs in the hotel bar. I’d be happy to get it for you.”

  I wasn’t surprised, it had been a reach. “No, thanks for the offer. I’ll take the best scotch you’ve got, then.”

  The bartender, an older man with graying hair and a stocky build, his flattened nose hinting at a pugilistic past, palmed the bill and offered an appraising glance before reaching for a bottle that was hidden beneath those displayed. “I’ve got a twelve year Glenlivet. Will that do?”

  I grinned, reaching inside my pocket for another hundred. “Yeah, that’ll do. When I want a fresh drink, keep an eye out for me at the end of the bar.” I handed him my second bill and surveyed the crowd jockeying for position to get a glass of cheap wine or a watered-down cocktail. “I don’t like waiting, especially for bad drinks.”

  He nodded, clearly thrilled with his good luck. “You won’t get a watered-down drink from me, sir. And I won’t keep you waiting.”

  I nodded, took a sip, and felt my bad mood start to ease. Enough that I considered looking around for my father. As crowded as the bar was, the ballroom itself had yet to fill up. I spotted my stepmother first, her pressed lips and pink cheeks telling me the woman carrying a clipboard and wearing a discreet but nonetheless visible headset with a microphone, obviously one of the event coordinators, was about to get an earful. My father was engaged in conversation with three men who ran successful funds nearby, their trio already surrounded by a cluster of acolytes hanging on their every word. Joining either of them was less than appealing.

  Manhattan was ruled by hedge fund kings, and looking around, it seemed as if every single one of them had been dragged to tonight’s fundraiser by their wives, who were no less cutthroat and ambitious. Bankers lived and died by the returns they generated for their investors, while their wives earned status by how much of their husbands’ money they gave away.

  Most of the faces in the room were familiar to me. I’d grown up with, worked with, attended school with, or fucked at least half the people there.

  My eyes skipped over a blonde in a red dress, and then quickly returned. I hadn’t realized I’d started walking toward her until a waiter nearly spilled my drink. She was gorgeous. And when she tipped her head back to laugh at something the man beside her said, I decided that word was entirely inadequate. Stunning was much more apt. Exquisitely stunning,
actually. Her creamy skin was flawless. And she was tall—I looked down—or at least she appeared tall with the five-inch stilettos on her feet. When her open-mouthed laugh faded into a generous smile, her wide eyes met mine. If she’d been an investment, she would have been labeled high risk, high reward, with a warning—Don’t buy if you can’t afford to lose.

  Her lips closed around the edge of the glass in her hands, our stare unbroken. Her eyes were the bright shade of freshly cut, well-tended grass. And after she took a sip, white wine by the looks of it, she didn’t look away. Her open appraisal was a lure, and I took the bait. She could have been a model on a billboard in Times Square, or in the GQ magazine I subscribed to but never had the time to read. I know I should’ve turned away. This girl was clearly trouble with capital T, something I needed as much as a hole in my head.

  After doing well with the first fifty million I’d been able to raise, I was just about to open my fund up to new investors. I didn’t have any official commitments yet, but I had no doubt my fund was about to grow to at least $500 million. I had a lot to consider, and a ton of work to do. This was the most important time in my career and I couldn’t afford to fuck it up by becoming a lovesick fool over some girl, exquisitely stunning or not.

  I stopped in my tracks, maybe ten feet away, although I couldn’t tear my eyes from her face. She was young. Maybe too young? But then she smiled again. And not just any smile. This one wasn’t polite, or friendly, or casual in any way. No, this smile was so bright it heated the drink in my hands and blinded me from seeing anyone else in the room. Her curved lips were an invitation I couldn’t resist. Even though I knew I should.

  Reina

  I stopped listening to my date well before he stopped speaking. All I could focus on was the striking stranger walking toward me, intention blazing from his eyes. He was one of the rare men who filled out his clothes so well that I knew he’d look even better naked—although it was obvious his tuxedo had probably cost as much as an entire table at this expensive benefit. Not that I’d paid for my ticket.