Penthouse Prince: A new York City Romance Read online

  PENTHOUSE PRINCE

  A New York City Romance

  TARA LEIGH

  PENTHOUSE PRINCE

  My billionaire boss is keeping a secret. Me.

  Tristan James Xavier Bettencourt IV.

  The prodigal son of a banking dynasty.

  And my new boss.

  With his silver tongue and dirty mouth,

  he’s everything I’ve ever wanted.

  And the one man I’ll never have.

  Some rules are as old as time.

  Girls like me don’t ride off into the sunset with men like him.

  Reina St James has a body made for sin,

  and a face that could tempt the devil himself.

  As the heir to a financial empire,

  a scandal is the only thing I can’t afford.

  But all work and no play

  make this billionaire a very bad boy.

  Reina is the one woman I can’t have.

  And a temptation I can’t resist.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Also by TARA LEIGH

  About the Author

  Prologue

  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 a contest I needed to win. I yearned to be on the other side of those shiny glass windows stretching into the clouds, where I could look down on little girls like me, their scuffed patent-leather shoes clinging to the sidewalk, necks arched all the way back, tender seeds of ambition taking root.

  My mother brought me into New York City quite a bit as a kid. Both the train ticket from our small Long Island row house and the restaurant bill were more than we could afford, but our Manhattan lunches were a special treat—for my mother as much as for me. As the wife of an aspiring novelist who spent more time reading than he ever did writing, these moments were a bright spot in her mundane days and I was more than willing to go along for the ride.

  Originally from the midwest, she’d been lured to Manhattan with dreams of making it big as a top fashion model. By day she pounded the pavement, rushing to go-sees and casting calls, booking the occasional paying job. By night she attended New York’s swankiest clubs on the arms of the most eligible bachelors in town.

  Our lunches were filled with her stories, and she painted a pretty picture with every word. Through her eyes, Manhattan was a city saturated with aspiration and excess, fortune and fantasy, glamour and gold. Powerful, important people—who could live anywhere in the world—chose this concrete jungle to call home. Manhattan was where you came to be someone. Here, even the most outrageous dreams came true every day.

  What she didn’t say, what she didn’t have to say, was that her dreams didn’t.

  At one of our lunches—our very last one, actually— I couldn’t stop staring at a man sitting nearby . . . Maybe because he couldn’t stop staring at us. After scolding me several times, my mother finally turned to see what I was focused on. A second later, she swiveled back toward me, so quickly a hairpin fell onto her plate.

  “We have to go,” she hissed, her eyes suddenly bright, her cheeks flushed.

  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.

  “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 before reaching for my hand and dragging me out of the dining room. She wasn’t moving very fast though, and by the time we got to the coat-check, he was waiting for us.

  My mother didn’t seem at all surprised.

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

  When my mother was angry, her lips thinned to a horizontal slash of red lipstick. But that afternoon it was obvious, to me at least, that she was working hard to suppress a smile. That she was happy about this situation, but didn’t want to show it.

  The man waiting in the coat closet, however, was very distinctly not happy. And despite the coat-check girl’s half-hearted attempts to distract me, their heated exchange lodged in my ears.

  I stewed over the new word I learned all the way home. Bastard.

  Much later, my mother bent to deliver a goodnight kiss to my forehead. Half-asleep, I mumbled the question I didn’t have the nerve to ask until exhaustion had blurred the edges of my indecision. “Who was that man?”

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

  Only . . . I already had a father.

  True, he’d always been more interested in fictional characters than me. And I now noticed that we didn’t have a single feature in common. 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 heard right, if what my mother said was true, what other lies had she told me? If the man I 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—if he really was 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?

  I didn’t rush to confront her, not that morning anyway. My trust in her felt too precarious. I was scared of learning the truth, scared of being fed more lies.

  But my questions didn’t go away, 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 of the Wall Street Journal, somehow knowing that one day I’d see his familiar face staring back at me. That’s probably where I developed my passion for business. Tales of mergers and takeovers and leveraged buyouts—those were my interests in middle school, not boys. My persistence eventually paid off, and on the day I finally saw his face staring back at me, I ran home to confront my mother.

  But instead of surprising her with my pilfered newspaper page, I was greeted by a Post-it stuck to the grocery store pastry box on the kitchen counter.

  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 be
droom, 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 always sat on the top shelf.

  My father—the only one I’d ever called Dad, anyway—arrived home shortly afterward. There was no Post-it addressed to him, so I assume my mother communicated with him 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.

  Eventually, I realized those lunches weren’t about us. They weren’t a special treat for me. They were darts thrown at a wall, in the hopes that one would stick. That chance meeting had nothing to do with chance. My mother made the same gamble over and over, just waiting for the odds to turn in her favor.

  And they did. She reunited with that man, the stranger in the shiny suit. My damned father, as she had called him. Gerald Van Horne, according to the newspaper. And about a year later, she left me behind.

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

  Her note was a lie, though. She didn’t come back for me. Not that night. Not ever.

  But I beat her at her own game, telling the biggest lie of all without saying a single word. I communicated with the curve of my lips, my wide-open eyes, the flutter of my pale gold lashes. My face projected happiness when sadness pulsed through my body with every beat of my heart, when every breath required choking down the reality of being unloved, unwanted, abandoned.

  Good liars tell believable stories. Great liars become a character in their own story.

  And when you’re a character, a shell of a person, lies are all you have. Lies are what you cling to when everything else, everyone else, makes no sense at all. They are your table of contents, your chapters, the spine of your script.

  The best liars stick to their script, always. It transcends fiction. It’s their reality, after all.

  Lies are their only truth.

  Lies become truth.

  Trust me. I’m a great liar.

  Chapter 1

  @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!

  Tristan

  The latest tweet from BettencourtBets flashes across my screen just as I’m about to leave the office on a Friday night. My groan is drowned out by several hoots of laughter, courtesy of my remaining colleagues still glued to their desks at seven o’clock on a Friday night.

  “Fuck off,” I grumble, shrugging into my suit jacket and heading for the elevator.

  “You too, stud,” Kyle, my senior analyst, calls out, accompanied by a wolf whistle. “Don’t celebrate too hard, we need you bright-eyed and bushy-balled here on Monday morning. Big week.”

  My jaw aches from grinding my teeth as I raise my right arm—and middle finger—up in the air.

  This bullshit has got to stop. Years ago, some shithead at the investment bank, Goldman Sachs, decided to start up a Twitter account based on conversations he overheard in the office elevator. Since then, similar clichéd accounts have popped up at every financial firm in Manhattan. Including mine. Does it piss me off? Fuck, yeah. But what infuriates me even more is that I haven’t figured out what to do about it. Yet.

  Not only has my name, Tristan James Xavier Bettencourt, admittedly the fourth, been reduced to IVy, all the hard-ass work I’ve put into making the Polaris Fund successful over the past year is being compared, not to the S&P 500, but to the reflection I see in the mirror every morning.

  As hot as he is!

  Who writes that crap? And don’t they have anything better to do with their lives—like actually work for a living? These days, I have time for little else.

  Yes, it’s true that I come from a long line of bankers, the fourth one to carry the same four names. But I’m not a leafy plant, certainly not a climbing, invasive species. And if IVy is 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 on a stretcher. But no, I don’t even know who they are. Or even if a plural pronoun is appropriate. Could be a he or a she. Could be anyone.

  Until today, I’ve taken the ridiculous tweets with a grain of salt. I’ve begrudgingly endured the administrative assistants calling me IVy with a teasing, sometimes flirtatious glint in their eye. But now even my own team of traders and analysts is getting in on the fun.

  And by fun . . . I mean fucking torture.

  With BettencourtBets too much of a pussy to throw down using their real name, I’m itching for a way to shut them up before they go from being a thorn in my side to an axe in my back.

  It’s taken nearly a year to scrape together $50 million for my hedge fund, which is chump change on Wall Street. But now that I’ve proven I know what to do with it, investors are knocking down my door to give me their money. And I’ll be damned if my double-digit returns are trivialized by anyone, let alone an anonymous asshole hiding behind a Twitter account.

  Given my current mood, I should really spend the next few hours blowing off steam with a long run along the Hudson River and around the lower tip of Manhattan. Beyond my need for exercise, standing in the shadow of the Freedom Tower—a soaring pillar of strength rising from the ashes of our city’s greatest tragedy—never fails to put things in perspective for me.

  Unfortunately, I don’t have time for reflection. Tonight is yet another in the endless parade of fundraisers dotting the calendar of anyone with a bank balance above seven figures. I would skip it but my father (whose shadow I am apparently struggling to emerge from) asked me to go.

  He loathes these types of charity dinner as much as I do. Anyone who respects the value of a dollar knows that the exorbitant event fees eat away at the donations received, sometime to such a large extent that the charity doesn’t get a dime. But since my stepmother is chairing the Board, he doesn’t have much of a choice. And since, in a moment of weakness, I said I would go, neither do I. Wall Street, and life in general, is filled with liars and frauds. I decided long ago never to be one. I always keep my word, no matter how painful.

  But I’ll be going alone. Because, not surprisingly, ignoring a note on my calendar doesn’t make it go away, it just means enduring the evening without the distraction of a date.

  After logging a few miles on the treadmill in the spare bedroom of my penthouse and then a quick shower, I reach for the nearest tuxedo hanging in my closet.

  Tonight’s fundraiser is at a swanky midtown hotel, the kind with a ballroom the size of a cruise ship. I bring my wallet, of course, but purposely leave my phone at home. I’ve already received at least a dozen texts about today’s offensive tweet, and I don’t need any more aggravation tonight.

  Getting a drink is first on my agenda, although the bar is packed three-deep. Don’t these damn event planners know that they’ll get more money out of the poor sods packed into the ballroom if they have enough bartenders to get everyone drunk before the bidding begins?

  Because money always speaks louder than words, I grab a crisp Benjamin from my inside pocket and hold it aloft. Within seconds it has the desired effect, producing an uniformed older man with graying hair and a stocky build, his flattened nose hinting at a pugilistic past. “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 bite back a sigh. “No, thanks for the offer. I’ll take the best scotch you’ve got, then.
”

  The bartender palms the bill and offers an appraising glance before reaching for a bottle hidden beneath those displayed. “I’ve got a twelve-year Glenlivet. Will that do?”

  I reach inside my pocket for another hundred. “Yeah, that’ll do. When I want a fresh drink, keep an eye out for me.” I hand him my second bill and survey the crowd jockeying for position to get a glass of cheap wine or a weak cocktail. “I don’t like waiting, especially for bad drinks.”

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

  My bad mood eases somewhat as I take a sip and make my way toward the ballroom. Most of the faces in the room are familiar to me. I’ve grown up with, worked with, attended school with, or fucked at least half the people here. I’m bound to find someone to make the next few hours bearable.

  I spot my stepmother speaking to a woman carrying a clipboard and wearing a discreet but nonetheless visible headset with a microphone, obviously one of the event coordinators. Judging from Claudia’s pressed lips and pink cheeks, the woman is about to get an earful. Nearby, my father is engaged in conversation with two other men who run successful funds, their trio already surrounded by a cluster of acolytes hanging on their every word. Joining either them is less than appealing.

  I study the remaining flock of Manhattan society, slotting them into their respective pigeonholes. Politicians, old money aristocrats, new money show-offs, grasping social-climbers, high-end prostitutes, former debutantes, financial whiz-kids, and Wall Street rainmakers. The gang’s all here.