After three Years in Prison, I Became a Billionaire

Chapter 9: A bad night,twice

The bodyguards left without a word, the door clicking shut behind them, and then it was just Francis and a stranger in a suite bigger than most apartments he'd lived in.

He set her down on the edge of the bed, checked her breathing, checked her pulse the way he vaguely remembered someone teaching him once, and then stood there a moment, unsure what came next. He wasn't a doctor. He wasn't much of anything at the moment, if he was honest with himself. Just a man three years out of practice at being responsible for another human being.

Up close, in better light, she looked younger than the alley had suggested, mascara smudged down one cheek, one shoe still missing. Whatever had chased her into that corner had done a thorough job of it. Francis had seen that particular kind of exhaustion before, mirrored back at him from prison cell walls more nights than he cared to count.

The suite around him looked like something out of a magazine he'd never had the money to buy. Floor-to-ceiling windows, a skyline glittering cold and distant below, furniture that probably cost more than the car that used to sit in his old garage. None of it registered as anything but noise. His mind was still back at that dinner table, still turning over the word divorce like a coin he couldn't decide which side of.

He thought about calling Naomi, asking her to send someone competent to look the woman over. He thought about calling the front desk instead, letting hotel staff handle whatever came next so he could finally sit somewhere quiet and let the day catch up with him. He did neither. Some tired, stubborn part of him had already decided he wasn't leaving a half-conscious stranger alone in a hotel room tonight, not after everything he'd just watched a hospital try to do to his own mother.

So he stayed. He pulled a blanket over her legs, set a glass of water on the nightstand within reach, and dropped into the armchair across the room, intending to keep watch until she sobered up enough to send home safely.

He lasted maybe ten minutes before she stirred.

"Water," he muttered, mostly to himself, and stood, turning toward the kitchenette.

He didn't get far.

Her hand caught his wrist, grip stronger than he expected from someone who'd nearly collapsed in an alley an hour ago. Her eyes were open now, glassy, unfocused, the alcohol clearly still running the show.

"Don't leave," she murmured, and before he could answer, she'd pulled herself upright and wrapped both arms around him, pressing close in a way that left no room for interpretation.

"You're drunk," Francis said, keeping his voice level, keeping his hands carefully still at his sides. "You don't want this."

"I want someone who isn't him," she whispered against his collar, and something in her voice cracked just enough to sound almost sober. "Just tonight. Please."

He tried, once more, to reason with her. "You don't even know my name."

"Good." Her fingers curled tighter into his shirt. "I don't want to know it. Names complicate things. I've had enough complicated tonight to last me a decade."

There was something disarmingly honest in that, honest in the particular way only drunk or desperate people ever managed to be. Francis understood the sentiment better than he wanted to admit. He'd spent the whole night wishing, more than once, that he could shed his own name for a few hours too. A stranger asking nothing of him except his silence felt, in a strange way, like the first honest exchange he'd had all day.

He told himself he'd stop it before it went too far. He told himself a lot of things that night that turned out not to be true.

Her hands found the collar of his jacket first, then his shirt, working with the clumsy determination of someone who'd stopped thinking several drinks ago. Francis caught her wrists once, twice, some last thread of sense trying to hold. Both times, she simply waited him out, patient in the way only the truly drunk or the truly desperate could manage, until his resolve wore thinner than the buttons under her fingers.

"Last chance to stop," he said quietly, more to himself than to her.

She didn't stop. Neither, in the end, did he.

Somewhere on the table across the room, his phone lit up, screen glowing faintly against the dark. Tina's name flashed once, twice, the vibration buzzing itself into silence against the wood. Neither of them noticed. Neither of them, for once, cared.

They fell asleep tangled in unfamiliar sheets sometime after the city outside had gone quiet, neither of them dreaming about anything worth remembering.

A phone woke him first. Not his.

Francis surfaced slowly, blinking against the morning light, and looked over to find the woman beside him already frowning at the noise, one arm draped across her eyes. Sunlight caught the curve of her shoulder, the tangled dark hair spread across the pillow, and for a brief, disoriented moment he almost forgot where he was and how he'd gotten there. Then memory caught up, the way it always did, patient and unhurried and entirely unwelcome.

She reached under the pillow without opening them fully, fished out her phone, and answered on reflex.

"Hello?"

Whatever came through the line snapped her fully awake. She sat bolt upright, sheet clutched to her chest, voice pitching into something bright and rehearsed. "Mom. Hi. Sorry, I—I stayed at a friend's last night. Lost track of time."

Francis watched her without comment, propped on one elbow, unhurried. He recognized the tone. He'd used a version of it himself, more than once, back when he still had people worth lying to. Whoever was on the other end kept talking, and her face, initially guarded, slowly darkened into something closer to fury. Her free hand had balled itself into the sheet, knuckles pale, whatever composure she'd woken up with burning off fast under whatever her mother was saying.

"I already told you." Her voice sharpened, all pretense gone now. "I will never agree to an arranged marriage with that Andrews!"