“I’m so sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry, baby.” Warm fingers brushed my lips, popping my eyes open. “Not about this. This one was all me,” he said softly. “I was the chickenshit bitch boy that let a few cunts in suits scare me into selling out. I was the one who had a billion people counting on me to provide a safe place to gamble... and I just gave it away.”
“Don’t say that,” I cried, eyes welling. “You weren’t any of those things, Rhodes. You were only twenty years old. Barely an adult. You weren’t even old enough to gamble on your own app!” That got a wry chuckle out of him. “You were put in a terrible position of having to choose between protecting your family and friends... and protecting your father.”
He swallowed hard, turning away, but somehow leaning firmer into my touch.
“Those shitheads never should’ve put you in that position, but they did, and you made the best choice you could. You have to know that.”
“What I know is I was the one who called up my dad, telling him to join GloryBoi. I told him that if he gambled on the app, and only the app, it could be his version of harm reduction, and eventually, when he saw that he could control his addiction, he’d see that he could beat it too.” His expression was blank—dead. “And I also know the name of the divorce attorney I drove my mother to meet after the cuntglomerate changed my app, andDad gambled away all the money Mom had saved to throw Nana’s seventieth birthday party.
“All of that money,” he rasped. “He stole from her and spent it all... on GloryBoi.”
“That’s not—”
“Don’t say it’s not my fault,” he sliced off. “Please.”
I fell quiet.
We both did. For a long time.
“Anyway,” he breathed, shaking himself. “You asked why all of this means we have to throw an eye-wateringly expensive celebration for our failed marriage. Well, after we were bought out and I had to watch them destroy GloryBoi, their money felt dirty to me. I didn’t want to spend a cent of it, so I gave it away.”
I blinked. “I beg your pardon? Did you just say yougave awayalmost seven billion dollars?”
“That’s right.”
“I see,” I repeated, tone calm. “And have you always been stupid?”
Rhodes started, body jerking as a surprise laugh ripped from his lips, and then kept coming. He howled, eyes watering and head falling on my shoulder. “Ouch, baby. No sugarcoating or nothing. Would it help if I told you I spread the money out among various addiction support groups, rehabs, and charities?”
“That just pisses me off more,” I snapped. “Because now all I’m thinking is how sweet and generous you are when I’m trying to be pissed.”
A lopsided grin teased the dimple from his left cheek. Eyes shining with mirth, I heated up to be on the receiving end of it.
Gods, Rhodes is sinfully gorgeous when he smiles.
“It was the right thing to do,” he affirmed, taking my hands in his. “But then, I ended up being another business graduate with no app, no money, and no one who wanted anything from me other than my next billion-dollar idea.
“And, I mean, the three of us did try,” he said, expelling a deep sigh. “We tried for years to come up with something in the same spirit of helping people, but part of the terms of the buyout was that we couldn’t launch another competing gambling, games, or sport-related app or businessso...”
“And so, there wasn’t anything else you were passionate about,” I finished. “Not in the way that you were passionate about helping people like your dad.”
He just nodded. “Starting the investment firm was a last-ditch effort to do something worthwhile with my life while still making enough to support my new wife and the baby we had on the way. I refused to let Micah or Alex invest their buyout money into the business, and my grandparents were done investing in me after my last idea outed that Grandpa had a whole second family he was hiding in Long Island—”
“What?!”
“Oh yeah,” he drew out. “Apparently, he’d been with this woman as long as he’s been with Grandma. We’re talking two other adult children and six other grandchildren out in the burbs that no one in the family knew about.” He whistled. “You ever seen a sixty-nine-year-old woman beat a seventy-one-year-old man half to death? It’s not pretty. Funny,” Rhodes admitted. “But not pretty.”
“Wow. And I thought my family drama was explosive.”
He snorted. “Yep. But like I said, no money was coming from that source, so I had to shop around for investors, and that’s how I ended up in business with theheryou heard us speaking about last night.”
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked. “Why do you need to get rid of your investor?”
“You always want to be the one in the strong position when you’re negotiating, and unfortunately, I wasn’t. I had to give her controlling interest and a say in every business decision—no matter how small. For the first few years, I held free financial literacy classes online and in-person all over New York. I even managed investment accounts free of charge for clients who made less than one hundred thousand dollars a year. It wasn’t much,” he said, “but it felt good to help people and families in some small way.
“But when the firm hit a pandemic-sized speed bump, she shut down the classes and kicked out every free client who didn’t agree to pay a minimum of five hundred a month to stay on.”
