Total pages in book: 133
Estimated words: 126589 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 633(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 422(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126589 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 633(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 422(@300wpm)
She interrupted the sullen diatribe with a genuinely amused laugh and he stopped talking to glare at her.
“What’s so funny?”
“The man who would rather live in his friend’s house than use his inheritance is afraid of spending that same money on frivolous things? So do you expect some kind of selfish, spoiled playboy switch to just flip in your brain if you decide to use the money? That’s ridiculous!”
“You never know,” he muttered, shifting his big shoulders uncomfortably. “That kind of money can corrupt.”
“Why would it corrupt you? It didn’t corrupt the rest of your family. You’ve just told me how wonderful and honest and ethical they are. You have a very low opinion of yourself, Gideon.”
“It’s hard not to feel like a loser when your siblings are pulling six figure annual incomes.”
“You would be doing that too, if you’d taken the easy way out like your brothers did,” Beth scoffed, and Gideon’s face went slack with shock. His expression darkened as he contemplated her words.
“You think they took the easy way out?” He framed the question carefully, his words slow to emerge as he mulled them over. Clearly the notion had never occurred to him before.
“You don’t? Gideon, they did exactly what was expected of them. It takes guts to stand up for yourself and go against what everybody else wants you to do. It takes real courage to follow your dreams.”
When he looked doubtful, she continued, “What did your brothers want to be when they were kids?”
“Nox wanted to be an astronaut. And Niall, a cowboy.”
“And what did you want to be?”
His lips quirked. “An artist. Specifically a cartoonist. But I kind of drifted toward illustrating to keep the bills paid. I freelance as a product and technical illustrator at the moment. Brochures, product packaging, marketing stuff.”
It was so weirdly similar to her line of work that it gave Beth pause. She wondered if he’d ever illustrated one of her instructional pamphlets. That would be a ridiculous coincidence.
She dismissed the distracting train of thought and focused on their current conversation. She had a point to make.
“And who do you think is the happiest?”
“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug, and a wicked grin. “Probably Nox. He has a Bugatti Veyron, a hot fiancée, and a penthouse apartment in Tribeca, Manhattan.”
Beth tried to keep her face impassive, but they were talking about some seriously mind-boggling wealth here. And she hadn’t really understood how much until he’d started speaking about Bugattis and penthouses in New York.
“You know that wasn’t the answer I was going for, Gideon,” she said with a stern shake of her head once she’d mentally moved on from the Bugatti.
“Hey, I’ve got to call it as I see it,” he said, still wearing that unrepentant grin and looking a little more like his usual cocky self. “But I understand what you’re getting at. And I’ve been happy enough, but that’ll never change the fact that my dad would have been a little more impressed with me if I’d grown out of the childhood dream and pursued a more adult ambition. See, to the old man, me becoming an artist was as whimsical and unrealistic as Nox being an astronaut or Niall being a cowboy. Or Kenny being a fairy princess.”
“I don’t see why any of those dreams were unrealistic,” Beth argued. “Cowboys and astronauts actually exist.”
“What about fairy princesses?” he asked, a teasing note in his voice.
“Of course fairy princesses exist,” she scoffed. “Ask any five-year-old. All I’m saying is that your dream wasn’t unrealistic, Gideon. Neither were your brothers’. You chose to pursue something you had a real passion and talent for. As far as I’m concerned, that’s something that should be praised and admired. It’s something your family should be proud of.”
“My family doesn’t measure success that way. It’s not enough to have simply indulged myself by following, what to them is, a completely impractical dream. I should at the very least have been tangibly successful at it. Living in my friend’s house, and pay check to pay check is not success. It’s abject failure.”
“Do you feel like a failure?” Her question made him grimace and his eyes skirted away from hers, answering her more effectively than words ever could.
“I mean, you said it yourself Lizzy-bit, I’m a freeloader living off my best friend’s charity.”
Now it was Beth’s turn to grimace as she recalled throwing those words at him so many weeks ago. Knowing what she now knew about the man, what she’d discovered over the last few weeks, she could not have been more wrong about him. But it was more than evident that her thoughtlessly cruel words had embedded themselves firmly and deeply within his psyche if he could toss them back at her almost verbatim.
She regretted that. She regretted a lot of things. And she knew he felt the same way. They’d said some terrible things to each other in the past. It was refreshing to just sit and talk to him like this.