The Billionaire is Entangled

Let's hope he doesn’t keep grudges.

I stood at the gate of the mansion where I had grown up; I couldn’t help the way tears rushed down my face. I not only lost my dad, but I am also losing the home we shared so many memories together.

I had lived here all my life and all my memories with my dad were here; all the forgotten ones with my mom were here too.

The West Village house was beautiful, the way things are beautiful when they are very old and have decided to keep going anyway. High ceilings. Floors that knew where you were walking. A back garden that had been winning a slow war against its own fence for as long as I could remember but it wasn’t the same as the hamptons estate.

I cried as I went to my car to drive there.

I do not know about Callie’s plan; I don’t know when she would come to pack her stuff at the estate but I do not really care about that, she also lost her mom but it feels like she’s not in the same pain as I am.

I don’t judge.

That night, I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop open and my tea going cold and a document on the screen titled, ‘What I Actually Know About Running A Hotel.’ I was blunt with myself; I was done pretending; therefore, the space beneath it was empty.

I stared at it for a while. Then I opened a new tab.

I had been ‘not’ thinking about one name all day. I had been very deliberate about not thinking about it, which meant it was the only thing I had actually been thinking about since Mr. Albert said the words "boutique property" and "forty-two rooms," and my brain had immediately, traitorously, made a connection I did not want to make.

I typed it into the search bar anyway.

Damien Price.

The internet gave me back what it would normally give back when you search that name: a man who looked like God had been showing off. Dark eyes that photographed like they were always in the middle of deciding something. Suits that fit the way architecture fits: intentional, exact, and nothing accidental. Forbes covers. Architectural Digest covers.

A profile in the Times that had called him “the most formidable figure in American luxury hospitality under forty,” which was the sort of sentence that made it sound like a compliment when it was really a warning.

Thirty-two years old. Sole heir to the Price Group. Twenty-nine hotels and counting. Three were under construction in cities she recognized and two in cities she had to look up.

His family and her family had been in the same business for longer than I could remember, even before I was born, from what I understood. Two hotel families, both building in the same markets, both competing for the same properties, the same investors, and the same size of influence.

For most of my childhood, the rivalry had been quiet, the sort that played out in boardrooms and acquisition battles and the polite, sharp language of industry dinners where both families sometimes sat in the same room and said nothing about it.

Then came the Coatian deal.

I had been sixteen. My father had spent eighteen months cultivating a partnership with the Coatian Group, a European hospitality company looking to expand into the American market. It was the biggest opportunity the Holloway Group had ever chased. My father had talked about it at the dinner table carefully, the way he talked about things that are important to him, because he knew getting it would make him number one in the industry across America. He had spent a lot of money to perfect the deal. He had already started making plans for what happens when he gets it.

The Price Group moved faster.

I never knew the full story; my father hadn't given me the full story, and I had understood even at sixteen that some things were not hers to carry yet. But I had seen his face the morning the announcement came through. The Price Group and Coatian, a joint venture. Signed. Closed. Final. My father had sat at the kitchen table with his coffee and his newspaper and he had been very, very still; he had lost money and plans.

He believed it was won through underhand methods.

So when I had met him at a camp that summer, he was a volunteer; I had hated him for what his dad had made my dad pass through. Even when he was paying more attention to me, staring at me repeatedly, I ignored him; when he had wanted to speak with me, I still ignored him.

The organizers had asked him to pick a team member during one game; he picked me, and I turned him down flatly in the midst of everyone. I knew he was hurt and I felt I had won one for my dad.

I was a daddy’s girl after all.

I clicked through three pages of results before I found what I was looking for, buried under the Forbes profiles and the architectural features and the society page photographs where he always looked faintly bored.

Price Group Executive Assistant, Office of the CEO. Applications open.

I read it twice.

Then I read it a third time, more slowly, the way one reads something that you already know is going to change something and you just haven’t admitted it yet.

I needed to learn this industry. Quickly, thoroughly, from the inside. I needed to understand how a great hotel company operated, not from a textbook, not from a seminar, but from the inside, from the ground up, from the office of someone who had been building empires since before I understood what an empire was.

There was exactly one person in New York City who could teach her that.

I closed the laptop.

I opened it again thirty seconds later and pulled up the application before I could talk myself out of it.

I started typing. My hands were steady. The rest of me was not.

I submitted it at 11:47 PM.

Let’s hope he doesn’t keep grudges.