Page 10 of Angels Are Falling

He sat back on his chair and slowly sipped on the amber-colored liquid in his glass. “I could make all your wishes come true.”

I scoffed. “My wishes? Do you consider yourself a genie, Mr. Cavendish?”

“Why not?” He sat up straight. “I’ve always been rich and never had to worry about money.” Obviously, he came from old money. Look at how he carried himself. “However, it wasn’t until later in life that I became wealthy—and I’m talking about an unimaginable type of wealth.”

Was he still trying to impress me with his money?

“With this type of resource, perhaps I can be your genie and give you the things your heart desires. What if I can grant you three wishes?”

“I wasn’t born yesterday, Kai. Nothing in life is free.”

“You’re right.” His tone was ominous. “Your wishes come at a price.”

“If the price is my wife, you can forget it.”

He lowered the glass and watched me, sizing me up. “You know, once I became absurdly wealthy, everyone wanted to be my best friend. Long-lost relatives and old friends reached out for favors that money couldn’t buy but status could. Everyone suddenly had an agenda, and I got accustomed to keeping people at arm’s length. Until your wife, I had become pessimistic about humanity’s greed. She didn’t know who I was, yet she took care of me outside the scope of her job. She read to me, wrote for me when I couldn’t hold a pen, and even fed me. It was the first time I experienced genuine affection. It was addicting because it was rare.”

Dammit, Amelie. Why did you have to be so compassionate? Other patients had given her similar feedback; she went above and beyond her job description. “If you want a nurse, you can hire one on Care.com. A nurse and a wife aren’t the same thing.”

He chuckled. “I’d say Amelie is an even better wife than she is a nurse. I can’t imagine it’s easy for a twenty-three-year-old to raise her husband’s siblings, but she acts like a mother to them. Who wouldn’t want to acquire such a wife?”

Acquire? The nerve of this man! “My wife isn’t for sale,” I said, barely keeping the ire out of my voice, and that was only because if I offended him, he might refuse to pay our portion of the bill. We couldn’t afford one item on the menu, let alone everything we consumed.

He sensed the shift in energy and my rising agitation. “No need to get offended. I’m not a lecherous man. Amelie mentioned how the nurses at the hospital confirmed my impeccable reputation when they googled me. Nor do I have any interest in breaking up your family. Clearly, Amelie would never leave you. You don’t lack love in your life, Stefan. If anything, you resent your family’s endless love because it obligates you to provide for them when you don’t have the means to do so. I don’t lack money. If anything, I have too much of it, and it poses a problem. Women approach me with dollar signs in their eyes. Authenticity, like what I experienced in Amelie’s care and with your family tonight, is impossible for someone of my stature to find. What if we reached an agreement in which we both gain what we lack and part with what we have in excess? All your wishes would come true. Mine, too.”

Kai had figured me out. He had sensed my hunger for limitless resources and my resentment at feeling stuck. He teased me with things his world had to offer, and only after I was desperate to remain in it, did he use my vulnerability to proposition me.

The worst part? It was working. Rather than leaving, I was hearing him out, and I hated myself for it.

My heart raced. “What exactly do you want?”

“I want a lively family like yours. I want a compassionate wife like Amelie. But my demanding schedule makes it difficult to dedicate myself to a full-time family. I can’t give up my work, but I’m tired of coming home to an empty house. Business is stressful enough without factoring in other people’s feelings. If I need to leave for Africa at the drop of a hat, I can’t be bothered with fighting my wife over the unprecedented business trip, and I wouldn’t have to if there were someone else to pick up the pieces. I’m not proposing to take your family away but rather add to it.”

I sat back in my chair. It finally dawned on me what he wanted. Kai Cavendish wanted to play house without the responsibilities of the real thing. He wasn’t asking to marry my wife but rather to marry into my family.

He was suggesting bigamy.

My face twisted in disgust. When you had Kai’s type of wealth, regular thrills became boring. He sought a bigger target for entertainment, exploiting our lives, problems, and desires to make a mockery of marriage.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Why not?” he asked boldly. “I want a family with flexible commitment, and you want financial freedom.”

“That doesn’t mean⁠—”

“My private investigator did a deep dive into your past,” he cut me off smoothly. “The average income in Darster is six figures. Your middle-class parents made less than that. A lot less. You’ve been looking up at the wealth in this town from the ground floor for years. Aren’t you tired of it? Don’t you want to see how the better half lives? Imagine a house overlooking the beach, just like the ones your rich high school friends lived in.”

I swallowed. He knew too much about my past, making it impossible to deny my deepest, darkest desires. Sixteen-year-olds in this town drove brand-new Mercedes and Audis, while I trudged along in my parents’ secondhand Camry. Of course I remembered my friends’ beautiful homes and their less-than-enthusiastic reaction upon seeing mine. The experience is what fed my desire for success and wealth. My classmates were aware that I was the scholarship kid at their fancy private school and well below their tax bracket. No one bullied me, though. They simply ignored me or made offhand comments.

Stefan can’t come to Vale with us, because you know.

We’d invite you, but dinner starts at two hundred dollars per person.

I was the outsider, itching to be a part of their exclusive inner circle. Amelie was the first person in that godforsaken school to look past the superficial and see me.

“You can lie all you want, Stefan,” Kai mused. “But I believe your lifelong dream is to rule over the same people who never gave you the time of day.”

I didn’t deny it because it was true. What I would give to stick it to the people who didn’t think I could afford Vale or a stupid dinner.