Anyone But Rich (Anyone But..., #1)(10)

I crossed my arms. “She’s just a loose end, and I hate loose ends.”

“You’re also a bad liar.”



My parents welcomed us into their home, which already bustled with “help.” The average American believed society had become too progressive for things like butlers and maids to still exist, but my parents hadn’t gotten the memo. Neither had my idiot of a twin brother, for that matter. I still wanted to shake my head in shame when I remembered the saga of “Jeeves,” the college kid he had dressed in a tuxedo and white gloves and paid to stand in his foyer for parties.

A man wearing a black suit—not a tux and white gloves, but not far from it—took our coats as we came in, and we had to squeeze past a team of women who were polishing the floors. Another team of men was debating the ideal height to hang a massive oil painting of my parents, and I could smell chicken and vegetables cooking from deeper in the house. I had no doubt it was their chef cooking the meal, and that every ingredient was gluten-free and organic. A soundtrack of pretentious classical music softly played over all of it.

My father, Harper King, was dressed as if he were on break from a busy day of running his own company. He had a button-down shirt tucked in neatly with his sleeves rolled up to his forearms. It was the kind of look that told you his idea of a hard day’s work was a phone call and some stern words to an underling. Of course, my father had also never worked a real day in his life.

My parents were blue bloods. My great-grandfather had earned a significant fortune in a handful of successful business ventures, from restaurant chains to real estate and investments. His son, my grandfather, had inherited more money than he could spend in a lifetime, but he had made a valiant effort of burning through it. Still, he’d ended up passing before he could squander the fortune he left to my father. Like his father, mine had made spending the family fortune his full-time job from a young age.

In the world of big money, there were two types of wealth. Old money and new money. The older the money, and the further removed you were from having had to work to earn it yourself, the more prestige you carried in high society. And no, it wasn’t supposed to make sense. It was simply meant to preserve the egos of the men and women who loathed the idea of doing anything useful but still wanted to feel like they were superior to everyone else.

Self-made millionaires and even billionaires were seen as upstarts. They didn’t just get skipped on invitations to the most exclusive parties and events; they didn’t even know about them in the first place. The blue bloods looked down on them because the self-made millionaires had to suffer the indignity of earning their fortunes. It was a little pocket of the aristocracy that was still alive and well in the dark gold-lined corners of the world.

So the success of my brothers and me put my parents in a strange place. They were old money. True blue bloods. But they also didn’t have a whole lot of that old money left. Conveniently for them, we had so much money coming in from Sion that we were practically overflowing with it. It was more than we could figure out what to do with. For my brothers, that meant giving my parents whatever they wanted was no big deal. Compared with what was in our bank accounts, it was pennies.

Maybe it made me a cold bastard, but I would rather have watched our parents struggle for the first time in their lives. I thought it might be the only thing that would humanize them. Instead, my brothers made sure our parents had their lifelong philosophy that things would always fall perfectly into place validated, and all they had to do was keep being obnoxious snobs.

My father patted me on the back and flashed his overly white smile. “Let me take you on a tour. We’ve got a lot planned in this old dump, but with a little hard work, I think we can get it looking respectable before long.”

I nodded and gave him a tight smile. The hard work, of course, would be from the men and women he hired with money from my brothers. And the old dump was a multimillion-dollar mansion on a sprawling property full of gorgeous landscaping.

My mother, Edna, made no attempt to hide her distaste for me. She stood a few feet behind my father with chin tilted up so high I could’ve counted her nose hairs. She wore a white turtleneck and a pair of jeans. She dressed up the outfit she probably saw as a casual, get-your-hands-dirty kind of style with pearls and diamonds.

“What’s this nonsense I heard about you visiting some young, local tramp?” My mother practically spit the last three words out as though each were a curse word.

I spread my hands. “Is there a response you’re looking for, or did you just want to insult her?”

“I’m looking for my goddamn son to show that he has some sense in his head. Stella is your future wife.” She thrust her arm at Stella. “Stella comes from good breeding.”

I nudged Stella. “Hear that? You were bred well. I’m sure your owners will be so proud to show you off. Maybe I can even ride you to victory in the Kentucky Derby if you stay healthy.”

Stella shot me a warning glare. The look in her eyes told me not to mess this up for us by poking fun at my mother, but there was also only so much I could take.

“Son,” my father said softly. It was almost like a plea. He knew my mother and I butted heads at every opportunity. Instead of talking down his wife, he always tried to get me to lay off.

“God forbid you got involved with the local girl,” my mother continued. “Just imagine what people would think.”