Page 3 of A Man of Wealth

“Mr. Sterling, how are you this evening? The usual?” he asks as he reaches for a tumbler from the shelf of glasses next to him.

Conner eyes the top-shelf alcohol and nods. “Yes, Marvin. Three fingers tonight.”

“Coming right up, sir.” Marvin goes to work, pulling down the most expensive bottle of whiskey on the shelf. I watch him pour it and place it in front of Conner. “Anything else that I can get you?”

Conner shakes his head, and as though sensing his mood, Marvin quickly moves away. He does cast me a quick glance out of the corner of his eyes. I nod to him, letting him know that I will chat with him later. He returns my acknowledgment with a nod of his own before going to wait on a few staffers from Senator Herringbone’s office.

I weigh my next move. Do I let him drink first? Should I speak now? I’ve been observing him for weeks, but suddenly I’m nervous, and I’m never nervous. I watch as he brings the tumbler up to his lips and takes a long sip. A tattoo peeks out from under his cuff. In this city, it speaks volumes. He’s no pretty boy. No polished leader of the flock. No, not Conner Sterling.

“You going to stare at me all night, or will you be grilling me while I try to unwind?” he mutters as he sets the glass back on the bar.

I attempt to remain unaffected by this abrupt change of my plans. “Rough day?” I retort.

His head slowly turns, and those dark blue eyes pierce me. He looks as dangerous as his father, but with a charm the older man never had. I see one of his suits behind us. He’s trying to blend in at a bar high-top table, only the man is even larger than Conner and couldn’t blend into a room of giants either. I’ve noticed that sometimes Conner has security and sometimes he doesn’t, but as of late, I see someone with him more and more. It has my curiosity piqued and I want to know why. What is going on with Conner? There’s something brewing in the nation’s capital, and I feel like Conner Sterling is most definitely involved.

My attention focuses back on Conner who is studying me coolly.

His eyes move from my face to my cream off-the-shoulder sweater, to the expensive trousers that hug my hips, and finally, my Louis Vuittons that grace my feet, which are currently propped on the brass footrest along the bottom of the bar. When his gaze meets mine again, I let out a breath. I should not be turned on by him. The smell of his woodsy cologne should not affect me. The way the fabric pulls around his bicep should not have me swallowing with desire. Fuck. Am I in over my head?

His eyes focus on mine for the longest moment as a frown threatens to form on his lips. Then, he looks past me at my laptop screen, and his lips thin into a line.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he grumbles as he turns back away from me and downs his drink in one large gulp. I find myself watching his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows the amber liquid.

And then he stands and nods at Marvin while throwing down a hundred-dollar bill and walks out of the bar, leaving me sitting there, watching his fine ass as it exits through the door in which it just came from a few minutes earlier. The giant of a man I had clocked as his security follows him.

“Damn it,” I mutter under my breath.

Marvin comes up to me and gives me a long hard stare. “Viv, you ought to be more careful. That man was not in a mood to talk to anyone, especially you. Bud can only handle so much,” he states, as he motions to his security man sitting by the door.

I roll my eyes. “Whatever. I’m out of here. I need to come up with a new plan.”

I’ve made friends with several staff members at prominent bars and restaurants and even hotels in the city. Marvin is my favorite. He works at this bar at night and also picks up a few day shifts waiting at the only hotel that doesn’t need a name associated with it in this city. Whenever I need to know something about someone in what some view as the most powerful city in the world, Marvin is one of the first sources I go to.

I close my laptop and stick it in my bag. “I’m off,” I state as I down the last few drops of my drink and toss a fifty on the bar.

“Thanks, Viv,” he says as he pockets the money.

“Always a pleasure,” I reply as I head home to rethink my plan.

Home. It’s exactly three blocks away. I live in the middle of college students, literally. My neighbors are all college students, well, except for Florence, who is eighty-three and I think moved in when the building was completed. And this building is not new. It’s so old that it’s actually back in style now.

I open my door with a shove because the steel frame is bent and catches every time I shut it. I look around and sigh. I need to do dishes and laundry. I dread laundry day. The laundry room might as well be a haunted house complete with spiders. Maybe Jeff is right? My brother has tried to get me to fall in line for a long time. He gleefully plays family mediator on the daily, well, now it’s more like the monthly because I ignore all my family’s calls, and slowly they have begun to stop trying, except for my father who showed me his true colors years ago. I will never be one of them. I never want to be one of them.

My phone pings with a text. My editor, Jane Armstrong.

Jane: How’s the article coming along? Will you have anything for me this week?

I groan. I’ve been going down a rabbit hole ever since overhearing Sebastian North mention something to his chief of staff. They didn’t know I was there. I was in fact hiding around a corner waiting to see if another congressman, who’s been avoiding me for weeks, might come by when Congressman North happened to walk to the elevator. He mentioned to Harriet that his girlfriend had traces of some chemicals in her system, and he was having a friend check out if they were similar to some other women who have been found dead in the park recently. This immediately piqued my interest. While I’m not a crime investigator, those dead-girl cases have everyone talking, and if I could get the scoop on something, that could be big, like career-changing big.

Me: I’m working on it. I need to get some more interviews. Probably not this week.

Jane: I can’t give you more time on this. Three weeks, that’s it.

Me: Understood.

Maybe I should try to pump information out of Aiden Thomas? He’s probably going to be an easier target than Conner Sterling, but I’ve long been trying to figure out the criminal connections of Sterling’s father’s company. Theodore Sterling is a brute amongst men, and the fact that he’s super shady and somehow his silver-spooned kid has a powerful lobbying firm, seems even shadier. And then there’s his wife, who died in an explosion on their yacht that was parked off their Chesapeake Bay waterfront property. Yet it was called an accident—faulty wiring in the boat short-circuited and caught a propane tank on fire. None of that ever stacked up for me. I even wrote an article about it with interviews about Patricia Sterling or Tricia as folks called her. I could never really tell if she was an awful person or a wonderful person; the people I interviewed gave quite the mix of thoughts about the elusive woman who was quiet and seldom seen out in public. Her husband though is notorious and has ties to all sorts of criminals. It seemed he had buried his past after meeting her in college. Yet I still suspect that Theo Sterling is anything but a good person. And I can’t imagine that Conner falls far from that tree.

And then there’s their fraternity. Theta Omega Delta. And not just any chapter of the fraternity. The chapter that Conner, Aiden, Sebastian, their fathers, and close friends belong to is a who’s who of power. There are a few other chapters with quite a list of powerful members, but theirs is particularly intriguing. Hell, the current president was a member as was his press secretary. So, what gives? I have my theories but proving them is not something I’ve ever been able to do.

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