Page 23 of Acquiring Ainsley
“Oh, god,” she mumbled. “I didn’t realize that. Ashton indicated the company wouldn’t meet expectations this year, but he said he could handle it.”
“It’s over,” I said, now on the verge of tears. “If we don’t figure out something, then we’re finished, and I—” I fell silent. It felt like the simplest reaction to the default numbness I’d been experiencing ever since the unpleasant meeting in Dad’s conference room. “I keep thinking about what Dad would say. We’ve let him down. He’d be so disappointed. This is—this is the worst thing that could have happened to his memory.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, honey.”
“No, mom, it’s deserved. Everything he built—we’ve let it slip away. And the worst part is, I allowed it to happen. I frittered it all way. I was so incredibly stupid.”
“Oh, Ainsley.” Mom sighed. “I wish there was more that I could do.”
“You should see Ashton.” I sat on the stool again and wondered when the tension in my back would leave my body. At this rate, it wouldn’t be soon. “Ashton is devastated. I went to New York a few days ago and he gave me a rundown of what things went wrong, along with all the things he says he has done to save the company.” I exhaled, trying to relax further. “We don’t have many options.”
Mom cleared her throat. “Did Ashton have any suggestions the last time that you talked to him?”
I considered my answer. I had no way to put this delicately. “Yes. Yes, he did. He wants me to… to marry Trevor McNamara.”
“What?” My mother shouted her reply, and I flinched. “I talk to my own son just hours ago and he doesn’t tell me this? Marry the son of your father’s biggest rival? You can’t be serious.” She paused. “Are you really going to do it?”
“According to Ashton, if I marry Trevor, then in exchange, Trevor will agree to liquidate our debt, take control of the remaining assets, and basically bail us out. Ashton would remain on the board. And according to Trevor, we’d be saved.”
“Saved? By getting married?” She didn’t hide the disbelief in her voice. “Married?”
I nodded and shifted the phone to my other ear. “That’s what Ashton says. He wants me to do it.”
“He’s not serious, Ainsley. Your brother is delusional.” She let out a loud exhale. “God, he must have lost his mind.”
“Maybe so,” I whispered. “But I also think he might be right. This might be our best way out of this mess.”
Mom scoffed. “Don’t be stupid, honey. This isn’t an option. You’re not going to sell yourself to Trevor McNamara, of all people.”
I rubbed my hand back and forth across my forehead a few times as I considered how I wanted to respond to this. “At first, I thought that, too, Mom, but he’s not that bad.” I remembered how he had acted the previous night, when he got me to leave the party before I got too drunk for my own good. “He’s kinder than I remembered.”
“I’d hardly call any of the McNamaras kind.”
We both fell silent. When my mother finally spoke again, her voice sounded shrill and harsh. “To be honest, I haven’t thought about Trevor in almost a decade. The last I remember of him, he was a sniveling twenty-year-old with too much hair for his own good, a boy well on his way to being just like his father.”
“Well, he still has a lot of hair, only now he’s thirty-nine,” I said with a light laugh, hoping to diffuse some of the tension I still felt pouring through the phone. “So, that’s something. And his real estate acquisitions should make him a billionaire by the end of next year. At least, that’s what I read inForbeslast week.”
“A billionaire? That much?”
I winced. “I’m not overstating things, Mom. He’s one of the richest people in the US under forty-five. Look him up. He’s always getting profiled in magazines.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” She clicked her teeth. “Money isn’t everything, Ainsley. It took me a long time to understand that, but it’s the truth. Even when it seems like it is, money doesn’t always bring what you think it will.”
“I know that.”At least, I’m starting to get it.I drank some more coffee. “I suppose you know that better than anyone.”
“One of the biggest lessons of the divorce.”
I remembered it all too well. Mom and Dad’s divorce dominated the gossip pages and, for a time, turned my mom into the posterchild for the term “jilted wife.” She’d spent so much of the eighteen months it took to sort out the settlement, crying in her bedroom, throwing things against walls, leaking salacious details about my father to friendly journalists, and racking up credit-card charges at Bergdorf Goodman.
But it wasn’t worthwhile to bring up any more of those unpleasant memories.
“Ainsley, honey… You’re seriously… not entertaining this, are you?” my mom asked, bringing me back from the bad memories. “I mean, it’s not even—”
Despite my efforts, the headache had spread. Everything in between my temples hurt. I got up and headed for the master bathroom. “No, I told him no. No way. Never. I’ll do anything to save Dad’s legacy and bail out our family, but I don’t want to do that. Marrying him is out of the question.” I found the aspirin on the second shelf of the medicine cabinet. “Even if he is on his way towards becoming a billionaire.”
“So why do I think that now you’re not so sure?”
Leave it to my mother to read me, even from more than four thousand miles away. I swallowed two aspirin caplets without using water and tried to come up with a good reply as the bitter pills coated my throat. “Okay,” I finally said. “I can’t hide from you. I’mconsideringit.”
