Page 11 of The Billionaire Is Back

“I don’t understandthe words that are coming out of your mouth right now,Dad! Why would we wait to eat these beautiful, crunchy puffs of corn?!” Jake protested around a mouthful of Cheetos, orange dust drifting down to his shirt and the upholstery.

“Crunchy cuffs of porn!” Robbie nearly busted a gut laughing, an orange cloud of dust spewing from his lips. That guy always acted stoned, but he never was. He was just an idiot who people liked hanging out with.

“Hey.” Jake punched Robbie in the arm. “Don’t say ‘porn’ around my sister.”

Claire was in the passenger seat next to me, and her eyes did an Olympic-level gymnastics roll.“Actually, Cheetos are made from cornmeal. I read an article about this! The cornmeal gets fed into this machine that causes friction between the cornmeal, and that friction melts the starch and then?—”

“Why do you have to make all snacks boring?!” Jake tossed a Cheeto at her face and then quickly retrieved itand popped it into his mouth after it fell to the floor. He was a class act.

“I wanna hear more about how Cheetos are made,” I told her.

And then she smiled up at me.

I grinas I remember her grin.

We didn’t have anywhere we needed to be.

We had all day to just hang out at the beach.

Back then we had all the time in the world.

Well, I had a lot more going on than most high school students, I suppose, but there were days when I let myself relax.

I inhale again.

There is also something sweet and floral wafting just above and around the young-dude aromas. I rocket through time again.

“Are you wearing perfume?”I asked Claire as she very demurely climbed into the back seat. She’d climbed into my car several times before this. She used to bound over and collapse into the seat the way kids did. But she was starting to move with more self-awareness.

A little grace that she probably didn’t even realize she had.

And she smelled a lot like flowers. Pretty ones. The kind you’d buy for a girl you really liked. Up close, she always smelled like vanilla and confectioners’ sugar. Itwas infused in her clothes and hair. Her soul too, I imagined.

“Yeah, I told her to knock it off with that, but Mom overruled me,” Jake complained. He was in the passenger seat that time.

Claire scoffed. “You’re in no position to judge. I’ve been choking on your Axe body spray for the last year and a half. You think the more you use, the more girls are going to try to rub up on you—have you not figured out how wrong you are yet?”

I remember the look on Jake’s face, the sputtering and the stuttering. He didn’t have a comeback because that wasexactlywhat his strategy was.

I laughed and smiled at her in the rearview mirror. She smiled back. That smile was just as new as the way she moved and how she smelled.

I didn’t like any of it.

Or maybe I didn’t like how much I liked it.

I shake my head.Claire didn’t always tag along with us. Most of the time she didn’t.

But for some reason those memories are the most vivid as I sit behind the wheel of this luxury time capsule.

I start the engine, and she roars to life right away. I pull out of the garage and toward the highway. Alice checks in to ask if she should have anything shipped overnight to my parents’ house, and that is the moment I realize I haven’t brought anything with me. Not even my laptop. I can access pretty much everything in the cloud, so I tell her to have a new laptop delivered, and then sherolls calls for me. My company might be in a holding pattern, but there are always calls to make. After ten minutes, Alice tells me a MacBook will be delivered to my parents’ house tomorrow morning. I have no idea how she’ll get it there overnight, but it’s not my job to know that kind of thing.

She also reminds me that I have a chauffeur, a helicopter, and a private jet, but I can’t think of a better way to get back to Beacon Harbor than this car.

As I get deeper into the drive, the distance between buildings becomes greater and the landscape begins to roll.

The volume gets turned down and my body relaxes.

I didn’t even realize how tense my body had been.

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