A Millionaire for Cinderella

He laughed again. “Of course not. No little boy wants to be lawyer. I wanted to be a professional baseball player.”

“What happened?”

“I grew up,” he said, repeating her answer. In his case, instead of sounding prickly, the words came out sad, despite his clearly trying to sound otherwise. “Turns out you have to have athletic ability to be a professional athlete—or a child athlete, for that matter.”

Looking at him, she found his protest a bit hard to believe. “You look pretty athletic to me,” she said. His arched brow made her blush. “I mean, I’m sure you weren’t as bad as you make it sound.”

“I had bad eyes, allergies and childhood asthma. Trust me, no one was ever going to confuse me with Babe Ruth. Or John Ruth for that matter.”

“Who’s John Ruth?”

“Exactly.” He grinned, and she got the joke. He was worse than a guy who didn’t exist.

“So,” he continued, “with the Hall of Fame out of the picture, I found myself steered toward the family business.”

“I thought your family business was mining?” Ana was always talking about Duchenko silver.

“Not since the turn of the century. Grandpa Theodore turned it into law. Thankfully. Can you see me coughing and squinting my way through a silver mine?”

No, she thought with a laugh. He definitely belonged to suits and luxury surroundings. His choice of words did make her curious, however. “You said steered. You didn’t choose?”

“Sometimes you find yourself on a path without realizing it,” he replied with a shrug.

Patience could sure relate to that, although at its worst, his path couldn’t hold a candle to the one she’d landed on. “Do you at least like it?”

“For the most part. There are days when I’d rather be in the mine.”

“No offense,” she told him, “but I’ll take the bad day of a rich lawyer over the bad day of a poor maid anytime.”

“Don’t be so sure,” he said. “You’ve never had to draft a prenuptial agreement for your step-grandmother.”

At that moment, the girl at the counter called out their order, and he slid from the booth, leaving Patience to wonder about his answer. Writing some document hardly seemed a big ordeal.

Stuart returned a few minutes later with a tray laden with food. The smell of fresh beef made her stomach rumble. Grimy location or not, Al’s did have good burgers.

She waited until they’d divided the burgers and French fries before picking up the conversation. “How is writing a prenuptial so awful?” she asked him. “It’s not like unclogging a toilet or something.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you met Grandma Gloria.”

“Harsh.”

“Not harsh enough,” he said, biting into his burger.

So Patience wasn’t the only person Stuart had issues with. Maybe he didn’t like outsiders in general. Or was it only women? “She had to have some redeeming quality. I mean if your grandfather loved her...”

“Grandpa Theodore wanted her. Big difference.”

“She must have wanted him too,” Patience replied. She wasn’t sure why she felt the need to defend this Gloria person, unless it was because exonerating Gloria might improve her own standing in his mind.

“She wanted Duchenko money.” There was no mistaking the venom in his voice. “And she went after it like a heat-seeking missile. Didn’t matter who she got the money from, or who she had to hurt in the process.”

Like who? The way his face twisted with bitterness made her think he was leaving something out of the story. It certainly explained why he had issues with her befriending Ana.

“This Gloria woman sounds lovely.”

“Oh, she was a real peach. Did I mention she turned thirty-four on her last birthday?” he added abruptly.

“Thirty-four?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Hasn’t your grandfather been dead for...”

“Ten years,” he supplied. My grandfather died ten years ago.”

Making Gloria...ew. Patience wrinkled her nose at the image.

“Exactly. And now I’m stuck dealing with her for the rest of eternity.”

Patience took a long sip of her cola. His comments had opened the door to a lot of questions, about many of which she had no business being curious, and yet seeing his frown, she couldn’t help herself. “Ana doesn’t talk much about her family,” she said. “Other than you, that is.

“Unfortunately, there wasn’t much love lost between Ana and Grandpa Theodore. From what I understand, they stopped speaking to each other around forty or fifty years ago. People were shocked when she traveled to his funeral. She told them it was only out of respect for me.”

“Wow.” To not speak to your sibling for decades? She couldn’t imagine going more than two or three days without talking to Piper. “That must have been some fight.”

“True. I asked Ana once, but all she said was Grandpa Theodore stole her happiness.”

“How?” Ana seemed like one of the happiest people she knew.

“Beats me. I remember my father grumbling once that he wished my grandfather would make things right this one time, so whatever happened was his fault. Unfortunately, unless Ana decides to open up, we might never know.”

“Your poor dad. Sounds like he was stuck in the middle.”

“For a little while anyway. He uh...” His eyes dropped to his half-eaten meal. “He and my mom died in a car accident when I was fourteen.”