Reaching into the pants pocket of his custom-tailored gray suit, he pulled out a plain, stainless-steel key ring. Separating a small brass key, he unlocked the bottom right-hand drawer of his massive antique Regency desk. Pushing aside a pile of contracts, he pulled out a battered spiral-bound notebook. Carefully he set it on his desk and opened it to the only page that had any writing on it.
A complex swirl of remembered pain and hope engulfed him at the sight of the words penciled there. He’d been sixteen when he’d made that list of things he was going to accomplish in his life. A scared, defiant sixteen who had just buried his parents.
As he’d stood over their graves, he’d vowed that never again would he allow himself to be at the mercy of other people’s decisions. And he’d kept that vow. He’d run away from the crowded foster home the state had dumped him in after his parents had died, determined to make so much money that no one would ever again have power over him.
His gaze swept the elegantly restrained grandeur of his office with its priceless antiques and original artwork, perched fifty-two stories above the bustling New York City streets. It was as far removed from the squalor he’d grown up in as he could ever imagine.
Picking up the gold fountain pen on his desk, Max deliberately drew a thick, black line through the third-to-last item on his list, which read, make a billion dollars.
His blue eyes narrowed as he studied the final two entries. Marry and have a family.
Marriage to the right woman would be the final step in his long journey toward respectability. It would be visible proof that he’d made it. That he was no longer “that woman’s brat,” but someone who was accepted in the highest levels of society.
Acquiring the perfect wife should be a lot like masterminding a hostile takeover in business, he reasoned. First you identified your objective and then you came up with strategies to achieve it.
He turned to a blank sheet in the notebook and, for the first time in seventeen years, began to write in it.
“Objective—wife,” he wrote at the top of the page. He thought for a moment then added a slash beside the word wife and wrote “mother.” Her role as the mother of his children would be every bit as important to him as her role as his wife.
Max stared blankly at the Monet on the wall to his right as he marshaled his thoughts.
Since he knew nothing about parenting, he was going to have to depend on his wife to show him how to recognize and nurture his children’s emotional needs. She would have to teach him the basic dynamics of family life that most people instinctively absorbed during their own childhood.
Max snorted. The only insight he’d absorbed growing up was the danger of getting too close to either of his parents when they’d been drinking. That and the futility of counting on them for anything.
So, one of his most important requirements in a wife was that she have firsthand knowledge of a happy, normal childhood herself.
She should also appeal to him physically. Common sense told him that his marriage would have a better chance of success if he were sexually attracted to his wife.
An image of his last girlfriend, an internationally famous model, formed in his mind. She certainly wasn’t his idea of a wife, but she definitely appealed to his libido with her tall, slender body, flawless features and long, blond hair.
Tall, blond, beautiful, he added to his list, paused, thought a moment, and then crossed out beautiful and substituted attractive. Looks weren’t all that important in a wife, and he didn’t want to limit his choices by being too restrictive.
Although she absolutely had to be intelligent since she was going to pass her genes on to his children. And she should be a college graduate to balance the fact that he hadn’t even finished high school.
And she should like him. He didn’t expect her to love him any more than he intended to love her. In his experience, love was at best an excuse for indulging in emotional excesses and at worst a humiliating, degrading trap.
Max winced as he recalled his father’s self-pitying voice claiming that he couldn’t do anything about his wife’s flamboyantly adulterous behavior because he loved her.
No, he wanted no part of the insanity called love. Besides, from what he’d seen, marriages based on love were very high-maintenance affairs. Women in love expected a man to be totally wrapped up in them, and he didn’t have time for that nonsense. He was far too busy running his business. And while he did intend to cut back on work once his first child was born, he also intended to spend most of his newfound free time with his children. He was determined to be a hands-on dad. His children were going to be the most important things in the world to him, and he needed a wife who understood that. A wife who wouldn’t expect to be the focus of his life. A wife who would find her emotional satisfaction in their children and not in him. A wife who would be satisfied with his respect and affection and not expect vows of undying devotion.
But even if he didn’t want a lot of messy emotions cluttering up his marriage, he also didn’t want to be married for his money. A woman whose only interest in him was his net worth might decide to bail out at the first hint of a problem, and a divorce accompanied by a bitter custody battle would be devastating to his children’s emotional health. Even someone with his nonexistent parenting skills could figure that one out.
He could protect both his children and himself to some degree by having his future wife sign a prenup, he decided. He added a notation to his list. A prenup wasn’t a foolproof solution to fortune hunters, but it was probably the best he could do.
And last, he wanted a wife from a socially prominent family that his children would be proud to belong to, unlike his own. He wanted his wife to reflect the fact that he’d arrived—financially and socially.
Max studied his list with a sense of satisfaction. It was the perfect blueprint for what he wanted in a wife.
But what might his prospective wife want in a husband? The unsettling thought occurred to him. Would he appeal to the kind of woman he wanted to marry? Unconsciously his fingers rubbed over the three-inch scar on his right jaw, which was the result of a barroom fight he’d gotten caught up in when he was eighteen.
Would his wealth be enough to overcome his rough-and-ready background for the type of woman he wanted to marry?
It depended, he finally decided. Depended on a lot of factors, some of which he had absolutely no control over.
And that being so, it was imperative that he seize control wherever possible. One of the things he could do would be to polish his social skills to a fine gloss. To learn to move with ease in the society his prospective wife would have been born into.
He frowned slightly as he suddenly remembered something he’d overheard at a cocktail party last month. One of the women in the group standing behind him had made a crack about Bunny Berringer, the twentysomething runway-model trophy wife of Sam Berringer, a business associate of his. Something to the effect that Bunny had undergone a transformation. That the liberal use of Sam’s money had turned the socially clueless Bunny into a clone of the late Diana, Princess of Wales. But despite the women’s speculation, no one had had any idea how Bunny had done it.
Max frowned slightly. While he didn’t doubt that Bunny had worked hard to learn the necessary skills, someone had to have taught her what to do and when to do it. And whoever that someone was had kept his or her mouth shut or those social piranhas at the party would have heard about it.
Maybe he should talk to Sam and ask him who he’d used. He’d always gotten along well with the older man. If he explained why he needed the information… Max nodded decisively. The worst Sam could do would be to refuse to give him the information. Sam wouldn’t tell anyone that he’d asked. Sam was far too smart