The Billionaire Next Door. Jessica Bird

the message went on and on, Lizzie put her purse and her keys down and leafed through the mail. Bill. Bill. Flyer. Bill.

      “Anyway, Lizzie-fish, I bought one this morning and it’s being delivered tomorrow. The credit card was broken so I wrote the check for two thousand dollars and I had to pay more for Saturday delivery….”

      Lizzie froze. Then whipped her head around to stare at the machine. Two thousand dollars? Two thousand dollars? There wasn’t that kind of cash in their joint account. And it was after five so Lizzie couldn’t call the local bank to stop payment.

      Her mother had just bounced that check good and hard.

      Lizzie cut off the message and deleted it, then sat down in the quilt-covered armchair by the front bay windows.

      The credit card was not “broken.” Lizzie had put a five-hundred-dollar limit on the thing precisely so her mother couldn’t charge things like kilns, for God’s sake.

      At least this situation was repairable, though. First thing tomorrow morning, she’d call the bank and cancel that check, then she’d get in touch with the one art-supply store in Essex and tell them the purchase was off. Hopefully, she’d catch them in time.

      A thump drifting down from above jerked Lizzie to attention. She looked at the ceiling then out the window. Another rental car was parked at the curb, this time a silver one, but she’d been too caught up in the drama over her job to notice when she’d arrived.

      

      Sean O’Banyon was back.

      Sean stood in his old bedroom and wondered how many boxes he’d need to clean out the space. On his way into Southie from the airport, he’d hit U-Haul and bought two dozen of their cardboard specials, but he was probably going to need more.

      He went over and opened up the closet door then tugged on a white string that had a little metal crown at the end. The light clicked on and the dusty remnants of his and Billy’s high-school wardrobe were revealed. The two of them had shared clothes for years because Billy had always been so big for his age, and when Sean had left for college, they’d divvied up the best of the stuff. All that was left now was a wilted chamois shirt with a hole under one pit and a pair of khakis they’d both hated.

      His cell phone rang and he answered it offhandedly, distracted by thoughts of his brother. It was the team of analysts from his office about the Condi-Foods merger, and he started to pace around as he answered their questions.

      When he got off the phone with them, he looked back across the room at the closet and frowned. There was something shoved in the far corner of the upper shelf, something he’d missed on the booze hunt that first night he’d been here.

      A backpack. His backpack.

      He went over, stretched up and grabbed on to a pair of nylon straps. Whatever was in the damn thing weighed a ton, and as it swung loose from the shelf, he let it fall to the floor. As it landed, a little cloud of dust wafted up and dispersed.

      Crouching down, he unzipped the top and his breath caught. Books…His books. The ones from his senior year in high school.

      He took out his old physics tome, first smoothing his palm over the cover then fingering the gouge he’d made on the spine. Cracking the thing open, he put his nose into the crease and breathed in deep, smelling the sweet scent of ink on bound pages. After tracing over notes he’d made in the margins, he put it aside.

      Good Lord, his calculus book. His AP chemistry. His AP history.

      As he spread them out flat on the floor and arranged them so the tops of their multicolored covers were aligned, he had a familiar feeling, one he used to get in school. Looking at them he felt rich. Positively rich. In a childhood full of hand-me-downs and birthdays with no parties and Christmases with no presents, learning had been his luxury. His happiness. His wealth.

      After countless petty thefts as a juvenile delinquent, these textbooks had been the last things he’d stolen. When the end of his senior school year had come, he just hadn’t been able to give them back and he hadn’t had the money to pay for them. So he’d marked each one of the spines and turned them in as you were supposed to. Then he’d broken into the school and the gouges he’d made had been how he’d found the ones that were his. He’d gathered them from the various stacks, put them in this backpack and raced away into the night.

      Of course he’d felt guilty as hell. Strange that palming booze from convenience stores had never bothered his conscience, but he’d felt that the taking of the books had been wrong. So as soon as he’d earned enough from his campus job at Harvard, he’d sent the high school three hundred seventy-five dollars in cash with an anonymous note explaining what it was for.

      But he’d needed to have the books. He’d needed to know they were still with him as he went off to Harvard. On some irrational level, he’d feared if he didn’t keep them, everything he’d learned from them would disappear, and he’d been terrified about going to Crimson and looking stupid.

      Yeah, terrified was the right word. He could clearly recall the day he’d left to go to college…could remember every detail about getting on the T that late August afternoon and heading over the Charles River to Harvard. Unlike a lot of the other guys in his class, who’d come with trunks of clothes and fancy stereos and TVs and refrigerators—and BMWs for God’s sake—he’d had nothing but a beat-up suitcase and a duffel bag with a broken strap.

      He’d gone alone because he hadn’t wanted his father to take him, not that Eddie had offered. And as he’d been forced to go on foot, he’d had to leave his books behind. There had been no question that he was coming back for them, though. He’d returned home that weekend to get the backpack…except his father had said he’d thrown it out.

      That had been the last time Sean had been home. Until three nights ago.

      A knock brought his head up. Getting to his feet, he walked down the hall to the living room, opened the door and—oh, man—looked into the very pair of green eyes that had been in the back of his mind over the past few days.

      Lizzie Bond was dressed in a little white T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. Her hair was down on her shoulders, all naturally streaked with blond and brown, and there wasn’t a lick of makeup on her pretty face.