AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Another thing that threw me for a loop was that Mom told me that she and Stefon would be leaving for a three-week honeymoon tomorrow. She was moving me to Malibu on my eighteenth birthday and then promptly abandoning me.
Happy birthday to me.
Apparently this wasn’t a terrible arrangement because Matthias, Stefon’s twenty-one-year-old son, would be around to keep me company.
More like babysit me.
In the limo, Kinzy opened the mini fridge in the back. “Whoa, look at this,” she gushed. It was full of water, liquor, sodas, and snacks, like M&Ms. Kinzy lifted the snacks. “Can we partake, Ms. Galbr—? Er…,” Kinzy amended, looking sheepish. “What’s your new last name again?”
“Vaulteneau,” Mom answered proudly, pronouncing it like a French woman, Vau-de-nue. “And you can consume anything you want but the liquor.” She’d been smiling nonstop since getting married.
As I watched the Nevada desert roll by, I couldn’t even enjoy cold M&Ms during my first ride in a limousine.
On top of Drew icing me out, I was grumpy because I’d yet to meet my mom’s husband. The man came in, married my mom, and didn’t even so much as say hello to my face. It wasn’t a good start. Mom said Stefon wanted to get everything ready for us. I said he was a coward for not wanting to face me without the support of a glittering mansion in the backdrop.
Over the last several days, my friends and I took our Internet stalking duties very seriously as we conducted our own investigations on Stefon Vaulteneau.
Stefon Vaulteneau was a sixty-one-year-old widower and the father of two. His oldest son, Dante, was twenty-eight years old and a senior vice president who lived in Asia. Matthias was twenty-one, a college student, and a champion swimmer on track for the Olympics.
Stefon Vaulteneau owned so many businesses, it took pages upon pages to list them all. He financed art and movies, and start-ups. Vaulteneau Group, Inc., was also a major investor in streaming companies like Netflix, owning millions of shares. The group owned luxury apartment buildings in almost every major city. Additionally, he was on the board of directors for so many corporations that Raj wondered if the man was an android. I couldn’t fault Raj’s logic there.
We didn’t learn much about Dante other than what was in his LinkedIn profile, and my friends quickly lost interest in the elder Vaulteneau once Brieana found an online image of Matthias.
“Yowza,” Brieana had said with a whistle. “He’s a dreamboat.”
Brieana wasn’t lying. For several days, I’d been low-key haunting celebrity tabloid websites to study his image. Dark hair, dark eyes, handsome face, impeccable taste in designer fashion. I’d even found older USA Swimming news about Matthias winning several Junior Nationals competitions.
And a few months ago, People Magazine had coined Matthias the “Prince of Malibu” in their Sexiest Man Alive issue.
Matthias Vaulteneau looked as arrogant as he was hot, and I bet he was very arrogant.
As we entered the airport grounds, Rowen nudged my side. Wordlessly, he showed me a recent tabloid article, which featured several photos of Matthias. The caption read, “Matthias Vaulteneau and date Zoey Anderson attend Grand View Indie Film Fest.”
It was from last night at a film premiere where he stood next to a beautiful blond starlet. I wondered if the blond on his arm was his girlfriend. In the image, they’d just exited a bright red Ferrari.
Matthias’s perfect smile and his confident stance did nothing for me. Nothing at all.
We couldn’t be more different. He was a prince and I was a pauper. I was never going to fit into this world. Maybe it wasn’t too late to call the whole thing off.
Kinzy stole Rowen’s phone. “Hey guys, look,” Kinzy said, showing the others.
Brieana did a fake swoon move while Raj pushed up his eyeglasses and tsked in a manner that suggested he wasn’t impressed at all.
“He looks like a show-off,” Raj said under his breath.
“Do you think it’s his Ferrari?” Rowen asked in a dreamy voice once he spotted the exotic car in the background. “Think your new stepbrother will let me drive it when I come to visit?”
“Stop calling him that,” I mumbled, but Mom gave me a stern look. I forced a smile. In a sugary-sweet tone, I said, “I’m sure he’ll let us all take turns, Rowen.” Mom didn’t like that, either.
Overall, though, my friends were impressed with everything Vaulteneau as we pulled into the private terminal section of the Las Vegas international airport. For me, though, it felt like I was leaving a part of myself behind.
Mom and I spent the last week packing the things we wanted to take to Malibu. Mom suggested I take only the essentials, like a few articles of clothing, books, and keepsakes. “We’ll buy whatever we need when we get there, sweetie,” she’d said as we taped up boxes for the movers. Family albums and Grandpa Tommy’s tchotchkes made the cut, as did Mom’s Vegas Showgirl outfits, to include the huge white feathers.
I made sure to pack up my writing journals, some artwork that Kinzy painted for me last year, and because I was a sentimental sap, I packed the poems Rowen wrote me when we dated in freshman year. They weren’t particularly good, but it showed a softer, emotional side he rarely revealed.
I’d been worried about our ability to sell the deli and the upstairs apartment, but apparently Stefon’s attorneys took care of everything. In under a week, a huge sum of money had been deposited into Mom’s checking account. From that, she paid our employees bonuses even though the new owner planned to employ them.
The amount that was left over was placed in my savings account. “Play money,” Mom called it. Considering she’d deposited close to twenty thousand dollars, I had a feeling that Stefon’s wealth was staggering if that was considered “play money.”
