Romancing the Billionaire: A Danielle Webster Comedy Short Read online

  Romancing the Billionaire

  A Danielle Webster comedy short

  By Cynthia Cross

  Copyright 2014

  All rights reserved

  I never know what shenanigans Evie will get into next. Sure, she’s my mom, and sure, she warms the eighth pew back every Sunday at Northern Lights Lutheran Church in Mesa, Arizona, just a few blocks away from Friendship Town, her luxury senior lifestyle condominium. And yeah, she’s in the church choir, and on the prayer chain. But I swear, my sis Patty and I could never have driven her distracted nearly as much as she manages to do now for us.

  Jill, my boss, came up to my desk at 9 on a Friday morning. “Danielle, you’ve got to tell me. What is the name of Evie’s novel?”

  “What novel?” I asked, taken aback.

  “You haven’t been on Facebook lately, have you?” said Jill.

  “Oh, dear. What is she up to?”

  “She’s reporting that her billionaire romance is almost finished, but she’s writing it under a nom de plume because it’s a little racy.”

  “Oh, my god.”

  “Seriously, you haven’t heard anything about this?”

  “No! And I can’t believe she’s broadcasting the news like this!”

  “Well, actually,” Jill admitted, “she posted it last night but she must have deleted it. It seems to be gone now.”

  “Well, thank goodness for that.”

  “But that doesn’t mean she isn’t writing a book. Maybe it’s so racy she had second thoughts about saying anything at all.”

  “Pffft. Who would publish a racy novel written by a 67-year-old woman?”

  “Didn’t you and Patty buy her an ebook reader for Christmas?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Two words: indie publishing.”

  I stared at Jill. “Oh, geez. Could she really?”

  “I’d ask her about it. You know, make sure she isn’t in over her head.”

  “Thank you, Jill. I’ll see what she’s up to. Patty’s flying in tonight, just for the weekend.”

  “Perfect. Between the two of you, see what you can discover. I mean, I’d get a huge kick out of reading anything Evie considers racy—“

  “She probably wrote about an open-mouth kiss and sees herself as the next E.L. Jones.”

  “Nothing wrong with that. I read somewhere that Fifty Shaves of Groin netted E.L. Jones nearly a hundred million.”

  “Seriously? That book was utter crap!”

  “I’d write utter crap if I could make so much,” Jill commented. “But Danielle, if you and Patty think she needs legal advice—“

  “Like for contracts she shouldn’t have signed?” I asked, and we both started laughing. Jill had to extricate me from just such a legal difficulty recently.

  “Just let me know if you need help.”

  “You’re the best.” I am so lucky. Jill’s my friend first, my boss second.

  When Patty arrived that evening, she already knew about the racy novel.

  “Yeah, I saw her post on Facebook. But, Dannie,” she said, “let her put it up for sale, if she gets that far. Maybe she’ll sell a few copies. It’ll keep her out of worse trouble.”

  “I’d still kinda like to know what’s going on,” I said. “I could just see her putting everyone she knows in the book. Like us.”

  “I suppose we should be allowed a look,” Patty said.

  So next day, we dropped by Friendship Town about 11 in the morning. We had to choose our time slot carefully. Evie goes to Senior University from 7 – 10 AM on Saturdays. Her bridge group meets in the afternoon.

  We’re pretty well-known there, which worked to our advantage. We were able to ambush Evie as she typed at a 15-year-old cast-off PC given to her by Jill.

  “What are you typing, Mom?” Patty asked, with ill-disguised hilarity.

  “You’ve been holding out on us, Mom,” I said. “Grab her, Patty! We’ll worm this out of her!”

  Patty could hardly speak for laughing. “Mom!” she gasped. “Dannie and I deserve to know about this racy novel you’re working on!”

  “Oh, all right,” Evie said a bit crossly. “This was supposed to be my little secret—“

  “Little secret? Are you kidding me?” I said. “Jill told me about your Facebook update—“

  “I saw it, too!” said Patty.

  “I knew it was a mistake. That’s why I deleted it. You girls are going to have to be very discreet. When it starts selling, I really don’t want to divulge that I’m the author.”

  Patty sat down next to Evie. “Oh, Mommm-my,” she sang out. “Read us a story!”

  “Oh, you girls,” Evie said indulgently. “Go ahead, my first chapter’s right there. If you want to read the whole book, I guess I can email it to you.”

  Patty and I drew chairs up to the computer and began reading.

  Fifty Shades of Chicken Soup

  Chapter 1 – An amazing job offer

  Evie interrupted us right away. “In my Writing for Seniors class, our professor, Miss Pyle, told us that we should avoid cliché language. But I want this to sell and make you girls a lot of money. So I figured that I should use clichés because most readers aren’t that smart and they do think in clichés. And I want them to identify with the heroine.”

  “Gotcha, mom,” said Patty.

  “What’s the cliché?” I asked.

  “Danielle,” Evie said. “Haven’t you noticed how overused the word ‘amazing’ is, anymore? It doesn’t mean what everyone thinks it means. ‘Amazing’ means surprising or perplexing or startling. Everyone uses it to mean ‘fantastic.’”

  “Speaking as a linguist, Mom—“

  “—Which you are NOT, Danielle. You have a degree in English, that’s all.”

  “What I started to say is that ‘fantastic’ used to mean something different, too,” I said patiently. “Two hundred years ago, it meant something so weird and grotesque that it existed only in dreams or a sick imagination.”

  “What’s your point?” Evie said irritably.

  “Just that ‘amazing’ is probably going the same route as ‘fantastic,’ whether we like it or not.”

  “Stop fighting,” Patty said. “Mom, tell Dannie to read so I can scroll down. I’m dying to know what’s on the next page.”

  “Thank you, Patty,” said Mom.

  “Golden child,” I said to Patty, and she made a face at me.

  "So, Ms. Gale, I see from your resume that you are right out of college and are a naive, almost virginal, native of Kansas," says billionaire Wilson Montgomery, scanning my blushing face with his pewter-gray eyes. I bite my lower lip. My inner Superego has opened a locked file cabinet behind the billionaire's desk and has my personnel file in hand. She peruses the information with a frown on her face.

  I'm perched anxiously on the edge of the white leather chair, trying to ignore my swelling ankle, which I just sprained as I fell into Wilson Montgomery's office.

  "Yes, I have a master's degree in fine art from KSU," I say proudly. "Go Willie!"

  "Excuse me?" says Wilson Montgomery.

  Oh crap! Hurriedly I explain, "That's Willie the Wildcat, the Kansas State mascot."

  "I'm glad you explained that," says Wilson Montgomery. "My ex-wives all called me Willie."

  "Oh, no, no, I wasn’t referring to you!" Double crap! "Just, you know, Go Wildcats!" I say, sucking my lower lip into my mouth and chewing it like a terrier chews on a rat.

  "I call myself Willie, at times," he says, a wicked gleam in his pewter-gray eyes. What is that supposed to mean?

  My inner teenager mout
hs some words to me that I can't understand. "What?" I say, and she rolls her eyes.

  “Mom!” I said. “You’ve read Fifty Shaves of Groin, haven’t you?”

  “Sure I have,” Evie said defensively. “That’s called research. I read that, and some copycat novels, too. You know they called it MommyPorn. This will be known as GrannyPorn.”

  “How is this GrannyPorn?” Patty asked. “There aren’t any old people in it.”

  Evie beamed. “Good, that’s what I want,” she said. “As you go on reading, you’ll find that the heroine is a sixty-something who looks 45.”

  “Oh, science fiction,” I said.

  “Don’t you mock me, young lady,” Evie said severely. “I’ve been told several times that I look 45. I’ve been taken for your older sister.”

  “I hate that,” I admitted.

  “Not only that,” Evie continued. “In our Writing for Seniors class, we all researched our topics thoroughly before we started writing. I did some research on billionaires. Do you know how many billionaires there are in the world who are under 30 and single?”

  Patty and I looked at each other. “No clue,” Patty said.

  “Here, I’ll show you my research,” Evie said, clicking on a spreadsheet file.

  “Mom, you know how to use Excel?” Patty asked.

  “Look, Patty,” I said, pointing. “It’s Excel 97!”

  “It works fine!” Evie said. “The prayer chain ladies use a spreadsheet so we can keep track of who needs prayer and how the prayer was answered.”

  “So you transferred those skills to tabulating the ages of the world’s billionaires,” I said, amused.

  “And a very good thing I did!” said Evie. “Look—here’s the list, it’s from Forbes magazine. I just copied it into a spreadsheet so I could sort them all by age.”

  “How many are there?” asked Patty. “Maybe there’s one for me!”

  Evie just looked at her over her bifocals. “Patty, all these romance writers are selling you girls down the river. Just listen to what I found. There are one thousand six hundred and thirty-four names on this list. That’s a lot of billionaires. But for some reason, about fifty of them don’t belong on the list!”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because,” Evie said indignantly, “Their net worth is less than a billion. There’s one guy in China with a measly 500 million from making baby formula. That’s false advertising!”

  “Well, Mom,” Patty said reasonably, “It’s not an ad. It’s a magazine article.”

  “I don’t care. We’ll take out these non-billionaires and we’ve got one thousand five hundred eighty-three left. Do you know what their average age is?”

  “Probably about 55,” I guessed.

  “Wrong. The average age is 63 and a half! There’s a 99-year-old on that list!”

  “Wow,” Patty said.

  “I’m only starting,” Evie said grimly. “Guess how many single billionaires under the age of 30 are on that list. Now mind you, this is a list of billionaires throughout the whole world!”

  “Probably only a dozen or so,” I said.

  “Wrong.”

  “I’m going to shut up and let Patty guess from now on,” I said.

  “Probably just a couple,” Patty said shrewdly.

  “Ha!” Evie said darkly. “There are NONE. Nada.”

  “So all those billionaire romance novels can be reclassified as science fiction!” I said. “I love science fiction.”

  “Mom, there’s none at all?” Patty said.

  “There are precisely two billionaires under the age of 30, TOTAL,” Evie declared. “One inherited his money from a family business making car antennas—“

  “Now THAT’S sexy!” giggled Patty.

  “—and besides, he’s married. The other one is a 24-year-old woman.”

  “Is she married?” I asked.

  “Who cares?” Evie said. “She’s FEMALE!”

  “Well, Mom, times are changing with all the marriage equality laws we have now. Maybe I could take a younger woman in marriage.”

  “That’s disgusting, Danielle,” Evie told me. “And besides, she’s Chinese!”

  “Whoa, Dannie, you get a twofer,” Patty said, laughing. “Homophobia plus xenophobia!”

  I shook my head. “It’s all that Rush and Dr. Laura crap filling her head. We must be patient.”

  Evie opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. She knows she can’t win against two of us. “There’s more,” she went on with dignity. “Do you girls want to hear it?”

  “Hang on, Mom.” Patty was scrolling through Mom’s spreadsheet. “What about these brothers? They’re only 25. They made their money in general contracting. Look, Dannie—they’re based in Chicago. Maybe they’re from Schaumburg!”

  “Pshaw,” Evie snorted. “Forbes got that all wrong. I thought they were my best bet, too, but one is 67 years old, and his brother is 65!”

  “Maybe Mom could go out with them!” I said.

  “Ménage à trois,” Patty said in my ear.

  “I heard that,” Evie said. “You might be surprised what’s in my novel.”

  Patty and I looked at each other and decided to drop that subject. “So there’s absolutely no rich young studs in the whole world,” Patty said with disappointment.

  I had a brainstorm. “What about the Facebook founders?”

  Evie looked at me. “Danielle, time is passing and we’re all getting older. Those young men are in their 30’s now. And I think all but one is married. The one that’s left is a notorious playboy who hangs out with Miss World and Miss Universe models. And he’s not even very good-looking!”

  “He doesn’t have to be,” I said cynically.

  “You bring the money, and I’ll bring the honey,” sang Patty.

  “Is that really a song?” I asked, diverted.

  “I think it’s country and western,” Patty said.

  “Have you read that series about marrying a Greek billionaire?” Evie asked. She didn’t wait for an answer. “There are 3 billionaires in Greece. The youngest is 52 years old!”

  “How To Marry a Middle-aged Balding Greek Billionaire,” I said dreamily.

  “Not even that,” said Evie. “All three are married.”

  “Imagine finding a billionaire who’s even close to young,” Patty said mischievously, “you know, youngish, and then add to that having a ripped body.”

  “Most of them are technology wizards,” I said. “They’d have marshmallow bodies from sitting too long at screens all the time.”

  Patty said, “Don’t forget, they’ve got to be such good lovers that all they have to do is tell the heroine to come and she does!”

  “Science fiction,” I said again. “A woman with any sense of self-worth would tell him, ‘I can decide for myself when I’ll have my orgasm, thank you very much!’”

  “Times sure have changed,” Evie said. “I can’t imagine myself having a conversation with your grandmother that included the word orgasm.”

  “Grandma wouldn’t have known the meaning of the word,” I snorted.

  “’Is THAT what happened to me in 1943?’” said Patty in a quavering voice.

  “You might be surprised. Grandma turned a lot of heads in her day, Grandpa used to say. And what a flirt!” Evie sighed and went on, “I got my next idea thinking about you girls. Lots of readers are in their 30’s and 40’s, like you both. So why not take a look at what’s available in billionaires between the ages of 30 and 40?”

  “Did you?” I asked.

  “Of course! And it’s almost as disappointing as the 20’s category!” Evie said, again sounding indignant. “Look!” she said, scrolling through her spreadsheet. “There are 27 of them, so that sounds promising, until we start looking at them. “Right off the bat, six of them are women. And don’t you start talking about lesbians, Danielle,” she said, shaking her finger at me. “That leaves 21 men, and nine of those are married. That brings us down to twelve billionaire bache
lors under the age of 40. Three of them have ex-wives!”

  “Slim pickings in the universe of billionaires,” Patty commented.

  “I wonder how many are gay?” I added.

  “You and Patty get after me for homophobic remarks,” Evie said accusingly. “What do you call that?”

  “That’s different. We’re trying to decide how many billionaires are available to marry romance-reading females.”

  “The ones who are left tend to have supermodel girlfriends,” Evie said bitterly. “That leaves you two out.”

  “Gee, thanks, Mom,” Patty said.

  “I was asked once if I wanted to do some modeling,” I said reminiscently.

  “Was it at a frat party?” Patty asked.

  “How did you know?”

  “Come on, Dannie. That’s a pick-up line.”

  “Oh.”

  Evie said, “The most likely age group of billionaires is men age 50 and up. The younger men are nonexistent. So if I want to avoid writing science fiction, as Danielle calls it, my best bet is to make my heroine older, as well as my billionaire hero.”

  “Aren’t they all married by the time they’re that old?” I asked.

  “Mine,” Evie said primly, “is divorced. And his ex-wife is a psycho stalker.”

  “How’s that for realism?” Patty said. “This is going to be a blockbuster novel.”

  Evie settled her glasses on her nose. “Then you should get back to reading.”

  My inner teenager mouths something to me but I can't understand. "What?" I say, and she rolls her eyes.

  "What?" Wilson Montgomery echoes, looking lost.

  "Oh, that's just me talking to my inner teenager," I explain.

  "You have an inner teenager?" Wilson Montgomery says, looking surprised. "But I trademarked the inner teenager 27 years ago. Is your license current?"

  "Um, I don't know," I say, troubled. "I didn't know I was doing anything wrong. I'm from Kansas. To my knowledge, no one else in the whole state has alter egos who take part in their inner dialogues like I do. Is that okay?"

  "For you, Ms. Dorothy Gale, anything is okay."

  "Please, call me Dottie," I blush.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Dorothy Gale? Why is that name familiar?”

  “Well, she’s from Kansas, so I named her after The Wizard of Oz,” explained Evie.