“Help yourself,” Silas said, nodding toward some kind of appetizer. But nobody moved. They couldn’t.

I tried to cross my arms, but there simply wasn’t room around the table. Five chairs had been squished into a space meant for four, and only three could be seated comfortably. As it was, six people were crowded into the room.

The Billionaire Book Club was a very select group. Men with power, paperbacks, and pussy—though the latter had largely been excluded from meetings until recently.

“You can sit on my lap, Blake,” Luke Knox offered. Usually his lap was reserved for his fiancée, Lexi. My stony look bounced off his easygoing attitude. He simply shrugged and stretched his legs out further, bumping my shins under the stainless steel table.

“You know, this would all be a lot easier if you guys stopped bringing girls into the clubhouse,” Silas pointed out.

Ironically, his ex-wife Maggie was the owner of our “clubhouse.” It was her restaurant—Settlement—that hosted our semi-regular meetings. After handing it over in the divorce, celebrity chef Silas Warner still felt compelled to find fault with anything no longer done “his way.”

Tonight, Maggie silently led us into the glorified closet space at the back. It housed a steel worktable and folding chairs, and opened to a large kitchen pass with a deep shelf, where we could watch the culinary magic happen—and the mistakes that Silas pointed out. It was like a secret chef’s table, but I suspected that we were the only people who used it.

The only real interaction with the tiny redheaded owner was reserved for Silas, who received her middle finger when he mentioned something about the fish special. Jackass. Every time we were here, I wondered which sous chef was hocking up phlegm into our first course.

Needless to say, I didn’t eat much during these book club get-togethers.

“This is the first time we’ve all been here since Nathan’s public indecency charge,” Viktor pointed out. Of all of us, Viktor was the one I would have expected to have troubles with the police. I was pretty sure his “business” was totally illegal, but I knew better than to dig.

“He got off easy. Well, once he got home, I’m sure.” I smirked.

Nathan Brownlow, who looked even more like a surfer boy after a recent trip to the Caribbean with his live-in girlfriend, blushed—though it was hard to tell with his tan. The girlfriend, who was currently perched on his lap, punched me in the arm.

“Ow!” I glowered at Zoe. Seriously, didn’t she have a playground to hang out in or something? Ten years separated her and Nathan, though it was considerably less if you considered their mental ages. Zoe squirmed on Nathan’s lap until his eyes crossed, and he whispered something in her ear. She turned pink and slid off him.

“I’m going to go hang out with Maggie,” she announced. A collective sigh of relief went around the table as she disappeared through the door. There was barely enough room in here for our egos, much less people who stroked them for us.

Though I was the youngest member of the club at twenty-seven, I gave off the impression of being much, much older. It could have been my wild success, my gravitas, my work ethic, intelligence and intensity. Or perhaps it was the salt showing up early in my mostly pepper-colored hair.

If you asked the others, they would say that I peddled bullshit for a living. That was partly true. I considered myself a motivational speaker, and I’d written a few self-help books that ended up on the screens of every Millennial out there. I was a Dale Carnegie for the new generation, a Tony Robbins for people whose parents had given up on self-improvement. And yeah, at first I had to look those guys up myself.

Technically, I wasn’t a billionaire. But then I wasn’t the only one. The term “billionaire” was used pretty loosely these days.

Lucas had reluctantly inherited a billion-dollar company, and then promptly handed it over to his cousin.

As one of Manhattan’s snappiest real estate agents, Nathan had bought and sold more than a billion dollars worth of property, mostly commercial.

Silas had a walk-in fridge full of cash, but his claim to billionaire status was the number of customers served at his various restaurants across the country. Though, from the rumors I’d heard, he’d probably won and lost a billion dollars at the tables in Vegas over the years.

Viktor… well, Viktor could be an actual billionaire. He was enigmatic enough. We all figured he was mafia, though it was never spoken out loud. The surly Russian hid a nasty scar behind his beard, and spoke even less than I did. Unless we were discussing Russian literature—then it was like a bottle of vodka had been poured down his throat.

Sure, I could be intense. But Viktor was Russian.

As for me, I was merely a millionaire. A multi-millionaire, sure, thanks to the hordes of people whose lives I’d touched with my books. If you looked for Marcus Blake books, you’d probably find them in the Self-Help section of the bookstore, but I considered them to be goddamn near to poetry. Billions of pages read, probably on people’s phones and laptops.

But I was still a billionaire, if impressions counted. In my opinion, impressions always counted. And I made a big one. For the most part, I spoke softly and carried a big stick—though most of the time it was suspected of being rammed up my ass.

“It’s too crowded to even pass the bottle,” Silas grumbled.

On the pass to the noisy, hot kitchen sat the gigantic bottle of hot sauce that we used as our conch shell in his little literary Lord of the Flies club, but we could barely raise our arms to the table from being swaddled together, shoulder to shoulder.

“It is a tight fit,” Nathan said.

I waited for it.

“That’s what she said,” Luke drawled.

There it was.

I rolled my eyes. These guys were so juvenile sometimes, so carefree. It amazed me that they were so successful with such a casual attitude to life, but a lot of their wealth could be ascribed to luck.

I wasn’t lucky. I’d busted my ass in a way that they hadn’t, and I didn’t have time to shoot the shit today.

“Well, if we’re not doing anything productive,” I said, shoving my chair back, “I’m getting out of here. I want to beat the traffic.”

Un-wedging myself was like pulling the keystone out of a stone arch. Everyone slumped. I stood up, finally feeling like I could breathe.

“Heading out for the weekend again?” Silas asked me, but his eyes were trained on the kitchen.

I reached into the pocket of my slacks, thumbing the key for the car that was currently parked a few blocks over. Nathan and Luke huddled together, chatting about something that made them both smile. A thousand bucks said they were talking about their women. Suckers.

“I’m only out of town once a month,” I said.

“Bullshit,” said Silas. “You’re out of town all the fucking time with speaking engagements and shit.”

I cocked my head. “Maybe, but only one personal weekend a month.” Although this time I’d be gone for longer; I was already dreading it.

“Yes, the mysterious ‘personal’ weekend.” Silas used air quotes and rolled his eyes. “How come you won’t tell us where you go? I tell you when I go to Atlantic City.”

Was he kidding? “Usually because you call me from there when you’re totally tapped, and you need me to float you train fare back to the city.”

“But we’re friends. Aren’t we?” Silas batted his eyelashes.

Nice try, but I didn’t fall for coy looks that easily. “It’s none of your business,” I said easily.

Viktor stroked his beard, his dark eyes crinkling at the sides. “Let him be. It’s ‘personal,’ Silas.” He, of all of us, knew the value of discretion and privacy.

Thank you, Viktor.

Nathan added his opinion, apparently done his conversation with Lucas. “A thousand bucks says he’s got a mistress stashed somewhere.”

I laughed. “You think I’m the kind of guy who would commit to investing in a mistress?”

Viktor narrowed his eyes at me while the others chuckled.

Nathan scoffed. “No woman would have the patience for you.”

More like the other way around. My personal motto of “use or be used” didn’t exactly get me a lot of dates, which was just fine with me. The black sweater I wore felt too heavy, too hot, despite the October wind outside. Fuck, this room was too small for all of us.

Silas nodded. “Hooker.”

“Maybe I have a secret life,” I taunted them. “Maybe I have a family somewhere, a loving wife and kids who think I’m a traveling salesman or something. Maybe they’re waiting with open arms for me to come home.”

As a joke, it fell flat. As a fantasy, it curdled in my stomach.

* * *

There was nothing better than opening up my car on the highway. I’d peeled off my sweater before putting on my seatbelt, and felt the wrinkles in my gray t-shirt release with every passing mile on the turnpike. When I pulled out onto the secondary highway, it was like a flag had been waved in front of me.

I couldn’t stop my smile from widening as I squinted at the road and tested the vehicle’s impressive acceleration. Fuck, Germans knew how to make cars. The horizon ahead of me glowed orange and pink, and as the light hit my windshield at the worst possible angle I was forced to slow down. A bitter awareness of local speed traps was also good encouragement.

By the time I got there the sky was inky, and my headlights splayed across the sidewalks and storefronts as I turned corners and made my way through town from sheer muscle memory.

The ease I’d felt in my body and soul began to dissipate, block by block. House numbers went down, but my tension ramped up. Every fucking time. I sighed. The predictability of my “fight or flight” response annoyed me. I should be better than this, I told myself as my hands tightened on the steering wheel.

I was Marcus fucking Blake, author of the bestselling e-book “Help Yourself.” My motto was not “do as I say, not as I do.” It was more like “use or be used.”

Somehow I never managed to get over this hurdle of anxiety. Often I didn’t even realize how wound up I got with every visit, until my regular massage therapist reminded me. My stress operated like clockwork, unlike anything else in this town. There was always a crisis, always a problem to solve or a solution to find. It was damn exhausting. A smarter man would avoid the whole thing.

But while I was obviously intelligent, I wasn’t always smart.

I parked at the far end of the mostly empty lot, wanting to bang my head against my steering wheel, which was probably wrapped with some special Himalayan goatskin.

Time to man up.

Robotically I went inside, signed in, and punched the code for the elevator. It took me upstairs much too quickly, where the floor was surprisingly quiet.

“How’s she doing?” I asked the charge nurse at the desk.

“So so. She had a good dinner, but she’s been pretty out of it lately. We had some staff changes lately and that threw her.”

My stomach flipped and I felt a choking sensation at the base of my throat. Phone calls weren’t enough, but I hadn’t been able to come down in more than a month thanks to my speaking schedule. And here, a month was a very long time.

She buzzed me through, and once in the ward it was noisier. Two men were pacing up and down in the hallway, one of them leaning against the wall the whole time and the other staring at his feet.

My lip curled automatically at the lingering odor of feces and urine, which they tried so hard to keep contained. But like any hospital or nursing home, there was always a certain smell, and the dementia unit was always harder to manage. Often the residents didn’t notice—or care—if they crapped themselves, and it was up to the nurses and patient care assistants to see to everyone.

My mother’s door was closed, and I heard some voices inside before an assistant came out, some linens bundled in her arms. “You can go in.” She jerked her chin toward the room, the wide door left ajar. “She’s just talking to the new CNA.”

I gave a cursory knock before pushing the door all the way open and waiting for her to notice me. I always waited for her to see me on her terms. I waited to see if there was a spark of recognition in her eyes, or if she would blink at me with her chin wrinkling as she tried to place me. Today, she stared and said nothing, which was never a good sign.

I glanced from her to the woman seated beside her bed. “I’m the son,” I said automatically as I stepped into the room. My whole body went hot, then cold as I did a double take.

“You.”

This was a sick joke, right?

Serena fucking Rossi stood up, smoothing her hands over her scrubs. “Hi, Marcus.”

She actually tried to smile at me. I couldn’t believe it. I stood there like an idiot, vibrating with remembered humiliation until the other nurse popped back in the doorway.

“We good, Serena?” she asked the other nurse, peeling off her blue gloves with a snap.

“No, we are not good,” I bit out. “Get this lying, two-faced bitch out of my mother’s room.”