Usually, when I got out of class, I would sit down someplace nice, take in the atmosphere, maybe flirt with a waitress or two. Get a phone number. Plan for a late-night liaison with her, with or without a date. Most of the time that date wasn’t needed. Then again, I was cocky like that.
Plus, it was how I relaxed.
Today I wasn't going to get that.
Something's gone awry with Mom.
I had serious doubts that it was anything potentially tragic.
No, I'd been expecting something like this to happen, just not at this exact time.
Waiting for the elevator, a man rushed up next to me. Looking over at him, it was like looking in a mirror. Almost.
Very few identical twins strive to be perfect copies of one another. Julian and I were no different. He'd leaned toward trying to be more professional, and he liked to keep his hair longer than I did, but at the end of the day, we were still more alike than we were different.
"Isabella call you eight hundred times, too, I presume?" I quipped, already knowing the answer to that question.
He nodded his head. "Sounds like she's at the end of her rope."
I rubbed at the scruff along my jaw. "Tiff can't be that bad. She’s just a little girl.” Then again, how could I say such a thing? I knew nothing about raising kids, or caring for them.
"You know how Isabella is, Jack. She's real big on family, which probably means it’s less Tiff and more that she's being kept away from her own."
He had a point.
The elevator arrived seconds later and we took our place in it, filing to the back of the metal box. We had claimed the penthouse on top of the tower as our own, something nice for us, as well as our mother and sister when we hit it big.
Julian and I were a little bit clever. Some would call us geniuses, but we didn't need our egos pet like that. We had plenty of other more creative ways of getting our daily affirmation that we were awesome.
We had created a funky little algorithm that tracked stock trading prices and anticipated when big, sweeping changes would occur, based on patterns of that stock in the past and of ones similar to it. We ended up turning a minimum-wage job's weekly paycheck into something that was paying dividends for us all to live on. We were quite nearly overnight successes, and for Mom? It was a burden off her over-stressed mind that she didn't have to work as a secretary, a waitress, and an Uber driver all in the same day just to make ends meet.
We reached the top floor in no time, and Julian led the way out of the elevator. He opened the door to the penthouse and called out for Isabella and Tiff, his voice echoing throughout the penthouse.
Luckily, the place didn't look like a tornado had torn through it, cutting out a couple possibilities.
We moved farther into the suite, closing the door behind us. I took in the scene before me, and as I suspected, Isabella's worry wasn't because little sister Tiff had become Lady Satan herself. She was actually just happily watching cartoons, behaving like a good eight year old should.
Isabella, who had been our housekeeper since we moved in, was sitting at the kitchen table, worried as hell, before she looked up at us. Hadn’t she heard us come in?
"Oh thank God, you're finally here," she huffed out.
"Yes? You asked for us, did you not?" I crossed the room. "What's going on?" I was all business, wanting to get down to the fact of the matter.
"It's Ms. Barnes. She’s um...she’s not here." Isabella wrung her hands together, worry marring her features.
"Hmm… Well, that’s definitely not a good thing.” I blinked trying to figure out what the hell it was that was going on. Mom didn’t normally up and leave without letting us know where she was going and what she was doing.
"She took off. Said she was going on a long vacation with some guy named Jean Pierre Jacques," Isabella said as if the guy’s name was part of one of those expensive perfume commercials.
"Jean Pierre Jacques?" Julian repeated, the name rolling off his tongue.
"I thought she was joking, but I'm two hours over my shift here and she's still not back and she's not answering my calls or texts." Isabella’s voice began to rise with panic, even as we were standing right in front of her.
"Seriously, Jean Pierre Jacques?" Julian blinked and shook his head, his gaze colliding with mine. We both knew this wasn’t going to end well.
"Ms. Barnes is a very troubled woman, boys. I know you two are too busy to take care of Tiff full time, so I asked my agency if they had anyone else that could nanny. They don't, but they did recommend a sister agency that deals in live-in nannies."
"Live-in nannies?" I snickered. "Like Marry Poppins or whatever it’s called?"
"If you want to call it that." She took a piece of paper from the counter and slid it over to me. "There's the number to call. I'm meant to keep the house tidy, boys. I'm not a childcare professional. However, it just felt wrong to take off and leave little Tiff here all alone."
A long sigh escaped my lips. "Thanks, Isabella. I'll be sure to make you sure you get proper overtime for all this."
Isabella grabbed her belongings and smoothed a hand down her shirt. "I need to get home to my girls. They must be starving, and I promised them not another canned soup dinner."
"Take care, Izzy." I gestured her way as she gripped purse in her hands before and taking off toward the door. As soon as the penthouse door closed behind her, I turned to my brother.
"You want to go see if Tiff knows anything about this?" I clenched my fist at my side, hiding the disapproval about our mother the best I could.
"Let’s.” He started off in the direction of the living room.
We didn't hate our little sister or anything like that. Actually, we loved her—a lot. It was just that everything had changed so suddenly in the past year. We hit our fortune. We freed Mom from having to work three jobs all at once, and we moved her and Tiff into this penthouse with a magnificent view of the city.
It was still unbelievable for me that she worked three jobs. Then again, she was a single mother with three kids. It's surprising she didn't snap sooner, all things considered, so I honestly considered her a hell of a woman, even if she was causing us a bit of trouble at the moment.
I pulled out my phone and was going to call her personally to see what this whole Jean Pierre Jacques thing was, but before I could even dial the number, an email appeared across the screen.
An email from her.
Apparently, she needed a nice long trip, and she was seeing the world with this guy who she'd been talking to online over the past few months. She said that we shouldn't freak out; she’d checked that he's not a serial killer and that they might elope, but she needs this. It’s been her dream since she was a little girl, and she won't be anywhere near a phone or computer for awhile.
Well damn.
It was sort of irresponsible of her to bail on Tiff, but maybe she was so stressed out that it made her stupid and think that Isabella's duty was to take care of her? So many years of single motherhood—along with some broken hearts along the way—is enough to send anyone to a shrink, right?
Or traveling the world with some French guy, I supposed.
I opened the slip of paper Isabella gave me. A live-in nanny, huh? It seemed to be the most obvious solution. Julian and I were busy with our college careers. Sure, we'd made our money, but the quickest way to lose money is to not know how to manage it. For example, most lottery winners.
We were driven to this whole “be smart” thing, so college was happening, millions and billions of dollars or not.
That meant we couldn't become Tiff’s sudden brother-dad hybrid. Sure, she was laughing and playing with Julian right now, but we couldn't do it alone, and since we had the money, we had options we could explore.
A live-in nanny, though? Au pair? Trumped-up babysitter? I mused on whom we could possibly get. I'd heard those fantasies about seducing the housekeeper and all that.
Isabella made me realize how silly that thought really was. She was middle-aged and happily married. Fantasies were just fantasies in my mind.
Pulling out my cell, I dialed the number, realizing I needed to focus on someone good for Tiffany instead of worrying about my dick so much. Finding girls who wanted a good time wasn't exactly hard for me anyway.
Even then? It was getting more than a bit old having a rotating cast of girls I would be sharing my bed with. I yearned for something steady, something real. Something to really make my blood boil with desire and keep me interested.
None of the girls I went to college with did that for me. Fuck, if I ever found a girl like that, I'd be all over her like a rabid dog. I listened to the automated system and options before pressing the “1” key so I could speak to a live person. It was mine and Julian’s duty to care for Tiff, and we were going to do whatever we could to make things right.