All Chapters of I'm The Thorn Stuck In The Billionaire Celebrity's Foot: Chapter 1 - Chapter 9

The floor buffer screamed against the marble like it had a personal grudge, and Ivy Calloway let it. Two in the morning was the only hour of the day nobody told her to be quiet.Vane Tower's lobby stretched out in front of her, forty feet of imported stone that cost more per square foot than her mother's entire hospital bill, which was a fact Ivy knew because she'd done the math out of pure spite one night in October. She liked the lobby best of all the floors she cleaned. No cameras pointed at her here. No tenants stepping around her cart like she was something spilled on the floor. Just her, the buffer, and the hum of the building settling into itself after everyone important had gone home.Except tonight somebody important hadn't gone home.He came out of the elevator bank like he owned it, which, Ivy would later learn, he did. Tall, dark coat, tie loosened around his neck like he'd been fighting with it for hours and lost. He didn't look at her. People who looked like that never l

Ivy's hands were shaking, and she hated that they were shaking, and she hated more that he could probably see it."You had someone look into my mother's medical records." Her voice came out low. "That's illegal.""It's a hospital payment plan, not a medical record, and it's a matter of public collections data if you default on it, which you're eleven days from doing." Sterling said it without cruelty, which somehow made it worse. "I'm not trying to hurt you. I'm trying to be efficient. Those aren't the same thing, whatever you've decided about me in the last twelve hours.""You don't get to decide what I've decided about you.""No," he agreed. "I don't. That's rather the point of hiring you."Reagan set the tablet down on the desk between them, screen dark now, and folded her hands like this was any other negotiation she'd walked into a hundred times before. "The arrangement is simple, Ms. Calloway. Six months, publicly, as Mr. Vane's partner. Events, dinners, the occasional photograp

The caption read: Sterling Vane's new "girlfriend" has a past he might want to Google.Ivy stared at the photo until the edges of it blurred. It was her, unmistakably, nineteen years old, standing outside a courthouse with her arm around her mother, both of them exhausted and hollow-eyed in a way that had nothing to do with celebration."Where did they get this.""I don't know yet." Sterling's voice was tight, controlled in the way of a man holding something back by force. "Reagan's tracing it. It'll be pulled within the hour, but it's already been screenshotted a thousand times. That's how this works. Once it's seen, it's seen.""You don't understand what this is a picture of.""Then tell me." He said it quietly, not a demand, and something in the shift of his voice, the sudden absence of the performance he'd worn all night, made Ivy's throat go tight."My father." The words came out smaller than she meant them to. "That's the day he was sentenced. Fraud, embezzlement, something he d

Ivy didn't sleep. She sat on her fire escape until the sky went gray, phone in her lap, reading the message over and over until the words stopped making sense as words and became something closer to a countdown.She called Sterling at six in the morning. He picked up on the first ring, which told her he hadn't slept either."He texted me," she said, no preamble. "Not you. Me."A beat of dead silence on the line, sharper than any shout would have been. "Read it to me."She read it. She heard something in the background on his end, a chair scraping back fast, a door."I'm coming to you," he said. "Don't leave your building.""I have work.""Ivy." His voice cracked slightly around the edges of her name, the first time she'd heard it do that. "Please."He arrived twenty minutes later without Reagan, without a driver, alone at the wheel of a car that looked nothing like the ones he usually rode in, plain and dark and unremarkable, which told her more about how seriously he was taking this

They didn't tell Reagan. Sterling argued against it for twenty minutes in the parking garage, low and furious, and Ivy let him get through every point before she said the thing that ended the argument."If it's a trap, it's a trap either way, with or without permission. I'd rather walk into it with you than have you find out after."He drove her to the address the message sent an hour later, an all-night diner three neighborhoods from her apartment, the kind of place with sticky menus and a bell over the door that didn't quite work anymore. Sterling made her wait in the car for ten minutes while he checked the place himself, came back tense but satisfied, and walked her in with his hand at the small of her back, not for photographs this time, not for anyone watching.Marcus Webb was smaller than Ivy expected, gray at the temples, hands that wouldn't stop moving around his coffee cup."You look like him," he said, before she'd even sat down. "Your father. Same eyes.""You testified aga