Best friends Ben, Justin, and Edie are surprised and excited to wind up on the same tropical cruise together. Their parents? Not so much. Ben's father Hank used to be good buddies with Justin's father Frank--but the two men have drifted apart over t...
Justin Dillard waved at the receptionist at the front desk of The Spires as he made his way to the bank of elevators. To his chagrin, two people joined him in the confined space. He felt their stares as he hit the button for the penthouse. There was only one, and just about everyone knew who owned it: Francis Dillard, the affluent British businessman who made a living buying metropolitan real estate and constructing distinctive, wonderful skyscrapers, then selling them to large corporations looking to move into an area right away without the hassle of having to build their own location.
Dillard, Incorporated became a giant in the realm of business infrastructure, more than just a contracting or a real estate business, for they had their own subdivisions within the all-encompassing corporate umbrella for every aspect of constructing a building, from the ground up: construction companies, building inspectors, interior designers, architects—everything was controlled by Francis Dillard himself, and anything that needed doing, he had the department to which he could delegate the job. It felt more like a union sometimes than a corporation, as the applications were so diverse, but whatever it was, Dillard made his first million getting the job done, so that was all that mattered.
Justin heard his father's rolling, bass voice emanating from the main area of the penthouse. It sounded like he was talking to somebody, but Justin couldn't hear another voice, so he figured it must be a phone conversation. He slowed his pace to tread absolutely silently. If Dillard was sitting, as he usually did on the phone, on the couch in the conversation pit, his back would be to the flight of stairs leading to the bedrooms, and Justin could just slide on by without even speaking to his father.
Not that they hated each other; they were each other's only family; with the death of his mother when he was nine, Justin had spent plenty of time over the ensuing years to get used to being the only son of a workaholic father who viewed others more as vehicles to accomplish his vision for a perfect world, or obstacles to that goal who need to be pushed out of the way—even his own son. Justin had done his best to not be an obstacle, and enrolling in the Student Exchange program under a Business Management major was one thing he did to please his father... But did his father have to insist on following him around, even to New York?
Justin, in planning this move to America while studying, would have been perfectly content with student housing or a studio apartment in walking distance of Broadway Street. On Orientation Day, however, he had emerged from the day's tour of the Columbia University campus to find a chauffeured Jaguar waiting to bring him to The Spires, an upscale apartment tower near Times Square, where his father waited in the penthouse he'd just purchased and moved into for the length of Justin's tenure at Columbia.
It wasn't so bad, actually; Francis Dillard was in the process of breaking ground for a new skyscraper in Queens while addressing a deal with another corporation buying another of his skyscrapers in Long Island, so he was on the phone pretty much all the time—such as right now.
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The trim, athletic man stood perfectly straight before the wide, black-quartz and chrome fireplace in the main area of the penthouse. He wore a narrow-ribbed sweater and dark-washed jeans, and he paced as he talked. Justin saw him pause, and briefly, smirked at how, with his salt-and-pepper hair, his firm, sharp features, and his admirable physique—his father was so keen on his own appearance that even in a casual conversation, in the privacy of his own home, Francis Dillard looked like he was posing for the cover of TIME magazine. Justin ducked back toward the doorway as Francis turned and his gaze briefly swept toward the entryway. Judging by the way the conversation continued, Justin surmised that the person on the other end had captured his father's attention, and he hadn't actually noticed his son's return.
