Professionally Perfect

Chapter 11

Kimberly.

I love my family, I promise, I do. But one thing I never enjoyed them seeing was my wealth. They had never been to my home before, they never had a reason. We hadn't even lived in this grand mansion for a long time. Robert somehow kept any reporters from publishing photos of our home in the tabloids. I'm still not completely sure why reporters want pictures of us sometimes, but Robert just says money means fame in some aspects. I say that's ridiculous.

Our house wasn't perfect, not just yet. The outside was taken care of by a team of three gardeners making it look like someplace a fairy could live. Roses grew just below some of the windows, while flower beds decorated the front lawn. I always loved flowers but for the life of me couldn't keep them alive. We had decided to focus solely on one room at a time, but Robert insisted on holding a party for our anniversary which my family of course wanted to come to, so Robert got in a team of decorators to finish all the guestrooms immediately. It was the entertainment rooms that still lacked any character, and an indoor swimming pool lacked quite a bit of water. Almost a year we had owned the property, and you'd think it would be practically sorted by now with how many hands we could hire, but when Robert decided he wanted to knock a wall into an archway on a whim, things tend to take a little while longer.

"Holy fuckballs. This is your house?" I knew the moment my family saw this side of me things would change, maybe for the better, probably for the worse. My family was on the poverty side of money, every one of them. I had grown up wondering if I would get breakfast before school that morning – the answer almost always being no – and squeezing into the same school uniform I had worn for the past three years.

Caleb's son ran to my side and wrapped himself around my leg. "It's huge."

I sympathise with some of my family, others I would not. My grandparents for example. Both my grandmother and grandfather worked, so why didn't it feel like they had enough money? It wasn't so much that they were struggling, but they were indeed living paycheck to paycheck. That's not how the world works anymore, and I'm not sure it ever really did to begin with.

My father, on the other hand, didn't work. Sure, my father did when my mother was alive, but after she worked he never worked a day, insisting someone had to look after the kids. Well the 'kids' were now twenty-three and twenty and neither of us needed looking after, but did he work? No.

Those facts alone helped me understand Robert and hy his job was selling drugs. It didn't matter how many hours of your life you wasted with a job, most people could never shift out of the 'comfortable' zone, where you could afford anything, yet at the same time nothing. Robert helped people with the money he earned, he never allowed his men to sell to kids or their bodies would be mysteriously found in a lake somewhere, and last year alone we donated a total of four million euros to charities alone. Unethical money, ethical views.

"Yes," I spoke simply.

They all followed me in through the front door and gawked at the entryway. My father was the next to speak. "Maybe this marrying for money thing was worth it after all."

And there was another reason. No one ever thought that maybe the wife made the money. It didn't matter if you both looked dressed to the nines, each and every time the person walking past the happy couple will presume the husband is the money-maker while the wife is a gold-digger. No one took into account that Robert was in student debt at Twenty-two and I at eighteen helped to pay that off so he could start up the business he had spoken about for months on end. No one took into account that it was me that would be pulled away from work in other parts of Europe if one of the bosses was needed. Why you ask? I was a lot better at finding pros and cons, I was better with my words, and I was better at numbers. But that didn't matter to anyone, not even my family, they would see me as nothing but a blonde bimbo who sucked her husband's dick to get the diamonds that decorated her body.