The Price of Inheritance Read Online Free Page A

and felt like I’d developed cataracts. Nicole looked at me like I was taking my final breaths.
    â€œAre you okay?” she said, leaning over and gripping my right hand. “Are you always this hot?”
    â€œOh, don’t worry about it. Poor circulation due to childhood illness. Polio,” I whispered back.
    â€œYou had polio?” she said, clearly imagining my painful childhood spent as a clone of FDR.
    â€œSorry, not polio, I meant pox. Like chicken. Chicken pox.”
    My tongue now had a mind of its own. Next I was going to declare myself the illegitimate ruler of France. I felt one step away from a supersonic meltdown. And, as Nicole soon pointed out, a real problem with hives.
    â€œYou look like you have enormous hickeys all over your face,” she said, physically recoiling.
    â€œI know, I know,” I said, reaching in my bag and taking out my foundation. “It will go down as soon as this auction’s over.” I opened my purse again and popped three Benadryl and did a few of the breathing exercises that I’d learned in my Virgin Airlines Flying Without Fear class during a work weekend in London. When I’d paid the £300, the teacher said I would learn lessons to carry me through all the stages of life, and he was right. Now was I supposed to hold my breath and puff up like a bird? Or was it slow and rhythmic stomach breathing? I tried both and the result made me gasp for air like a scuba diver with the bends. Nicole grabbed my hand again and I began to calm down and itch less, but it all started again when Olivier reached $10 million, and there was silence in the room.
    I held my breath until Michael’s phone bidder bit on the bid.
    â€œRaise your hands, raise your hands!” I quietly pleaded to everyone in the room as the bids went just past $11 million. I needed to shatter records. I wanted my name in the papers and on the pages of Art in America . I’d even had a new head shot taken last week by one of Annie Leibovitz’s minions.
    The Chippendale had to break $12.1 million, a sum so insanely high that I didn’t actually grasp what it meant. Except that at minimum wage, you had to work for more than 1,600,000 hours to have enough money to buy it, which is about sixteen lifetimes.
    Olivier’s voice coming from his elegant form behind the rostrum snapped me back into the present and I touched my face to make sure my hives were still covered by my industrial-strength foundation. I heard $11 million from the phones, then $11.3 million in the room. When $11.5 million rose to $11.9 million, I froze.
    Without showing any trace of emotion, Olivier said, “Did I hear twelve million?”
    Did he? Was someone bidding twelve? It was Michael’s phone bidder. I wanted to leap over to him, steal the phone, and pledge all my white blood cells, future children, and savings bonds to that person. But I still needed it to climb.
    â€œTwelve-point-one, please,” I silently begged. Someone! Bill Gates! The Zuckerberg man-child. A corrupt Vatican official. Kanye West. Anyone! I needed some heavy testosterone and ego proving to start pumping through the air.
    And then, as the sweat from my palm actually dripped onto my gray dress, someone did. I saw it, from the left corner of my eye. Paddle 79 went up and no one gasped.
    â€œTwelve million one hundred thousand from the gentleman in the middle,” said Olivier, looking at a man who had dropped out until now. Michael flicked his hand up, the arm of his suit falling ever so slightly.
    â€œMichael, yours now on the phones for twelve million two hundred thousand,” said Olivier. He quickly took the bid up by another one hundred thousand. The man in the center of the room in the navy suit with silver hair lifted his paddle again and Olivier declared, “Here in the room at twelve million three hundred thousand.”
    The bidding had just hit $12.3 million, then $12.4 million, and a second