Page 2 of Unwillingly His

Stella Deiderich had struck me.

In public, no less.

Of course, now I would need to teach her a lesson.

She’d need to learn what happened to bad little girls the hard way.

The easy way never seemed to stick.

Rising slowly, I raised my hand to the judge to signal he was not to interfere.

I circled the plaintiff’s desk as I buttoned my suit jacket before stepping up to her.

In business, I used every advantage, no matter how trivial, to get the upper hand.

One such advantage was my superior height.

Usually taller than the average man in the room, I completely towered over Stella’s slight frame.

She really was uncommonly beautiful, despite her age. With more maturity and life experience, I could see her becoming an absolutely stunning woman. At the moment, she was a little too thin, perhaps from her sudden grief. And her eyes held the wild, unguarded emotions of youth, rather than the calculated intelligence of a woman who knew her place in the world.

Recent events had shown me I needed to make some changes to my life.

Marriage, for one.

This wasn’t about love or any superfluous need for affection, but more about preservation.

My children had shown an admirable, if inconvenient, rebellious and stubborn nature as of late. It had become clear: if my vision for the future of my company was to be realized, I would need more offspring. And for that, I needed a wife.

The idea of searching for one was as distasteful as it would have been inconvenient.

Fortunately, the perfect prospect had practically fallen into my lap.

Stella.

Her father, that moron Wallace Oliver Deiderich, had decided to travel in an ice storm several months ago. He’d managed to kill himself, his wife, and the driver in a terrible crash. He had also very nearly killed his daughter.

It was chilling to recall. I had held her in my arms not moments before when she’d accidentally bumped into me on the sidewalk that night after slipping on the ice.

If I had known…

I recalled being intrigued not only by her beauty… but by her obvious hatred—of me.

Clearly her father had been distasteful enough to share his business woes with his wife and child. I imagine they were regaled over the dinner table with tales of my evil manipulations as I’d divested him of numerous companies and investments, significantly reducing not only his fortune but his influence.

I wouldn’t apologize for it.

Wallace was an idiot who had run those companies into the ground.

While the world and my peers may have perceived my actions as the worst of corporate greed, I knew the truth.

Over five thousand people, close to thirty-five hundred families, and four entire towns in the Midwest would have been eviscerated with unemployment, bankruptcy, and debt when his factories eventually closed from mismanagement—had I not stepped in.

Still, it served my purposes for the public to think the worst.

In business, no one liked to cross the devil in a corporate boardroom.

True to his bumbling nature, Wallace had neglected to update his will.

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