Page 3 of In Love with a Cruel Billionaire

I couldn’t answer. Oh dear God, I had shouted! I was still appalled myself, unable to believe how I had become totally violent in a few hours. First, I got into a freaking fist fight and now I was involved in a shouting match with my Principal Childress.

This was wrong, but...I couldn’t help it. She made me so mad! Trying to get a grip on my emotions, I said unevenly, “I was orphaned when I waseight.My aunts were career women and suddenly they had an eight year old to take care of. I was insatiable for bedtime stories because it was my way of clinging to my parents’ memories, and they knew that. When they ran out of stories, they just switched to simplifying Harlequin romances. Surely you can understand that? Surely you don’t see anything wrong?” I looked at her pleadingly. “You know those books—-”

“No. I’m sorry. I donotknow those books because I don’t read anything that’s sold in Walmart.”

I gaped at her answer. “But—-”

She shut me up with a glare, pointing at me like she was branding me a witch in the Salem Trials. “Youhave more or less admitted that your aunts had raised you to believe it is fine to use the holy sacrament of matrimony as a stepping stone for improving your financial and social status in life.”

Was she basically saying I was a gold-digger?

“Holy Angels is a well-respectedCatholicschool, Ms. Tanner. If you wish to remain enrolled here, then tomorrow you must admit that the entries you have written in your blog—-”

“But it isn’t my blog!”

Principal Childress ignored that. “—-are based on false and malicious beliefs.”

My head started to hurt, enough to have me close my eyes. If I understood her perfectly, she was basically asking me to call my aunts liars and turn my back on my happy childhood.

“Well?” Principal Childress demanded.

I opened my eyes and gave her the answer she asked for.

Fuck you.

Prologue 1B

“YOU’RE ONLY EATINGsalad?” Aunt Norah asked that night as she hung her lab coat on the back of the chair before taking the seat at the head of the table. She had on her trademark pearl necklace, and matched with her silk sheath dress, Aunt Norah looked more like a socialite than a doctor on call.

I adjusted the dark glasses on my nose. “I’m on a diet.”

Aunt Vilma took the seat across from me. She was also dressed in her typical power suit, pink, form-fitting, and covering her from head to toe. She had once told me that “looking sexy while kicking ass” was her way of discouraging the big boys in courtrooms from messing with her.

When Aunt Norah asked me about what new movie we could watch over the weekend, I began to relax. My appetite gradually came back and I happily moved on to the next course, a creamy mushroom soup that was my aunt’s only masterpiece in the kitchen.

As Aunt Vilma took another helping of Caesar salad, she asked in a disarmingly casual voice, “And what about school, Mairi? Do you think we’ve given you ample time to have the guts to tell us what really happened?”

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