Page 22 of Heiress Gone Wild

“That didn’t cut ice with my father. He and I never got on. When I was eighteen, he cut off my allowance and disinherited me.”

“How awful. What did you do?”

He gave a shout of unexpected laughter. “You do have a poor opinion of me, don’t you? Assuming straightaway I did something to deserve being disinherited.”

“That wasn’t what I meant! I was asking what you did in response.”

“Well, with no money but the sixteen pounds in my bank account, it wasn’t as if I had many options. I left and came to America.”

“You left, just like that? At eighteen, broke and alone?”

His smile faded, a hard glint coming into his eyes, but when he spoke his voice was light. “Well, I did ask my fiancée to come with me, but somehow, she couldn’t see marrying a man who no longer had prospects or an income and going off with him to another country. Love is one thing. Material comforts, as she pointed out to me at the time, are something else.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was a long time ago. And honestly, I’m not sure we’d have been happy together. We’d probably have moved into some tiny, low-rent flat in Brooklyn, and I’d have spent the past ten years pegging away at some office job in Manhattan, a life we’d have both despised. She’s quite comfortably situated now, I heard, married to a wealthy banker and living in a luxurious house in Grosvenor Square.”

She began to see why her teasing talk about furs, motor cars, and lavish parties had flicked him on the raw. “Is her husband wealthier than you?” she asked.

“I doubt it.”

She grinned. “How gratifying.”

That made him laugh. “You are a wicked girl, Marjorie.”

“I’m not,” she protested. “Don’t misunderstand. I have a lot of sympathy for her position. A woman needs to know that her children will have a home and be taken care of properly, and a tiny apartment in Brooklyn wouldn’t be very nice for them. But I see your side of it, too. She didn’t trust you to take care of her, and that, on top of what your father did, must have been a painful betrayal. And you said you had things to prove, so it must have been quite satisfying to know that you ended up richer than the man she did marry.”

“Perhaps,” he admitted, “but she wasn’t the main one I wanted to prove things to. That would be my father. And though I enjoy making money for the challenge of it, material considerations don’t really matter much to me. I came to realize that once I struck it rich.”

“What does matter to you, then?” she asked, curious. “What do you want from life?”

“That,” he said slowly, “is an interesting question. Ten years ago, I was sure I knew the answer, but...”

“But?” she prompted when he paused.

He looked down, staring into his glass, watching the bubbles rise, silent so long, she thought he wasn’t going to reply.

“Do you remember our conversation this morning?” he asked at last, looking up. “When I told you I know how it feels to have all one’s dreams snatched away?”

“Yes.”

“My grandfather was a shrewd man of business. He inherited two newspapers from his father and proceeded to build Deverill Publishing into an empire. In its heyday, we had twelve dailies, five weeklies, and several magazines.”

She could hear a new note come into his voice as he spoke, a note of pride. “So, running the family business was your dream?”

“More than that, I believed it was my destiny. My grandfather seemed to believe it, too. He often said I was just like him—that I had ink in my veins instead of blood, and that he knew I would be able to carry on what he had built, expand Deverill Publishing even more and take it into the next century. Unfortunately, he never got around to putting his faith in me in writing.”

“Meaning?”

“He never made a will.”

“What? But why not?”

“The attorneys said he kept procrastinating. It’s quite common, they said. Anyway, when he died, everything went to my father, who proved to be a dismally bad steward of my supposed destiny. By the time I was eighteen, the company was sailing very near the wind. I tried to avert the disaster, but my father wasn’t about to listen to advice from his adolescent son. We had a flaming row—not our first, by the way—and he told me that since I thought myself a better man of business than he, I ought to have the chance to prove it.”

“That’s why he disinherited you and left you destitute? Because you tried to help him?”

“Well, in all fairness, I also called him an incompetent idiot and told him he was unworthy of the Deverill name. It was stupid, but then, my father and I had always been like matches and gunpowder, even when I was a boy. Whenever we were in the same room, there were bound to be explosions.”

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