Page 58 of Accidental Groom
He stares at me like I’ve grown a second head.
“I’m not going to keep her shackled to a deal she never asked for and felt pressured to accept, especially when you wouldn’t even allow it to be postponed so it could go correctly.”
His laugh is humorless, barked across the space between us. “You think she has a choice? You genuinely think that after the scandal of that wedding, after you taking your son’s place, that there’s still room in any of this for herwhims?”
“She should be allowed to have them.”
“She is aWhite,” he sneers, leaning forward, his eyes going cold as ice. “A White does what’s necessary for the family. Always has, always will.”
Something inside me goes rigid. “She is a Highcourt now,” I clarify, my words slow. “And you’ll find that I’m not so easily commanded.”
“This isn’t aboutyou.” His jaw works between words, irritation oozing from him like ichor. “This is about the empire our families are building together. And if you think for one second that you can just burn the contract we drew up and let her run off to play house with whoever she chooses, you’re a bigger fool than I thought.”
“Then I’m a fool.”
His eyes flash with anger. “If you breach this agreement, the Whites will pull every barrel, every contract. You’ll be bled dry by the end of the fiscal year.”
I lean forward until the edge of the desk cuts into my forearms. “Do it. Pull it all. I don’t give a damn.”
Ralph falters. “You’d risk Highcourt Hotels?”
“You seem to forget that one of us is old money,” I say carefully, holding his gaze. “I don’t need Highcourt Hotels tosurvive. I don’t need your contract. Most of all of this, Ralph, is me doing a fucking favor for the Whites.”
He huffs out a breath, his mouth open, his tongue hooked on his top teeth. “You may have more money, but Highcourt Hotels is your legacy.”
“My legacy doesn’t fucking matter if I can’t look her in the eye and tell her she’s more than a ledger entry. I walked down that aisle when I didn’t need to, and I’ll tell you right now that I didn’t do it for the contract. I didn’t do it for the merger or for your fucking wine. I did it because I felt sorry for the woman begging me to marry her so that her sister wasn’t offered up to someone else.”
We stare at each other across the desk, the air thick with twenty years of deals and dinners andlies. For the third time now, I see him — not as the partner, the ally, the man with his hand always reaching for the same ladder I was climbing, but as the bastard who raised a daughter like she was an investment he got to cash in on.
“I never should have agreed to this,” I say, quieter now. “Not with George. Not with me. I thought I was securing something for a friend, but all I did was surround a woman with men who never gave her any kind of choice.”
Ralph’s jaw ticks. “You talk like you care about her.”
“I do.”
“Like you’re in love with her.”
I don’t flinch.
He studies me, then scoffs. “Well, that’s rich,” he mutters. “You always were stupidly sentimental under the stone face. Geraldine saw it, thought it was sweet. I should have remembered.”
The mention of her name cuts like a knife, but I don’t let it show. “You want to know the truth?” I ask. “If Elena decides she doesn’t want to be with me, if she decides she wants nothing todo with this family at all, I will let her walk. And I’ll protect her as she does it. Both her and the child. Because they are not yours to barter anymore, Ralph. She is her own fucking person and deserves to be treated as such.”
He rises slowly from the chair, his hands flexing by his sides. “You’re making a mistake,” he shoots back. “The kind you don’t come back from.”
I stand too, towering taller, even as I lean over the desk toward him. “I’ll make it gladly.”
“You’ll regret it,” he says.
“No,” I say softly. “The only thing I regret is thinking it was okay to put a price tag on either of our kids’ lives.”
————
I stand at the window long after his car disappears down the drive. I’m tempted to go to Elena, to talk to her, to tell her what happened — I know she’s probably curled up on the bed in the cottage, watching some vapid show to fill the time, her hand on her stomach the way she’s been doing lately when she thinks I’m not looking.
The thought of it makes something warm bloom in my chest.
But then ice. Because I know what’s waiting in the wings now.George.
