Page 76 of Billionaire Corruption

Our eyes locked and he lifted a hand slowly in greeting.

He’d found me.

Of course, he’d found me.

I rushed down the stairs as he was coming up them and leaped into his arms, breathing in his wonderful smell.

“How did you know where I was?”

“Where else would you be?” he asked me and kissed me, deeply. “My God, I’ve missed you,” he said.

I had missed him too.

I showed him the apartment. “I’m afraid it’s not the Ritz,” I said.

“It’s perfect,” he said.

“Well…“ I didn’t want to tell him about the lumpy mattress and the faulty heating, the fact that the apartment could get noisy early in the morning when the kitchen staff got ready to open the shop. There were no heated towel rails, no expensive Italian coffee machines.

“I’ve changed,” he said. “I’m not that guy in the suit anymore,” he said, pointing at his jersey, the jeans he was wearing. “That Paul is gone. I hope you won’t mind.”

“I love this Paul,” I said, realizing too late what I had said, blushing furiously.

“I mean…” but he put a finger to my lips, to stop me from backtracking.

“I love you too, all of you. The old you, the new you.”

He kissed me again.

“I want us to be together, forever. To make a new life here, or wherever we want, as long as we are together.”

“Me too.” I was so happy I could barely speak.

“In fact,” he said, suddenly feeling in his pocket.

“I was going to wait for the right moment, but this is it, isn’t it?”

He sank down on one knee and held out a small box.

“Will you marry me, Grace Bishop?” he asked me, his eyes bluer than the brightest fabric on my quilt.

“Of course I will,” I said, jumping into his arms.

I knew he had done some things that were wrong, that he’d made terrible deals with horrible people, even decisions that had hurt people. But he was willing to change, willing to make me happy and right now, that meant figuring out how to create big swirls of foam in cappuccino cups. I realized that all along, I wasn’t looking for perfect after all, but for perfect for me.

Chapter 30

Paul

We planned to get married in the spring or summer, a simple ceremony at City Hall, followed by a big reception at a hotel in the city. Grace would have liked to have the wedding here, in Maine, but that would mean travel for her grandmother and inconvenience for them.

I told her we could elope, perhaps host a special dinner with her family but it was important to her to have them there.

“I have already moved out of the house, I don’t want to have my wedding without them too. They need to be there,” she said.

It was not the same for me. I didn’t need my family to be anywhere near me, at all. After the bombshell dropped in the media about Ladden, I was glad to get out of the city and stuck into all kinds of small business problems at the coffee shop. I got into the habit of leaving my phone on silent and only checking messages at night. During the day, we painted, hung cupboards, sanded the floors. A lot of the work was done during a two-week period in winter when heavy snow cut the power in some areas in town, making the roads treacherous and forcing most folks to stay indoors.

Not that the place really needed it, but I wanted to keep busy and take my mind off the trial. Agent Dyer had kept his word, not prosecuting my father and arresting Jerome Cobb instead. Brock Brenneman surprised many by resigning as chairman of the board to take up sailing and fulfil his lifelong dream of sailing around the world. When I told Grace how I had managed to engineer that, she had not been convinced that it was the right way to go.

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