Chapter 20: Four Seconds

Rafe's POV

I watched Sylvie sign my father's hotels back into the world, and I could not move.

She did it on the stage, at the head table's white cloth, with the old man's pen.

The first page was the Harbor Hotel.

The second was a list of eleven names I had known by heart since I was twenty-one.

She read each name aloud, and I stood at the foot of the stairs, hearing my father's life in her voice.

He had built those hotels with a loan and a handshake.

He had died in March, with nothing left but a photograph of the lobby of his first hotel.

Sylvie put the pen down.

A hundred and twenty people clapped, and she turned, searching the room.

She found me.

She smiled.

It was a clear, direct smile, the kind she gave me when no one else could see, and it hurt to look at.

I smiled back.

Then I walked out of the ballroom.

I took the service stairs, because the lobby was full of phones.

I stopped on the second landing with my back against the cold wall and my hands shaking.

I had wanted this for fifteen years.

I had made a hundred small plans, each one cleaner than the last.

I had never planned for a woman who handed it to me.

I had put her in my office the morning after the party and offered her a loan at real terms.

When she pushed, I had told her I wanted the Kingsbury hotels.

All of that was true.

What I had not told her was that on the first night, at table nine, watching her face on that screen, I had thought: here is the weapon.

Keep reading free with an account. Start After His Betrayal, I Became the Woman He Couldn't Afford from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.