An Understated Dominance novel · Chapter 24 of 24

Chapter 24: Understated

We were married at ten past eleven that morning by a clerk with a stamp, in front of Bev and the owner of Delgado Hardware.

The owner cried more than I did.

Colter wore the grey cardigan.

I wore the camel coat, and I held a bunch of pine boughs that Bev had cut from a planter outside.

It took four minutes.

Nobody made a speech.

We ate meatloaf for lunch at the Silver Spur, at a booth in the back.

The waitress brought us a slice of pie with one candle in it and refused to take payment.

Three months later, on a clear night in April, Fieldwell launched its spring line.

It was the same warehouse hall where I had once handed my husband the papers.

The champagne tower stood where it had before.

I made them take it down and replace it with a long table of hot soup for the staff.

Four hundred guests came anyway.

There were buyers and reporters, and Summit's head buyer in her grey braid, and the man from the loading dock in a clean shirt.

Three hundred Fieldwell employees stood among them in the new jackets we had just released.

On the lining of every jacket, inside the left cuff, was a tiny stitched tag that said, Built by the people who wear it.

It had been a patternmaker's idea.

The company had a new owner, too, on paper.

Thirty percent of Fieldwell now belonged to the employees, in shares nobody could take back.

I had signed the papers in the atrium in front of all of them.

Colter's twenty-two percent stayed in his own name, openly, where everyone could see, and the rest was mine.

At eight o'clock I walked up the three steps to the stage.

The spotlight found me.

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