Corrupting My Billionaire Boss's Heart novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Offer

He offers her twenty thousand dollars to leave the club. The hospice billing office tells her over the phone that her father's bills were already paid by his family trust.

The Branwell Capital building stood on the ridge above the course, all glass, and I could see his office light from the cart shed.

At 8:57 p.m. I stood outside his door in my good jeans.

Everything in the hallway was labeled.

The thermostat, the fire extinguisher, the plant.

Even the plant had a label, and the label said FERN.

I knocked, and he said, "Come in" from inside, exactly as if he had been counting.

His office was a long gray room with a desk the size of a dinner table and nothing on it.

No photos, no mug, no mess.

A single legal pad lay square to the edge, with a pen laid straight across it.

He stood at the window with his back to me and his sleeves rolled to the elbow.

The forearms were a problem.

I decided to look at the fern.

"Sit," he said.

"I'll stand."

"Then stand." He turned around. "You poured a glass of water over a member."

"She poured coffee over me first."

"I saw."

"So why fire me?"

"Because I couldn't think of another way to end the scene."

He walked around the desk and stopped four feet from me, which seemed to be a measured distance.

"I wasn't angry at you. I was angry at the situation."

"The situation was Zara."

"The situation was you."

I crossed my arms.

"Then fire me properly, and don't un-fire me because my name was on a pay slip."

His eyes flicked up from my face to the wall behind me, and then back.

"Your name is Ketterman," he said.

"It's the name on my driver's license."

"Your father was the head groundskeeper here."

"Was," I said.

The word stood there between us.

I hadn't said it out loud to a stranger yet.

He didn't ask what happened, and he didn't say sorry in the practiced way people did.

He only went very still, and something moved behind his gray eyes.

"I knew he'd passed," he said. "I'm sorry."

"How did you know?"

He did not answer.

He opened the top drawer of the desk instead and took out a long white envelope.

"Twenty thousand dollars," he said. "Cashier's check. Take it, resign tonight, and go wherever you like."

I looked at the envelope.

I thought about my father's hospice bills, the stack in my kitchen drawer, thirty-eight thousand four hundred dollars of it.

Twenty thousand would have been a start.

"You're paying me to leave."

"I'm paying you to be safe."

"From what?"

"From this place."

"It's a golf course."

"It's not what you think it is." He pushed the envelope an inch toward me. "Please."

That was his second please in one day.

I could have taken it.

Instead I picked up the pen from his legal pad, which made him flinch, and I wrote on the pad in capital letters, NO.

I turned it around and set it back, exactly crooked.

He stared at it.

He stared at it.

"Do you know," Ramsay said slowly, "that nobody has touched this desk in eleven years?"

"Then somebody should have."

"Ms. Ketterman."

"Mara."

He didn't say it.

He picked up the pad, tore off the page, folded it into four, and put it in his shirt pocket.

I had no idea what that meant, and neither did he.

"The job stays," he said. "The section stays. The rules stay."

"And the check?"

"Burn it."

"I'd rather cash it," I said, and he laughed.

It was one short, startled breath.

We both heard it.

He stopped looking at me, and I stopped looking at the fern.

"Go home," he said roughly. "Six a.m., your cart, black coffee at 6:40."

I went.

At the door I turned, because I'd been wanting to ask all day.

"What happened to the pool house?"

"Good night, Ms. Ketterman."

I walked to my car with my chest buzzing, and the phone in my pocket rang before I reached the lot.

It was the hospice billing office, the number I had been dreading for five weeks.

I answered with my shoulders already up around my ears.

"Ms. Ketterman? I'm calling about your father's account."

"I know I'm behind, and I'm working on it. I just started a new job today."

"Ma'am," the woman said, gently. "It's paid."

I stopped walking.

"Excuse me?"

"Paid in full, six weeks ago. Thirty-eight thousand four hundred dollars. I thought someone had told you."

"Who paid it?"

I heard a keyboard.

"A transfer from the Branwell Family Trust," she said.

"It's right here in the notes. It says anonymous, per the donor's request, and do not tell the daughter."

I stood in the dark parking lot with my keys in my fist.

Six weeks ago was before my dad died.

Before I had ever heard Ramsay Branwell's name.

The whole ridge was lit above me, glass and light.

In the top window a tall man stood watching me, with a folded piece of paper in his pocket.

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