Found A Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Two and a Half Years

I held on to the edge of the marble sink.

My mother watched me in the mirror and fixed her lipstick.

She did the bottom lip first, the way she always had, and pressed her mouth on a tissue.

"Don't look at me like that," she said. "You got two good years out of him. He was very attentive."

"You picked the ring," I said.

I didn't know I knew it until I said it.

The one-carat oval. Brady had no taste. He'd never picked anything in his life but a truck.

My mother smiled at the mirror.

"It suited your hand."

I let go of the sink.

I unlocked the door.

"Katie," she said behind me. "Don't you make a scene in my ballroom."

"It's the country club's ballroom, Mama."

The band was playing "Blue Christmas" when I came back in.

Quinton stood up from table one the second he saw my face.

I shook my head at him once, and he stopped.

Then he followed three steps behind me anyway.

Brady was at the bar in his white dinner jacket with the bank president, a county commissioner and the Rose Club treasurer's husband.

He had his fourth bourbon in his hand and his big laugh going.

It stopped when he saw me.

"Hey, Kate." He put the smile on. "Come to congratulate me?"

"How long?" I said.

The bank president looked at his drink.

"How long what, baby?"

"Don't call me baby. How long have you been sleeping with my mother?"

The commissioner set his glass down very slowly.

Brady laughed.

"Since the fall. She told everybody. Since the fall."

"She just told me two and a half years."

His laugh died.

"She's had a lot of wine."

"Was asking me out your idea, Brady? Or did she write that down for you too?"

The bartender stopped polishing a glass.

The treasurer's husband took one full step back from Brady.

"Kate, that's crazy." Brady's eyes went to the ladies' room door. "That's crazy talk. Look at me."

"I am looking at you."

"I loved you."

"You proposed to me at her lake house," I said. "On her dock. She took the pictures."

He didn't say anything.

He didn't have to.

His face had gone the color of the dinner jacket.

"Every Sunday dinner," I said. "Every Thanksgiving. Every time you held my hand under her table."

"Kate."

"Was she watching?"

The bank president put a twenty on the bar and walked away.

The commissioner went with him.

Brady stood there alone with his bourbon and his white jacket under the fairy lights.

I left him standing.

I didn't run.

I walked out through the middle of the ballroom, past table one and my mother's empty chair, and Quinton held the door.

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