Found A Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Penthouse

Quinton tells Katie who he really is, she sets her terms for going home, and Brady posts the certificate photo she sent only to her mother.

The elevator opened straight into his living room.

Not a hallway. Not a door. The room.

Glass on three sides, and the whole frozen lake out there under a white sky.

A Christmas tree stood in the corner, twelve feet tall and decorated by somebody paid to do it.

"Whose is this?" I said.

"Mine."

"Quin."

"It's mine, Katie." He shrugged off the thrift jacket and laid it over a leather chair like it was cashmere. "I haven't been inside it since June."

The man in the camel coat went to the kitchen and started making coffee without being asked.

I stayed by the elevator in my red coat with my arms crossed.

"Say it," I said. "All of it. Right now."

He said it.

His name was Quinton Stuyvesant, and his grandfather had started Stuyvesant Holdings with one freight truck.

It owned buildings, rail yards and a bank.

He'd run it for six years.

In June he'd found his uncle Raymond moving money out of it, a lot of money, for a long time.

He told Raymond he knew.

Two nights later, a truck with no plates ran his car into a pillar on Lower Wacker.

"Fifty yards from my ledge," he said. "I walked away with this." He touched the white scar at his hairline. "And I thought, he'll try again. In a hospital. At this building. At my office."

"So you went and lived under a bridge."

"Nobody looks at the man under the bridge." He said it plainly. "Raymond had people checking every hotel in the state. The board thinks I'm on medical leave. My security chief and a team of accountants have spent six months taking his books apart."

The man in the camel coat set a mug in front of me.

I didn't touch it.

"On January second," Quinton said, "the board votes. Raymond wants to be made permanent, and he wants me declared unfit. I'm going to walk in and end him."

I looked at him across his own living room.

At the shaved jaw I'd shaved.

"Your ribs," I said.

His face changed.

"I paid three hundred and forty dollars at urgent care," I said. "I didn't have three hundred and forty dollars. I put it on my card. I brought you soup for a week."

"I know."

"You had a penthouse."

"I know, Katie."

"I gave you my scarf in October. My good one."

"I still have it."

"That's not the point!"

My voice bounced off all that glass.

The security chief quietly took his own coffee and left the room.

Quinton didn't defend himself.

He stood there and let me be angry, which made me angrier.

"Why did you say yes last night?" I said. "If you were so careful. If it was all so secret. Why marry a baker who asked you on a sidewalk?"

"Because you asked."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got." He came around the couch. "You can have an annulment Monday morning. My lawyers will have it done in an hour, and nobody will ever know. Or you can have anything else you want. Name it."

"I don't want your money."

"I know you don't. That's why I'm offering it."

I walked to the window.

Down there on the lake, kids were sliding on the ice by the shore.

"I want you to come home with me," I said.

He was quiet.

"Not like this." I turned around. "Not in a car like that. Not with him." I nodded toward the kitchen. "I want you on the plane in the thirty-eight-dollar suit, in that awful coat. I told them I married a man with nothing. That's who I'm bringing."

"You want them to see what they do with a man who has nothing."

"I want to see it." My throat was tight. "I want to know who my family really is before you're anybody."

He studied my face.

"You understand they'll be cruel to me," he said.

"Yes."

"And to you."

"They already are."

"Then yes," he said. "What else?"

"I pay for my own ticket."

"Katie."

"I pay for my own ticket, I keep my job, and you never lie to me again. Not once. Not about anything."

He held out his hand.

"Not once," he said.

I shook it.

He didn't let go.

He drew me a step closer by the hand, and then another, until I was standing against his chest.

He smelled like my drugstore shaving cream.

"There's one more thing you should know," he said, low.

"What?"

"That kiss this morning wasn't for the judge."

My heart was banging.

He bent his head.

His mouth was an inch from mine and I could feel his breath, and my hands were already sliding up his shirt.

I wanted it.

I wanted it so much it scared me.

"Not today," I whispered.

He stopped.

He stayed exactly an inch away.

"Not today," he agreed, and his voice was rough. "Tell me when."

I stepped back on shaking legs.

My phone buzzed in my coat pocket.

Then buzzed again, and kept buzzing.

Texts from girls I went to high school with. My cousin. A number I didn't know.

I opened the first one.

It was a link to Brady's page.

He'd posted a photo forty minutes ago.

It was my marriage certificate.

My exact photo, with my thumb in the corner, the one I'd sent to nobody but my mother.

Under it he'd written: "My ex married a bum to spite me. Merry Christmas, Tyler."

It had four hundred likes.

The first comment was from my mother's best friend.

A crying-laughing face.

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