From a Humiliating Bet to the Boss He Can't Have novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Page Nine, Out Loud

The screen behind me went from gold to white.

Then a grid of numbers filled it, and the tab at the bottom said "Household."

"Technical difficulty, folks!" Cynthia said brightly, and drew a finger across her throat toward the booth.

Nobody in the booth moved.

"It's the hotel's system, ma'am," a voice called back. "It's not ours."

I looked at the screen once to be sure.

It was my file, in my plain font, with the column headers I had set on a Sunday four years ago.

I didn't need to read all of it.

I scrolled to the rows I wanted and read three of them out loud.

"June. Mortgage payment, Alder Court, twenty-one hundred and forty dollars. Paid by me, from my account, because his was late."

"October. Same."

"A Tuesday in March. Dentist, Birdie's two cavities. Paid by me, from my account, and I drove her."

The ballroom had gone completely quiet.

"I put these in a spreadsheet because I like numbers," I said into the microphone. "Blaine had permission to view it from my first year."

Blaine took a step toward me.

"Jo, stop."

"I added the column on Saturday. I'd never done it before." I clicked, and the number appeared at the bottom of the screen, white on black. "Eighty-seven thousand, three hundred dollars."

A sound went through the room, six hundred people drawing in air at once.

"That's the money I paid into his house," I said. "The house he said I was after."

"It was a gift," Blaine said.

He said it too quickly.

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