He Chose His First Love. I Own His Empire. novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Lake House

Benton drives Hallie to Odile, who says she saw it coming and explains the trust rule that made Hallie the placeholder. Hallie says she wants Dalton to lose it all. Headlights sweep the drive and Camille steps out of Adaline's car.

Benton drove for ten minutes without speaking.

I sat with my coat pulled over my knees and watched the lights of Lake Forest slide past the window.

My hands would not stop shaking.

"There are crackers in the glove box," he said.

I opened it.

There was a sleeve of saltines, a bottle of ginger ale, and a folded blanket.

"You were ready for me," I said.

"Odile told me to be."

"She told you before dinner?"

"She told me to wait by the cars with the engine running." He kept his eyes on the road. "She didn't say why. She didn't have to."

I ate a cracker and cried without making any noise.

He handed me a clean handkerchief and did not look over.

The road bent along the water, and the Aldrich lake house came up out of the dark with every window lit.

I had spent three Sundays a month in that house for three years.

I had never once walked into it as someone with nowhere else to go.

Odile was waiting in the sitting room, in her wheelchair beside the fire, with a grey shawl around her shoulders and a tray of tea.

Her nurse had brought her home in the other car, and she was already out of her good dress.

"Sit," she said. "Benton, the door."

He closed it and stayed standing against it.

I sat on the edge of the sofa with my coat still on.

"You're going to ask me if I knew," Odile said.

"Did you?"

"Not tonight. I knew something was coming. Dalton asked me last week to bring the emerald to dinner, and I told him it was in the bank."

"And?"

"And he said he'd have it fetched." She turned her cane in her hands. "I'm seventy-nine years old, Hallie. I know when my grandson is arranging a party."

"You let me walk in there."

"I did."

She said it flatly, without any excuse.

"I wanted you to see it with your own eyes, so nobody could ever tell you later that you'd imagined it," she said. "That was cruel, and I'll own it."

I stared at the fire.

"Why?" I asked. "Why would he do that to me in front of everyone? He could have just divorced me."

"Because of a rule I wrote."

Odile put the cane down across her knees.

"My son died and left the company in a trust. When I go, it passes to my grandson, but not before he proves he can hold it. He is named chairman on his thirty-fourth birthday, five weeks from now, if he is married and his wife is expecting a child."

I heard it, and my mind would not take it in.

"I wrote that rule to make him settle down," she said. "I thought it would make him grow up. It made him shop for a wife."

"A wife," I said.

"Camille wouldn't be the placeholder. She told him so, and I think she meant it. So he found a girl who baked and had no family to ask questions." Her mouth tightened. "I'm sorry, my dear. That was you."

The fire popped.

I thought of the night he proposed, in the back of the pastry kitchen, on one knee beside the walk-in.

I thought of the year he had asked me for a baby, and the way he had said, Finally.

"So the baby was never mine," I said.

"The baby is yours," Benton said from the door.

It was the first thing he had said in a quarter of an hour, and his voice was low and rough.

"Whatever Dalton wants, the baby is yours."

I looked at him, and then at Odile.

"I want him to lose," I said.

My voice shook, and I let it.

"I don't want money. I want him to lose all of it. Every chair he thinks is his."

Odile studied me for a long moment.

"Then eat something," she said, "and sleep tonight. You can't do it hungry."

She looked at my coat, still buttoned to my chin.

"You'll keep that with you," she said.

I didn't ask what she meant.

"The cottage is made up," she said. "Benton will walk you down. Tomorrow you'll decide how to be angry. Tonight, you're only tired."

Benton took my overnight bag, which I realized someone had already put in his trunk.

We were halfway down the lawn toward the little cottage at the water's edge when the lights swung across the grass.

A car had come up the long drive behind us, fast.

I turned.

It was Adaline's white sedan.

The passenger door opened, and Camille stepped out in her green dress, with the emerald catching the porch light on her hand.

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