My Fiancé's Baby Isn't Mine, So Neither Is My Fortune novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: What Heidi Owes

Bradford buttoned his blazer and did not look at Heidi again.

"I'll be with my lawyer," he said. "Nobody here will like what comes next."

"Go," my mother said. "Derrick, let him find his own car."

He walked out through the hall without hurrying.

My mother kept Dean at the table with a hand flat on his sleeve.

"Take her to the library, Bethany," she said. "Take Derrick. I'll keep this one."

The library at Auchincloss House has one lamp and a leather sofa.

Heidi sat on the edge of it with the baby asleep against her chest.

Derrick stood with his back to the closed door.

"Say it from the beginning," I said.

She wiped her nose with her wrist.

"In our second year of college, my scholarship ended," she said. "I was going to leave. A man from your family's foundation called me in and paid the rest of my tuition."

"Bradford."

"He met me in his car outside the dining hall. He said Robert Ames's daughter had no real friends, only people who wanted something. He asked me to be the real one."

I felt the blood leave my hands.

"He paid you to be my friend."

"He paid for my degree. Then he paid for everything else." She stared at the baby. "I told myself I would have liked you for free. I did like you. I still took the money."

"The crises," Derrick said from the door.

"He wrote them." Her voice dropped. "He called me the night before each wedding date. The airport, the breakdown, the ceiling. He told me what to say and what hour to call Dean."

"Eight times."

"Eight."

I sat down in the leather chair across from her.

"Why?"

"Your grandfather's will. The day you marry or turn thirty-five, everything on your side of the family comes to you with nobody's signature on it." Heidi looked up at last. "Until then Bradford signs. He has been signing for twelve years. Four more years was all he needed."

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