The Hidden Goddess Who Made Him Beg novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The Luncheon

Lucian put the roster down very carefully.

"My father did not kill anyone."

"Ask him about Anselm Orme and the roof of the old firm building."

"That was an accident. It was in the papers."

"Ask him anyway."

His face had closed.

But he was looking at my bare feet, and his voice was not the one he used on vendors.

"If you wanted to hurt my family, you could have done it eight months ago."

"I wanted to hurt your family. I was in your bed for eight months because you made it very easy to forget."

That landed.

I watched it land, and I felt no pleasure.

He picked up his shirt from the floor.

"I'll ask him," he said. "And then I'll come back."

"Don't come back for me. Come back with an answer."

He went out through the glass door into the wet garden without his coat, and Tobias, who had been listening from the kitchen the whole time, put a cup of coffee in my hand.

"For the record," he said, "I'm not going to say it was a mistake."

"You just did."

"I said I wouldn't."

At noon the dining room on Chestnut Street filled with women in cashmere.

Hester held a luncheon on the third Thursday of every month.

She had skipped them for twenty years, and nobody dared decline this one.

Fourteen guests sat under the Orme chandelier eating cold salmon and looking at me.

I had put on the dark green dress Hester's seamstress had finished three years ago and never delivered.

It fit.

"My granddaughter, Delphine," Hester said, with no more ceremony than a woman naming a new car. "She has been away learning how other people run things."

An elderly woman at the end, with a diamond brooch the size of a quail's egg, leaned forward.

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