Vows of Treachery: Claimed by His Ruthless Brother novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: 11:53
The Rowe Lakeshore reopened on the last Saturday of September, two years after it burned.
My father's name was back over the doors in brass.
The night auditor cut the ribbon, because I had asked him to, and he cried through the whole thing.
By ten the lobby held six hundred people.
Half of them were the old staff, in suits that did not quite fit, and they hugged each other every time somebody new came in.
The chambermaids had a table by the fountain. The line cooks had taken over the kitchen and refused to let me in it.
"You'll eat what we send," the oldest cook said, "and you'll tell us it's right."
"I always do."
"You don't. You told me the soup was thin in 2019."
"It was thin."
"It was a beautiful soup."
I kissed her cheek and left her to it.
Rhys stood at the foot of the stairs in his black suit, with both cuffs open and his hands in his pockets.
The press had stopped asking him to smile.
He had stopped being the Carrow who ran the company, too. The board had made him chairman in July, and he had given the title to the audit committee woman within the week and kept the chief executive's chair.
"She says it's too much work," he told me, when I joined him.
"She's seventy."
"She told me she'd already been a coward once."
The man from Phoenix came across the floor with a glass of ginger ale.
"Ma'am," he said. "Mr. Carrow. They want the toast."
"Which toast?" Rhys asked.
"Hers. At the stage. Everybody's waiting."
Rhys looked at me.
"I didn't write one," I said.
"You never do."
He took his hand out of his pocket and put it at the small of my back.
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