He Chose His First Love. I Own His Empire. novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: Stolen Years
Benton pushed himself off the back wall and walked down the middle of the ballroom.
Three hundred people turned to watch him come.
He stopped in front of Dalton and did not raise his voice.
"I was arrested at nineteen," he said. "The charges were dropped. That part is true."
"A thief," Dalton said to the cameras. "My grandmother brought a thief into this family, and now she's handing him the lake house."
"Is she?" Benton asked.
Odile's lawyer came out from behind the stage with a folder.
He had been waiting there since the afternoon, I realized, and so had she.
"The deed is ready, Mr. MacAllister," the lawyer said. "Mrs. Aldrich wished it signed tonight, in front of the family."
Benton took the folder and opened it, and he did not read it.
"It was never mine to want," he said.
He turned to the lawyer and held out his hand for a pen.
"Give it back to her. Put it in the trust."
"Benton," Odile said from her chair.
"I don't want the house, Gran." It was the first time I had heard him call her that in public. "I came back because you asked. That's all I ever wanted from this family. To be asked."
He signed it standing, on the lawyer's arm.
The pen scratched in the silence, and he handed it back.
Dalton laughed, shortly.
"A show," he said. "A show for the cameras. It doesn't change what he is."
"Excuse me."
The voice came from table four, and it was thin and old and quite clear.
A woman of about seventy in a plum dress was getting to her feet, with one hand flat on the cloth.
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