He Scorned His Substitute Wife, Now He Begs Her Back novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Everything He Owned

Luca had slept on the office couch because Livia, crossing the street the night before, had told him only this.

"Not my problem," she had said. "Goodnight."

He had stood there until her taillights were gone, and he had not once felt like arguing.

At six a guard he had known for nine years knocked and asked for his badge, and apologized while he took it.

Luca told him it was fine.

Then he walked to Penn Station with his jacket over his arm, because his cards no longer worked, and rode the first train to Sands Point on a ticket he paid for in cash he found in his coat.

His father was at the breakfast table.

Aldo sat in his usual chair with the paper folded beside his plate and the gold pen next to his coffee.

A place had been set across from him.

"Sit," Aldo said. "You've had a long night."

"I'm not staying."

"Sit anyway. I've told the cook to make your eggs."

Luca stayed standing.

"I came to resign my seat on the board," he said. "I'll put it in writing today."

Aldo turned a page of the paper.

"I wondered when you would. You've been resigning from my family since you were twenty-two. Today you finally have the nerve to say it."

"You bought her."

"I introduced you to an arrangement."

"You wrote a number on a napkin."

"I wrote a number she was happy to take." Aldo looked up, and his face was perfectly kind. "Do you want to know why, or do you want to shout? I can do either."

"Why."

"The Holloway girl would have cost you everything. You'd have given your seat for her. You'd have run my company on her advice, or run it to the ground trying to prove you were right to choose her." He lifted his cup. "A son in love with someone he can't have works eighteen hours a day. I knew that. I've counted on it for nine years."

Luca's hands were at his sides.

They were still.

"You kept her as a leash," he said.

"I kept her as a reminder. When the Carrano match came up, I needed you married quickly to a girl with no one behind her who would make trouble. Mirella's sister was the better bargain. She had no friends, no money, no name. She'd never have asked you for a thing."

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