He Called My Inheritance a Forgery in Front of Three Hundred Guests, Then Took Every Blow Meant for Me novel · Chapter 25 of 40

Chapter 25: His Half

I pushed the tack room door all the way open.

Kendrick turned around with the phone still at his ear.

He saw my face and didn't bother pretending.

"I'll call you back," he said to the banker, and hung up.

The tack room smelled like old leather and saddle soap.

"Your father's half," I said.

"Yes."

"You're selling Graham Mercer's half of this company to pay my father's debt."

"I'm selling it to pay a debt," Kendrick said. "The debt doesn't care whose it was."

"No."

"Gen."

"No. You've sold the boat. You've sold the condo. You've sold the couch you sat on."

"You've got one arm and no job, and now you want to sell the last thing your father left you."

"It's the last thing I've got that's worth one point four million dollars."

He said it so plainly I wanted to hit him.

"Then let Leonard have it," I said. "Let him have my father's half. I don't care."

"You care."

"I care more about you."

It came out before I could stop it.

Kendrick looked at me for a long time.

"He wrote 'I'll get them from your girl,'" he said. "In your father's own hand."

"If Leonard owns that half, he owns a seat at the table where you'll be sitting the rest of your life."

"I'm not letting him sit across from you. Not for a boat. Not for anything."

"Please," I said.

I'd never said it to him before.

He heard that.

His jaw moved.

"No," he said gently.

I went home to the motel in Lee.

He followed me in his black car twenty minutes later.

He knocked once.

I opened the door, and we stood there, him outside in the cold and me inside in the heat from the rattling wall unit.

"I'm still selling it," he said.

"I know."

"I came anyway."

"I know," I said, and pulled him in by his shirt.

It wasn't like Naples.

In Naples it had been the storm and the dark and the relief of finally.

This was angry.

This was me pushing his good shoulder against the door and kissing him.

The door rattled in its frame.

He let his head fall back against it and let me.

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