He Chose His First Love. I Own His Empire. novel · Chapter 20 of 24
Chapter 20: The Last Board
Nine hundred guests stood on the Aldrich Grand's front steps in coats and bathrobes, in the cold.
Fire trucks lined the curb with their lights turning.
The alarm had stopped ringing ten minutes before we arrived, and nobody had been hurt.
Dalton stood at the top of the steps, with a fire marshal on one side and a reporter on the other.
His jaw was still swollen, and he held a manila envelope up over his head.
"This hotel was nearly burned," he said, "because my grandmother cannot manage her own affairs."
Benton pushed Odile's chair up the ramp.
Walk beside it, I told myself. Don't run.
"I have a letter from a geriatric psychiatrist," Dalton said, to the cameras. "Odile Aldrich is not competent. Her vote was taken from her by a pastry cook, with a forged note, and a ring she stole."
The crowd murmured.
Several of the board members were already standing at the foot of the steps, summoned by phone, in overcoats.
Odile put her hand on the arm of her chair.
"Benton," she said. "The cane."
He gave it to her without a word.
She leaned on it, and she stood.
I saw how much it cost her.
Her hip shook, and her knuckles went white on the handle.
She was on her feet in front of nine hundred people, with her silver hair blowing.
"I am Odile Aldrich," she said, in the voice that had run Sunday dinners for sixty years. "I am seventy-nine."
She waited a beat.
"It is Wednesday. I know who the president is. And the boy who pulled that alarm has been pulling alarms since he was nine."
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