The Heir Who Quit Luxury novel · Chapter 12 of 32

Chapter 12: Freshman Year

Blair didn't let go of my sleeve.

She didn't even blink.

"Carter told me," she said.

"Carter didn't tell anybody. He likes it that way."

For a second she looked at me like she was deciding what I was worth.

Then she smiled.

It was a smile I'd never seen in four years.

Small. Tired. Honest.

"No," she said. "Carter didn't have to."

Down the hall, Carter turned around with his phone still at his ear.

He saw her hand on my arm and hung up.

"Blair," he called. "Car's downstairs."

"In a minute."

He walked toward us anyway.

Behind him the elevator opened, and the two Penrose executives stepped out with an older man in a black overcoat carrying a briefcase.

My grandfather's lawyer.

I'd seen him once, at my grandmother's funeral.

They all stopped when they saw us.

"Your nineteenth birthday," Blair said to me. She didn't lower her voice. "Freshman year. October. A man in a black suit came to the dorm with a card."

I remembered.

The driver. The cream envelope.

"You opened it in the lounge," she said. "There was a check inside for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Signed Hollis Penrose."

"I tore it up."

"In front of me. And you said, 'Old family stuff.'" She laughed softly. "You tore up a quarter of a million dollars and called it old family stuff. Do you know what that does to a girl from Grosse Pointe?"

The lawyer had gone very still.

Carter had stopped a few feet away, his hands in his pockets.

"I looked him up that night," Blair said. "Penrose Holdings. One daughter, cut off. One grandson by the daughter. You."

"We started dating three weeks later," I said.

"Yes."

"You picked me."

"I picked the right horse," she said. "I just didn't know the horse was stupid."

The words went into me like a nail.

"For four years," I said, "you let your father call me the scholarship kid."

"Daddy doesn't know. Daddy would have sold me to you on the first date." She shrugged. "I wanted you to choose it. I wanted you to want it."

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