He Cheated on Our Wedding Night, I Canceled His Fortune novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Benefit Dinner

I wore my mother's green dress to the Cattlemen's Benefit Dinner.

Boone drove me, in the ranch truck, in his one good jacket.

He parked at the far end of the Sheridan Inn lot and did not turn off the engine.

"I'll wait here," he said.

"You were invited."

"I was told to stay home." He looked at the dash. "She's right, Annie. It's their crowd. You walk in with the hired man, and you hand them every word they want."

"You're not the hired man."

"I'm the foreman. It's the same thing in that room."

"Then I'll make it a different room."

He said nothing.

I saw it in the set of his shoulders, the thing he had carried all week and would not say.

He thought I would go in there and look at all that polish and remember who I had been raised to marry.

I got out of the truck and shut the door harder than I needed to.

The ballroom held two hundred people at round tables, ranchers and bankers and their wives, with a silent auction along one wall.

Heads turned as I came in.

Constance sat at the front table in grey silk, with her chin high and her pearls on.

She had come anyway.

I understood that at once: a Kell who stayed home was a Kell who had lost.

Austin was already on the stage.

He stood at the podium in a dark suit with a microphone in his hand and his hair combed, and when he saw me, he smiled with all his teeth.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "Thank you. I'll be quick."

The room quieted.

"Last Saturday I made the worst mistake of my life," he said. "I hurt the finest woman in this county. I've been too much of a coward to say it in front of anybody."

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