Secret Billionaire Returns on Christmas novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Rental
Caleb brings Nina home for Christmas in a beat-up rental; his father calls him a thief in front of the neighbors, and burns Nina's cash.
My husband is worth one point seven billion dollars, and his father just called him a thief.
He said it before Caleb had both feet through the door.
"Thief's back," Frank Reichert said, and set down his fork.
The whole family sat around the dining table, and every one of them stopped chewing.
Snow was melting off our shoulders onto a braided rug.
Caleb stood very still in his thrift-store canvas coat.
I had begged him not to wear that coat.
He had smiled and said, "Just until Christmas Eve, Nina. I want one night where they see me, not the money."
Now I watched the money not help him at all.
His mother came out of the kitchen with a dish towel in her hands.
Hazel Reichert was small and gray and wiped her eyes on her wrist.
"Caleb," she whispered. "Oh, honey."
She crossed the room and held on to him.
"Hazel," Frank said. "Sit."
She let go.
She sat.
That was the whole fight, and she lost it without another sound.
At the head of the table, a big man in a flannel shirt looked us over.
Frank had the deacon's pin on his collar and a white buzz cut.
Caleb had the same jaw, and I would have found that funny anywhere else.
"Dad," Caleb said. "This is my wife, Nina."
Nobody said hello.
A blond man in a quilted vest leaned back in his chair and smiled at me.
"So the prodigal brought a girl," he said.
"Dale Reichert. I run the hardware store, the town board and the church money."
"You'll hear about me."
He said it as a joke.
Nobody at that table took it as one.
The woman beside him wore a camel coat indoors and nails like little red knives.
"Lacey," she said, and did not offer her hand.
"Caleb and I used to date, before he stole from the church and ran," she added brightly. "I'm sure he's told you."
"He has," I said.
That wasn't quite a lie.
Caleb had told me on our second date, in a parking lot, in the rain.
I still had not decided what I thought about it.
"Twelve years," Frank said. "Not a call. Not a card."
"You told me never to come back," Caleb said quietly.
"And you came back on Christmas, with a wife in a coat from the clearance bin."
Frank looked at me.
"What do you do, young lady?"
"I'm an ER nurse."
"Nurse." He said it the way you taste milk that has turned. "My son is a drifter and he's married a nurse. Lord help us."
A woman near the end of the table snickered into her napkin.
My face went hot.
Caleb's hand closed around mine under the edge of the table.
He was shaking.
This was a man who could buy this house, this street and the bank that held its mortgage.
He was shaking because a sixty-two-year-old man in a flannel shirt had not said his name.
"You owe this church three thousand eight hundred dollars," Frank said.
"With twelve years of interest, I figure it's nineteen thousand."
"Pay it tonight, in front of these neighbors, or you can turn around and walk."
Nineteen thousand dollars is nothing to Caleb.
It is less than he spends on one flight.
I watched him open his mouth and close it again.
He wanted so badly to be loved first.
I could not stand there and watch that.
I dug in my coat pocket for my wallet and pulled out everything in it.
Two hundred and twelve dollars, mostly in fives and ones.
I walked to the head of the table and laid it next to Frank's plate.
"That's a start," I said. "You'll have the rest by Wednesday."
The room went completely silent.
"Wednesday," Dale said. "Where does a nurse find nineteen thousand dollars by Wednesday?"
"From the same place I found the nerve to walk in here," I said.
Somebody gasped.
Frank looked at the little pile of bills.
He picked it up, one fist closed around it.
He crossed to the iron stove in the corner and opened the door with his sleeve.
He threw my two hundred and twelve dollars into the fire.
The ones curled and went orange, and the smell was ink and burned paper.
"I'll take no money from a thief's wife," Frank said. "Get off my land."
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