The Heiress' Return: No More Pretending novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Handoff
At Camille's birthday dinner Adele introduces Gill to two hundred guests as the girl who will take Ronan off Camille's hands, and in the study Ronan tells her the Hollisters owe two hundred million if she leaves.
My mother tapped her glass and told two hundred guests I was the girl who would take the Bellingham heir off her other daughter's hands.
The room laughed.
It was a small, polite laugh, the kind people give when they aren't sure they're allowed.
A woman near the stage whispered, "Poor thing. Poor man."
A man lifted a phone to film me.
I stood on the terrace of a mansion in a green dress that belonged to another girl, holding a glass of water I hadn't touched.
Six weeks ago a blood test had proved I was their real daughter, and the girl they raised was not.
"Nobody is ever going to send you back, Gill," my mother had told me in the car. "I promise."
It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me.
The Hollister Foundation also paid for the roof of the children's home I grew up in.
So I had kept my mouth shut for six weeks.
On the little stage, my father, Gordon Hollister, pulled the girl he raised against his side.
Her name was Camille.
"Happy birthday to my girl," he said, and everyone clapped.
Camille kissed his cheek and found me over his shoulder.
She mouthed, You're doing great.
That afternoon she had taken the diamond earrings out of her own ears and pushed them into mine.
"You have Mom's face," she'd said. "I'm so glad you're here, Gill. I really am."
A driver in a gray suit waited by the terrace door holding Camille's coat over his arm.
Camille hadn't driven herself anywhere in two years.
Her white convertible sat under a canvas cover in the garage, and I had walked past it twice that day.
"And Gill will be joining the Bellingham family," my mother, Adele, said again, a hand at her pearls, smiling at the crowd. "Ronan has had such a hard time. We all want him looked after."
A man beside me murmured to his wife, "The invalid's bride. Well, at least she'll be grateful."
His wife laughed behind her hand.
Nobody had asked Ronan to come tonight.
Nobody had asked me either.
I looked at the faces turned my way, forty of them smiling, and not one of them looked at me as a person.
I set my glass on a passing tray.
So I stepped off the terrace.
Adele's voice followed me for a few steps, bright and calm, still talking to the room.
Inside, the house was quiet and smelled of lilies.
A woman in a black apron was carrying a tray of champagne toward the kitchen.
"Where is he?" I asked. "Ronan Bellingham."
She looked at my face for a second and then at the hallway.
"West study," she said. "He comes early to these things so he can leave before the stairs."
There was a line of yellow light under the last door.
I opened it without knocking.
A man sat in a wheelchair by the window with his back to me, his jacket over the arm of the chair and his tie pulled loose.
"You're the one they just handed over," he said, without turning around.
"Nobody handed me over," I said. "I was given away."
He turned the chair with two pushes of his hands.
He was younger than I'd expected, with dark hair and a tired, steady face.
"Ronan Bellingham," he said.
"Gill."
"I know." He looked me over once, not unkindly. "I've been waiting two hours for someone to walk through that door who didn't look sorry for me."
"I'm not sorry for you," I said. "I'm furious."
The corner of his mouth moved.
"Good. Sit down, Gill. You're the first person in this house tonight who's got a reason to be angry and a reason to stay."
"I don't have a reason to stay."
"You do." He took a folded page out of his jacket and held it up between two fingers. "Do you know why they went to the trouble of finding you?"
"To marry you."
"To avoid paying me."
I stopped with my hand on the back of a chair.
"This is the contract my grandfather signed with your grandfather," Ronan said. "It says the Hollister daughter by blood marries the Bellingham heir."
He looked at me.
"Camille isn't by blood. You are. If you walk out that gate tonight, the Hollisters owe my family two hundred million dollars."
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