The Real Heiress Don't Need Your Love novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Check
On her first day with her birth family, Abby's mother throws a million-dollar check at her, her fiance says not to expect love, and she reads the check aloud as forged.
On my first day as a Whitcroft, my mother threw a check at my face in front of forty guests.
The party was supposed to be a welcome.
Everyone had come to meet the heiress who had been missing for twenty-five years.
I had been in the house less than an hour.
The check hit my cheek and slid down to the marble floor.
"One million dollars," my mother said. "Take it and go back to your little town."
She was fifty-four and very thin, with pearls at her throat.
Phones came up all over the room.
I bent down and picked the check up.
I'm an accountant. I read every piece of paper that gets put in front of me.
"There's no signature on this," I said.
"The amount has been written over. The one is a different ink from the zeros."
"And the account number belongs to a closed account. No bank on earth would cash it."
Somebody in the crowd laughed out loud.
"I signed it this morning," my mother said. "I watched the ink dry."
She was staring at the check in my hand.
Her fingers were shaking.
Then she lifted her chin. "It doesn't matter. Take it anyway and leave."
A tall man with silver hair stepped between us and laid a hand on her shoulder.
"Darling, you're overwrought," he told her.
Then he turned to me with the kindest face in the room.
"Abby, sweetheart, forgive her. She's been crying since breakfast. Give me that and I'll tear it up."
He held out his hand. A gold pen was tucked between his fingers.
I slid the check into my pocket. "I'll keep it."
He smiled and let his hand drop. "Of course. It's yours."
His name was Lawrence Whitcroft, and my mother was Beatrix.
Abigail Whitcroft was the name on the invitation.
Abby Rudkin was the name on my paycheck, and it was the one I was using.
A blonde girl my age slipped out of the crowd and put a cardigan around my shoulders.
"I'm Portia, your sister," she whispered. "Don't listen to any of it."
Ten minutes earlier, I had watched her carry an envelope across the room to my mother.
She was the only person in the family who had smiled at me since I came through the door.
Then a man in a gray suit stepped out of the crowd with a drink in his hand.
"Anson Rotherham," he said. "Your fiancé."
Our families had signed that engagement six years ago.
Until this morning, my name on it had been Portia's.
"I'll marry you," Anson said. "I'll see that you're comfortable for life."
"But don't expect me to love you."
The guests murmured. Portia's grip on my arm tightened.
I rolled my eyes.
"I read Rotherham Logistics' filings from last year," I said. "Your cash runs out in about ten weeks."
"So stop acting like a big shot and get out of my way."
Nobody laughed this time.
Anson's jaw tightened.
He did not argue. He looked down at the floor.
My mother made a small sound and turned her face away.
Lawrence laughed softly and clapped his hands. "She's tired, everyone. Please, the buffet is open."
The guests drifted off, and I could feel every one of them looking back.
The butler took me upstairs after that.
He was the old man who had found me three days earlier, at my desk in Dunmore, Pennsylvania.
I had been awake for twenty-four hours chasing a fifty-cent error through a client's books.
Then the intern giggled and told me she had deleted the line herself, because it bothered her.
She pulled a dollar from her purse and flicked it down at my feet. "Keep the change."
I crumpled it into a ball and threw it in her face.
The butler had been standing in the doorway the whole time.
"Your grandfather did exactly that to a banker in 1974, miss," he said on the stairs. "That's how I knew."
I laughed, and it was the first time all day.
Anson was waiting outside my bedroom door.
He stood with his back against the wall and his tie loosened.
The party was far below us now, only a hum.
"Leave tonight," he said. "There's a bus to Dunmore at nine."
"You just told forty people you'd marry me," I said.
"I said what that room needed to hear."
"And what does it need to hear now?"
He stepped closer and dropped his voice.
"The next thing they hand you won't be a check. It'll be a pen."
I looked at his face for a long moment.
He wasn't sneering anymore. There were dark smudges under his eyes.
"I've been told to leave by better liars," I said.
I opened my door.
So I stayed.
When I looked back down the stairs, my father was standing at the bottom.
He lifted a hand and smiled up at me, warm as ever.
The gold pen was still between his fingers.
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