The Runaway Bride Is Marrying His Billionaire Boss novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Place Card

Laurence answers the room, toasts her father into walking her down the aisle, and Delaney drives to her mother's lake house, where Shelby opens the door wearing Anne's pearls.

Nobody in the ballroom answered him.

Laurence Hartwell waited, and the silence got longer.

"I did," my father said at last.

Sheldon Whalley does not back down in front of his own guests.

"She is my daughter, and this is my party."

"Then you must be the father of the bride." Laurence held out his hand. "Laurence Hartwell. I wish we were meeting at dinner."

My father looked at the hand and did not take it.

Laurence kept it there and smiled.

Two hundred people watched my father decide.

He shook it.

I heard a phone in the back row take the picture.

"Your daughter told me you'd be walking her down the aisle on Saturday," Laurence said. "It's good to hear it from you."

"I haven't said that."

"Not yet."

Laurence turned to the room.

"Everyone is welcome Saturday at four. The bar is open and the food is good. Delaney picked the menu herself."

Nobody laughed, but nobody left either.

Brett was still standing with a dish towel wrapped around his hand.

The towel had gone red.

"Brett," Laurence said.

"Sir. I can explain."

"Explain what? That my fiancée was given a hard time at her own father's party?"

Brett's mouth opened and closed.

"Go and get that hand stitched," Laurence said. "I need it for the handshake line on Saturday. You'll be in it."

Shelby pulled Brett toward the doors.

She looked back once, and her face was white.

My father jerked his head at the security men, and they stepped away from the walls.

"Mr. Hartwell, I'd like you and my daughter to leave."

"We'll leave after dinner," Laurence said. "I'm told the salmon is excellent."

"Sheldon." Marlene was suddenly at my father's elbow, one hand on his sleeve. "Not here. Please. Let them sit."

"Marlene."

"He is a guest and she is your daughter, and two hundred people are watching you." Her voice was quiet and soft. "Let them eat."

My father breathed through his nose.

He nodded once, and the band started up again, too loud.

Marlene steered us to the head table herself.

"Right here, Mr. Hartwell. Delaney, sweetheart, you're beside your father."

There was a place card on the white cloth in front of an empty chair.

Delaney, it said, in Marlene's looping handwriting.

I knew that handwriting from every birthday card I had ever gotten.

I looked at it for a second.

Then I sat down.

Laurence took the chair on my left and put his arm along the back of mine.

"Terms," he said under his breath. "Rule two. Someone is watching."

"Everyone is watching."

"Then this is permitted." He picked up my hand and kissed my knuckles.

My father stared at his plate.

A waiter set the salmon in front of me, and my hands were shaking too much to use the fork.

"You said eight-thirty," Laurence said quietly. "It's nine. I thought you'd want the first minutes alone."

"I did."

"How did it go?"

"A man bled on the tablecloth and my father called security."

"So, well."

I almost laughed.

He cut a bite of his salmon and ate it.

I felt better watching him.

The waiter brought the champagne for the toasts, and Marlene tapped her glass.

"A toast to Sheldon," she said brightly. "Sixty years, and the best husband a woman could ask for."

The guests lifted their glasses.

Laurence stood up before they could sit down.

"May I?"

My father could not refuse a guest in front of the room, and Laurence knew it.

"To Sheldon Whalley," Laurence said, "who built something from nothing, and who is going to give away his daughter on Saturday in front of this whole town."

Glasses went up.

My father's hand shook as he raised his.

"To Sheldon."

Everyone drank to it, and half the room filmed it.

I leaned toward Laurence.

"That's cruel."

"It's a toast."

"He'll hate you for it."

"He already did, when I walked in."

I turned my face so my father could not see me smile.

Dessert was a lemon cake with sixty candles.

Nobody ate any.

At ten-thirty my father stood up and said he was tired, and the party was over.

I walked out to the lot with Laurence's hand at the small of my back.

"Where are you staying?" he asked.

"My mother's lake house."

"Is that wise?"

"It's my mother's house. I have a key."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"I'm at the Heron Inn. Call me if there's trouble."

"There won't be."

I drove the ten minutes to Pike Lake with the window down.

The porch light was on at the house my mother had painted herself, white with blue shutters.

I had not been there in seven years.

I walked up the steps with my key in my hand.

Before I could use it, the door opened.

Shelby stood in the hall in a silk robe with the lamp behind her.

Around her neck were my mother's pearls.

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