He Didn't Know She Was the Heiress novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Seat at the Head of the Table

Lena walks into the Chicago boardroom and stops the vote. The buyer's lead, Samson Sorrell, invites her to his grandmother's Thanksgiving. Sorrell is her husband's name.

The board of Fairbanks Hotels was due to vote at nine, and I walked into the boardroom at eight fifty-two.

I had taken the last flight out of Hartford and slept two hours on a lobby couch.

I wore the navy dress from my gym bag and my old wool coat.

My father's attorney met me at the door, gray and rumpled, and shook my hand with both of his.

"Ms. Fairbanks. Thank God."

Twelve people sat around a table of black walnut.

At the head of it, in the tall leather chair my father had held for thirty years, sat a man with silver hair and a very expensive pen.

He glanced at my coat.

"This is a private meeting," he said. "If you're with the cleaning service, the staff entrance is on the ground floor."

"I'm Lena Fairbanks," I said. "My father built this company."

The table went still.

A woman near the window put her coffee down too fast and it rang against the saucer.

The silver-haired man smiled with his teeth.

"Miss Fairbanks has been out of contact for seven years. Frankly, we weren't sure she was alive."

"Her father was sure," the attorney said, and laid a folder in front of him. "Every share of voting stock. Sixty-one percent. It's all hers."

"The estate is under review."

"It's under no review at all. The probate closed in September."

The chairman turned the pen over in his fingers.

"Then Ms. Fairbanks can sit in the gallery and watch us do our jobs. We're about to take a very good offer for her company."

I crossed the room.

I stopped beside the tall leather chair and waited.

He did not move.

"That's my father's seat," I said. "You can get up, or my attorney can have the guards help you."

Somebody at the table coughed.

The chairman looked at the attorney, then at the folder, then at me.

He stood.

I sat in the chair, and the leather still held my father's shape.

For a moment I could not speak.

Then I put my palms flat on the walnut.

"The vote is cancelled," I said. "Fairbanks Hotels is not for sale."

"You can't just..."

"Sixty-one percent says I can."

A man across the table had not spoken yet.

He sat at the far end with a closed leather folder in front of him, in a charcoal suit and no tie, and he had watched the whole thing without blinking.

His hair was dark and going gray above the ears.

"Congratulations," he said, in a dry, level voice. "That was the fastest hostile takeover of a boardroom I've ever seen, and I did it for a living."

"And you are?"

"Samson Sorrell. I represent the buyer."

I did not move.

Sorrell was the buyer, and the buyer was my husband's family.

I had never heard his first name.

Ethan had mentioned an older half-brother exactly once, at our wedding, and then he had changed the subject.

Samson Sorrell watched my face.

He did not know who I was, and I did not tell him.

"Our offer was four hundred million," he said. "It's off the table, I suppose."

"It's off the table."

"Then I'll say this once. The chairman was lying about the estate review, and I was already going to walk away from him."

The chairman made a sound of protest.

Samson did not look at him.

"You'd have found out in a week. I'd rather you hear it from me."

"Why would you tell me that?"

"Because you stood up for a chair," he said. "I've waited six years for someone to do that in a room I was in."

He almost smiled, and a dimple showed on his left cheek, only on that side.

It was a nice face.

I looked away from it and opened my father's folder.

The chairman cleared his throat.

"Ms. Fairbanks, there are things you don't understand about the business."

"Then I'll learn them. You can start by handing the room to my attorney."

I heard chairs scrape back along the table.

Samson Sorrell stood and buttoned his jacket.

He laid a cream-colored card in front of me, and I saw the Sorrell crest at the top.

"My grandmother, Eleanor, does every deal at her Thanksgiving table," he said. "She'll want to meet the woman who just cost her four hundred million dollars."

"I'm not for sale either."

"She isn't buying." His eyes rested on me, gray and unhurried. "Tomorrow, two o'clock. Come hungry."

I looked down at the address on the card.

It was a house in Connecticut, the one my husband grew up in and had never once taken me to.

Tomorrow it was the house where Ethan meant to show off Maisie.

I put the card in my pocket.

"I'll be there," I said.

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