My Best Friend Changed Boyfriends Weekly... Until She Chose My Ten-Year Fiancé novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: The Toast

Willem's POV

The coat check at the Drake was a little marble room with a Dutch door and a girl of about twenty reading a paperback behind it.

I got there at six twenty-five in a borrowed black suit that pulled across my shoulders.

Edgar was already there, leaning on the half door.

He had a leather folder under his arm and a tuxedo that fit him perfectly.

"Willem," he said, as if we were old friends. "You came. Good man."

"I said I would."

"Walk with me."

"We can talk here."

He glanced at the girl behind the door, and then he shrugged and slid the folder across the marble.

"Fifty thousand dollars," he said. "A cashier's check, made out to you. And a contract to restore the six buildings my firm owns on Fulton Market."

"For what?"

"For a week of your time, which I'm told is worth about a thousand." He smiled. "You walk out of that ballroom tonight, and you stay out of her life. Gin will be back with me by spring. She always is. You'll have a nice building to work on."

I looked at the folder.

I did not open it.

"Why would she come back to you?" I said.

"Because I'm what she knows."

He said it so gently that I understood, for the first time, how he had held a smart woman for ten years.

It wasn't force.

It was a warm hand on the back of the neck, and a plan to wait.

I picked up the folder and pushed it back across the marble, to his side of the door.

"I don't carry what isn't mine," I said. "I carried one thing for a week that wasn't, and I'm still paying for it."

"Everyone has a number."

"Miss," I said to the girl behind the door.

She looked up from her book.

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