The Billionaire Heir Called Me a Freeloader, I'd Bankrolled His Family for 600 Years novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Forty-One Names

We went up to the roof when the lobby had finally emptied.

The sun was low behind the water tank, and the orchids in the bay had turned gold.

Rowan walked to the far railing and put his hands on it.

I let him have a minute.

"You turned down the chair in front of three hundred people," I said.

"Yes."

"It's yours. It is the one thing in that building that is only yours."

"That's why I turned it down."

He faced me.

"You've been looking at me all afternoon, working out a price," he said. "What does the heir cost? What does it take to make it right?"

"That isn't what I was thinking."

"What were you thinking?"

"That I can't give your mother a single day back."

He said nothing.

I took the receipt out of my blazer pocket, a small slip with a stamp on it.

The night guard had pressed it into my hand in the lobby before Geoffrey began to speak.

"Sixteen thousand two hundred, paid in full at noon," I said. "I know you've heard. I'm not giving it to you as a gift."

"Then what is it?"

"A first payment."

I took out the second paper.

It was a lunch receipt, soft with folding, and the back was covered in blunt pencil handwriting.

"The guard wrote forty-one names on it this afternoon. Cleaners, porters, night guards, their husbands and wives. Every one of them has a bill like hers somewhere, or a son in a school they can't afford, or a roof that leaks."

"Forty-one," Rowan said.

"I have ninety gold sovereigns. I'll sell them one at a time to a dealer who asks no questions, and I will pay every debt on this list myself, by name, in person."

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