An Heiress to Remember (The Gilded Age Girls Club #3) - Maya Rodale Page 0,32
gossip pages.
“What I’m proud of is learning the rules of the game, playing to win, and succeeding.”
Almost.
Beatrice did not seem impressed.
He thought again of the beautiful rare birds that were slaughtered so he could sell feathered hats. Give the women what they want. He thought of the shopgirls deprived of higher wages in the name of market rates. Give the women what they want? Birds and women sacrificed so he could stand in a ballroom, sip champagne, and feel important.
The flash of insight was inconvenient and uncomfortable, so he ignored it.
“Without staff, you do realize you’ll have to shut down the store,” he pointed out. “For days. Weeks. It’ll take that long until you fill all the positions and get everyone trained up. In the meantime you’ll lose money and I’ll make more. So much more that you won’t have a prayer of bringing Goodwin’s back to life.”
He would buy it for some throwaway sum. Destroy it.
This is what he wanted.
My name is Wes Dalton. You stole my love and insulted my honor. I have sworn revenge.
But she was smirking at him.
“I should think that would be good news for you. So why, Dalton, do you sound like you’re trying to talk me out of it?”
“I’m not trying to talk you out of it. I’ve been waiting sixteen years for the Goodwin siblings to run the store into the ground. But it wouldn’t be very sporting of me to win by letting you make some egregious and disastrous mistakes.”
“What a hollow victory that would be,” she replied.
“Exactly.”
“It would make your revenge just that less sweet,” she teased.
“Indeed.”
“Or are you procrastinating because you haven’t made your plans for after?” That hint of a smile again. Like she was teasing him. Another man might have felt angry. He felt the thrill of a challenge.
“I’m more interested in your plans. Are you certain you know what you’re doing? Are you certain you don’t wish to sell? I’ll strike a deal with you, right here. Right now.”
“Dalton, this is hardly proper ballroom conversation,” she chided him. “If you really want to make a serious offer, you’ll make an appointment to speak with me in my office. Privately.”
He had visions of her in an office.
Up against a desk. Lips tilted up to his. Soft laughter, not the mocking kind.
No, he would not make an appointment to speak privately with her in her office.
“But then again, it took a lot for us to both get here,” she mused. “To have inappropriate ballroom conversation.”
And just like that, things took a turn for the personal.
“All I had to do was earn a fortune from nothing.”
“Not nothing, Dalton,” she said pointedly. “There was that three thousand dollars that my parents gave you not to marry me. Hardly an insignificant amount of money.”
“That old news? You had already accepted the duke and you wanted me to stay in town and watch it all unfold?”
“My mother thought you were such a temptation to me that she had to pay you to leave town. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“It does now. Much too late.”
“Much too late, indeed. You have already revealed that all you ever wanted was Goodwin’s. Your obsession with buying it now only confirms it. You never wanted me, just the store.”
“And the duke was not after your fortune?”
“He never pretended to love me.”
Her words landed like a slap across the face.
“Is that what you think? That my feelings had just been an act? That I bared my body and soul to you with an ulterior motive? It was never pretend, Beatrice.”
She tilted her head curiously. “Then why did you take it?”
“Why did you say yes to him?”
“A marriage proposal from a duke was an offer I wasn’t allowed to refuse. Tell me, Dalton, how a young girl is supposed to reject the one thing she was born and bred to do, especially when she had no other options?”
“Tell me, Beatrice, how a young man with few opportunities is supposed to say no to a life-changing windfall?”
“Well you certainly didn’t squander it. There is that, at least. You may have even gotten the better end of the deal.”
No, he had not squandered it. But he wondered what she meant by “the better end of the deal.”
For the first time since her return to New York, Dalton stopped to think about what she must have endured to get back here to this ballroom. Divorce wasn’t unheard of, but it was still rare, especially among the sort of people in this ballroom.