An Heiress to Remember (The Gilded Age Girls Club #3) - Maya Rodale Page 0,11
So it would be like that. He was enraged all over again.
She turned back to the gentlemen of the board. “As I said, there will be no sale.”
Her brother gave a huff of disgust. “Beatrice, what is this nonsense? Dalton here has already made an offer.”
“It’s not nonsense. It’s business. Though they might be one and the same to you, Edward. Otherwise we wouldn’t be in this predicament.”
Oh, he would not quirk a smile. She hadn’t lost her spark. Not entirely.
Edward predictably reddened.
“We’re going to sell. Dalton here has already made an offer.”
“Did he now?”
“He did,” Wes said.
“There will be no sale,” she said again as if just by repeating it enough she could make it true.
“Dalton made a good offer, Beatrice. I think I speak for the board when I say we all see the merits of a swift and lucrative deal. We can all move on with our lives knowing that Goodwin’s is in good hands. It’s a win-win situation.”
“Not for me it isn’t.”
The ensuing silence conveyed what no man dared to say aloud: She didn’t really count, did she?
“With all due respect, your ladyship, this is a complicated matter best left to men with more experience in such matters,” one of the men at the table said.
“First of all, it’s Beatrice Goodwin Archer, Duchess of Montrose, Marchioness of Hargrove, and Countess of Winslow, and an assortment of other lesser titles. You may address me as ‘Duchess’ or not at all. And if such matters are best left to you, then could you kindly explain how you have come to run Manhattan’s premier shopping emporium into the ground?”
Wes could explain.
Edward could not. Would not.
“I have consulted with my legal counsel and have been apprised that no sale of the company shall occur without my signature,” she said. “I am not inclined to sign. Not for anyone, but especially not to him. It seems he’s only ever wanted the store.”
She had thought him a fortune hunter; his acceptance of Estella’s offer seemed to prove it years ago. And this moment served to confirm it now.
She turned to face him. And he met her gaze.
He saw love and pain. Years of what if and if only. The tilt of her chin. The flash of her eyes. The color stealing across her cheeks. A woman, determined. But he also had visions of her walking down the aisle—to someone else. A woman, waving goodbye from a ship. He remembered the hurt like it was yesterday.
Wes had waited sixteen years for the opportunity to buy the thing she loved most in the world and destroy it. He could wait another week or two.
She held his gaze.
She wasn’t going to make it easy. But he had no doubt that he would succeed.
“You can consider it all you want,” Beatrice went on, “but according to my lawyers you cannot sell Goodwin’s without Mother’s and my agreement. It’s in the terms of Father’s will.”
She might complicate things, Connor had warned.
She already had.
Chapter Six
Beatrice really would have loved a moment alone to allow her thundering heart to slow, but it was not to be. From the moment she’d pushed open the doors to confront a room full of gray old men in gray suits, her heart had been pounding and hadn’t let up. She had been positively shaking under her dress. It had been a battle to hide her nerves, to keep the tremble from her voice, the fidgeting from her hands, as she had tried to project a confidence she didn’t quite feel.
She had tried to channel the dowager duchess, that fearsome old dragon.
It was a daring thing to do, storming into business meetings to which one had not been invited, declaring this and insisting on that. She hadn’t had practice. She hadn’t had the experience which bred unshakable confidence.
Not like Dalton, who apparently made a habit of it. So calm, cool, and collected he had been, offering his millions. The last she had seen him, he’d been begging her to run away with him. Then he’d taken her mother’s money to disappear. And now here they were, at odds over the ownership of the store.
Dalton. She hadn’t thought of him in years.
Now he was hot on her heels.
They were moving toward the same destination: the elevator at the end of the corridor.
She arrived first, called for the carriage, and stepped back to wait. She tossed a look over her shoulder at him. Ignoring him was impossible.