idea, Harper. No idea what you’re asking me.”
“He was wrong to make that rule!”
“Maybe so, but I don’t know what the hell happened between your mom and him. It’s not my place to judge whether he should have done it or not. It’s his money, and this is how he wants it spent.”
“It’s my money,” I say, my voice made imperious with impotent rage.
He huffs his amusement. “Spoken like a true St. Claire.”
“Christopher, I don’t know if you think we’re only in this for billions of dollars. I don’t care about that. We have nothing. She has nothing. All she needs is enough to live off of. You can have the rest.”
He steps back as if I slapped him. “You think I want your inheritance?”
Something wavers inside me. Did I go too far? Christopher is going to let my mother starve because he wants to honor a request that should never have been made. That’s wrong. Not me standing up for her. “Everyone else in that room wanted it. And you were there.”
It’s like watching ice form over a lake in a matter of seconds. The water had seemed deep and unnerving, but now he’s simply impenetrable. “The only reason I went to that damn reading is because the lawyer called me this morning and said I should come. And something in his voice told me it was going to be bad, so I had the car waiting for us and the hotel on standby.”
My throat feels scratchy, like I’m near tears. “I didn’t thank you for that.”
“I don’t want your thanks. I don’t want that fucking yacht, either. And I sure as hell don’t want a single cent from your inheritance.”
“We’ve been living in a motel.” The words burst out of me, ugly and hushed so my mother doesn’t wake up. “Every day Mom takes one of her jewelry pieces to the pawn shop, where they give her a few cents for every dollar that it’s really worth. That’s how we pay the bill so we have a place to sleep that night.”
My words crack the ice around him, at least enough so that I see the old Christopher looking back at me, the one who would have dived into the ocean to save me. “Hell.”
“Daddy paid for my tuition and my private dorm room directly, but that’s it. If I had asked for anything more, he would have had his investigators look into us again.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t understand.”
The words spill from me, more careless with our secrets than I’ve ever been. No, not careless. Trusting him to do what’s right. “When I was nine, Mom was between husbands. We had this shitty apartment on the outskirts of LA and ate ramen noodles every night. It sucked, but I didn’t really care. But I cared when Mom said we couldn’t afford to get more paint, so I called Daddy.” Tears sting my eyes, and it’s such a twisted feeling to mourn him right now, to love him and hate him at the same time. “He came down on us like freaking Zeus from Mount Olympus. He took me to New York City until she had enough money to come get me, and that was only when she had found this asshole director who wanted her as his side piece. She did that for me, so that I could come back.”
Christopher stares at me as if testing the words, weighing them the way he must weigh every sentence spoken in his crazy-smart Emerson business classes, the way he must gauge everything around him with that stone-cold confidence. And he must see in me the desperate truth, because he stalks back to the window and curses under his breath.
He’s not even facing me, but I’m utterly and completely exposed. I could strip naked in this suite and still not be as naked as I feel right now. This is something I don’t talk about with anyone, least of all with a man who’s saved me twice. It’s something of a pattern already, and that should be enough for me to make it stop. I can’t depend on anyone, even him.
But I can’t let my mother go back to arguing with the landlord for a few extra days. Not when I’m living like a princess at Smith College in the dorm Daddy paid extra to get. I can’t let her whore herself to some asshole with money when I’m the heiress to a freaking fortune.
If I’ve convinced Christopher, the