He Brought Me a College Guy, Saying I’d Never Touch Him—But I Kept Him Chapter 09

He Brought Me a College Guy, Saying I’d Never Touch Him—But I Kept Him Chapter 09

A death certificate. Stamped and signed by a hospital. Dated three years ago.

Nathaniel’s hands started shaking.

“Dad, what is this?”

“There’s more. Read everything.”

Eugene’s voice was heavy as stone.

He pulled out a wire transfer receipt.

Amount: Eight hundred thousand dollars.

Recipient: An unfamiliar account.

Nathaniel stared at it for three seconds. Then he remembered.

A few years ago, Isabella’s father had been kidnapped.

The kidnappers demanded eight hundred thousand dollars. No police.

At the time, the Hawthorne Group was on the verge of collapse.

Even the family estate had been mortgaged.

Every dollar Nathaniel could find had gone into the company. He had a deal lined up with a business partner. Everything was riding on it.

The next morning, eight hundred thousand dollars disappeared from the corporate account.

Accounting traced it back to Isabella.

He went crazy.

He stormed home and slammed the transfer receipt on the table.
“Isabella. What did you do with the company’s money?”

She didn’t explain.

She just looked at him with red eyes and said, “I’ll pay you back.”

It wasn’t about the money.

It was the fact that her father had been kidnapped and she didn’t come to him first.

She took that money without telling him.

He treated her like family. She treated him like an ATM.

That night, he slept in the guest room.

Things were never the same after that.

The company recovered. The eight-hundred-thousand-dollar hole got filled.

But something else never healed. His trust in her.

He remembered what his mother used to say. “There’s a reason people marry within their own class. Her family doesn’t have money. She has low-class instincts. That doesn’t change.”

“See? I told you. She married into this family for the money.”

Those words were already nails, hammered in deep.

The eight hundred thousand dollars just made them rust.

He thought he’d been betrayed. His pure love, stomped on.

He loved her so much. Knelt in that chapel for hours just to keep her safe. Made her the most important person in his life.

And how did she repay him?

At his most vulnerable, she stole from him. Made him look like a fool.

He started thinking his mother was right.

Class wasn’t prejudice. It was a lesson learned from people who got burned.

Isabella didn’t deserve his devotion. After that, he changed.

All those dinners and parties he used to skip, now he went to all of them.

He used to be home by ten. Now he was out until two in the morning.

His phone used to have no passcode. Now she couldn’t get in.

She never said anything.

And the more she stayed quiet, the more he thought she was just enduring it for money.

What woman could watch her husband run around with other women and still iron his shirts and make him coffee and toast for his hangover without a word?

Unless she didn’t care.

Unless she wanted something else. The house. The cars. The title.

Once that idea took hold, he felt relieved.

It wasn’t his fault. She had ulterior motives from the start.

All that guilt. All that hesitation. All those moments when he thought of her and felt something soft. All of it was unnecessary.

She deserved what she got.

She should have thought about that before she took his money.

He kept doing whatever he wanted, guilt free.

Sometimes he even did things in front of her on purpose, just to see when she’d finally crack.

But she never cracked.

Always that same unbothered look.

He found it unsettling. A person with no emotions wasn’t forgiving. She was calculating.

He hated her even more.

“So the father she spent the company’s emergency fund to save,” he said slowly, “died three years ago?”

He laughed bitterly. “How thoughtful of her. Not a single word to me.”