He Called It a Joke. I Called My Lawyers. Chapter 10

The Whitfield London Winter Gala was the biggest night of my new life.

Five hundred guests at the Savoy. Press on the red carpet. My first public appearance as Managing Director of the London office. My father flew in. My mother cried when she saw me in the dress, midnight blue, long sleeves, nothing anyone could ever wrap me in.

Theo was waiting at the bottom of the staircase. Black tux. He looked up at me and forgot, for a full second, how to hold his glass.

“You look,” he said, “like a very bad day for anyone who underestimated you.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“It’s the best one I have.”

Security had Kayla’s photo. Every door. Every camera. Harlan had warned the Met police.

So when she found me, it wasn’t through a door.

She was a server.

Black vest. Hair dyed dark. Glasses. Carrying a tray of champagne flutes straight toward me at the top of the grand staircase while I was talking to a journalist from the Financial Times.

I didn’t recognize her until she smiled.

“Hi, Ice Queen.”

She threw the tray.

Champagne exploded across my face, my hair, my dress. Glass shattered on the marble. And in the same motion, she grabbed my wrist and threw herself backward toward the stairs.

I understood it in a flash. She’d fall. She’d scream that I’d pushed her. Five hundred witnesses. A hundred cameras.

But Theo was already there.

He caught her by the vest before she went over. Hauled her back onto the landing like she weighed nothing.

Kayla shrieked. “She PUSHED me! You all saw it! The heiress PUSHED me! Somebody film this!”

Somebody already was.

Every guest at the gala had a phone. And above us, on the giant screen behind the stage, my own livestream team had been broadcasting the arrivals in real time. Three angles. HD. Slow-motion replay built into the software.

The screen switched to a replay.

Kayla. Approaching with the tray. Smiling. Throwing. Grabbing my wrist. Pulling herself toward the stairs.

The ballroom went silent.

Kayla’s face changed. I watched the mask drop. The sweet, wet eyes went flat and furious.

“You think you won?” she hissed at me, champagne dripping between us. “You were nothing without his little rescue story. You were so grateful. So pathetic. It was disgusting to watch.”

I wiped the champagne off my face with my bare hand. Slowly.

Then I stepped close.

“You’re right,” I said. “I was grateful. It’s the most dangerous thing a woman can be. Somebody always/notices leaned in. “But you made one mistake, Kayla.”

“Yeah? What?”

“You poured champagne on me twice. And this time, my hands aren’t tied.”

The Metropolitan Police came up the stairs behind her.

“Kayla Dunn, you’re under arrest for assault, and on a provisional warrant requested by the United States-”

She screamed the whole way out. Rich bitch. Liar. Fake. The cameras followed her to the door.

Nobody followed her outside.

My knees finally went. Theo caught me. I was laughing and crying at the same time, champagne in my eyelashes, and the whole ballroom began to applaud.

Not laugh. Applaud.

My father climbed onto the stage and took the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen. My daughter.” His voice cracked. “Who, it turns out, is very hard to break.”

Later, on the Savoy terrace, wrapped in Theo’s jacket, I watched snow fall over the river.

“You were fast,” I said. “On the stairs.”

“I wasn’t watching the stairs,” he said. “I was watching you. I usually am.”

I turned to look at him,

He didn’t kiss me. He just let the words sit there, honest and warm, and waited to see what I’d do with them.

Nobody had ever waited for me before.

My phone vibrated in my clutch. A text from a new number. A photo.

A frozen pond. A red scarf tied to the bare branch of a tree.

I’m in London. I’m outside your building. I’m not leaving until you see me.