After the wedding, Arthur closed his office door and said the words I’d been dreading. Then he saw my face and softened. “Not that, child. Not ever that. I married you for something else. I’ve watched you for a year, and I want everything to go to the one person in this house who treated me like a man instead of an inheritance. You didn’t sell yourself. You signed your name next to mine as my heir. Welcome to the family, Mrs. Pendleton.”
Chapter 2: The Man Behind the Fortune
I sat down in that office, still braced for something terrible, and Arthur Pendleton told me who he actually was, and I realized I’d married a far better man than the desperate bargain in my head had let me believe.
Arthur had built his fortune from nothing — a poor boy who’d made himself rich and never forgotten the poor boy. He’d married once, for love, and lost his wife twenty years earlier, and they’d never been able to have the children they wanted. The adult children circling his deathbed were his late brother’s kids, whom he’d taken in and raised and given everything, and who had grown, he told me with a grief that aged his face, into people who saw him only as a bank account with a pulse.
