Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
He told me his grandfather's will, the one that handed him control of the Winthrop Group's voting shares, came with a single brutal condition.
Donovan had to be legally married before his fortieth birthday, and he had to remain married straight through to that date, no annulments, no convenient separations, nothing that would let a clever lawyer argue around the spirit of the thing.
"And if you're not," I said, "married, on that exact day."
"Control reverts to the Castellan branch of the family." He said the name the way you'd name a disease. "My cousin Reginald, specifically, who happens to be close personal friends with Charles Hamilton, who would absolutely use that leverage to finish whatever business he started with you tonight."
"I'm not interested in love," he said, and there was no apology in it, just fact, stated the way he probably stated everything, like weather. "I'm interested in a wife who can survive scrutiny without flinching. Tonight proved you can do that better than anyone I've watched in years."
"I'm not a job applicant."
"You are exactly that, whether you like the framing or not." He didn't miss a beat saying it. "And the position comes with considerably better terms than the one Charles Hamilton just terminated you from."
It should have insulted me. Some nights, looking back, I think it did, somewhere underneath the part of me that was already doing the math.
Donovan Winthrop wasn't offering me love.
He was offering me leverage, against the very people who'd spent three weeks watching me for cracks, and leverage, it turned out, was a far more useful thing to be offered than sympathy.
"Tell me the terms," I said. "All of them."
He told me the will had been written by a man who'd never trusted his grandson to choose well on his own, a man who'd watched Donovan's father destroy two marriages through neglect and had decided, with the particular arrogance of the very wealthy, that the only solution was a legal cage disguised as an incentive.
Marry, stay married, and the Winthrop Group remained intact under Donovan's control.
Fail to do either, and every voting share, every board seat, every decade of accumulated influence transferred automatically to Reginald.
"He's spent the last eighteen months positioning himself for exactly that outcome," Donovan said, his voice flattening into something I'd later learn was his particular register for talking about his cousin, a controlled, contemptuous calm that never quite rose into anger.
"Building relationships with the board members least loyal to me, courting press coverage that frames him as the more stable choice.
He's patient. He's willing to wait out the clock if it means inheriting everything without lifting a finger to earn it. "
"And Charles is helping him."
"Charles and Reginald have done business together for years, mostly small things, favors traded back and forth the way men like that trade favors.
If Reginald takes control, Charles inherits a friend with considerably more power than he has now, and a friend who happens to already despise the woman Charles just humiliated in front of half the city.
" He met my eyes directly. "I'd be lying if I said protecting my own inheritance wasn't the primary motivation here.
I'd also be lying if I said I hadn't noticed how neatly our problems happen to overlap. "
I asked how long he had. Less than a year, he told me, which meant the man standing in front of me, drink untouched in his hand, terrace lit gold behind him, had roughly nine months to find a wife or watch his family's entire legacy fall into the hands of a man connected to mine through the worst night of my life.