Untouched Until Her Ultra-Rich Husband

by Dani Collins

  Soft footsteps sounded. The maid arrived with braised duck on a bed of colorful, julienned vegetables.

  “Take that one back,” he said of Luli’s plate before the maid could set it. “You enjoy it. We’ll share this one. I’m getting full.” He sent Luli a droll look as he set the single plate between them.

  The maid curtsied and hurried away with her full plate and fresh gossip. Luli imagined she would be accused of sleeping with Mrs. Chen’s grandson very soon. Little did they know he had already turned her down.

  “Mr. Dean—”

  He dipped his chin in warning.

  “Gabriel?” She said it softly, not wanting to be overheard when it felt so much like an overstep. She was still the youngest on staff and always addressed others formally or at least with a respectful auntie.

  “Eat,” he commanded. “My turn to talk.”

  He was the one who had asked so many questions, forcing her to go on and on. She singled out a pale stick of daikon and nibbled the sweet-spicy end of it.

  He sat back and regarded her with flinty eyes as he sipped his wine.

  “You accused me of neglecting my grandmother—not stepping in to manage things before today. She disowned my mother before I was born. I met Mae for the first time at my mother’s funeral when I was seven. I didn’t see her again until five years had passed. My father warned me about allowing her to influence me, which seemed paranoid, but he knew her better than I did. I saw her again at my father’s funeral and we remained in touch—through you, I now realize, but I never made assumptions about whether I would inherit her fortune. As for assisting in managing her wealth... How would I know she needed help? You’ve done your job so well, I had no cause for concern.”

  Was that a compliment or a rebuke?

  He set down his stemless glass.

  “I, however, have no need for your management services. Chen Enterprises is mine. I’ll chew and swallow it the way I would any other company that falls under my control, restructuring where necessary and allowing my existing legion of executives to do what I pay them to do.”

  She kept her expression a stiff mask, not revealing the crumple inside her.

  “As to the threats you’ve made, my life is completely impervious to them. I don’t need my grandmother’s money and her misdeeds are not mine. I’m not close enough to her for her loss of good standing to affect my pride. You’re the one who will feel it if you implode her legacy. I’ll walk away unscathed.”

  She had known that, deep down. She had known she had no real leverage. She had nothing and was nothing. Her throat tightened and it took all her effort to keep the press of tears from reaching the front of her eyes.

  “So I’m to be deported?” Her stomach fell while the flutter of nerves behind her heart became the panicked batter of bird wings against a window.

  He wasn’t saying anything.

  Through the lashes she dropped to disguise her agony, she saw his lips curl, but it wasn’t a smile. Self-deprecation, perhaps.

  She set down her chopsticks, but she couldn’t think beyond that.

  “You’re not going to eat? Come with me, then.” He rose abruptly and started into the house.

  She half expected to be shown the front door, but he went up the wide staircase and strode into Mae’s bedroom. She trailed him on feet that felt encased in cement, heart dragging as a weight behind her.

  She had only been in this bedroom a handful of times. It was the purview of Mae’s personal maid and her nurse, decorated in Mae’s signature classic style without too much fuss or femininity, if a little dated. Mae never spent money unless she had to.

  The mirror over the makeup table swung open like a cupboard. Gabriel revealed a safe and punched in the code.

  “How did you—?”

  “You can open these older safes by setting them back to their factory default. It takes longer to look up the combination online than it does to actually break in.” He removed a leather-bound portfolio. “I was looking for her will and also I found this.” He handed the portfolio to her.

  “What is it?” She unzipped it to see a handful of her standard reports on some Chinese businessmen. Head shots, the natures of their businesses, net worth, any red flags that might cause Mae to have concerns about partnering with them.

  “I don’t know why she had this in her safe. It’s a very typical—” She flipped past the third profile and found a document that read Marriage Contract.

  “Oh, my God!” She threw it all away so the pages and photographs and colored notes with Mae’s spidery handwriting fluttered like a flock of startled birds, then drifted to the silk rug to leave a jagged, broken puzzle upon it.

  “Why so surprised? You said she was arranging you a marriage,” he chided.

  “I didn’t know she was doing it!”

  She hugged herself, staring in morbid horror at the papers. What did they say? What had Mae hoped to get in exchange for her? What was she worth this time?

  “The dowry she was offering was quite generous. There’s a decent settlement if you divorce, especially if you stick it out at least five years. Excellent terms if you provide children, especially sons.”

  “When? I thought—” She had thought Mae wanted her. That she was doing a good job for her.

  She had told him what she was, but it was pure debasement to stand here before him, proven to be nothing but an asset to be bartered in one more business deal. Chattel.

  * * *

  “The one in textiles is the oldest. Has a heart condition.”

  Luli turned her head, expression persecuted.

  Gabriel’s conscience twinged, but he was still processing this discovery himself. He had removed the folder with his name on it, curious to see if she would betray a notice of its absence.

  She seemed genuinely shocked by the existence of this portfolio at all. The fact it had been stored in the safe told him Mae had wanted to keep it very private. Her notes on each of the candidates revealed explicitly how she saw each of those older men falling short in her estimation, especially as compared to him.

  That had been the most disturbing discovery. These other men were fallback positions. Mae had wanted him as Luli’s husband.

  Because she did, in fact, seem to view Luli as a daughter. His efforts to find Luli on any payroll list or other household record had turned up nothing. He had personally questioned the butler who had shown him his own system for tracking staff hours and vacation days, but Luli wasn’t on it.

  She had her own arrangement, the butler had said with affront. And no, she didn’t leave the house, which was a nuisance. Other staff had to pick up her personal items and the cost went against his household budget—a perk not available to anyone else. In his opinion, if staffing cuts were needed, Gabriel should start with Luli.

  Gabriel remembered clearly the feeling of his own money, earned honestly and through great effort, going to support his father. It wasn’t something he should resent. As Luli had said earlier, family supported family, but his father had abandoned any effort to do his part. It had all fallen on Gabriel at a very young age to keep him and his father clothed, sheltered and fed.

  Luli had to be suffering a similar impotent anger. She had put in the time, had done what was expected, but that work had gone unacknowledged. Her reward was the opportunity to do the same for a stranger. Him or some other man.

  “I won’t do it.” Her voice shook with the rest of her. She lifted her gaze from staring through sheened eyes at the pages she’d thrown across the floor. “You can’t make me.”

  “Calm down. I’m only saying that I’ll honor her intentions if you want to go through with it.” He was testing her, was what he was doing.

  “Of course I don’t!” She covered her face, visibly trying to take hold of herself.

  “You said you would make a good trophy wife. That’s what th
is is.” He had never aspired to have any sort of wife—trophy or otherwise. That Mae had thought she could interfere in his life to this degree was a shocking affront.

  “I want to marry on my terms,” Luli said, echoing his own sentiments. She dropped her hands to reveal a raw agony in her expression that made his heart lurch. “I thought she liked me. Why would she do this?”

  He had his theories, but asked instead, “Was there any indication she was ill? Was she putting things in order because she thought her time was near?”

  “I don’t think so.” She paced a few steps, calming a little as she thought. “She only brought it up a few times. One of the maids left to get married last year. Mae said I wouldn’t have to marry some fish-smelling man from the hawker center. She said she’d find me a good husband. But she also told me at different times that she would take me shopping and let the chauffeur teach me to drive and take me back to Venezuela so I could tell my mother what I think of her. It was never a good time for any of those things. ‘Another day,’” she tacked on in Mandarin.

  Presumably she was quoting Mae. Her accent was spot-on.

  “I don’t think she was lying to me on purpose,” she continued despondently. “She talked about a lot of things that never happened. She wanted to redecorate. Retire. She said when you came to visit we would take you to see the sights.”

  Gabriel had seen the ones he wanted to see. He’d been here several times and had never once let his grandmother know he was in town.

  His stomach tightened in disgust with himself. Had she meant to introduce him to Luli? Oversee their courtship?

  So what if she had? What he’d said earlier about having no interest in finding women for other men stood. He had no desire for his dead grandmother to find him a wife, either.

  But he ruefully had to admit she had never led him astray with any of the other opportunities she had presented to him.

  “I don’t want to marry one of those men and be trapped here for the rest of my life.” Luli’s hushed voice made something grate in the base of his throat. “Why would she do that to me?”

  Why had Mae thought she could do this to him? The answer was the same in both cases.

  “She was angry my mother didn’t abide by the marriage she wanted for her. Good children allow their parents to make them a good match.”

  “I’m not her child and I’m not doing it!”

  He held up a hand. “But this does prove she saw you as a foster daughter. She was taking a personal interest in your future the way she thought a mother should. She wasn’t finding husbands for any of the housemaids. Only you.”

  In fact, like the rest of the house staff, the maids were entitled to a settlement based on their years of service. Gabriel had shown that part of Mae’s will to the butler and told him to begin making plans to take the house down to a skeleton staff.

  Luli wasn’t house staff, though. Not that it mattered. Gabriel could offer her any amount that he deemed fair out of his own pocket and ignore his grandmother’s wishes. He owed Mae nothing.

  Except that she had birthed the woman who had given him life. Luli could tell him things about his grandmother, maybe even his mother, that likely no one else could.

  He cursed silently and ran a hand through his hair.

  “I don’t know how to ask to be deported.” Luli moved to the window where she stared down at the courtyard. Her shoulders seemed very narrow, all of her quite fragile despite her willowy height. “I’m worried they’ll put me in jail if I admit I’ve been here all this time. I can’t stay, though. I don’t want to and I have nothing to stay for. I have no one to put in a good word to help me get a job or find a place to live. They all hate me for never doing laundry or dusting. They think I’m a freeloader.”

  Her fingers were digging in to her upper arms, liable to leave bruises beneath her smooth skin.

  “I heard men on the other side of the garden wall talking about fake passports once. I should have called out to them, but I was afraid. They were talking about guns and drugs. I would have had to steal money from Mae’s purse. They might have decided to come in if they realized—”

  “Luli.” The other suitors crumpled beneath his feet as he walked across to her. “My grandmother intended you would be looked after. That’s proof of it.” He pointed back to the billionaires found to be not quite good enough for Mae’s surrogate daughter.

  “She wanted to hand me to a stranger like I’m a...a thing.” Her eyes were bright and angry.

  “I don’t think that’s true.” He had taunted her earlier that she was one more asset he was inheriting, though. And he might not need this inheritance from Mae, but if he intended to accept it, he had to take all of it—including the treasure she had confined to this house like an heirloom jewel tucked in a safe.

  He took in Luli’s ugly dress and flat-footed sandals, her hair rolled into a cinnamon bun at her nape, her hands like rocks in the wide, patch pockets of her dress.

  Whatever she was, Mae had kept her close for a reason. She had valued Luli highly enough to think her good enough for her only grandson. For that reason alone, he couldn’t throw Luli away. Not without a thorough polish and appraisal first, he deduced with dark humor.

  “You’ll honor the dowry if I marry one of them?” she asked with dread, glancing at the papers with desperation and anguish.

  Repulsion gripped him as he thought again of gnarled hands setting themselves against those luscious curves. If anyone touched her, he wanted it to be him.

  “No. I want you to marry me.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “WHAT?” HER EYES went round as big blue plates. “Why? No.”

  “It’s what she wanted.” He moved back to the safe and brought out the pages he’d removed from the portfolio, the one with his own head shot atop it. “I was in there, too.”

  “No.” She shook her head and spoke in a hurried, half-panicked tone. “She often asked me to include you as a comparison when I prepared reports like this. She regarded you very highly, always measuring other businessmen by the standards you set.”

  “She asked me nine different times in the last year to come visit. How many times were any of those men invited here?”

  “They live in the city. She didn’t like to travel. She probably wanted you to come so she could tell you she was leaving everything to you.”

  “She wanted me to meet you. Look.” He flipped past the summary of his holdings and showed her the contract with their names already written into it.

  Her sharp inhale told him that had been a blow she hadn’t expected. He’d been shocked, too. And had wanted to see her reaction, to be sure she hadn’t set this up. Her lips were white, her pupils tiny dots.

  “You don’t want to marry me! Do you?” she asked with trepidation.

  “Marriage has not been a priority for me,” he admitted, but frowned.

  Mae was the only person he had ever listed as his beneficiary because she was the closest relative he had. There were reasons he hadn’t pursued marriage and children, one of them being that he would have to wade through a swamp of gold diggers to find someone suitable.

  Regardless of how uncomfortable it made him that Mae had plotted like this, there was something very expedient and businesslike in having marriage and progeny sourced and negotiated so all he had to do was agree to the terms. It provided a beautifully simple means of keeping emotions out of the equation.

  “You could just give me the dowry,” Luli urged with faint hope.

  If everything she had told him was true—and he was beginning to think it was—then she was too inexperienced to strike out alone, especially in a major center like New York or Paris, money in her pockets or not. The idea of her disappearing into thin air didn’t sit well.

  “It’s very likely Mae intended to make our marriage a condition of my inheriting.” He likely would have refuse
d, but now he’d met Luli and wasn’t so sure. He saw so much untapped potential in her. “In the same way I’m honoring her arrangements for the staff, I should provide you what she intended you to have.”

  “A husband? Lucky me,” she choked.

  He was both amused and insulted.

  “This is a very quick means of gaining you residency in New York, where you said you wanted to go. I’d prefer to get back there without delay.” He handed her the contract. “Read it. If you agree it’s favorable, we’ll sign it in the morning, marry and be on our way.”

  “New York? Really?” For the first time, an avid flash glittered in her eyes.

  It made him cautious enough to add, “And this way I can be sure you’re not embezzling to accounts in South America or dropping inconvenient PR bombshells.”

  She rolled the contract and held it in her fist, cocked her head in suspicion. “Am I supposed to disable everything now?”

  “This isn’t a trick.” He hid a smile at how much he enjoyed the way she held ground and presented a challenge at every turn. “Disable the timer. I’ll break in on my own time and assess what you’ve done. I don’t like that you’ve found vulnerabilities. I’ll examine those doors and seal them myself, ensure nothing like this can happen again.”

  Maybe this was the real attraction to marrying her, he mused as she frowned and left the room. He wanted to delve past her defenses and understand how she worked.

  * * *

  It was an opportunity that felt too good to turn down. And Luli had run out of options. Losing Mae had left her bereft in many ways.

  The marriage contract was quite generous, but he didn’t really want to give her an allowance, did he? Not that much? She crossed it out and set a question mark beside it for discussion. What about the settlements for children? Did he expect them to have sex? Or was this a marriage in name only?

  She went down early the next morning, wanting to talk it out, but he was much in demand. Solicitors and other officials were literally queued up, waiting their turn while he signed papers, made arrangements for Mae’s cremation and held a small press conference.