The moment I stepped across the threshold of the ballroom, the air thick with the scent of lilies and expensive desperation, I heard it. It was a whisper, technically, but it carried the acoustic precision of a gunshot in a canyon.
“Oh, great. The stinky country girl is here.”
Sloan Whitmore, my brother’s flawlessly manicured fiancée, was leaning toward her phalanx of bridesmaids, a crystal flute of champagne dangling precariously from her fingers. Her friends—a clone army of pastel chiffon and blowout hairstyles—erupted into giggles that sounded like hyenas fighting over a carcass. Sloan didn’t even deign to look at me. To her, I was less than significant; I was an atmospheric disturbance, a smudge of dirt on the lens of her perfect engagement party.
I was merely the embarrassment that had crawled out of the backwoods to ruin the aesthetic.
What Sloan Whitmore didn’t know—what not a single soul in this room knew—was that the very ground beneath her overpriced Italian heels belonged to me. I had signed the deed to the Monarch Hotel three years ago. Every crystal in the chandeliers vibrating above her head, every thread in the velvet drapes, every ounce of silver in the fork she was using to spear a canapé—it was all mine.
