My mother spent the whole of Thanksgiving shoving an apron at me and making me cook, serve, and clean for the entire extended family while they sat at the dining table drinking my father’s best wine, bragging about my sister’s New York fashion career and my brother’s failed business ventures, never once noticing my own plate sat untouched beside the kitchen sink.

Nathan was staying in the presidential suite at the Four Seasons, the same hotel my father had been trying to get a meeting at for six months. The doorman greeted him by name. The elevator operator smiled and asked if he wanted his usual newspaper in the morning.

Everyone knew Nathan Cole.

Everyone except my family.

When the elevator doors opened onto the top floor, Nathan led me down a hallway lined with original paintings I had only read about in art books. He used a key card to open the double doors, and I stepped into a room that was bigger than the entire first floor of my parents’ house.

Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over downtown Houston, the lights of the city stretching out forever. A fire was already lit in the fireplace. There were fresh flowers on every table—white roses, my favorite.

I had never told him white roses were my favorite.

“How did you know?” I asked, walking toward the arrangement.

Nathan came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders.

“I notice things about you,” he said. “You always stare at them when we pass florists. You touch the petals like you’re afraid they’ll disappear.” He turned me around to face him. “Nothing about you is going to disappear, Emily. Not anymore.”

He kissed me then, slow and gentle, like he was trying to convince me I was safe. For a minute, I let myself believe it. I let myself forget about my mother’s threats, my father’s phone call, the life I had just walked away from.

But when he pulled back, I couldn’t stop the questions.

“Nathan,” I said. “We need to talk about this. About my father’s company. About the contract. You knew who they were when you came to the house tonight, didn’t you? You knew Harold Whitmore was my father.”

Nathan walked over to the bar and poured two glasses of whiskey. He handed one to me and took a sip of his own before answering.

“I knew,” he said. “I’ve known since the day we met.”

I sat down on the edge of the couch.

“Since the day we met,” I repeated. “That was seven months ago. At the industry conference in Dallas. You were the keynote speaker. I was there because my father sent me to hand out his business cards to anyone who would take one. You walked up to me by the coffee station and said—”

“‘You look like the only person in this room who would rather be anywhere else,’” Nathan finished for me. He smiled at the memory. “I remember. You were wearing that blue dress that brings out the color of your eyes. You had three different pens in your purse because you said you never knew when someone would need to write something down. You told me you worked for Whitmore Construction. I put it together before you finished the sentence.”

“And you didn’t say anything?” I asked. The hurt in my voice surprised even me. “Seven months. We’ve been together seven months. You proposed to me three weeks ago. And you never once thought to mention that my father has been begging you for a fifty-million-dollar contract?”

Nathan put his glass down and knelt in front of me. He took both my hands in his.

“I didn’t tell you because it wasn’t relevant,” he said. “Your father’s business ambitions have nothing to do with us. Nothing to do with how I feel about you. I watched you for three months, Emily. I watched how you worked. I watched how you treated the waiters and the secretaries and the interns no one else noticed. I watched you stay late every night fixing mistakes your brother made, taking blame for things that weren’t your fault, apologizing for existing. And I fell in love with you. Not with Harold Whitmore’s daughter. With you.”

He paused, choosing his words carefully.

“I also knew that if I told you who I was in relation to your father, you would never have given me a chance. You would have assumed I was using you to get to him. Or that you were using me to get back at them. And neither of those things is true.”

I looked into his eyes. I wanted to believe him. God, I wanted to believe him.

“But why go to the house tonight?” I asked. “Why show up like that? You could have just called me. You could have picked me up somewhere else.”

Nathan’s face hardened.

“Because I got tired of it,” he said. “I got tired of you going home every night to people who treated you like garbage. I got tired of you lying to me about how ‘fine’ everything was when I could hear it in your voice that you were crying. And then this afternoon, your father sent me another email. The fourth one this week. He begged me for one last meeting. He said he would bring his whole family to dinner at my convenience. He said he would ‘make sure his daughter was there to serve’ if that’s what it took.”

My blood turned to ice.

“He said what?”

“His exact words,” Nathan said. “I have the email saved. He said, and I quote, ‘My daughter Emily is an excellent hostess. She will personally ensure every detail of the evening is perfect for you.’ He was pimping you out, Emily. To me. For a construction contract. And when I read that, I decided I had waited long enough. I wanted to see it with my own eyes. I wanted to see exactly how far they were willing to go. And then I wanted them to see exactly what they had thrown away.”

I stood up and walked to the window. The city lights blurred together.

So that was it.

My father hadn’t just been ignoring me. He hadn’t just been taking me for granted.

He had been planning to use me.

He had invited Nathan to dinner—invited the most eligible bachelor in Texas into his home—and fully intended for me to be the entertainment. The servant. The bargaining chip.

And if Nathan hadn’t been who he was, if he had been just another rich, entitled businessman, my father would have handed me over without a second thought.

“I’m going to destroy him,” Nathan said quietly behind me.

I turned around.

“What?”

“Your father,” Nathan said. He stood up and walked toward me. His eyes were dark. “The contract he wants? The fifty-million-dollar hotel expansion? I’m not just not giving it to him. I’m going to make sure he never works in this industry again. Every supplier he works with, every bank he borrows from, every politician he has in his pocket—I’m going to take them all away. He wanted to play games with my fiancée? Fine. I’ll play. And I always win.”

“Nathan, no,” I said. I grabbed his arm. “You can’t do that. There are other people who work for that company. Good people. People who have families. If you destroy Whitmore Construction, hundreds of people lose their jobs.”

Nathan looked at me like I had just told him the sky was green.

“After everything they did to you,” he said. “After twenty-five years of making your life a living hell. After tonight. You’re still worried about them?”

“I’m not worried about them,” I said. “I’m worried about you. My father doesn’t fight fair, Nathan. I told you that. If you come after his company, he will come after you. He will dig up everything he can find on you. He will make up lies if he has to. He will ruin your reputation. He doesn’t care who he hurts as long as he wins.”

Nathan smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile.

“Let him dig,” he said. “I’ve been waiting a very long time for Harold Whitmore to make a mistake big enough that I could take him down legally. Tonight, he gave me everything I need. The email. The eyewitnesses in that dining room. The way he treated you in front of everyone. This isn’t just business anymore, Emily. This is personal.”

The way he said it—personal—sent a shiver down my spine.

There was something he wasn’t telling me.

Something about why he hated my father so much.

Something that had started long before we met.

“Nathan,” I said slowly. “Why have you been waiting to take my father down? What did he do to you?”

The smile faded from his face.