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Page 79 of All the Beautiful Things

She hitched her purse over her camel-colored wool coat. “Dad’s already inside.” Her lips were pressed together in a tight, faux smile.

“Nina—”

She’d heard. She’d heard every single word and I didn’t exactly relish the fact she heard me call her nothing even if it was the truth. There was a time when I’d thought she could be everything, but there was never that spark. Never became that for me, and I suspected I wasn’t that for Nina, either. My money might have been. What we could have been as a power couple for whatever that meant. I had her respect and her loyalty… but her love? She’d never really had mine. I might have believed it for a time, but that was before I knew what love felt like. As for Nina, I wasn’t entirely sure she was capable of it.

“Come on. Dad’s waiting and you know how impatient he is.”

“We should talk.”

Always with appearances with her. Always thinking having a name made for yourself in Des Moines meant something more to anyone outside a small city. Like she was a Vanderbilt or a Kennedy. And she hadn’t even done anything. She was born into a family much like I was, but she didn’t do the work like I did. She just took the benefits her name brought her. Both of our families were in development. Fortunately, her family tended to stick to residential areas, buying up land and selling them for increasing growth in mostly suburban areas where we tried to stay in the city. We rarely came across each other and butted heads over the same property, but the river project on the Southside was too important to me.

And apparently, too important to her dad as well.

“I think you’ve said everything you need to say, don’t you?” Nina kept her eyes straight ahead, but she wasn’t as unaffected as she’d want me to believe.

“Listen. Nina. After dinner… can we go somewhere? Talk? I’d like to clear the air.”

“So you can be the Boy Scout and do the right thing?”

“Is that so wrong?”

“It’s been almost two years.”

“I know.” I was an asshole to her when we broke up, mainly because she didn’t want to listen. It was after Melissa’s death and I realized I didn’t love Nina, not the way I’d previously thought I had, not the way a man should love a woman he was dating for years. I was done wasting time with things that didn’t matter, but I hadn’t treated her kindly or respectfully. Maybe if I explained, in private, we could move on.

I reached around her to open the door.

She smiled up at me, a soft, friendly smile I had at one time been so attracted to. “Fine, Hudson. If it will make you feel better.”

“So, on a scale of one to ten, how difficult are your dad and brother going to be about this meeting?”

“With you? Probably a nine.”

“Oh great. Because I was worried this dinner wasn’t going to be stressful at all.”

She burst into a laugh and we walked in as if what she overheard meant nothing, but she was happy to be with me anyway.

Yeah. She and I needed to talk.

* * *

“What areyou going to give me for walking away?”

“Pardon?” I patted my mouth with my black cloth napkin.

I hadn’t expected her dad to ignore business all through dinner, or for her brother to continue glaring at me like he wanted to set me on fire.

And I definitely hadn’t expected this to be his opening line to get down to work.

“You heard me. If we choose to walk away—”

“Which we won’t—” Patrick cut in. Where Nina was aloof and proper and possibly unfeeling, Patrick was a douche, living on Daddy’s money and pretending he helped out at the office. He’d run the business into the ground when Gerald retired eventually.

Without me to merge the companies, Patrick would ruin his inheritance and everything Gerald and his father and his father before him built. At one point, they’d owned most of the farmland around Des Moines. And what they didn’t own, they bought. Once development started happening and once the suburbs started taking off, they became the richest family in Iowa. Far surpassing our own.

We stuck to Des Moines. They had land in every county of the state.

Gerald cut Patrick a glance and returned his attention to me. “You want the river land. We want it. What would you give up to get what you want?”


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