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He slanted her a long look. “I worked for my money.”
Taken completely aback, she stared at him. “And no one else did?”
“Not the same,” he said tightly.
“Then explain it.”
“Fine.” He turned around, braced one hip against the edge of the counter and looked at her over the rim of his coffee mug. “You were born into money. Your father, too, probably.”
“And that’s bad.” It wasn’t a question, because she could see in his eyes that he definitely thought it was a bad thing.
“Not bad. Just easy. You can’t appreciate something if you never had to work for it.” He set his cup down. “I saw those people at the party last night. The women dripping in diamonds and the men standing around bragging to each other about their country clubs or cars or golf scores or whatever the hell else they care about. No one was talking about work.”
“It was a party,” Chloe said, and felt the first wave of frustration rise up to nearly choke her. “People were there to have a good time.”
“And to show off.”
He had a point, but... “For some people that is the good time.”
He snorted and shook his head.
And still she tried to break through whatever wall of silence he’d erected around himself. What they had was ending, and she at least deserved to know why.
“I’m not going to apologize for my family. I’ve already told you that I left that life as soon as I could. I work for a living, remember?”
“For now,” he acknowledged.
Those two words hit a trip wire inside Chloe. She felt the physical snap of the leash holding her temper back. “How do you get to make proclamations about what I’m going to do with my life?”
He snapped her a fiery look, and she knew that he too had reached the point where the truth would spill out or be buried forever. “I’ve seen it before.”
“With who?”
“A woman like you,” he said. “Born to money. Beautiful. Building her own life, she said, and I believed her. And for a while, it was true. Then one day, she decided she’d had enough of playing a role and returned to what she’d always been.”
As infuriating as this revelation was, it was also a relief. Finally, they were getting to the bottom of his inability to see her as a hardworking woman with a mind of her own and dreams to build.
“So I’m being judged by what some other woman did?” Chloe couldn’t believe this. She hadn’t been working to convince him she could do the job. She’d been in competition with a memory—a bad one. And the ghost had won. “Because she was a bitch, all women are the same?”
“Not all women.”
“Just the rich ones,” she said.
“Basically.”
“Right.” Shaking her head at the stupidity of this conversation, when she spoke, her voice carried the heat of her rising temper. “You know, my great-grandfather was a wildcatter. He sunk holes over half of East Texas looking for oil. Meantime, he worked the oil fields, moving from one to the next, taking his family with him. They lived in tents, fished for their dinner and worked hard.”
She was tired of being held up as somehow unworthy of respect because her family had money. Well, they hadn’t always. “He and my great-grandmother had five kids, and still managed to save enough money to buy a piece of land outside Beaumont. Grandpa had a hunch, he always said.” Liam was listening, at least. “They worked that plot of land for a solid year before they struck oil.”
He took a gulp of coffee and nodded. “It’s a good story. And your great-grandfather sounds like a hell of a man. But what’s your point?”
“You’re deliberately stupid,” she snapped, “if you don’t see it. They were a team. My great-grandmother was the one holding the family together while her husband worked for their future. Their sons grew the company and their children expanded it. My point is people work for what they have, one way or another. They all do. I do.”
“Yeah, but if things don’t work out for you, there’s always Daddy’s money to fall back on, right? So it cushions the failure.”
