The Billionaire Heiress Returns Too Late to Beg

The day Nigel Delgado fell for the girl I'd been sponsoring, I was sitting at the head table of our engagement banquet, waiting for him to slide the ring onto my finger.

The emcee had said it three times now. Will the groom please place the ring on his bride.

Three hundred guests watched the silence stretch, and their expectant faces slid into confusion, then into the bright, ugly anticipation of people who sense a scene coming.

I gripped the bouquet until my fingertips went white.

"Ms. Henson, Mr. Delgado is outside. But"

A waiter had hurried in and stopped, swallowing whatever came next.

I kept my face still, lifted my skirt, and walked out.

By the fountain in the hotel garden, Nigel was down on one knee, fitting a shoe onto a girl in a white dress.

I knew the girl. Constance Pruitt, the scholarship student I'd taken on three years ago.

She'd come to the city for college with nowhere to live, so I'd moved her into my apartment, bought her clothes and bags, introduced her to the people in my circle.

I'd treated her like my own sister.

When Constance saw me, her eyes reddened on cue, her voice catching on a sob.

"Alma, I'm so sorry, my heel snapped, Nigel was only helping me"

"Don't."

Nigel stood and stepped in front of her, shielding her with his body. There was no guilt in the way he looked at me. Only a kind of guileless honesty.

"Alma, I've thought it through. I can't go through with the engagement."

...

Around us, every spectator drew a sharp breath.

None of them had believed Nigel would actually say it out loud, in front of all of them.

He was the only son of the Delgado family. I was the eldest daughter of the Hensons. A marriage between the two houses was something New York's business circle had taken as settled fact.

We'd been together three years. He'd been gentle, attentive. Everyone said we were made for each other.

"Why?"

My voice came out steadier than I'd expected.

"Because I'm in love with Constance."

"She's simple, kind. She isn't calculating like everyone in our world. With her, I get to be who I really am."

As he said it, he glanced back at the girl behind him, and his expression went unbearably soft.

Calculating?

I nearly laughed out loud.

Five years I'd spent clawing through that business world. I'd closed three major deals for Nigel. When his father had the stroke, I'm the one who held the company steady.

Everything I'd done, and in his mouth it became calculating.

"So? You want to call it off?"

I looked at him.

Nigel nodded, his tone firm.

"Yes. I'm going to marry Constance."

Behind him, Constance sobbed until she couldn't catch her breath.

"Alma, I never set out to take Nigel from you, I'm not good enough for him"

"I just, I couldn't help how I felt. If you have to blame someone, blame me, don't blame Nigel"

She cried so prettily, so innocently, as if she were the one who'd been wronged.

I took a slow breath and worked the engagement ring off my finger.

I looked at it, and the irony cut deeper.

Because I'd been the one to go pick this ring up, alone, because something had come up for Nigel that day.

I held it out to him.

"Fine. I hope you'll be happy."

Nigel blinked, thrown. He hadn't expected me to make it so easy.

He took the ring, his lips moving like he wanted to say something, but in the end all he managed was a low, "I'm sorry."

I turned and walked back the way I'd come, indifferent, my hem dragging gray across the stone path.

Behind me, Constance's small, thin voice drifted after me.

"Do you think Alma hates me? I don't want to lose her as a sister"

Nigel was comforting her.

"She won't. She's not that kind of person."

I almost laughed.

Not that kind of person?

No. I wasn't like them.

I wouldn't tear into anyone in front of three hundred people. I wouldn't turn the Delgados and the Hensons into open enemies.

I would leave with my dignity intact and keep every scrap of the wreckage for myself.

The engagement was off.

The murmuring of three hundred guests rolled toward me like a tide. I had dragged the Henson name through the mud.

My mother cried right there in the ballroom. My father stood rigid, his face dark, and said nothing.

News travels fast.

By the next day, I was the joke of every social circle in New York.

"The eldest Henson daughter, thrown over for some charity case!"

"Three years together, and she still couldn't beat a scholarship girl!"

"I heard she brought that girl into our circle herself."

The talk spread everywhere, so I turned off my phone and shut myself in my apartment for three days.

On the fourth morning, I switched it back on and found that Nigel had posted on social media.

A photo of Constance cooking in a kitchen.

The caption read, An ordinary day, with the person I love most.

I didn't bother reading the comments.

I called my father.

"Dad, I want to go to London for a while. The branch office is short-staffed, isn't it?"

He was quiet for a long time.

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure."

"Then go."

Before he hung up, he said one more thing. "Alma. Your father will always be in your corner."

That was when the tears finally came.

The day before I left, I went to the office to pack up my things.

When the elevator doors opened, I saw Nigel and Constance.

Constance was wearing the Chanel dress I'd left at the apartment, her hair styled exactly the way I used to wear mine, a Starbucks coffee in her hand. She was tilted up toward Nigel, listening to him talk, her eyes crinkled with laughter.

The moment she saw me, the smile froze on her face.

"Alma"

She shrank back behind Nigel without thinking.

Nigel saw me, and something complicated crossed his face.

He looked me over.

No makeup, a hoodie and jeans. Nothing like the woman who once never let a single hair fall out of place.

"Alma, you"

He tried to speak, to smooth over the awkwardness.

I cut him off, flat and cold.

"Ms. Henson is fine. We're not close."

Constance's eyes went red again, her voice thick. "Alma, are you still angry with me? I really I really don't know how to make it up to you"

"If you want the apartment, Nigel and I can move out!"

I watched her run through that dull little performance and told her the plain truth.

"That apartment is in my name. If you want to live there, consider it a rental. Don't forget the rent."

The color drained out of her face.

Nigel frowned. "Alma, don't talk like that. Constance didn't mean any harm"

"Neither did I."

I pressed the button to close the doors. I had no interest in looking at either of them any longer.

"Goodbye."

As the doors slid shut, I saw Constance fold into Nigel's arms, her shoulders trembling, as if she were crying.

I closed my eyes.

Enough.

This mess wasn't mine to manage anymore.

So three days later, I flew straight to London.

No one came to see me off.

My mother was crying on the phone, my father was in a meeting, and my assistant, Glenda Coleman, was clearing the rest of my things out of the apartment.

"Alma, that ungrateful little snake Constance walked off with the limited-edition bags you had in the storage room. She took your white mink coat, too!"

Glenda's voice shook with fury through the line.

"Let it go. Call it scraps thrown to a dog."

"You're too easy to push around!"

"Not easy to push around. Just not worth my time."

I watched the clouds drift past the window and answered with a faint, almost amused smile.

Nigel wasn't worth it. Constance wasn't worth it. None of that wreckage was worth it. My life shouldn't be wasted on people like them.

London was quiet.

The branch office didn't demand much. I rose early, ran, went to work, learned to bake, practiced yoga.

Weekends I wandered through museums, or walked the Thames alone for a long, long time.

I grew thinner. And quieter.

The old Alma, the one who could charm a table over three glasses of red wine and walk away with a two-hundred-million-dollar deal, seemed to have died on the day of that engagement party.

There was a colleague at the branch named James, blond, blue-eyed, with a smile like an open sky.

He pursued me for three months. Coffee. Movies. An invitation to spend Christmas with his parents.

I tried.

But when he took my hand, all I could see was Nigel standing by that fountain, saying, "I'm in love with Constance."

The nausea hit at once.

So I turned James down, gently.

I wasn't sure anymore that I could believe in love at all.

Time moved fast.

I learned a great deal in London.

And in the spring of the third year, my father called. "Alma, come home. Your mother misses you."

I thought about it for a long while, then booked a flight back.

On the plane, I scrolled to a message from Glenda.

"Alma!! Nigel and Constance have fallen out!! Do you want the gossip!!"

Three exclamation points.

I raised an eyebrow and replied with a single word. "Talk."

And Glenda fired off a barrage of voice messages, one after another.

I listened to them one by one, and slowly the corner of my mouth curved up.

Who doesn't want to hear their enemy's misfortune?

It turned out that less than half a year after I left, Nigel and Constance had married.

When Nigel married Constance, the whole Delgado family stood against it.

His mother even threatened to take her own life, saying Constance was low-born and unrefined, no match for the Delgados.

But Nigel had set his heart on it. He said Constance was the only person he would ever love, and he'd cut ties with the family before he gave her up.

In the end the Delgados gave way, on one condition: no wedding, just a signed certificate.

Constance cried over that for days. A woman only marries once, she said, and she wanted a proper wedding.

It broke Nigel's heart, so he paid out of his own pocket for a small wedding.

It couldn't touch the ten-million-dollar spectacles their circle was used to, but it counted as effort.

For the first three months after the wedding, Nigel paraded their love across social media every single day.

Constance learned flower arranging, baking, piano, and Nigel actually had the nerve to caption a post calling her "my hidden treasure."

But it didn't last.

Once Constance moved into the Delgado estate, the trouble started.

She wasn't used to the rules of high society.

She didn't greet her elders, she picked up her fork before they did, she barked at the staff.

Eve Delgado was furious. She called her out in front of the whole family for having no upbringing.

Constance ran back to her room in tears and complained to Nigel.

Nigel, aching over his darling, turned around and had a screaming fight with his mother.

Eve laughed, cold and short, and mocked her own son for his stupidity.

"You said you loved her for being so simple and innocent. Just you wait! There'll be plenty of days you can't stand how little she knows!"

"Let me tell you something, Nigel. Innocence is cute in the slums. In this family it's an embarrassment."

Nigel took it.

He swallowed his pride, coaxed Constance for the better part of a month, and finally she agreed to start learning etiquette.

Eve had a sharp tongue but a soft heart, and she even hired a private tutor to teach her.

But after the better part of a year, Constance still managed to wear the wrong thing to the events that mattered.

For the birthday banquet of an old Delgado family friend, she'd worn a white gown, and the sight nearly gave the man a stroke.

The first time Nigel ever blew up at her was eight months into the marriage.

The Delgados were in talks with another family, and the other side had brought their daughter along, clearly angling for a match.

Eve hinted that Nigel could use the opportunity. He turned it down flat.

But once Constance found out, she made his life hell for three straight days.

Was he sorry he'd married her, she demanded. Had he set his eye on someone else.

"That was my parents' idea! And I already said no, so what are you still throwing a fit about?"

Nigel couldn't believe it.

"If you didn't have your own ideas, why even sit down with them? Let her father handle the talks instead."

Constance cried until her makeup ran, sobbing herself sick, gutted right through.

"You regret it. You think I'm beneath those high-society girls!"

"Enough!"

Nigel finally hit his limit and hurled a glass to the floor.

It was their first head-on fight.

After that, fighting became part of daily life.

Constance grew more and more touchy, convinced Nigel looked down on where she came from.

When he took her to banquets, she said nothing the whole night, then came home complaining she'd been treated like a piece of furniture.

When he left her behind, she accused him of being ashamed of her.

"I don't know how she turned into this," Nigel said over drinks with a friend. "She wasn't like this before. She used to be so kind, so gentle."

His friend gave him a long look. "Maybe she always was like this. You just never saw it."

Glenda's voice memo paused there. Then another one came through.

"Alma!! Here's the main event!! Constance got caught in bed with Nigel's chauffeur!!"

I nearly dropped my phone.

What?

"Last month!! Constance said she was going for a spa day, and the paparazzi snapped her checking into a hotel with Nigel's chauffeur!!"

"That driver had been with Nigel for five years!! The photos were crystal clear, the two of them all over each other right in the lobby!!"

"Nigel was out of town closing a deal, and his phone blew up. He didn't even believe it, said the paparazzi were making it up. So he flew back overnight and walked in on Constance and the driver in his own garage"

"Hahaha he lost it!! He went to swing at the driver right then and there, and Constance dropped to her knees, hugging his leg and crying that she'd only done it because she was so lonely!"

"Nigel was never home, she was rattling around that huge house with nobody to talk to, she said she just needed someone to hold her! God, she actually said that out loud?"

"Now Nigel wants the divorce and Constance won't budge, says she wants half the family fortune. His mother got so worked up she landed in the hospital, and his father's threatening to cut him off entirely"

"Bottom line, Nigel is a joke now."

I set the phone down and leaned back in my seat.

Beyond the window, London's sky was a dull gray. In a few more hours, I'd touch down in Westport.

Three years.

I'd changed, they'd all changed, and nothing was the way it used to be.

Still, this particular joke, I was happy to hear.

The day I landed in Westport, Glenda came to get me.

She stood at the arrivals gate holding up a big sign that read, "Welcome home, Ms. Henson."

I walked over smiling, and she threw her arms around me and burst into tears.

"You've gotten thinner, Alma."

"And you've gotten fatter."

"Can you not?"

She wiped her eyes and smacked me.

I climbed into the car and watched the city streak past the window, a whole lifetime away from where I'd left it.

Three years gone, and a lot of it had changed. But some things hadn't.

Traffic. Smog. Glenda's nonstop chatter.

"Alma, now that you're back, what's the plan?"

Glenda asked it without taking her eyes off the road.

"Mr. Henson already said the CEO seat is still yours. Your father's been holding it for you all these years."

"No rush. I'll rest a few days first."

"Then where are you going to stay? Miss Pruitt lived in your old apartment for over a year. She moved out eventually, but she left it a mess."

"I sent a cleaning crew in, but if you'd rather not stay there"

"Of course I'm not staying there. What were you thinking? Find me somewhere new."

I said it with a laugh.

There was no way I was moving into a place that still carried Constance's presence.

Glenda found me a fully furnished apartment fast, near the downtown trade center, with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the whole financial district.

I signed a one-year lease, bought new furniture, started over from scratch.

On my third day back, I went to the mall to buy clothes.

As I stepped out of the fitting room, I heard a voice I knew.

"This one's too revealing. I don't like it."

I looked up and saw Constance.

She had on a red dress, her hair set in loose waves, her makeup flawless. But the shadows under her eyes were dark and deep.

A sales associate stood beside her, holding four or five outfits, looking faintly put out.

Constance wasn't looking my way.

She was studying her profile in the mirror, touching the corner of her eye, muttering, "Have I been staying up too much lately? My skin looks awful..."

I watched her for two seconds, then turned to go.

"Alma Henson?"

She'd caught me.

I turned back.

Constance's face went from confusion to shock. Her eyes ran up and down me as if she meant to see straight through.

"It's really you?" She took a step closer. "When did you get back?"

"A couple of days ago."

"Oh..."

She pressed her lips together, like she was weighing her words.

"You've changed so much."

"Have I?"

"Thinner. And you're glowing."

Her gaze settled on my face and lingered.

"Do you... have a boyfriend now?"

I didn't answer. I turned it back on her. "And you? I heard you and Nigel Delgado..."

I didn't finish. Constance's face changed.

She bit her lip, and her eyes went red in an instant.

"Alma, I... Nigel wants a divorce. He wants to throw me out. I really don't know what to do anymore..."

I looked at her.

Three years ago, she'd stolen my fianc at our engagement party.

Three years later, she was crying to me in a mall about how miserable that marriage was.

"Alma, can't you help me?"

She grabbed my wrist, her grip startlingly strong.

"You and Nigel had something once. Couldn't you put in a word for me? I know I was wrong. I really do know I was wrong..."

I peeled her hand off, my face blank.

Inwardly marveling at the sheer nerve of her.

"Constance, whatever's going on between you and Nigel Delgado has nothing to do with me."

She froze, tears clinging to her lashes, hanging there without falling.

But I felt no tenderness toward her at all.

"You're the one who took him in the first place. How it gets handled now is between you and him."

I picked up my shopping bags as I spoke.

"I have no standing in it, and no interest in getting involved."

With that, I turned and walked away.

Behind me came Constance's voice, thick with tears.

"Are you still blaming me? You hate me, don't you?"