Two people who each believed they were running a con on the other, circling closer and closer, each mistaking the other’s hunger for a mark’s gullibility.
She thought she’d found a wealthy fool to fleece; he thought he’d found an heiress to marry up into.
Neither of them had noticed the joke at the center of it — that the real fortune had been sitting in the quiet woman they both looked straight through, the wife he demeaned and the rival she never bothered to fear.
They deserved each other in the most complete sense of the phrase.
Two people who valued human beings strictly by what could be extracted from them, who had finally, inevitably, found the one partner cruel enough to try to extract from them in return.
I did not have to destroy their romance.
I only had to turn on the lights and let them see, at last, exactly who they had chosen.
Chapter 14 — The Forgery
A promissory note appeared on the screens.
Forty million dollars.