Page 80 of The Heiress

“Samantha Victoria Rossi Roark Stroman.” I glared at the two attorneys and four business liaisons that seemed to have forgotten I was in the room at all.

“What was that?” Charles asked. I was very, very grateful Georgia’s personal attorney and lover was there. Even though I hadn’t seen much of him in the last couple of weeks, he was an ally.

“My name. Legally going forward I will be Samantha Victoria Rossi Roark Stroman.”

“Uh,” the first liaison babbled. “I thought we all agreed you would take the first name Victoria and simply go by Samantha.”

“It’s not my name. I’ll keep Victoria, but my name is Samantha.”

His face went sour, but he scribbled something on a piece of paper and then began mashing his keyboard.

Charles spoke again. “You want Stroman to be your surname?”

I nodded once. “None of this hyphenation crap. I want to keep Rossi. That’s important to me. And I’ll keep Roark too. But my last name will be Stroman.”

The room fell so silent it seemed impossible. At least the army of laptops should make a noise of some kind. A fan clicking on or something. They were probably too advanced for that. I bet they had alien tech inside them that stayed cool forever or something.

“We simply cannot agree to that,” lawyer number two said.

“It wasn’t a request.” I stared him down, so truly done with the bickering. “That’s the final decision. Make it happen. Someone call me when the car is ready.” As I stood up I caught Charles’ grin and the secret thumbs up he showed me and only me.

It was the one and only time I felt alive all day. I was numb through the court proceedings, conference calls, and paperwork. I barely registered the enormity of my holdings and trusts being transferred to my name, let alone the actual changing of my name. None of it mattered anymore. It was all details.Iwasn’t changing. And none of it could bring me the answers I needed any faster, so what did it matter?

* * *

“Didyour meeting go all right last night?” I asked. “We didn’t get a chance to talk about it.”

Jace looked up from buttoning his dress shirt. “What? Oh. Yeah it was fine.”

He seemed annoyed by my question. So annoyed he went over to the sound system and started music.

Was he trying to keep me from talking?

“Are you sure?” I asked over the music. “You’ve been in a mood all day.”

His jaw flexed and he didn’t look at me. Whatever he did last night, he wasn’t happy about it and he really didn’t want to talk about it. After he finished buttoning his shirt he came to me. “Today was a lot. Keeping you safe is a full-time job. I just felt the stress of it today after we learned what we learned from the paperwork last night. I can’t have you in harm’s way.”

“I’m going to talk to Georgia tomorrow.”

He half-smiled. “What did or didn’t happen twenty-eight years ago isn’t as important as keeping you safenow.We know who the problem is, so I’m working on a solution. All this trouble started when the Feyereisen brothers hooked up with Bernard. They’re the one who came after you. Whatever the details are, the most important one is that they’re dangerous.” He ran his thumb over my cheek. “I’ve got this. Trust me.”

Ah, there was that word. Trust. I trusted him. But did I believe him? Yes, he was worried about me, and yes, he had to handle the club and his clients on top of it all, but I knew when he was keeping something from me, and he was keeping something from me.

“Okay.”

He sighed with relief, closing his eyes. Then he took my face in his hands and kissed me. “I love you, Sam. So much.”

“And I love you.”

We kept dressing. The song switched. Jace groaned.

“What’s wrong?”

Jace frowned like a forlorn little boy. “This song. It’s Wes Allen’s walk-up music.”

“Is this a baseball thing again?”

He nodded and it was really quite pathetic. “Every player has a song they play when they go up to bat. This is Wes’s. And the season is over and I miss baseball already.”

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