Chapter 288: His Girl
** Eli **
Eli stopped, an arm’s length away from Harper. She stopped as well. Then they both turned to where the sound had come from.
Emory was dusting off her palm, rubbing it on her dress with a sickened face as if she had just touched something dirty and revolting. Vanessa was clutching her cheek with one hand, eyes wide as she stared at the younger woman standing across from her.
The entire hall fell into stunned silence.
"... You bitch!!" Finally, Vanessa recovered enough from her shock to remember to shriek. "How dare you!"
"You just stole my line there. I mean, lines, both of them." The black-dressed girl stabbed her fellow heiress with a dark look, and a surprising dose of lethal anger shone through her eyes. "How dare you wiggle into the spotlight and utter all that nonsense, when my father’s announcement has absolutely nothing to do with you? How dare you slander my brother with such absurd innuendos and then call me names when I defend him? Who the hell do you think you are?"
Vanessa stared at the younger woman, still steaming in fury, and it apparently took a few moments for those words to fully register. She blinked a few times in confusion before turning her gaze to a man standing behind the podium — her father, the president of Voyage Bank — as if unsure whether she had just heard everything right.
Obviously, she had no idea who Emory was, and it was only the awkward look on her father’s face that confirmed the fact she needed to know.
"I have no idea where you got those baseless rumors from," Emory continued. "They are not even that creative, you know. Kind of cliché and boring. Maybe you’re simply assuming based on your own experiences — self projections are common when it comes to speculating other people’s motives. But anyway, no thanks to that, the rest of us can see things for ourselves just fine. All it takes is to look out the window," — she waved at the high glass panels lining the upper walls beside them — "that’s the project sponsored by Sterling’s latest partnership deal right there, if anyone wants to judge its ’professional quality’!"
The crowd’s attention turned to the direction she was pointing at. Eli was about to follow suit, when he suddenly remembered that the windows beside them ... were facing east, opening right up to an unobstructed view of the harbor centering on the city billboard.