Chapter 1

"You reek of money!"

Ethan Pruitt slammed his chopsticks down on the rosewood table with a sharp crack.

The air in the private room froze on the spot.

I was still holding that thick stack of cash envelopes, about to hand them out to the aunts and cousins on the Pruitt side, and the smile locked onto my face. I couldn't hand them out, and I couldn't put them away.

The relatives around us traded glances. Some dropped their heads and drank their tea to cover the awkwardness; others just wore the look of people settling in to watch a show.

Sitting beside me, my wife, Yolanda Pruitt, went red with distress and gave her father's sleeve a quiet tug under the table. "Dad! Today's supposed to be a happy day, our dinner as a married couple. In front of all these relatives, what are you doing?"

Ethan Pruitt, veteran professor in the History Department at Sterling University, and a well-known "old scholar" in the antique world.

He pushed the gold-rimmed glasses up his nose and shot me a cold glance, the kind of look you'd give a badly made fake.

"A family dinner? Looks to me like you came to show off your money."

Ethan pointed at the envelopes in my hand, his voice heavy with grief and reproach. "Dick Finch, I know you've made a bit of money out there running your business. But look at yourself now. Every other word out of your mouth is a sales pitch, and you reek of new money from head to toe. This is a family of scholars, not your marketplace. Throwing cash at people? You think money buys respect? You think it buys culture?"

I drew in a deep breath and forced that whole bellyful of anger back down.

What could I do? He was the professor who'd flunked me in history four years running. And I was the one who'd carried off the precious daughter he'd spent more than twenty years raising.

Yolanda and I were college classmates.

Back then I was the notorious slacker, skipping class every day to run a startup and hawk goods from a street stall. And Ethan was the notorious "enforcer" of a professor, who took attendance every single class.

He failed me four times. I sat the makeup exam four times.

He liked to say, "Rotten wood cannot be carved."

And yet, of all people, his proudest daughter, that model student Yolanda, fell hopelessly in love with a piece of "rotten wood" like me.

The day we graduated, I proposed to Yolanda. Ethan was so furious he nearly threw an inkstone at me, and swore, "As long as I'm alive, don't you dare set foot in the Pruitt household!"

To prove myself, I worked like a madman those three years after graduation.

I caught the e-commerce wave, started from one small warehouse, and built the company up to over a hundred million a year in revenue.

I thought that once I had money, once I could give Yolanda the best life, Ethan would see me differently.

But reality slapped me hard across the face.

In his eyes I was still the class-skipping, uncultured slacker, now with a fresh label slapped on top: the man who reeked of money.

"Dad, Dick meant well..." Yolanda was still defending me.

"Meant well? Good intentions, bad results!" Ethan gave a cold snort. "Culture and refinement aren't something you can pile up with a few filthy dollars. Dick, if you really want me to think better of you, read more books and cut out all this flashy, empty nonsense!"

That dinner tasted like chewing wax from start to finish.

In the end, the envelopes I'd prepared never left my hand. I slunk them back into my bag.