Hillbilly Girlie Marries a Billionaire – Episode 07
Sophie removed her shoe from the dress, but the damage remained. She insisted Emily had provoked her and was unworthy of the Anderson name. Lucas listened without interruption, which Sophie mistook for uncertainty. Emily recognized something colder: he was allowing her enough rope to destroy herself publicly.
When Sophie finished, Lucas asked the boutique manager who had damaged the merchandise. The manager pointed to Sophie. He asked who had threatened a customer and attempted to strike her. Again, the answer was Sophie. Facts, delivered without emotion, dismantled every excuse she offered.
“She is not a customer,” Sophie snapped. “She’s a fraud wearing your name.” Lucas turned toward Emily, checking her face for injury before replying. The small gesture warmed her more than a grand declaration could have. He had entered a room full of powerful people and looked first to see whether she was safe.
Lucas said he alone decided what was right for him. Sophie’s lateness had revealed her arrogance; her behavior now confirmed his judgment. Emily had stolen nothing. She had simply accepted an offer that Sophie had treated as beneath her until someone else possessed it.
Desperation cracked Sophie’s composure. She seized Lucas’s sleeve and begged him not to throw away years of family expectations for a woman he had met that morning. Lucas removed her hand. His marriage might have begun as a contract, but humiliating Emily was not included in anyone’s terms.
Sophie laughed bitterly and pointed at Emily’s dress. “Look at her. She’s dressed in trash.” Lucas glanced at the torn blue fabric, then at the plain dress Emily had arrived in. His expression did not change. “She could wear a feed sack and still have more dignity than you’ve shown today.”
Emily stared at him. No one had ever defended her with such certainty—not even Kevin during their happiest years. Lucas did not demand gratitude or turn the rescue into a performance. He simply treated the attack on her as something intolerable.
Sophie warned Lucas that he was embarrassing himself in his own shopping center. The phrase caught Emily’s attention. She looked from the uniformed guards awaiting Lucas’s direction to the managers standing rigid nearby. Pieces of his identity aligned at once: the cars, the assistants, the limitless card, and the deference that followed him.
Lucas ordered security to escort Sophie out and ban her permanently from every Maple Malls property. Her face drained of color. She had expected his attention to belong to her by right; instead, the jewelry tycoon was using his authority to close the doors of his empire against her.
As the guards approached, Sophie shouted that Emily was temporary and Lucas would regret choosing her. Emily met her stare without shrinking. Sophie might understand wealth and family influence, but she had underestimated the endurance of a woman who had worked through hunger, betrayal, and fear.
The guards led Sophie away while her threats echoed through the atrium. Shoppers pretended not to stare. Emily turned to Lucas, stunned by the scale of what he controlled. “You own this place?” she asked. He adjusted his cuff and called it no great matter.
“You’re a billionaire jewelry tycoon,” she said, unable to keep disbelief from her voice. Lucas’s gaze held hers. “Right now, I’m Emily’s husband.” The simple answer sent a dangerous flutter through her chest, one the contract had not prepared her to manage.
Only after the tension eased did Emily realize her ankle ached from stepping back against a display. She attempted to walk and winced. Lucas crouched without concern for his tailored suit, examined the swelling, and told her not to put weight on it.
Before she could protest, he lifted her into his arms. Emily caught his shoulders, startled by the ease with which he carried her. Every eye in the mall followed them, but Lucas appeared indifferent. He instructed Adam to have a stylist bring suitable clothes to the house and walked toward the private elevator.
Emily insisted she could hop. Lucas replied that his wife would not hop through his mall because someone else had attacked her. Beneath the stern words, she heard concern. Her face warmed, and she blamed the crowd rather than the solid heat of his chest beneath her hand.
In the car, he arranged her injured ankle across the seat and placed a cold pack against it himself. Emily thanked him. Lucas said protection was part of the agreement, but his hands lingered with a gentleness no clause required.
She asked whether banning Sophie would create trouble with their families. Lucas acknowledged that it would. Sophie’s relatives did business with the Andersons, and his grandfather might object. Yet he showed no regret. Power meant little, he said, if it could not prevent cruelty beneath his own roof.
Emily looked out at the city, remembering how Kevin had watched Rose humiliate her in the rain. In less than two days, two men had revealed themselves by what they did when someone tried to hurt her. The comparison should not have mattered inside a temporary marriage, but it did.
At Lucas’s mansion, staff rushed forward with boxes from the mall. Gowns, shoes, and jewelry filled the entryway. Emily protested that one dress was enough. Lucas answered that she would choose whatever made her comfortable, then carried her upstairs despite her renewed objections.
He set her gently beside an enormous bed and reminded her they had a banquet to attend. As he turned to leave, Emily noticed an open velvet box among the deliveries. Inside lay an emerald necklace bearing the Anderson crest—and tucked beneath it was a card announcing her to the family as Lucas’s permanent bride, not his one-year wife.