Traded for his empire

Chapter 2: The Visitor

Nadia's POV

I didn't sleep.

Not because of the baby, though the nausea came back around two in the morning and I lay still for twenty minutes waiting for it to pass. Mostly I didn't sleep because of the sound of Cole's office door. Closed. The thin line of light under it that was still there at midnight when I got up for water. Still there at two. Gone by four, which meant he'd either finished or fallen asleep at his desk.

He did that sometimes. I had stopped going to check.

By seven I was dressed, eating crackers at the kitchen island. The housekeeper, Gloria, came in at seven-thirty, glanced at me with the careful expression she wore when she was pretending not to notice things.

"Good morning, Mrs. Whitmore."

"Morning, Gloria."

Cole appeared at eight, already in a suit, hair damp. He poured coffee without looking at me and drank it standing at the counter with his phone in his other hand.

"I'll be back late tonight."

"You have the Harding presentation."

"And a dinner after." He set the mug down. "Don't wait up."

He was gone before I could find anything to say to that.

***

The visitor arrived at eleven.

I was in the living room with my laptop, trying to finish the grant proposal I'd been working on for the foundation, when the intercom buzzed and the lobby attendant told me a Ms. Dani Layne was asking for Mr. Whitmore.

"Mr. Whitmore isn't home," I said.

"She says she doesn't mind waiting, ma'am."

A beat.

"Send her up."

The woman who stepped off the elevator was not what I expected and I couldn't have told you what I expected. She was tall, endowed with honey-blond hair, the kind that looked effortless and wasn't. She wore a camel coat over dark jeans, and she moved through my front door the way some people moved through spaces they remembered.

Like she had been here before.

"You must be Nadia." Her smile was warm and practiced. "Cole's told me so much about you."

"He hasn't told me anything about you," I said.

The smile stayed. "I'm Dani. We go way back, Cole and I. I was in London for three years and just got back last week." She looked around the living room. Her eyes moved over the art, the furniture, the view. "He redecorated. I always told him the old place was too dark."

My stomach turned. Not from the baby this time.

"Can I get you something while you wait?" My voice came out level.

"Coffee would be wonderful. Black, no sugar." She sat on the couch like she'd been invited. "He always made it too sweet, your husband. I spent two years trying to break him of that habit."

Two years.

I went to the kitchen.

***

She stayed for an hour.

Cole didn't come home. She finally stood, pulled out her phone to send him a message I couldn't read from where I sat, and smiled at me again.

"It was lovely meeting you. Truly… I can see why he chose you."

"Chose me?" I repeated.

"For the arrangement." She said it like it was common knowledge. Casual like it was a normal thing people do. "His grandmother's condition, the shares, all of it. He needed a wife who understood the terms." She tilted her head. "You did know it was an arrangement, didn't you?"

The room was very quiet.

"Of course," I said.

"Good." She touched my arm once, light, the way someone does when they're trying to appear kind. "Because I wouldn't want there to be any confusion. Now that I'm back."

She left.

I sat on the couch she had just vacated and didn't move for a long time.

***

Cole came home at ten.

I was still awake, sitting in the chair by the window, no lights on, the city spread out below like something that belonged to other people.

He saw me and stopped. "Why are you sitting in the dark?"

"Dani Layne came by today."

He was very still for exactly one second. "I see."

"She stayed for an hour. We talked." I looked at him. "She told me about the arrangement."

"Nadia—"

"I knew it was an arrangement," I said. "I knew from the beginning. Your grandmother asked me to marry you and I said yes and I understood what that meant." My voice was steady. I was proud of that. "What I didn't know was that there was someone else."

"There isn't someone else."

"She seems to think differently."

He loosened his tie, then sat in the chair across from me. The space between us was exactly the width of the coffee table and felt much wider.

"Dani and I have a history," he said. "It's finished. It was finished before the wedding."

"Is it finished now that she's back?"

He looked at me. His eyes were dark in the low light. "I married you."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have right now."

I stood up. My legs were steady. That surprised me too.

"I'm going to bed," I said. "We can talk on Saturday like you said."

I went upstairs.

He didn't follow.