TE BILLIONAIRE'S SECOND BRIDE

CHAPTER FOUR

Avery's POV

The dress came in a white box three weeks later, with no note.

Deep green silk slid across my hands like poured water, cut low at the neck, long and heavy. It was not a dress I would ever have chosen. It was a dress I had only ever seen through shop windows.

"For the Senator's gala," said the housekeeper. "Mr. Blackwood's orders."

"Did he pick it?"

"His assistant did, ma'am."

Of course.

I put it on anyway. It fit almost perfectly, and I could not tell if that was kindness or accident. The stylist had come that afternoon, taken one look at my curls, and said, "Leave them. They're gorgeous." I turned to the mirror, and a stranger looked back, her skin glowing against the green, her curves standing tall instead of hiding.

I stood there so long the housekeeper coughed.

The night they took my thumb drive, I had lain awake and made a list of what I still had. My memory. Harbor Line Consulting. The forty-one payments. And every night after, I worked in secret at my little desk, tracing the shell company through public tax records.

They had stolen my evidence. They had not stolen my brain.

Damian waited at the foot of the stairs in a black tuxedo. His eyes lifted, widened, and his hand clamped on the banister.

Then his face shut like a door.

"You're late."

"I'm sorry."

"Rules. Smile. Speak little. Say nothing of business."

"Yes."

He offered his arm, stiff as a soldier's. I took it. Through the wool, I felt heat and hard muscle. I pretended not to.

The Reyes Foundation gala filled the ballroom of the Whitcombe Hotel on Park Avenue, under a gold ceiling and a hundred crystal lights. Cameras flashed as we entered. "Mrs. Blackwood! Over here!" I flinched. No one had called me that in public before.

"Smile," Damian murmured against my ear.

I smiled. His palm settled on my waist, and every thought in my head scattered.

Senator Reyes met us at the top of the steps, silver-haired, handsome in a polished, professional way. He held my hand a moment too long.

"So this is the woman who saved the merger. Not what the papers described."

"What did they say?" I asked.

Damian's fingers tightened on my waist.

The Senator chuckled. "That you were plain. They were wrong."

"Thank you, Senator."

"Callum. I look forward to working with your family. Very closely."

I disliked the way he said family. I glanced at Damian. His face gave away nothing.

For an hour, I stood at his side.

I said my few lines. I watched women stare at him with open hunger, and watched him ignore every one. I watched men shrink when he spoke. And I caught him looking at me, over and over, when he thought I wasn't watching, with a quick, frowning stare, like a man trying to recall a word on the tip of his tongue.

At nine, Sabrina cornered me by the dessert table.

"Green is a bold choice."

"Thank you."

"I hope you don't mind that I told everyone about your little basement adventure." Her smile was sweet as syrup. "So sad. Sneaking around his father's things, trying to seem useful. I almost feel sorry for you."

"Sabrina..."

"Sabrina."

The voice was low and cold. Damian stood behind her, glass in hand.

"Go home."

"Damian, I only..."

"Now."

She went white and fled. A dropped strawberry rolled across the floor.

"You didn't have to..." I began.

"I didn't do it for you," he said. "She embarrassed the family."

The tiny warmth in my chest guttered and went out.

"Of course," I said.

The car ride home was silent. City lights slid down the black window in long streaks. I stared at my silver shoes and pressed my nails into my palms.

"Do you enjoy it?" I said suddenly.

He turned his head. "Enjoy what?"

"Making me feel small."

"I don't make you feel anything."

"You do. Every day. In the kitchen. At dinner. Tonight." My voice shook. "I am not a chair, Damian. I am a person."

He said nothing for so long I thought he would not answer.

"I know you are a person," he said at last, rough as gravel. "That's the problem."

In the flash of passing streetlights, his face looked older and more tired than I had ever seen it.

"I don't understand you."

"Neither do I."

The car stopped at the estate. He strode ahead through the front door, and I gathered my heavy skirt and hurried after. Halfway across the great hall, his phone rang. He listened. The color drained from his face.

"What happened?"

"Grandmother." His voice split. "She collapsed at dinner. They're taking her to the hospital."

We spent that night in the waiting room of the Hudson Valley Medical Center, under a buzzing light, beside a vending machine that ate a dollar and gave nothing back. Damian punched it once, hard, then sat down and stared at his hands.

I did something I did not plan.

I took his hand.

He did not pull away. He sat with his elbows on his knees and his tie hanging loose, and his fingers locked around mine until my knuckles ached.

"She's all I have left," he said. It was the first honest sentence he had ever given me. "My father died a few weeks after the accident. My mother was already gone. Grandmother raised me."

"I know," I said softly.

"How?"

"It's in every magazine."

At four in the morning, a doctor came out. Vivienne's heart had skipped, but she was stable. She needed rest. She was asleep.

Damian exhaled, long and shaky. He pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes, and his shoulders jerked once.

I wrapped my arms around him.

He stiffened. Then, slowly, like a wall giving way, he leaned into me. His face pressed against my neck. His hand crushed the back of my dress.

"Stay," he said.

I should have said no. I knew the contract. I knew clause six. I knew he would hate himself by sunrise.

But I had waited seventeen years for him to look at me like this.

"Yes," I whispered.

I will not tell every detail of what happened at the estate that night. Some memories are too tender to say out loud.

I will say he kissed me like a man coming up from underwater. His hands trembled. He said my name, my real name, against my skin, over and over, as if it were the only word he knew. For a few hours, there was no contract and no Celeste and no lies. There were only two lonely people in a dark room.

Later, I lay with my cheek against his shoulder and found the scar under my fingertips, a thin ridge running across the bone.

"Does it still ache when it's cold?" I asked.

His whole body went still. "How do you know it aches?"

But sleep was pulling him down. His breathing slowed. His arm tightened around me. And I said the thing I had kept locked in me for seventeen years, so softly he could not hear.

"Sleep, Captain. You're safe."

I closed my eyes and thought, foolishly: Maybe he sees me now. Maybe it will be different.

When I woke, the bed was empty.

Cold light lay across the sheets. My green dress sprawled on the floor. On the pillow sat a note on Blackwood Global letterhead, in his sharp, tidy hand.

Last night was a mistake. It will not happen again. Do not think it means anything. Remember the contract.

I read it once. Then I folded it into a square no bigger than a stamp and held it against my sternum. Down the hall, a car door slammed. Tires crunched away on the gravel.

He had not even stayed to say goodbye.

I did not cry. I was past it.

I washed my face. I dressed. I sat at my little desk and opened my laptop. For three weeks I had chased Harbor Line Consulting through state filings and tax records. That morning, at last, I found the registered agent's bank details.

Then I found a transfer from Harbor Line, dated the day before Celeste vanished. The amount was two hundred thousand dollars.

The receiving account belonged to Thomas Vale.

My father.

I read the name until the letters swam. The room tilted like a ship's deck.

My hand dialed my mother on its own. She answered on the second ring.

"Mama. Papa took money from a company called Harbor Line. The day before Celeste left. Why?"

Silence. A long, thin breath.

"Avery." Her voice was perfectly calm. "Do your job. Be a good wife. And stop asking questions."

"Mama..."

"Some things are bigger than you."

The line clicked dead.

I sat there with the phone pressed to my ear, listening to nothing.

They had known. Celeste's disappearance, the rushed wedding, the empty pew in the church, all of it was a stage, and I was the actress my parents had chosen because I never said no.

They had sold me. Two hundred thousand dollars. And my husband didn't want me, and somebody in this house wanted me dead.

Outside, gravel crunched. I rose and looked through the window. Damian's black car pulled into the drive.

A second car followed. Reginald stepped out of the back seat, a thick folder tucked under his arm, and looked up, straight at my window, and smiled.

The folder had my name on the tab.