STITCHED IN LIES

Chapter 11: The Gala

The Wenthworth Foundation gala filled the ballroom of the Grand Meridian with four hundred of the city's richest faces. Chandeliers hung like frozen fireworks. Waiters in white gloves drifted between ministers and bankers and women with spines of steel and smiles of silk.

Marcus's palm settled on the small of her back the instant they walked in, light as courtesy, heavy as a leash.

Cameras flashed. Marcus Maine and his devoted wife. He had the smile ready, a beautiful instrument that he could produce on command and withdraw without a trace. Shyne's own smile arrived half a beat behind. It always did. She had once been the kind of woman who lit up a room without trying. Now she had to remember where to put her mouth.

A woman passed them on the stairs, tall, polished, cool-eyed, in a column of emerald silk that fit like a secret. Marcus's palm did not move on Shyne's back, but she felt something in the muscle of it change, a minute tightening, like a man who has heard his own name spoken across a room.

"Vivienne," he said, nodding.

"Marcus." The woman's gaze touched Shyne for exactly the length of a blink. "Mrs. Maine. What a charming dress."

The scent reached Shyne a moment later, floral and expensive and faintly bitter at the base, the way a lily smells when it has been kept too long in a warm room.

It was the scent on her husband's collar. The one that arrived every night at one a.m.

Shyne smiled. She said, "Thank you." Her voice did not shake.

She was almost proud of that. It was a terrible kind of pride, the pride of a woman who has become so good at hiding that she can hide from a stranger in a ballroom. But it was also a skill, and as she followed Marcus into the glittering crowd, it occurred to her that skills can be turned around.

I'm very good at being underestimated, she thought. That's the one thing he never taught me to lose.

She saw Chad Wenthworth before he saw her.

Black tuxedo. No tie. He stood apart from the crowd the way a mountain stands apart from weather. People circled him, ministers and moguls, and never quite touched him. A man in a decorated uniform was saying something, and Chad listened with the polite stillness of a man memorizing exits.

Then, without turning his head, his eyes found hers across the room.

Nothing in his face changed.

Everything in her body did. Her pulse stuttered. A flush ran up her throat, hot and humiliating, and she was suddenly aware of the high collar at her neck like a hand around it. She thought of his fingers on her wrist at the gym. The patient, unhurried may I.

Not here, she told her own blood. Not in front of him. Not with Marcus's hand on my back.

But her body had never been good at obeying instructions it did not like.

"Chad," Marcus said, crossing the floor like a man arriving at his own coronation, "finally."

"Mr. Maine."

"Marcus, please. And my wife, Shyne."

Chad's gaze came to her. Calm, courteous, a stranger's look. But his hand, when he took hers, was warm and unhurried, and he held it exactly one second longer than politeness required.

"Mrs. Maine."

"Mr. Wenthworth."

"Shyne used to dabble in fashion," Marcus said, with an indulgent laugh. "A little hobby. Now she runs my home. Don't you, darling?"

The word hobby went through her like a pin. She felt, rather than saw, Chad's eyes sharpen. Shyne smiled. She had practiced that smile in mirrors for three years, and it did not fail her.

"I own a textile conglomerate, Marcus," Chad said evenly. "I've never met a hobby that dressed half the continent."

The air changed. Marcus's smile did not move. But a muscle near his jaw did.

Across the ballroom, a woman in emerald silk watched the exchange and slowly set down her glass.