The Billionaire's Revenge Bride

Second Thoughts

Chapter Four

By seven the next morning, Damian had read the same email four times without absorbing a single word of it.

He hadn't slept.

He'd spent most of the night in the study with his phone on the desk in front of him, watching it not ring. He resisted with a discipline that had cost him more than he wanted to admit. The urge to call her himself instead of routing an offer through his driver like a coward hiding behind protocol.

He told himself it was a strategy.

Give her room.

Let her come back on her own terms, because a woman cornered twice in one night wasn't a woman who'd ever trust him again, and trust was…

He stopped the thought before it finished because he didn't like where it was going.

Trust wasn't supposed to be the objective.

Trust had never been part of the plan he'd built with his uncle, Victor eight months ago, over scotch in this same study. The two of them had worked out the shape of a debt neither of them had ever fully priced.

"Twelve years," Victor had said that night, not for the first time. "Twelve years, and the man who did it to us never spent a single day paying for it. Don't you think it's time someone did?"

Damian had agreed.

He still agreed, with him sitting in his study at seven in the morning with a cold cup of coffee and a wife who had walked out of his house in her wedding underwear rather than spending one more hour under his roof.

The knock at the study door was soft, familiar, and unwelcome at this hour.

"You're up early," Victor said, letting himself in without waiting for an answer, the way he'd done in this house since Damian was a boy.

He was dressed for the day already. Pressed slacks, a cashmere sweater that probably cost more than most people's rent, silver hair combed back with the same precision he brought to everything.

"Or perhaps more accurately, you never went to bed."

"How did you know that?"

"Your driver called me at midnight, asking whether he should keep the car running outside your sister-in-law's building in Brooklyn or come back for further instructions."

Victor settled into the chair across from the desk, unbothered, the way he settled into every room he entered.

"I told him to come home. I assumed you didn't actually want her followed, whatever the impulse might have been at the time."

Damian said nothing.

His jaw was tight enough to ache.

"You told her already," Victor said.

It wasn't a question.

"She asked why I married her."

"And you thought the wedding night was the moment for honesty."

Victor's mouth curved, not quite a smile.

"Damian. We discussed this. Months. The plan was months, not hours."

"I know what the plan was."

"Do you?"

Victor studied him for a moment.

Damian felt, not for the first time, the particular discomfort of being read by someone who had known him since before he had words for half of what he felt.

"You sound like a man who's having second thoughts."

"I sound like a man whose wife left him on their wedding night."

"Which is precisely why I'd expect you to be relieved, not sitting in the dark nursing a coffee you haven't touched, looking like you've lost something instead of started collecting on it."

Victor leaned forward slightly, his voice dropping into the register Damian remembered from every difficult conversation of his adolescence, gentle, patient and entirely certain.

"I understand this is hard for you. I do. You've spent twelve years carrying what happened to your father, and now that the moment is finally here, some part of you wants to feel it differently than you expected to feel it. That's natural. Grief does strange things to timing."

"This isn't about grief."

"Isn't it?"

Victor's eyes were kind, which somehow made it worse.

"Your father died believing Charles Bennett destroyed everything he built. You were twenty-two. You watched it happen. I watched you watch it happen, Damian, and I promised myself I'd help you see it through to the end, because someone in this family owed your father that much, and God knows your mother wasn't capable of it at the time."

He sat back.

"I'm not going to apologize for holding you to the plan we built together. But I will say this, whatever softness you're feeling this morning, examine it carefully before you let it change anything."

"The girl is charming. I'm sure she is. Charles Bennett was charming too, by every account, right up until the moment his charm cost your family everything it had."

Damian looked down at the laptop on his table, at the email he'd read four times without understanding, and said nothing for a long moment.

"I'm not backing out," he said finally.

"I never suggested you were."

Victor rose, smoothing the front of his sweater, entirely at ease.

"I simply want you to remember why we started this. It would be a shame to lose sight of it now, so close to the end, over a girl who happens to look good in a wedding dress."

He paused at the door.

"Have you told your mother she left?"

"Not yet."

"I'd do that before she hears it from the staff." Victor said with a faint, almost fond smile.

"Eleanor's going to be insufferable about this, you understand. She never wanted the marriage in the first place. This will feel, to her, like vindication."

He left without waiting for a response.

Damian sat alone in the study for a long time afterward, turning Victor's words over the way he'd turned over every piece of advice his uncle had given him for the past twelve years. Carefully, gratefully, and not once, he actually realized questioning any of it.

“Whatever softness you're feeling this morning, examine it carefully.”

He didn't examine it.

He closed the laptop instead.

By the time his mother found him in the breakfast room forty minutes later, dressed for the office as if this were any other Tuesday, he had rebuilt enough of the wall to answer her first question without his voice giving anything away.

"Where is your wife, Damian? The staff told me she left."

"She's staying with her sister for a few days," he said, buttering a toast he had no intention of eating.

Eleanor Blackwood set down her coffee cup with a precise, controlled click that Damian recognized uncomfortably, as an inheritance he'd passed down from her without ever meaning to.

"On your wedding night?”

"Yes."

"Well."

His mother's expression didn't shift exactly, but something in it settled, hardened and resolved itself into an opinion she'd clearly been holding in reserve since the engagement was announced.

"I suppose that tells us everything we need to know about how well this arrangement is going to held together."

"It's one night, Mother."

"It's the first night," Eleanor corrected, rising from the table with the particular grace she brought to every exit, whether it was a boardroom or a breakfast room.

"The first night of a marriage tends to set the tone for a great many that follow, in my experience. I'd think carefully, Damian, about what tone you're setting."

She paused at the door, her hand resting for a moment on the frame.

When she spoke again, her voice had lost some of its edge. It was replaced by something more tired, more genuinely uncertain than he was used to hearing from her.

"Whatever this arrangement is, I have my suspicions, though you haven't seen it fit to share the details with me. I hope you know what you're doing."

"Because from where I'm standing, it looks a great deal, like a man about to lose something before he's even finished pretending to want it."

She left him alone with his toast and his cold coffee.

Damian sat for a long time afterward, staring at his own reflection in the dark window glass, unable to decide which of the two people who'd spoken to him that morning had actually told him the truth.

His phone buzzed on the table.

A text, not from the driver this time but from Amelia herself, the first message she'd sent him since walking out the door.

“I'll be back Thursday to collect the rest of my things from Westchester. I'd appreciate it if you weren't there.”

He read it twice, the way he'd read the email four times without understanding a word of it.

He found, to his own quiet astonishment, that what he felt wasn't triumph, or relief, or any of the things twelve years of planning should have made him feel.

He felt, for the first time he could remember in longer than he wanted to admit, something that felt uncomfortably close to fear of losing something he hadn't even let himself start wanting yet.