My Husband Cheated With My Best Friend, I Married His Billionaire Boss

CHAPTER 9: THE RULES OF BEING AN ALEXANDER

When Alexander left, the penthouse didn't feel bigger.

It felt colder.

Eleanor Sterling didn't sit. She stood in the middle of the living room that cost more than my parents' entire neighborhood, and looked at me the way a judge looks at a resume full of typos.

Sophia, the tall thin woman, had already unpacked. Three garment bags. Not bags — sarcophaguses. She unzipped the first one and my stomach dropped.

Inside was not a dress. It was architecture.

"Rule number one," Eleanor said, without looking at me. "An Alexander never wears last night's clothes to breakfast. Especially not when the press thinks you spent the night negotiating the Tokyo merger in the conference room."

"I was —"

"I know what you were doing." She finally looked at me. Her eyes were the same color as Alexander's, but where his were winter, hers were an ice age. "My son told me you needed a place to stay after your... unpleasantness with your ex-husband. He said you were a friend. Friends don't leave toothbrushes in my son's penthouse."

Sophia pulled out the second garment. Cream. No, that was not a color. That was a warning.

Emma, the old Emma, would have cried. The Emma who found her husband Mark in bed with Jessica, her best friend since college, who laughed when she walked in holding grocery bags. That Emma would have apologized and left.

But that Emma died three weeks ago when Alexander Sterling — Mark's boss, Mark's billionaire boss, the man Mark called 'sir' and feared — looked at me across the divorce mediation table and said, "Marry me for a year. I'll make sure he never works in this city again. And I'll make sure you never have to worry about rent again."

This Emma, the Emma in his too-big pajamas, lifted her chin.

"I'm not just a friend, Mrs. Sterling. I'm his wife."

Silence.

Sophia's hand froze on the zipper.

Eleanor's perfect, Botox-smooth forehead did not move. But something flickered behind her eyes. Amusement. Or respect. I couldn't tell.

"His wife," she repeated slowly. "Alexander Sterling got married without telling his mother. To a girl in his pajamas who still has the price tag of a Target toothbrush in his trash can."

She walked to me. Every step was a lesson. This is how you walk when you own half of Manhattan.

"Do you know why I came here, Emma?"

"To judge me?"

"To save you. And to save him from you."

She clapped once. Sophia moved like she had been shocked.

"Undress."

"What?"

"Rule number two. If you are going to pretend to be an Alexander wife, you will look like one. That dress from last night — the blue one you wore to the gala — that was borrowed. That," she gestured to the bags, "is who you have to become in four hours."

"What happens in four hours?"

"Your first press conference as Mrs. Alexander Sterling. The board thinks my son married a ghost. The press thinks he married a gold-digger. Your ex-husband and your ex-best-friend are giving interviews right now to Page Six saying you trapped him."

My blood went cold. "Mark and Jessica are doing interviews?"

"Of course they are. He is unemployed because my son fired him. She is unemployed because no one likes a best friend who sleeps with the husband. You are their only income now. The story of the cheating husband and the best friend pays. The story of the wife who then traps a billionaire pays more."

She pulled out the cream suit. "This is Chanel. Fall collection. It costs $8,900. You will wear it and you will not spill coffee on it. Sophia will do your hair. I will do your mouth."

"My mouth?"

"You have a habit of saying exactly what you think. It's charming if you are a barista. It's suicide if you are an Alexander. When they ask you, 'Did you marry him for money?' what will you say?"

I thought of Mark, of the grocery bags dropping, of Jessica pulling the sheet up.

"I married him because he was kind when everyone else was cruel," I said.

Eleanor stared at me for a long second. Then, for the first time, she nodded. "Not bad. Save that one. Now, rule number three."

She leaned closer. Her perfume smelled like cold money.

"Rule number three: In this family, we do not explain. We do not complain. And we never, ever fall in love with the arrangement. Do you understand?"

I looked towards the bedroom where Alexander had disappeared an hour ago. I thought of the way his hand had felt on my back last night when I was crying. How he hadn't said anything, just stood there.

"I understand," I lied.

"Good. Because my son," her voice dropped, "my son has a habit of trying to save broken birds. And broken birds always cut his hands when they fly away."

Behind us, the bedroom door opened. Alexander came out. He had changed into a dark navy suit. He looked like a man who was about to go to war.

And when he saw me standing there in my old clothes, surrounded by his mother's expensive armor, he looked at me like I was the only thing in the room that was real.

"Mother," he said, "that's enough. She has four hours. Let her breathe."

Eleanor picked up her bag. "She has three hours and forty minutes now. And Alexander — the board is watching. Make sure your wife remembers the rules."

She walked out. Sophia stayed.

I looked at the cream suit. I looked at Alexander.

"Is she always like that?" I asked.

"Only with people she thinks might matter," he said.

And for the first time since I said "I do" to a man I barely knew to get revenge on a man I knew too well, I wondered if I had just married into something much more dangerous than a billionaire's name.