Once Bitten, Twice Shy.

CHAPTER 2: THE SIGNATURE

I backed away from that door one careful step at a time, shoes silent on the marble, heart slamming so hard I was sure Gideon would hear it through the wood, if I hurried.

Talia sat frozen at her desk when I passed her again, and this time she didn't try to stop me. She watched me go without a word, the food carrier still swinging from my hand like a prop from a play I no longer wanted a part in.

My hands didn't start shaking until I reached the elevator.

By the time I reached my car, I had already made a decision. Gideon would never know what I heard tonight. Not until I understood what he and Naomi were building behind that locked door, and how much of it belonged to me.

I drove home, slid both untouched plates into the refrigerator, and blew out every candle one by one. Then I sat at the empty table and waited.

His key turned in the door two hours later.

"El?" His voice carried down the hall, warm and easy, a voice that carried no trace of the one I'd heard through his office wall. "I am so sorry about tonight."

He walked in holding a bouquet of white orchids, the same flowers he'd given me the day he proposed. I almost laughed at how well he still knew which buttons to press.

"You didn't have to do that," I said.

"I wanted to." He set the flowers down and pulled me into a hug before I could decide whether I wanted one. "The contract fell apart at the last minute. I had to handle it myself. I know that's not an excuse."

I looked at him over his shoulder, at the man I had shared a bed with for five years, and saw him the way a stranger might. The careful charm. The apology that landed a beat too well. Eyes that never quite settled on mine for more than a second.

"Are you angry with me?" he asked, pulling back to study my face.

Twelve hours ago I would have said no because I meant it. Now I said no because I needed him to believe I hadn't heard a word.

"No," I said. "I'm not angry."

He smiled, relieved, and kissed me the way he always did after an apology, slow and certain of its own effect. I almost pulled away. Every part of me wanted to step back and ask who Naomi Reed was to him, what transfer he expected me to sign, why my father's company had become a conversation he was having with another woman behind a locked door.

Instead I smiled against his mouth and let him believe a bouquet of orchids had fixed everything.

"Let me run you a bath," he said. "You look tired."

"I am," I admitted, and that much, at least, was true.

"I'll make it up to you this weekend," he said, brushing a strand of hair off my face. "The two of us, no phones. I promise."

"Sounds perfect," I said.

He didn't hear the flatness in my voice, or he heard it and chose not to look for it. Either way he led me toward the stairs, talking about some restaurant he wanted to take me to, and I let him talk, memorizing the sound of it the way you memorize the voice of someone you're about to lose.

Gideon fell asleep within twenty minutes, the way he always did after a long day, his breathing slow and even beside me while my mind refused to stop circling every word I'd overheard.

I waited until his breathing settled into a deep, even rhythm. Then I slipped out of bed, pulled on a robe, and walked down the hall to his study.

The door opened without resistance. He never locked it at home. Why would he, when the woman he shared a house with had never once looked past the surface of anything he told her?

I sat down at his desk and opened the top drawer.

The first folder held routine paperwork, vendor contracts, tax filings, none of it explaining the conversation I'd heard through his office door. I checked my phone. Two in the morning. I had until sunrise before Gideon noticed I wasn't beside him, and I meant to use every minute of it.

The second folder was labeled *Restructuring, Phase Two.*

Inside sat a stack of documents I recognized on sight, the same restructuring proposal Gideon had been pushing me to approve for months, the one he'd called a routine consolidation to attract new investors. I had trusted him. I had signed the summary pages without reading every line beneath them.

This version had a signature on the final page.

My signature, on a page I had never signed.

I traced the loop of the E, the slant of the S, with my thumb. Close. Close enough to pass a glance across a boardroom table. Not close enough to have come from my own hand.

Someone had forged it to authorize the full transfer of my controlling shares.

My fingers went cold around the edge of the page.

Beneath that folder sat another, thinner, its label a single date with no name attached. Inside were transfer agreements naming a holding company I had never heard of, and beneath its registered address, one name appeared again and again as authorized signatory.

Naomi Reed.

Her signature sat beside the space reserved for mine on every page, as though the two of us had built this arrangement side by side. I read the terms twice to be sure I understood them. Once signed, they would move sixty percent of my father's company into an entity I couldn't trace, sixty percent, enough to strip away my controlling stake and hand it to whoever sat on that entity's board.

I already knew who that would be.

I photographed each page, my hands steadier now than they had any right to be, as if fear had traded places with purpose the moment I decided to keep looking instead of walking away.

Then I found the folder that changed everything.

It sat at the bottom of the drawer, unlabeled and thicker than the rest. Inside were printed emails between Gideon and Naomi, meeting notes, a consulting contract billed to Shaw Holdings.

The dates stopped me cold.

I had always believed Gideon met Naomi two years ago, when he promoted her into a senior role and she started showing up at the same events we did. That was the story he'd told me once, in passing, when I asked how long she had worked for the company.

These pages told a different one.

The earliest email between them was dated four years back, before Naomi ever held a title at Shaw Holdings, before, as far as I knew, they had ever met at all.

I kept turning pages until a photograph slipped free and landed face up on the desk.

Gideon and Naomi stood outside a restaurant I recognized, his arm around her shoulders, both of them caught mid laugh at whatever lay outside the frame. Not a photo of two colleagues. A photo of two people who knew each other well enough to laugh like that in public, without checking who might be watching.

I turned it over. On the back, in handwriting I didn't know, someone had written a date.

I read it twice to be sure.

Three months before Gideon proposed to me.

I sat still, the photograph trembling between my fingers, and let that date settle into every corner of what I thought I knew about my marriage.

Gideon met Naomi before he ever met me. He courted me, proposed to me, married me, while a relationship with another woman already lived somewhere beneath the surface of his life.

I thought of every anniversary dinner. Every business trip he claimed kept him away. Every time he told me he loved me and I believed him without question, because why would I doubt a man who built our life with his own two hands.

Except he hadn't. He had built it on my father's company, my father's shares, my inheritance, and a woman he had already known long before he ever looked across a room and decided I was worth pursuing.

I stared at the photograph until the edges blurred, and one question rose up through everything else, sharp enough to cut.

Did Gideon marry me because he loved me?

Or because he wanted everything I owned, and I was the fastest way to get it?