Married to my ex

CHAPTER NINE

Chapter Nine:

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What She's Owed

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Cindy Timmerson had been back in London for exactly six days when the rumour reached her, and she'd spent five of those six days perfecting the art of appearing entirely unbothered by her own public humiliation, so the sixth day's news landed with a particular unfairness that made her want to break something expensive.

She heard it from her hairdresser, of all people — a woman paid handsomely to know things before anyone else in this postcode did — who mentioned it between foils with the casual cruelty of someone who didn't realise, or didn't care, that she was handing Cindy a knife with her own name carved into the handle.

"Roman Hoxwood," the woman said, "engaged already, if you can believe it. Peter Winslow's girl. Apparently she's been in London for years and nobody knew — some illegitimate daughter, kept hidden. Quite the story."

Cindy sat very still under the foils and let her face do nothing at all, which had become, over the last six weeks, the single skill she'd practised most diligently. Inside, something old and familiar and entirely unattractive was uncoiling in her chest — not grief, she was honest enough with herself to know that much, but something closer to fury at the sheer speed of it. Six weeks. She had been publicly, humiliatingly dropped for six weeks, and Roman had already replaced her with someone new before the gossip columns had even finished enjoying her downfall.

It wasn't supposed to go like this. None of it was supposed to go like this.

She'd made one mistake — one, in five years of doing everything correctly, of managing Roman and his tedious father and the whole exhausting architecture of being exactly the fiancée everyone expected — and a single video, taken by someone she still hadn't identified and intended to make suffer for it eventually, had unravelled the entire careful structure she'd spent half a decade building. She'd told herself, in the humiliating weeks since, that it was temporary. That Roman's father valued the alliance too much to let a moment's indiscretion end it permanently, that there would be an apology, a quiet reconciliation, a second engagement announcement dressed up as reunion rather than replacement.

Instead there was a stranger. An illegitimate daughter nobody had heard of a month ago, apparently walking into a role Cindy had spent five years earning.

She left the salon with her hair barely finished, ignoring the stylist's protests, and sat in her car outside for nearly twenty minutes before she trusted herself to drive anywhere at all.

Henry Aldous had always been easy to talk to, which was precisely why Cindy had kept him on hand for the better part of two years, long before she had any particular use for him beyond the pleasant, low-effort ego boost of being adored by someone who worked hard enough to actually matter someday.

He worked two floors below Roman at Hoxwood Enterprises, a mid-level executive with real ambition and real talent that his own modesty consistently undersold, and he had made no particular secret, over the two years of their acquaintance, that he found Cindy considerably more interesting than his actual job. She'd never encouraged it directly. She hadn't needed to. Men like Henry required so very little encouragement, in her experience — a laugh at the right moment, a hand on an arm that lingered half a second longer than strictly necessary, the occasional late-night message that implied, without ever quite stating, that she thought about him more than she did.

She called him that evening, from a restaurant she'd chosen specifically because it wasn't anywhere either of them usually went, and watched his face do the small, helpless thing it always did when she smiled at him across a table.

"You look wonderful," he said, which was, she reflected, precisely the correct opening line and precisely why she'd never had to work very hard with him at all. "I heard about — I'm sorry, about the engagement ending. That must have been horrible, having it be so public."

"It was." She let her voice waver, just slightly, just enough — a skill she'd honed since childhood, watching her own mother do the exact same thing to her father across countless dinner tables. "I'm trying not to dwell on it. It's rather difficult, though, when everyone in London seems determined to talk about it."

"People are idiots," Henry said, with the particular fierce loyalty she'd counted on. "You deserve so much better than how they've treated you. Than how he's treated you, honestly."

"That's kind of you to say." She reached across the table and let her fingers rest briefly over his, watching the effect land exactly as expected. "Actually, Henry — I did want to ask you something, if you don't mind. Purely out of curiosity. This new arrangement of Roman's, with the Winslow girl. Is it — do you know if it's genuine? Or is it more of a business matter, like ours was?"

Henry hesitated, the particular hesitation of a man weighing loyalty to his employer against the desire to be useful to a woman he'd quietly hoped, for two years, might one day look at him the way she was looking at him now. "It's business," he said finally. "Mostly. Charles Hoxwood's been pushing it hard — there's a formal alliance being drafted, contracts, the whole thing. Roman doesn't seem entirely comfortable with it, if I'm honest, but you know how his father is."

"I do know how his father is," Cindy said softly, and let something calculating slip, just for a fraction of a second, beneath the wounded warmth in her expression — gone again before Henry could properly register it, though something in his face flickered anyway, some small instinct warning him this conversation had shifted onto ground he didn't fully understand. "It seems so unfair, doesn't it? That she gets handed everything Roman and I built, just because her father happened to be rich and she happened to turn up at the right moment."

"It does seem unfair," Henry agreed, already leaning slightly forward, already, Cindy noted with satisfaction, entirely hers for whatever came next. "Is there — is there something I can do? To help, I mean."

She smiled at him then, warm and grateful and utterly, deliberately misleading, and thought, with the particular cold clarity that had gotten her through every difficult negotiation of her life, that this — this earnest, useful, thoroughly besotted man across the table — was going to be considerably more helpful than he currently understood.

"There might be," she said. "I don't want to ask you to do anything that puts you at risk, Henry, truly. But if you happened to hear anything, over the next few weeks — anything about the arrangement, about her, about how things are progressing — I think it would help me a great deal just to understand what I'm actually facing. Before it's too late to do anything about it."

"Of course." He said it instantly, without hesitation, exactly as she'd known he would. "Whatever you need. I mean that."

"Thank you." She let her hand stay over his a moment longer than necessary, watching him practically glow under the small mercy of it, and thought, with something that was not quite guilt and not quite satisfaction but sat somewhere close to both, that Beatrice Whitfield had absolutely no idea yet how badly she'd chosen her moment to walk back into Roman Hoxwood's life.

Cindy intended, very deliberately, to make sure she found out.