The Billionaire’s Missing Bride

Chapter1

The dining room at Kingstone House had been designed, Namara had always privately

thought, to make people feel smaller than they were. The ceilings rose two full stories

overhead, ringed with a balcony no one had used in a decade. The table sat twenty-two and

was set, most evenings, for two. Tonight it was set for two again — her father at the head, as

always, and Namara three chairs down, close enough to speak without raising her voice and

far enough that the distance itself said something about what he expected of the

conversation.

She’d learned, over the years, to read her father’s moods in the small things — the number

of times his knife touched the plate, the length of the silences between courses, whether he

looked at her at all or simply through her, toward whatever ledger was running behind his

eyes. Tonight the knife had touched the plate exactly four times in the last three minutes,

and he had not looked at her once.

“I have news,” Adrien Kingstone said finally, setting his fork down with the kind of precision

that made her stomach drop before he’d said another word. “You’ll be married by spring.”

Namara set down her own fork more slowly, giving herself a second to be sure she’d heard

him correctly.

“I’m sorry?”

“Damian Calloway,” her father said, as though the name alone should settle the matter.

“Voss-Calloway Industries. The details are being finalized with his people this week. There

will be an engagement announcement within the month, and a wedding by early spring —

April, most likely, once the venues have been confirmed.”

For a moment Namara simply stared at him, waiting for some sign that this was a joke, a

test, a strange rhetorical device he was building toward some other point. Her father did not

make jokes. He never had, not once in her memory, and the absence of one now was its own

kind of confirmation.

“You’re arranging my wedding,” she said slowly, “to a man I have never met.”

"You’ll meet him at the engagement dinner. There’s no need to be dramatic about the order of operations.”

“Father.” She heard her own voice climbing, further than she usually allowed it to in that

room, in that house, and made herself breathe before continuing. “You cannot simply decide

who I’m going to marry. That isn’t — that isn’t how this works. Not anymore. Not in this

century.”

“It is exactly how this works,” Adrien said, and now he did look at her, directly, in a way he so

rarely did that it stopped her breath for a second. “It has always worked this way for families

like ours. You think the Calloways got where they are by marrying for sentiment? You think I

built what I built by leaving anything as important as this to chance?”

“I don’t want an empire,” Namara said. “I have never once asked you for an empire. I don’t

even know what I’d do with one.”

“You don’t have to want it.” Her father’s voice was calm now, infuriatingly calm, the voice he

used in boardrooms when he already knew he’d won. “You only have to accept it. Do you

understand how many people would trade places with you in an instant? A stable future.

Resources beyond anything you could spend in a lifetime. A husband who, whatever else he

is, is not a fool, and will not squander what you bring into the marriage. Most daughters

would consider that the easiest possible outcome.”

“Then let one of them marry him,” Namara said.

Something flickered across her father’s face — not quite anger, something colder and more

controlled than anger, a kind of finality settling into place.

“This isn’t a negotiation, Namara. I’m informing you, as a courtesy, of a decision that has

already been made. Kingstone Holdings requires access to infrastructure that Voss-

Calloway controls outright. Damian Calloway has declined every commercial proposal my

people have brought him for two years. This is the only avenue left that secures both our

futures at once. It is not merely a good match. It is a necessary one.”

“So I’m collateral.” The word came out flatter than she meant it to, more exhausted than

furious, though the fury was there too, banked low and building. “You’re using me to close a

business deal you couldn’t close any other way.”

“I’m using every resource available to me to protect this family’s future,” her father said.

“You are the most valuable resource I have. I would think you’d take some pride in that,

rather than treating it as an insult.”

Namara pushed back from the table so abruptly her chair scraped hard against the floor, a

sound that seemed to hang in the vast empty room far longer than it should have.

“I won’t do it,” she said.

“You will,” her father said, not raising his voice at all, which somehow frightened her more

than shouting would have. “You’ll do it because the alternative is watching everything your

mother and I built — everything I have built since — collapse under debts and rivals who

would gut this family for parts. You’ll do it because in the end, Namara, you understand duty

better than you think you do. You were raised to understand it.”

“I was raised in a house with four kitchens I wasn’t allowed to enter,” Namara said, “by a

father who decided, unilaterally, exactly which parts of me were acceptable and which parts

had to be locked away. Forgive me if I don’t trust your judgment about what’s good for me.”

She was shaking by the time she left the table — really shaking, hands trembling around the

napkin she hadn’t realized she was still holding until she set it down on the seat behind her

— and for the first time in her entire life at Kingstone House, no one called after her to sit

back down.

She walked. She didn’t consciously decide where; her feet simply carried her, past the east

wing, past the study where her father conducted the business of forgetting he had a

daughter, down the long servants’ corridor that led, eventually, to the one place in the entire

estate that had ever felt like it belonged to her instead of to the Kingstone name.

The kitchen was warm and loud and smelled of butter and rosemary, and Julien was exactly

where she needed him to be, elbow-deep in the evening’s prep, his sleeves rolled to the

elbow and flour dusted pale across his forearms.

He looked up before she’d said a word, and something in her face must have told him

everything, because he set down his knife immediately and crossed the kitchen toward her.

“What happened?”

“He wants to marry me off,” Namara said, and heard how strange the words sounded out

loud, how much stranger they felt leaving her mouth than they had inside her own head. “To

Damian Calloway. Spring. It’s already being finalized.”

Julien froze, his mind doing rapid math on a problem he didn’t like the thought of.

“Marry you off,” he repeated. “Just — like that? Without asking you?!”

“He asked me nothing. He just informed me.” Her voice cracked on the last word, and she hated

it, hated that after everything, after years of practicing exactly this kind of composure in

front of her father, it was here, in this kitchen, in front of the one person who’d ever made

her feel like more than an asset, that she finally let herself come apart.

Julien didn’t say anything for a moment.

He simply reached over, careful of the flour still onhis hands, and pulled her into him, and Namara

let herself lean into it the way she never let herself lean into anything in that house.

“He doesn’t get to decide this,” Julien said quietly, into her hair. “Not if you don’t let him.”

“He’s decided everything else my whole life.” Namara was sobbing now.

“Not everything.” He pulled back just enough to look at her, and there was something steady

in his face, something reckless and certain in equal measure that she would remember for

years afterward, long after she’d stopped being able to trust anything else about him. “Not

this. Not if we don’t let him.”

Namara looked at him for a long moment — at the flour on his hands, at the kitchen that had

been the one honest place in her entire life, at the boy who had never once, in four years of

stolen afternoons, made her feel like a line item in someone else’s ledger.

“What are you saying?” she asked, though some quiet, frightened part of her had already

guessed.

“I’m saying there’s a whole world outside this house,” Julien said, “and your father doesn’t

own any of it. Not really. Not once you’re standing in it.”

Behind them, the ovens hummed on, indifferent to the entire conversation, filling the kitchen

with the smell of bread that would be served, in a few hours, to a man who had just informed

his daughter, over dinner, that her life had already been sold.