Married to the wrong billionaire

CHAPTER SEVEN

AVA

Someone easier to manage. The words followed me into the dress I put on that night, into the car, into the ballroom itself, no matter how many times I told myself they didn't matter.

The event was a fundraiser for something I didn't fully catch the name of — a museum wing, or a hospital ward, some cause important enough to warrant three hundred people in formalwear and a string quartet that never seemed to stop playing. Ethan had briefed me on the way over: smile, stay close, let him lead the conversations that mattered.

"And if someone asks how we met?" I said.

"Tell them the truth. That my brother failed to show up and I stepped in." A pause. "Leave out the part where you looked like you wanted to run."

"I did want to run."

"I know," he said, and something in his voice almost sounded like it found that funny.

Inside, his hand found the small of my back the moment we crossed the threshold — warm through the fabric, certain, exactly where it had been at the wedding. I'd stopped being surprised by it. I hadn't stopped noticing it.

"Mr. Van Doren! And the new Mrs. Van Doren!" A reporter appeared out of nowhere, phone raised, smile too wide. "Can we get a comment? Is it true this was love at first sight?"

"Very much so," Ethan said, without missing a beat. He wasn't looking at the reporter when he said it. He was looking at me.

My heart did something stupid and involuntary, and I hated it for doing that, and I smiled anyway because that was the job. I was getting good at that too — smiling on command, the way I'd once learned to keep my voice steady on a call with an angry client, the way I'd learned, long before any of this, to make sure my face never showed anyone exactly what I was thinking.

"How does it feel, being married to one of the most powerful men in the country?" the reporter asked me.

"Like an adjustment," I said, which was true enough to pass as charming.

Ethan's hand pressed once, briefly, against my back — approval, maybe, or warning, I hadn't learned yet which was which.

We moved through the room like that for an hour, his hand rarely leaving me, his voice dropping into my ear every so often with instructions disguised as intimacy. Smile. Not that much. Laugh, now. I found myself getting almost good at it — reading the room the way I used to read a crisis for a client, anticipating what was needed a half-second before it was asked of me. It wasn't so different from my old work, I realized. Just with higher stakes and a much better dress.

When a socialite I didn't recognize made a comment about my dress being "surprisingly appropriate for someone from such humble beginnings," Ethan didn't raise his voice. He simply said four sentences that dismantled her condescension so precisely she excused herself within the minute, and I understood, watching it happen, exactly why people were afraid of this man in boardrooms.

"You didn't have to do that," I said, once she'd gone.

"No one speaks to my wife that way." He said it like fact, not defense, and something about the certainty of it landed somewhere in my chest I wasn't ready to examine.

"That's twice now," I said.

"Twice what?"

"Twice you've defended me like you meant it, not like it was part of the performance."

He didn't answer that. I decided not to push, mostly because I wasn't sure I wanted to hear whatever answer he might have given.

Later, near the bar, he leaned down and murmured against my temple, "Smile," and when I did, he kissed me — brief, practiced, over before I could decide how to feel about it, except that it lasted half a second longer than it needed to, the way it always seemed to.

It was on our way back through the crowd that I saw him.

A man near the far windows, dark hair slicked back, a drink in one hand and an expression of pure, easy amusement on his face, like the entire room was a play he'd already read the ending to. He raised his glass toward us — toward Ethan, specifically — a small, deliberate gesture that somehow felt less like a toast and more like a taunt.

Ethan didn't raise his back.

"Who is that?" I asked.

"No one you need to worry about tonight."

That wasn't an answer, and we both knew it.

ETHAN

He watched Julian Vance lower the glass without drinking from it, that same knowing smile still fixed in place, and felt the old, familiar tightening low in his chest — not fear, never fear, but something closer to recognition. The recognition of a man circling something he intended to take apart slowly, piece by piece, patient enough to wait years for the right moment.

Julian hadn't come tonight for the charity. He'd come to see the wife.

It was a mistake, Ethan thought, to assume Julian's interest in Ava was only strategic — a way of testing whether the marriage was as solid as the press wanted to believe. Men like Julian didn't waste an evening on strategy alone. There was something personal underneath it, something Ethan didn't yet have the shape of, and that unknown quantity bothered him more than he wanted to admit, even to himself.

He kept his expression perfectly still, the way he'd been trained to since before he understood what training even meant, and steered Ava toward the far side of the room with a hand that stayed exactly where it needed to be — protective, deliberate, giving nothing away.

He would deal with Julian Vance later, on his own terms, in a room where the man's smile wouldn't matter.

Tonight, he only needed one thing to be true in front of every camera in the building: that no one, least of all Julian, could look at Ava Morgan and mistake her for anything other than his.

He told himself that was only about the optics. He was aware, distantly, that he wasn't being entirely honest with himself about that.