The Billionaire's Second Chance Bride

The man who forced his way into my family and demanded I marry him had loved me for ten years.

I never even knew his face.

Last life, I ran from the wedding. Three days later he was dead, and he'd signed everything he owned over to me before he went.

I only understood him after. A room in his house, wall to wall, every inch of it my face. Not photographs. Paintings. Canvas after canvas, done by his own hand, the small mole at the corner of my eye caught every single time. His assistant could barely get the words out.

He loved you for years, Miss Sinclair. On the worst days, thinking of you was the only thing that made it bearable.

His father had spent those same ten years making sure a day like that would come.

So this time, when my oldest friend arranged the same quiet way out, I smiled and turned him down.

I'm not running.

I want to see for myself, up close, exactly how far gone a man can get over a woman who never once knew his name. And this time, I want to reach him before his father does.

Chapter 1

Damian Ashcroft died three days after I ran out on our wedding. He left me everything he had.

I already know how all of it ends. This is the second time I've lived it.

I'd never met him. To me he was the man who'd walked into my family's house and demanded I marry him like he was forcing through a hostile takeover, a stranger I'd never traded a full sentence with. And then, three days after I climbed out a window to get away from him, he was gone. The will was already written. Every account, every holding, signed over to my name.

I was in Paris when my brother called. My face went stiff against the phone and stayed that way.

None of it added up. A stranger. And yet every single thing that surfaced afterward read like he'd been in love with me for years.

The lawyers flew me home. Someone put a small square box in my hands, what was left of him, and I held it like it belonged to somebody else. He had no family. No past anyone could dig up. His assistant looked at that box like it had hollowed him out.

"He loved you for years, Miss Sinclair." Quiet. Not a trace of blame in it. "On the bad days, thinking of you was the only thing that made it bearable. I thought, once you married him, he'd finally be all right. I thought..."

He didn't finish. He didn't need to. Something in my chest knotted anyway.

Then he pressed a key into my palm. "This is the estate he had built for you. He set up every room himself."

Where it happened.

The place was enormous, all of it done in the deep sapphire blue I've loved since I was a girl, every chair and every fixture chosen like someone had studied me my whole life.

One room upstairs was different.

Wall to wall, it was me. Not photographs. Paintings. Canvas after canvas, my face rendered by hand, patient, obsessive, the little mole at the corner of my eye there every time. Years of them. He'd been carrying me around behind his eyes since before either of us had any reason for it.

And it made me furious.

He loved me, so why not say it. Why crash into my house like a thief and open with a marriage contract. How was I supposed to walk calmly into that.

And this whole shrine of a room. What was it for. So I'd feel guilty. So I'd carry him the rest of my life and never once get to set him down.

Dream on.

I gave it all away. The estate included. Signed it off in an afternoon. Someone stripped the paintings off the walls. Whatever Damian Ashcroft had beenbrief, brilliant, impossible. I wiped him clean off the face of the earth.

That was the life I already lived.

It took me three days to accept I'd been handed it back. Three days before this, Damian had come to my home and pushed for the marriage, all quiet pressure and no room to say no. My oldest friend heard about it and told me to run, to disappear to Paris for a couple of weeks until it blew over.

Last time, that's exactly what I did.

This time I thought about that room full of my own face, and the way his story ended, and I shook my head.

"I'm not running." I said it out loud, to no one at all. "I'm going to find him and ask him to his face why he wants to marry me."

So I did.

Damian's company was its own skyline. He was still in a meeting when I got there; his assistant came down himself and sat me in the office to wait.

"Boss will be down soon."

I hummed a yes.

He was fast. I hadn't finished my tea before he came through the door, still fastening a loose cuff as he walked. He saw me and stopped where he stood.

"Miss Sinclair." Flat. Cool. Set down carefully, at a distance.

Like he was looking at a stranger.

Chapter 2

His coldness left me with nothing to say. I turned it over for a second, then asked him, gently, "Mr. Ashcroft. My father tells me you want to marry me. Why is that?"

"I want to. I don't need a reason."

I looked at him.

What was I supposed to do with that.

I stood up slow and picked up my bag. "Then I'll be on my way."

Something moved across his face. For once, he looked genuinely thrown.

"You're leaving?"

I kept my expression flat and watched the color drain out of him, watched something like self-disgust settle over his whole body. And still, he stepped aside to let me pass.

If I weren't already certain this man wanted me, I'd have sworn he was toying with me.

I sighed and reached out first, caught him by the sleeve.

"How about dinner, then?"

Whatever was happening between us had his assistant white-knuckled by the door. On my way out he kept apologizing. "Boss isn't good with women, Miss Sinclair. Please don't be angry with him."

"I'm not angry." I smiled at him. "I actually like him. This face of his is very much my type."

The office door hadn't latched. Through the gap I caught Damian touch his own face, dazed, like he'd never heard the word before.

I bit down a smile and turned back to the assistant. "I've got dinner with your boss tonight. Remind him. He doesn't get to stand me up."

He nodded fast, like I'd take it back if he blinked.

I walked out through the front doors in my heels. My phone rang before I hit the sidewalk. Everett's name on the screen. I let it ring out and watched the clouds instead.

Everett was good to me. He meant well, always had. But childhood friends, best friends, they all eventually blur out somewhere down the road.

Like last time.

He got himself a woman, then children, and learned to keep a careful distance from me. So years later, when I was trapped in the backcountry with a research team and finally got a call through to him, it was his wife who picked up. She tore into me, called me a dried-up old maid nobody would ever marry. Everett stood right there beside her the whole time and said nothing.

I died out there. I never did find out what he made of that.

That evening Damian came early. Dinner was another cold front. I did all the work, reaching for one topic after another, and he killed each one without trying.

I set my knife and fork down harder than I needed to.

"Mr. Ashcroft. When you act like this, it makes me feel you don't actually want to build a life with me."

His throat worked. He dropped his head. "I'm sorry."

"You know that's not the part I wanted to hear." I was running out of patience. "You've run a company for years. You've never lost at a negotiating table. They say you read people down to the bone. And then you sit across from me like this, and it makes me think you're simply not interested."

He'd gone pale. His nails pressed hard into his own palm, knuckles bloodless, until the grip left little crescents in the skin.

"Don't read too much into it," he said. "I've just... never been this close to you. I'm not used to it."

The near-confession came out of nowhere and left me staring at him. The nerves, the flat loneliness underneath them, the marks he'd pressed into his own hand. None of it looked like an act.

And then it surfaced, from a life ago, the thing his assistant told me:

The dark got bad for him. Only seeing you ever made it bearable.

Chapter 3

"Mr. Ashcroft." Curiosity got the better of me, and I just asked it straight. "Have we met before?"

His lips twitched. His eyes cut away on instinct and fixed on the dark window across the restaurant.

"We have."

"When?"

He pressed his mouth shut and wouldn't give me one word more.

I lost interest in trying. I picked up my knife, started on my steak, and let the conversation die.

He didn't seem to notice anything was wrong. He just watched me, dull and fixed, his eyes catching on my mouth and then the line of my throat, tracking the swallow of wine down it, until his own manners hauled him back.

I shot him a look.

He turned away fast, gone pale, and caught his lower lip hard between his teeth.

I sighed. "If you want to look, look. You don't have to do it like a thief. We're getting married soon, Mr. Ashcroft. Try doing something out in the open for once."

All those years he'd spent orbiting me from a distance, keeping whatever small piece of me he could, filling a locked room with my face painted by his own hand. In another life I might have found an uglier word for it. But I'd seen how that life ended for him, and the ugly word didn't fit anymore.

Besides, his assistant had told me the truth. Damian was sick. You're supposed to be gentler with someone who's sick.

I reached over and took his hand. He went rigid, but I didn't let go. There were little half-moon marks pressed into his palm where his own nails had been. I wet a napkin and smoothed my thumb across them, slow.

"You've got beautiful hands," I said. "Stop doing this to them. Please?"

He didn't answer. He just held my face in that stare for a long moment, then asked, low, "Does this mean you're willing to marry me now?"

"Did you give me an option where I'm not?"

His throat moved. "If you didn't want to, you could always..."

"Run? Or hunt you down and scream in your face that I'd never marry you in a hundred years?" I held his eyes. "I could do that. I'd be fine. But you, Damian. What happens to you?"

The answer was obvious enough.

He wouldn't come out the other side of it.

Last time, I couldn't understand it. A man the whole city couldn't touch, undone by nothing but the news that I'd gone. I understand it better now. He didn't fall on his own. His father had spent years quietly digging the ground out from under him, and my leaving was only ever meant to be the last push. I wasn't going to hand that man the same ending twice.

Because Damian was, without question, a genius. A brutal eye for the market, and a past buried so deep that even his rivals dug for years and came up with nothing. They just had to stand there and watch him ride the tech boom straight up and squeeze the old Kingsford money until it couldn't breathe.

And a man like that, at the height of everything he'd built, was gone. Over a woman, the city decided. His rivals made sure that was the story that stuck. Simp of the year, the internet crowned him, and then said every ugly thing it could reach for.

I wasn't going to let that be how it went. Not twice.

The drive home, my head was somewhere else. I watched him steer, face flat, and decided I'd find his assistant in a day or two and actually talk. I had no idea how to be around this man. And there was the other thing. Whatever was wrong with him.

Was there really nothing to be done?

The black Rolls pulled up outside my family's house, and of course, of all the timing in the world, there was Everett coming up the drive with a box of pastries.

Chapter 4

Damian's eyes narrowed. "Do you want to go say hello?"

I tipped my head at him. "Everett's a good friend of mine. It's fine."

He leaned across and unbuckled my seatbelt himself. "Go on in."

The words said it was fine. Everything under them had gone cold and bitter in a heartbeat, like he'd swallowed something that wouldn't go down.

I caught him by the wrist. "He really is just a friend. Don't spiral on me."

"I won't."

"You won't?"

I turned and saw both his hands locked around the wheel, the tendons standing up along the backs of them.

I reached out and touched his fingers.

"If something's bothering you, tell me. Okay? Don't sit on it and let it eat you alive. That's the part that'll actually make this hard."

He let me push him into it. His throat worked, and he looked off out the far window, and finally, slow, it came out.

"I don't like him."

"Then don't spend time with him." I ruffled his hair like I was reassuring a kid. "He's my friend, not yours. You don't have to force yourself to like him. And anyway, you and I are about to be married. That's a hundred times closer than whatever he is to me. If it bothers you this much, him and me, I'll keep my distance from him from here on."

Damian looked genuinely startled. "You'd stay away from him. For me?"

"Why wouldn't I?" I smiled and said it soft. "We're the ones getting married."

He froze, went a little slack, like the sentence wouldn't compute.

I pressed while it was still landing.

"See? Things only get solved when you say them out loud. Anything you don't like about me, anything you want to say to me, you say it. Don't bottle it up until you've worked yourself half to death while I'm standing right here with no idea. What a waste that would be."

The man had no idea how to do closeness. He'd run a hostile play on my family to force the marriage, then stood there lost the second I walked toward him on my own, no clue what to do with it. Frighteningly out of his depth, for someone so lethal everywhere else.

It's fine, I thought. I can teach him. Slow.

Everett watched me climb down out of Damian's car, and his eyes went narrow and unfriendly. The car pulled off, and he closed the rest of the distance to me.

"So you've decided. You're marrying him."

"He's good-looking. He's rich. Clean reputation, no scandals. Why wouldn't I?"

"But" He stopped himself halfway.

Flustered, off-balance, something angry under it and something rushed. What finally scraped out was thin.

"Are you sure you even like him?"

"How many marriages in our world happen because someone likes someone?" I shrugged. "He's a good fit."

Everett's eyes went wide. "He can't give you what the two of us"

"Everett." I cut him off, cold. "I'm getting married. Some things you don't say out loud. People turn them into something."

I walked inside and left him standing there.

Here's the truth of it. Two lifetimes in, I still couldn't tell you what Everett Langford actually wanted from me. At his best, he once crossed half of Scandinavia to bring me back a single necklace. At his worst, all these years later, he still can't remember my birthday.

Chapter 5

Last life, I was the one who brought up marriage to Everett. He turned me down. Said he wanted a couple more years to enjoy himself first.

Then, building a snowman in Vienna, he fell for a sweet, uncomplicated girl on sight and married her and had a kid, start to finish, in under three months. His wife couldn't stand the sight of me, and I knew better than to linger in the picture, so I never reached out again.

I didn't know that would turn out to be the last of it, either.

Everett would be a little sad when he heard I'd died. Probably. He was the one on the rooftop with me the night his own father and stepmother slapped him across the face over his younger brother. I sat up there with him and counted stars until morning.

The next day I went to find Damian, and he was in another meeting.

Through the glass wall I watched him, brows drawn tight, something meaner than usual living in the lines of his suit. I waited in the lounge and made conversation with his assistant.

The man was a locked vault. He talked me in circles, and every time I steered near the subject of Damian being sick, he went conveniently deaf.

I gave up being subtle. "Doesn't it seem like telling me the truth would be the better thing for him?"

"Boss doesn't want you to know." He said it carefully. "He wants to be flawless in your eyes."

Then, with weight behind it: "He wants very badly for you to be able to lean on him."

"What are we talking about?"

Damian came in, meeting done, dragging his tie loose as he walked, looking worn through.

"I was asking whether you'd had work done. You're that good-looking." I leaned back into the couch and smiled up at him. "But your assistant swears you haven't, which is a genuine shame. I'll never catch up to bone structure like yours."

Damian just stopped.

His assistant had already made himself scarce and pulled the door shut behind him. The lounge went very quiet. I could hear the shift of fabric as Damian moved.

His voice came out rough. "You like this face."

"Is that supposed to be shocking?" I raised a brow. "Does Mr. Ashcroft genuinely not know he's beautiful?"

The tips of his ears went red. He turned his face away, caught out, and wouldn't look at me.

"Although," I said, "calling you Mr. Ashcroft is starting to feel a little formal."

I crossed to him and reached up to touch his hair. Stiff with product, dull under my fingers. Not great. I leaned in close to his ear.

"Can I call you baby?"

He shoved me off him.

It came out of nowhere, the anger. I couldn't work out why he was furious any more than I could work out why he wanted me in the first place.

He'd put the desk between us, his back to me, and when he spoke there was something raw underneath it.

"Get out."

"But I still want to have lunch with you."

"No." He didn't hesitate. "I have something at noon."

What was this man doing?

I looked him over a moment, then said, slow, "Fine. Watch the time, then. You have to eat."

I picked up my bag and walked out, and I waited just past the door.

The assistant's face went tight. Then I heard it. Something hitting a wall, hard. A sound torn out of Damian I'd never heard from him before.

I'd left the door open on purpose. Just a crack.

Glass broke somewhere inside, and under it that same low, wrecked sound kept coming. I rapped my knuckles once on the assistant's desk, my face flat.

"Are you still planning to tell me nothing?"

He hesitated. I didn't wait for him. I pushed the door open and walked straight in.

Chapter 6

Damian was a wreck.

He'd folded himself into the corner, knees to his chest, sitting in the middle of the broken glass. His fingers were cut and raw where the shards had caught them.

I crossed the room. My heels ground down on the wrecked glass, a thin, ugly sound with every step.

He kept his head down, panic in the set of his shoulders, shaking, and he wouldn't look at me for anything.

I laid my fingers on his shoulder. "What's going on?"

He was too big to hold, all of him, well over six feet of a man I couldn't have gotten my arms around if I tried. So I crouched down next to him instead and started working the slivers of glass out of his palm with a pair of tweezers, careful.

He lifted his head then. Stared at me a while. Then, hoarse, "They're ugly. Aren't they."

"What? Your hands?"

I looked down at the long fingers in mine, barely any flesh to them, and had to bite back a comment about how spectacularly this man failed to see himself.

"They're beautiful." I gave up, bent, and pressed a kiss to his fingertips. "They really are."

It didn't land. He still wasn't happy.

"The men before me," he asked. "Did you say things like that to them too?"

"Like what?"

"Sweet talk. Being good to me. Calling me..." He couldn't get through it. "Baby. Those men before me. Did they all get this too?"

I went quiet in a strange way.

So that was what had set him off.

I'd assumed there was a sister somewhere in his past, something that made one pet name go off like that. Turned out it was just the lovesick spiral again.

A man this powerful. This untouchable. And feeling could still take him apart down to the studs.

I smoothed his hair and let out a low sigh. "You idiot."

I'd dated a fair amount. I was good-looking, came from a good family, had no shortage of men chasing me, and a few of them had genuinely made me feel something. That happens.

"But in families like ours, dating and marriage aren't the same thing," I said. "My father told me early. Date whoever I want, but when I hit the right age, I come home and marry properly."

I got him up onto the couch, waved the cleaner in to deal with the floor, poured him a glass of water, kept moving around him.

Damian caught my hand. "You don't have to do any of this."

"Mm."

I let him pull me down beside him and sat there with my own thoughts. He'd almost certainly dug up exactly how many boyfriends I'd had. I used to like a good time. I'd done my share of reckless, ridiculous things. If he wanted to hold that against me, there wasn't much I could do about it.

"Just... don't talk to them anymore."

Damian's voice cut across it. I turned my head. His face was dead serious. I reached over and scratched lightly at his wrist.

"Are you giving me an order?"

His whole body went taut, his breath thinning out, like he'd only just heard himself, and he turned his face away, nervous.

"If you want to talk to them, just... tell me first. Otherwise I'll"

"I've got it." I cut him off. "I won't be talking to them."

Then I asked, "That temper, just now. Was it about my exes?"

Damian didn't say a word.

Chapter 7

I was losing patience.

"If something's wrong, just tell me. Okay? This is exhausting. You won't say anything, you get angry out of nowhere, you throw things, and I don't even know how to talk you down"

"So the men before me. They did it better than I do. Is that it?"

Damian cut me off, his breath gone ragged, the accusation in his voice childish, like a little kid's.

How had we gotten here?

All I'd wanted was to talk to him.

I straightened up and asked him, worn out. "If you can't get past this, there's nothing I can do. I don't think dating a few people is some crime against heaven. The past is the past. Why keep clawing at it?"

"Mr. Ashcroft. Digging it all up and squeezing it dry, does it actually make you happy?"

"Fine. Here it is. Yes, I dated. And when I did, I meant it, every time. I liked them." I held his eyes. "Does hearing that feel good?"

His eyes went redder, brimming, close to spilling over. When I stood, he grabbed for my sleeve, frantic, and I brushed his hand away, gentle.

My voice came out somewhere lost.

"I used to think as long as I played along, we'd be fine. But I'm starting to see I just can't keep up with the way your head works."

I looked at him, wrecked and unblinking, and let the edge out of my voice.

"You're not happy around me. You keep getting hurt over it. Damian. Maybe we should just call the wedding off."

"No."

He looked at me and there was nothing soft about how certain he was, those red eyes lifted to mine, both hands locked around my arm, saying it over and over.

"We're not calling it off."

Our faces were close, close enough to see the fine down on his cheek, and with that pleading in his voice it really did feel like I was bullying a child.

I ran my fingers through his hair, mind gone blank, and asked him one more time.

"Then tell me. Why do you want to marry me?"

His eyes flickered. He turned his face away on instinct and I caught his chin.

"Tell me, Damian. Baby. Tell me." I didn't take my eyes off him. "I don't want to be the one person in the room who understands nothing."

His lashes trembled. His voice came out small. "I want to marry you."

"Why do you want to marry me?"

His jaw worked, blinking up at me, something like begging in it, and something he couldn't force out.

So I said it for him. "You're in love with me. Aren't you? Idiot. What's so impossible about saying it?"

I rubbed his cheek and started to rise, and he pulled me back down, pinned me to the couch. Whatever mild, obedient thing he usually wore tore clean off. He wrapped his arms around my shoulders and cried, quiet.

"I'm disgusting," he said. "Aren't I. Someone as disgusting as me, in love with you. It's repulsive. Isn't it."

I stared at him, not believing it.

What went on inside this man's head?

Disgusting? Repulsive?

Did he not know he'd topped an online list of the men women most wanted to marry?

How did someone like him end up this far underwater?

I'd caught the edge of something.

Chapter 8

I took his face in my hands and made him look up, wiped the tears from the corners of his eyes.

"When my friends found out I was marrying you, they were jealous. Said I must have saved up eight lifetimes of luck for it. So how does it turn into something shameful the second it's you?"

He pressed his face into the side of my neck and said nothing. He did stop crying, though.

I patted his back and sighed a little. "Baby. Could you please have a little faith in yourself?"

"Thirty-two floors of tower with your name on it. Nobody looks at you without saying boss like it's a prayer. And you look like that. Me falling for you isn't exactly a shock, is it?"

Damian shivered. When he asked, it came out small, like he didn't dare believe it. "You've fallen for me?"

"What else? You think a girl shows up to see you every single day because she's got nothing better to do?"

I rubbed his back and told him, gentle, "Baby. Girls don't waste their time on men they don't want. Have some faith. You're good. You're really good. We're going to be good. Trust me."

He started crying again. The tears soaked into my collar, warm, and a little numbing.

"You can't lie to me."

"I'm not lying to you."

Something in me went soft past saving. I ran my thumb over his earlobe, felt the heat coming off his neck, felt my own heart going.

Maybe it was only that none of the men before him had ever been like this. New territory.

Damian's core was paper. One word from me, one syllable, one look, and I could take him apart at the seams. It had no business existing in a man who ran a public company. But there it was, bizarre and true.

He got up, graceless, cheeks flaming, and put his usual cold face back on out of pure habit.

He looked at me. "Are you hungry?" he asked, low.

"A little."

I stood and straightened my collar where he'd rumpled it, tugged it down over the strip of waist showing. Damian's face turned away, red as a ripe apple, and something in me went tender at the sight of it.

This innocent? The man was almost thirty. Surely he'd... done that, at least once?

I swallowed the theory and made my request, lazy about it. "Have your assistant bring the food up. I don't want to move."

"Okay."

He went to tell the assistant something, and I watched his tall frame against the light, traced the length of his legs with my eyes, and decided the proportions on this man were genuinely absurd. Good face, good body, rich, doesn't sleep around. If not for the whole broken-in-the-head thing, he'd never have landed in my hands in eight lifetimes.

I sighed.

A lot of Damian's bad nights came down to the fact that he couldn't sleep.

His assistant told me, mortified down to a whisper, that most nights Damian couldn't drift off unless he was holding one of the small studies he'd painted of me. I didn't ask how long he'd had it. The assistant looked relieved that I didn't.

Back beside him, I watched him work for a while. The tips of his ears went red. He couldn't seem to focus.

He set his documents down. "Is it that nice to look at?"

I nodded before I caught myself. Then, a beat later, I remembered what I'd actually come here to do.

Chapter 9

"Can I come see your place? The house you set up for us?"

Damian blinked. "Why the sudden interest in going out there?"

"I just want to see it. It's where we'll be living, after all."

He never said no to me, so he just nodded, then added, "Anything you don't like, tell me and I'll change it."

Walking back into that graceful, high-ceilinged estate, my eyes stung before I could stop them.

The place was full of light, sun slanting in warm across my skin, easy to be in. Nothing like last life, when it had been so cold and dim it made you want to run.

I stole a glance at the far-right room on the second floor. The locked one.

I knew what was inside. Wall to wall, my own face, painted by his hand. The likeness unmistakable, down to the small black mole at the corner of my eye.

I followed him into the bedroom without a word. Crisp ivory bridal linens, our two initials embroidered together across them.

Standing by the bed, I wanted to laugh and I wanted to cry, and in the end I just tugged Damian's sleeve. "You want to marry me that badly?"

"Mm." His throat moved. "Something you don't like?"

"No. It's all good." I pulled him down to sit with me on the bed. "When did you start putting it together?"

"The last few days."

He slid his fingers into my hand, practiced now, letting me play with them, obedient past all saving. Because I'd complained, he'd quit the hair product, and his bangs lay soft against his forehead, some of the sharpness gone out of him, softer to look at.

The room next door was where it happened, last life. Where he died.

And now here he was, arms around me, chin resting on the top of my head, his face gone soft and full and satisfied, like some big predator that had eaten its fill and stretched out in the sun.

Had I changed it? His whole fate. Was that what this was.

The wedding was close now.

I went to see him every day and stayed late, late enough my father called me shameless more than once. Damian seemed happy about it, though. Eating more. Filling out a little, a few ounces of flesh back on those thin fingers.

One day, on my way to him, I found Everett waiting at the base of the building.

He grabbed me the second I got close. "He's got you under some kind of spell. Let me take you out of here. We'll go abroad, Cami."

"Have you lost your mind?" I threw him off, not believing it.

"Think whatever you want. But I am not letting you sink any deeper into this."

Everett's jaw locked. "You don't love him, Cami. You're curious, that's all. You can't throw your whole life away on curious."

"Whether I love him or not, what does that have to do with you?" It struck me as genuinely strange. "Don't you think you're reaching a little far here?"

His eyes were bloodshot, and grief broke across his face all at once. Something in him went out like a snuffed flame, and his voice dropped to a plea.

"Let's get married, Cami. You can't just decide you don't want me..."

He looked wrecked, like someone had worked him over, his suit crushed against him, begging me for something close to pity.

And I remembered what my best friend told me, a lifetime ago, at Everett's own wedding.

If you'd married first, he'd have lost his mind over it. Love at first sight, sweet little nobody, none of it holds a candle to what the two of you had. He only got to run around this freely because he was so sure you'd never want a man. You were his one female friend, and he traded on it for years.

Chapter 10

"Everett."

I said his name with something complicated in it and reached up to brush the dust off his shoulder.

"Go home. Today, I never heard any of it. I'm getting married. And from here on, you be careful too, or people will start reading into it, and there's no explaining that away."

He stared at me, stricken, and then, just like that, the tears came. He murmured, low, "One moment. I looked away for one moment, and there's no coming back from it?"

"We're friends." I gave him the same answer he'd once given me, a life ago. "If you want, we can be friends for the rest of our lives."

His mouth opened and nothing came out of it. Whatever he'd braced to say died in his throat, and he just stood there, caught, watching me the way you watch something you've already lost.

Damian was on the couch when I came in, pressure rolling off him in waves.

"Why are you so late tonight?"

"Ran into a friend downstairs. Talked for a bit."

I set the pastries I'd brought on the table and turned to find him still storming, quietly. It threw me a little.

"What's wrong with you?"

He looked up, and there was something oddly wounded in his voice. "How did it go with Everett?"

"How did you kn"

I started to ask how he knew, then remembered Everett had planted himself right outside Damian's own building, in full view of every window and every man on his staff. Of course it had gotten back to him. There was no point to the question.

So I told him straight. "He came to find me. Said he wanted to take me away."

Something dark moved at the back of Damian's eyes.

I patted his shoulder and leaned into him, lazy about it. "I turned him down, though. Told him I wanted to stay right here with you."

"Oh," Damian said, slow.

"No praise for me?"

He turned his face away. "What's there to praise?"

"I pledged my loyalty to you, out loud, in front of another man." I pinched him, mock-wounded. "And you can't even manage a little something in return?"

Damian's throat worked. He looked at me, lost, and then, after a moment, got up and took a box out of a drawer.

He opened it. An enormous sapphire necklace.

It looked familiar. "Isn't that the one from the Sotheby's auction?"

"Mm."

I burst out laughing. It was a gorgeous piece, worth a fortune, but Damian had paid forty million for it. The headlines that night had all run some version of the same line: The Sucker Who Dropped Forty Million on a Necklace.

"Why did you buy this?"

"You like blue." He said it low. "I thought it suited you."

"Thank you, baby." I hooked my arms around his neck and nuzzled his cheek. "The auction was two months ago. Why bring it out today?"

"You weren't happy today." Quiet. "I was going to give it to you on your birthday. But I thought you could be happy now instead."

"When was I ever not"

I remembered my own mock-pouting from a minute earlier and shut my mouth, biting down a laugh. The man genuinely couldn't tell the difference between a woman being angry and a woman playing at it.

I poked his cheek.

"I'm not upset. Really. But I'm still very happy right now." I meant it. "Baby. I really am falling for you more and more."

Damian's cheeks went faintly red. He lifted me into his lap and kissed my forehead, careful, like I might come apart in his hands.

Honestly, apart from that one time he broke, I could barely feel this illness of his. With me he was just a man a little slow with feelings, a little lost around women. Normal.

But his assistant kept warning me, over and over, not to set him off.

Chapter 11

I couldn't help asking. "Has he actually gotten worse these last few days?"

"No." The assistant said it haltingly. "Boss is doing a lot better, honestly. Most nights he doesn't need anything to sleep anymore."

"Then why do you keep hounding me?"

"He got better because you came close. If you got tired of it and left, the fallout would be..." He was pleading now. "I don't know what brought you to Boss in the first place. But I'm begging you. Don't leave on a whim. It would break him."

And worse.

I finished the sentence for him, in my head.

I patted his shoulder. "Relax. It hurts me more than it hurts you."

I'm no savior. I'm not a trained therapist. All I can do is try my best to make Damian a little less unhappy. I want him to be able to be happy. Get the mood right and the rest of it tends to follow.

When Damian's father came to find me, I was a little surprised. It was the first I'd ever heard of him having family at all.

The man was from New York. The same sharp suit, a face cut close to his son's, and a presence nothing like him. There was something sly and rotted in him that genuinely frightened me.

He opened without ceremony. "Miss Sinclair. I'd like you to leave my son."

It caught me off guard. I picked up my tea, took a sip, and asked, perfectly level, "And how much are you offering?"

"Twenty-five million. Enough to get your family through this little crisis of yours."

I paused. I hadn't been aware my family was in a crisis.

I looked him over without a flicker and said, decisive, "We're the real thing, so you'll have to add a few zeros. Damian dropped forty million on a single necklace because I mentioned I like blue. Twenty-five doesn't even get my attention."

He let out a thin laugh. "You think being at his side is a good thing?"

He watched me, smiling faintly.

"Those exes of yours. You haven't kept in touch, have you? Go ask around. See how many are still breathing." A beat. "And that Everett. You think Damian lets him walk? And your brother. You think sharing blood with you keeps him safe? Let me tell you, Damian won't spare him either. Quite the grand love story, the two of you. Everyone around you is the one who pays for it, and you're kept in the dark like a fool, with no idea about any of it. Isn't that funny?"

My brows drew together, and something like disgust rose in me.

"I believe Damian." I said it flat. "He isn't that kind of man."

"Isn't he? Go check. You'll find out."

He smiled, sure of himself.

"You know what they say. Like father, like son. Everything I used on his mother, all those years back, he'll hand right back to you, down to the letter. You don't believe me