Marrying My Ex's Billionaire Brother

She's a stutterer. I'll dump her when I get bored.

Behind him, the girl he'd grown up with laughed into her hand. It takes her three minutes to finish one sentence. Last time she almost cried trying.

I was standing on the other side of the door.

Five years.

Later I walked into the Fairbank banquet on his brother's arm and answered every question they put to me, clean, first try.

Dex caught my wrist in front of everyone. "When did you get fixed?"

The man beside me set a hand at my waist.

"Sorry," Adrian said. "She's always been quick when she's insulting someone."

Chapter 1

Through the glass, Dex had his hand under Blair Winslow's chin. He was kissing her. The whole room was cheering him on.

My hand stayed on the door handle. I forgot to push.

Rain slid off my sleeve and hit my shoe. One drop. Another.

The pharmacy bag in my coat had gone warm from being carried against my ribs. The label had soaked through. You could still read half of his name.

Five years. He kept me out of every room like this one, the way you keep a thing you don't want anyone to see you own.

Blair Winslow had left him back when the Fairbanks still had nothing. She'd been in the country nine days. He already had her sitting on the arm of his chair, in front of everyone he knew.

"Still running?" Dex said.

She shook her head. Tears came down on cue, two of them, neatly. "No. Just stop being cruel to me."

She hadn't touched her drink. The glass sat by her knee, full to the line, one lipstick print on the rim.

Then she looked up, fast, at the door.

She checked that I was watching.

She found me. Her mouth moved into his shoulder.

I pushed the door open before it could get worse.

"Dex. Your medicine."

I was dripping on their carpet. The words came out with a shake in them and I hated that.

His right wrist aches when the weather turns. He got that pulling me out of the lake the spring we met.

He didn't look at the bag.

He lifted two fingers and a waiter came and took it from my hand.

"It's a mess in here," Dex said. "Go home."

Someone by the window whistled. "Look at that. He worries about his girl."

Blair curled into him. His coat was over her shoulders. He'd had the thermostat turned up because she said she was cold, and nine grown men were sweating through their shirts and not one of them said a word about it.

She tugged his sleeve. "Make her sing."

"You want that?"

His whole face opened. She'd asked him for something.

He knows exactly what happens when I sing.

I had one sentence ready. I'd been working on it for a week, in the car, in the elevator, in the shower, the whole thing start to finish with no breaks in it: my speech is almost clean now, I wanted you to hear it first. Eleven words. I'd never once said eleven words to him without stopping.

"I I'm going," I said.

Blair laughed. Then she said it back to me, slow, clear-eyed, taking her time on the break in the middle.

"I. I'm going."

Dex's eyes lit. He caught her wrist. "Let her go. Where do you think you're going?"

My face was on fire.

I set the pharmacy bag down on the table, between the ice bucket and somebody's phone.

I put the sentence back where I keep it.

I turned around.

Behind me, at the door, one of them asked, "So what are you and the little stutterer even fighting about?"

Blair didn't slur. She didn't hurry.

"Three minutes for one sentence."

"Last time she couldn't get it out at all. She almost cried."

Dex laughed, low, the way he laughs when he's fond of someone.

The door swung shut on his voice.

"A stutterer"

Chapter 2

"you dump her when you get bored."

The gap in the door was two inches wide. It was enough.

Inside, Dex stretched an arm along the back of the couch. "Ungrateful little thing. Everything I do for her, and all she knows how to do is get jealous."

"So when are you cutting the stutterer loose?"

"She's a stutterer. I'll dump her when I get bored."

Then he looked at Blair, and something went across his face that I didn't have a name for.

"If it brings Blair back, all of it was worth it."

I walked out into the rain.

There was a black Bentley at the curb with its engine running.

I came up to it and wiped the water out of my eyelashes with the back of my hand. The window came down on a hard, elegant profile. Black suit. A watch worth more than the building I lived in.

"Mr. Fairbank. I'm sorry. I let you down."

Adrian Fairbank is Dex's older brother. He runs the Fairbank Group.

Since my freshman year a specialist has flown in from Zurich, every session paid, no name on the invoice. Week by week the words came loose. Four months ago he found me and told me why in three sentences. Dex is my brother. I'd like things to go well for the two of you.

For his brother's happiness, I assumed. That's what people spend money like that on. And by the time it worked, Dex didn't want me.

Adrian didn't take the apology.

He looked at me through the rain for a second longer than he needed to.

"Your piece should have taken first," he said.

I didn't know what he was talking about.

He put the tablet down on the seat beside him.

"Get in."

I opened the door and sat on the edge of the leather, folded small, so the water wouldn't run off me onto anything of his.

He ended a call.

"So," he said. "Would you consider wanting someone else?"

"What?"

His eyes came up. They were very cold and completely calm, and my chest went tight.

"You could marry me."

The rain hit the roof.

"Whatever Dex has, I have. More of it."

"On the numbers, I'm the better position."

The silence went on long enough that I could hear the wipers.

"Why," I said. It didn't come out as a question. It came out as one word I'd gotten stuck on.

He was poaching from his own brother, and he was doing it the way you'd read a term sheet out loud.

"My grandfather wants me married," he said. "You'd be doing me a favor."

"In return you'd have whatever you want."

"You can also say no. Take your time."

I had been talking to the wrong Fairbank for five years. Dex broke things when he wanted them. This one waited, and priced them, and then owned them.

The Fairbanks pulled me out of the water once. That debt has been sitting on the table my whole adult life.

"I'll think about it," I said finally. "If you ever meet someone you love, we get divorced."

His eyes went back to the tablet.

"We'll see."

He had the driver take me to my building in Queens.

I stood in the doorway and watched the car go until the taillights turned at the end of the block. Then I opened my phone.

Blair had posted four minutes ago.

Hotel room. Blackout curtains open on the skyline. She was awake, propped on one elbow, hair loose, looking straight into the camera, and she'd tagged him.

[Blair: someone told me I'd never get him back.]

One comment.

[Dex: good girl.]

Chapter 3

I stood under the awning until my breathing evened out, and texted him: I want to talk.

Nothing came back. Not that night. Not for a month.

He wasn't coming back. I knew it the way you know a story is dead: nobody's returning your calls, and nobody has to.

Then, on a Tuesday, I sent the message ending it. I blocked his number, his email, every account he had. My hands were steady.

That afternoon Adrian Fairbank and I signed for a marriage license at the courthouse downtown, and he flew to Chicago the same evening. His driver took me to the townhouse on the Upper East Side. Someone else brought my things over from Queens.

Three days in, he was still gone.

One lamp on. Gray, white, nothing on the walls. In the closet, forty feet of his suits, a drawer of watches lined up like evidence.

And my clothes, still in the box they came in.

At ten at night I heard the front door.

I thought it was him. I opened the bedroom door two inches, and a voice came up the stairs that I knew better than my own.

"My brother's out of town. We'll stay here tonight."

Then Blair, out of breath. "Dex. I can't breathe."

A door shut down the hall.

I got back in the bed and pulled the duvet over my ear and pressed it there with my hand and counted my own breaths.

Forty-seven.

The house had six bedrooms. Not one of the doors in it locked from the inside. That was the thing I learned, lying there. It was his house, and his brother had a key, and I had a cardboard box.

A hinge moved. Somebody laughed.

I got up to find earplugs and my knee hit the stool at the foot of the bed and I went down onto the floor with a sound the whole house heard.

Down the hall, everything stopped.

The bedroom door opened.

Adrian was still in his coat. He'd come straight up from the car, hadn't put anything down, and the cold of the street was still on him.

"What are you crying about?"

He took off his watch and set it on the dresser. Then he crouched and took my chin, and his thumb was warm and rough on my jaw and my ears went hot.

"This is your house," he said. "Why haven't you thrown them out?"

"He's your brother."

You spent a fortune on my mouth for his sake. I don't get to put him on the street.

I didn't say that part.

He looked at me for a moment. Whatever he did with it, it didn't reach his face.

He put his arm under my knees and stood up with me like I weighed nothing.

"What's the hurry," he said.

His tie was crooked where I'd grabbed it. Under his collar there was a gap, and a line of his throat, and I looked at it for exactly as long as it took me to realize I was looking.

Knuckles on the door.

"Adrian?" Dex, on the other side. Careful. "Did you. Did you bring someone home?"

The handle turned down.

Adrian took two steps and put my back against the door, and held it there with the whole weight of me, and I got my arms around his neck and didn't move.

The handle kept turning.

Chapter 4

"Can you keep quiet?" he said.

I shook my head.

"Adrian, open the door." Dex was losing patience. "Do you have a woman in there?"

Adrian was looking at me while he answered him, and his voice had nothing in it at all.

"Do I report my dating life to you?"

A pause. "I heard something. I heard a"

"You heard wrong."

His hand settled at my waist. It stayed there. It didn't go anywhere else, and somehow that was worse.

My breathing had gone shallow and he could feel it, and he waited, and let me hear myself.

"If you can't keep quiet," he said, "sing."

Then, quieter: "Your voice is worth listening to."

Nobody had ever said anything like that to me. Not once, not in twenty-four years.

Something in my head came loose, and I opened my mouth, and what came out was the lullaby. The old one, the one about the mockingbird, the one they play in every nursery in America.

I got four words in and stopped, because of the way he was looking at me.

"That," he said, "is very hard to say no to."

There was laughter under it. I put my forehead against his shoulder and stayed there.

Outside the door, the hallway had gone silent.

Then Dex, and his voice wasn't steady. "Adrian. Who is she?"

Adrian reached back and turned the lock.

Click.

"Tonight is my wedding night," he said, "with your sister-in-law."

"She doesn't like noise."

"So take your girl and get out."

On the other side of the door, Dex started a word and swallowed it.

Then footsteps. A suitcase handle knocking once against the stairs. Two seconds at the landing where nothing happened at all.

And then, close to the door, low enough that only I could hear it through the wood, Blair said:

"The best actress in this house isn't me."

The front door closed.

The house went completely quiet.

Chapter 5

He brought up a first aid kit and crouched in front of me.

He had my calf in one hand. The ointment went on cold and turned warm under his thumb, and neither of us said anything for a while.

"Mr. Fairbank." I was smiling by then. I couldn't help the smile. "I'll pay you back for all of it. I promise."

His hand stopped.

"June. Since I was eighteen I have given away somewhere north of two hundred million dollars."

He didn't look up when he said it.

"Do you think I need to be paid back?"

Then he did look up.

"Or is that what the last five years were. You being good to Dex, to settle a debt with me."

He had put his thumb straight through the middle of it.

"Then what do you want," I said. Too fast.

"What I want, you've already given me."

He bent his head and went back to my knee, and worked the last of the ointment in, and let it sit there between us.

In the lamplight there was a wedding band on his ring finger.

Five years ago I won a city essay competition, freshman year at Kingsbury. The Fairbank foundation put nine of us through college, so a Fairbank sat in the third row that night, and it wasn't the one I was dating. Dex left at intermission. He said the acoustics were bad. What was bad was his girlfriend at a microphone.

My speech ran eleven minutes because I couldn't get past my own name.

The whole hall waited. Somebody's chair creaked. In the third row a man in a black coat sat with his hands folded and did not look at his watch, not once.

It snowed that night, hard, and the roads locked up, and I heard later that he missed a meeting worth more than the building we were standing in.

My advisor walked me out to his car to apologize.

My lips had gone blue. I got out three words in the cold.

The window came down two inches. Snow blowing sideways between us. And he said the thing he said.

I hadn't thought about it in five years.

I thought about it now, on the floor of his bedroom, because four nights ago, in the rain, on the curb outside a bar, he had said it to me again.

Word for word.

Something in my chest turned over.

He got a call and left before I could look at his face.

He did it for Dex, I told myself. Everything he has ever done, he did for Dex.

Summer hung on that year, well into October.

The Ledger moved me off the culture desk and onto business, still writing. The same week, Dex Fairbank was installed two floors up as my boss.

Blair Winslow came with him, as his assistant.

I heard them before I saw them. I was outside the restroom on nine, and behind the door somebody was crying with her voice pushed down flat, the way you cry when you don't want it in the hallway.

"You're unbelievable," Dex said.

Then Blair, not crying anymore. "Fine. Go find your stutterer. You can't stomach a real woman, so you go eat scraps."

"The scraps are better company than you."

I heard my own name in their mouths, in a room I wasn't in.

I stopped walking.

I took my phone out of my coat, and I pressed record, and I held it flat against my leg. Evidence. That's all I wanted. He'd said things about me in that building before, and I had nothing but my own word, and my own word takes three minutes.

Behind the door, Dex kept talking. His voice dropped. It changed.

Somebody called my name from the end of the hall and I went, and the phone stayed in my pocket, running.

Whatever he said next, he said it with the door shut.

I never played it back.

He turned up at my building that same night.

"Little stutterer. Where've you been for a month?"

He got me against the entryway wall, smiling, and there was nothing behind the smile at all.

I moved my face away from his hand. "We broke up."

Something went across his eyes. He took my jaw and turned my head back.

"You're not stuttering."

"Get out."

Two words. I have speech therapy every Wednesday and I still can't hold a long sentence at speed. But two words I can do.

He'd been fighting with Blair. It was all over him, that stubborn ugly heat men get when a woman has told them the truth an hour earlier.

He got a fist in my coat and pulled, and I went sideways off the step, and I said, "I'm calling the police."

He threw my bag into the back seat with my phone in it.

The locks came down.

"Police." He was breathing hard. "You've been begging to meet the family."

"Dinner's tonight. My grandfather's there. My brother's there. Come meet them."

My right wrist had four marks on it where his fingers had been. They were still there an hour later. They were still there the next day.

I sat with my hands in my lap and my bag six feet away in the back and the doors locked, and there was nothing on that whole drive that I could open.

"Dex. I'm married."

He hit the wheel. The horn went off, once, short.

"Married. Who the hell would look twice at you."

Then his eyes dropped to my hand, and everything vicious in them drained straight out.

"Right," he said. "Of course."

He laughed. "Don't lie to me. You can't even find the diamond on that thing. Whoever married you is broke."

I chose that ring myself, off the second tray at a Silverline in a strip mall. It was the cheapest one they had. I didn't want anything anyone would look at.

Adrian's is plainer than mine. It has no stone and no engraving and it cost less than the tie he wears with it.

He puts it on every morning.

Dex watched me hold my hand against my stomach, and it made his whole night.

"Nobody's been born yet who could take something from me."

"Tell your husband to come to the house and try."

Chapter 6

He drove ninety the whole way out to Long Island.

My phone rang under the back seat, over and over, the entire drive.

I sat in the car for a minute after he parked, swallowing, before he pulled me through the door by the arm.

Adrian was by the window with a phone to his ear. There was a cigarette burning down between two fingers and he had let it go all the way to the filter without tapping it once.

He turned his head.

He put the phone down. He looked at my wrist, where his brother's hand was closed around it, and at the four marks coming up under the fingers, and he looked at them long enough that people near him stopped talking.

He didn't say anything. He didn't move.

Whoever had been calling me for the last hour. Please, no.

I tried to pull my arm back. Dex didn't let go.

He walked me straight across the room to the old man.

"Grandfather. My girlfriend."

"I'm not"

The old man cut me off. He was quick. "You're one of the foundation's kids. You're a good kid. Where you come from is nothing to me. Be decent, and be faithful."

He put the last word down like a chip on a table.

Dex's eyes went to the corner of the room. Blair was sitting alone in a hard chair with her lip bitten white.

That's all this was. It was always for her benefit.

I took my arm out of his hand.

"Sir," I said. "I'm married."

The old man blinked. "Married. And nobody thought to mention it?"

"Not to Dex. To someone else."

Across the room, Adrian set his glass down. His hand stayed on it half a second longer than it needed to. Then he moved off through the crowd, and I didn't understand why, and I kept talking.

"I think the person Dex would most like to marry is Miss Winslow."

"We hadn't broken up when he took her to a hotel. He didn't answer me for a month. I assumed we were finished. I'm married now, and he came to my home tonight and put me in his car."

The room went quiet in the particular way a room goes quiet when forty people decide to listen to something.

I didn't call him anything. I didn't need to.

Somebody near the bar laughed into his drink. "Cheating on one and stepping out with the other. Busy year for the boy."

Dex's face came apart. "Who told you to say that?"

"And since when do you talk like"

The cane caught him across the shin.

"Blair Winslow," the old man said. "You'd marry that."

Dex made a sound through his teeth. Blair came out of the corner at a run and got between them.

"Don't hit him. Hit me instead."

Somebody got a hand under the old man's elbow. Blair's knee came down hard on the flagstone. A glass went over on a passing tray and nobody picked it up.

I stepped back out of it, and my ring caught the light, and not one person in that house looked at it twice, because it cost eighty dollars and it has no stone in it.

Across the room, Adrian moved his glass to his left hand.

His is plainer than mine.

I was almost at the door when a hand closed on my arm and pulled, hard, and I went sideways into a dark room.

The lock turned over.

Click.

Then, close to my ear, very quiet:

"June. I'm someone else?"

Chapter 7

Somewhere behind me a tap was dripping onto steel. Once, twice. The kitchen was dark and neither of us had turned a light on.

"You didn't pick up," he said. "I called you eleven times."

Something behind my teeth let go, and what came out of me was a complaint. I heard it happen. I stopped.

"He put me in the car. My bag went in the back with my phone."

And then, because I wanted him to know exactly how it happened: "It's still in there."

"Mm." His thumb moved along the shell of my ear. His voice didn't warm up at all. "Second question. Is it humiliating, saying out loud that you married me?"

Oh.

That's what this was.

"It was the first time I met your family," I said. "And I was standing there with Dex holding my arm. If I drag you into that, what will they think of you."

He laughed. It was very quiet.

"What will they think of me."

"That you got handed someone else's mess. That you're the one who got taken. That you're easy to lie to"

"Easy to lie to."

I had his tie in my fist. I don't know when I took it. I know that I didn't let go of it.

He waited. He was close enough that I could feel the shape of the wait.

I moved my chin, half an inch, up.

Then he kissed me.

He'd had a mint. Under it, cigarettes. Cold and hot at once and my back went into the kitchen door, glass and cool against my shoulder blades, and the whole room narrowed down to the fact that his hand was flat on the small of my back and his mouth had opened over mine.

Outside, through the glass, Dex was promising his grandfather that I'd file for divorce within the week. That I didn't like the man at all. That I only did it to spite him.

Inside, Adrian took his mouth off mine, one inch, and left it there.

"He says you don't like me."

"Is that so?"

My hands were around his neck. There were forty people on the other side of that door.

"Mr. Fairbank," I got out. "Quieter. Please. Everyone's right there."

He straightened me up against the glass, unhurried, as if he had all night and had already scheduled it.

"Answer the question."

Tonight there was something in him with teeth.

"Answer it and I'll let you go."

My legs weren't holding me. He was.

I laughed, once, silently, into his collar, and I bit down on it, and I said, "I like you."

His fingers went up into my hair. He pulled his own tie loose.

"Then we'll keep going."

When I came out of the kitchen my skirt was creased through and I couldn't do anything about it.

Behind me the kitchen stayed dark. The door hadn't quite caught. There was a mop and a bucket knocked over somewhere in there.

The old man had taken his temper out to the garden. Everyone followed him out there.

I pushed the glass door open and let the cold get at my face.

Dex had an audience by then. He waited until the terrace was full, until his grandfather's back was ten feet away, and he raised his voice.

"My brother?"

"He's old. Nothing works. He can't hold on to anybody."

He was warming up. Somebody laughed and it made him louder.

"You want it like I did it. Start in college. Put in the years."

"Then it doesn't matter what you do to her. You crook a finger and she comes back. Like a dog."

"I tell her to get a divorce, she'll get one."

Behind him the kitchen door swung the last inch shut, and Adrian came out of it, straightening his cuffs. Nothing about him had moved. He had his tie in his hand.

I was walking over there to say something when my skirt caught.

Blair was on the ground in the corner with her arms around her knees, and her eyes were scalded.

"He's going to marry you," she said. "Are you happy?"

"You followed him to a family dinner. You have no shame at all."

I stood there.

There was the question of which of them to start with. It was a hard question. They were both so cheap.

She was staring at the creases in my skirt.

"You'd do that with him. In front of me."

"That's fine. He has to do something to hurt me."

"Or how would he chase me."

She lifted her face. It was a good face. She'd had it ready.

"Dex is mine."

Chapter 8

"He gets jealous. That's all it is."

She said it to me the way you explain something to a slow child.

"You don't know anything about us. He can't be away from me. He's never been able to."

Behind her, on the terrace, nobody was laughing anymore. A man near the rail turned his head and looked at the hedges instead.

The wind came across the water and I stood there with my scalp prickling and no idea what I was supposed to do with any of it.

I crouched down so we were level.

"He used you for five years to make me jealous," I said. "You call that love."

Her face went completely blank. "What. What did you say."

She started crying in front of everyone.

"You're a stutterer. You're an orphan. You have nothing, and you married a man who can't even buy you a real ring."

"And you still have more than I do."

"I know people aren't born equal. I know that."

"I'm not fighting you. I'm asking you. Tell Dex to leave me alone."

Ten feet away, Dex laughed at her.

"Blair. When did I ever say I loved you?"

The blood went out of her face.

Behind him, across the terrace, his brother had started walking.

"Even if June divorces him," Dex said, "I'd marry her anyway."

He had no idea. He didn't turn around. He looked at me instead, and he put everything he had into it.

"June. Divorce him tomorrow. I'll come sign the papers with"

Adrian didn't break stride. He lifted one foot and put it into the small of his brother's back.

Dex went off the tile.

The splash came up over the coping and hit the first row of shoes.

Nobody moved. Nobody could get there fast enough to understand it. He had kicked him into the pool the way you'd move a dog off a couch, and he hadn't spilled his drink.

Dex came up choking.

"Adrian. What is wrong with you?"

"Are you insane? Pull me out."

Adrian stood at the edge. Dex got a hand on the coping and Adrian nudged the fingers with the toe of his shoe.

He was laughing.

"That's how you talk your sister-in-law into a divorce?"

"You want to die tonight?"

Dex stopped moving in the water.

So did the forty people around the pool.

Blair let go of my skirt. Her mouth opened.

"Sister-in-law. Who's a sister-in