He Left Me To Die (Billionaire Grovel Romance #1)

Chapter 1

Kellan’s thumb moves across his phone screen the way it always does — steady, certain, like the message he’s typing matters more than whatever I just said.

I said something about the mountains. Something about how the light hits the snow below us and turns it pink at the edges, like the whole range is blushing.

Something that deserved at least a glance out the window, because it’s the kind of view you can’t buy, which is saying something when you’re married to a man who buys everything.

“Mmhm,” he says. His eyes don’t leave the screen.

The Gulfstream hums around us. Smooth leather seats the color of dark honey, the faint smell of fresh coffee from the galley, that particular silence you only get at forty thousand feet in a plane with no commercial passengers.

No crying babies. No armrest wars. No overhead bins slamming shut.

Just Kellan, me, Jonas Decker reading a thriller two rows back, and two pilots behind the cockpit door doing whatever pilots do when the autopilot is doing the work.

This is my life. I remind myself of that sometimes, the way you remind yourself to be grateful for something you didn’t exactly choose.

Five years ago I was pulling twelve-hour shifts in the ER at Mount Sinai, holding pressure on a gunshot wound at 3 AM, eating cold pizza in the break room at 4, falling asleep on a gurney because the on-call room smelled like somebody’s divorce.

Now I’m on a private jet over Switzerland watching my husband ignore me in a seat that costs more than my first car.

The trade was worth it. I’m almost positive.

“You know,” I say, “most people pay thousands of dollars for this view.”

“We pay more than that.” He glances up with the half-smile that still gets me after five years — brief and slightly crooked, like he’s surprised he finds me funny. “Operating cost on this thing runs about fourteen thousand an hour.”

“Romantic.”

He laughs. A real one, low and short, the kind where his whole face changes for a second before his jaw resets.

Then his phone buzzes and the laugh is gone and his thumb is moving again and I think: this.

This is the marriage. The laugh and the buzz.

The moment of real contact and the immediate retreat into the machine he’s building or running or whatever verb billionaires use for the thing that eats them alive.

Kellan Carmichael, third generation. His grandfather started with a single charter plane out of Teterboro.

His father turned it into a fleet. Kellan turned the fleet into Carmichael Aviation Group — the largest private aviation company in North America.

FBOs in twenty-seven cities, fractional ownership for people who consider first class slumming it, concierge services that include things like “we’ll move your horse to Dubai.

” I’m not making that up. That was a Tuesday.

And me. Marie Carmichael, née Reeves. Thirty-three years old.

Former trauma nurse. Current… I’ve stopped trying to name what I currently am.

Wife is the legal answer. Part-time clinic volunteer is the résumé answer.

The woman who used to hold dying strangers together with her bare hands and now holds a champagne flute at fundraisers and pretends the two lives have nothing to do with each other — that’s the honest answer, but nobody asks the honest question.

Nobody asked me to quit, either. That’s the thing I tell myself when the itch starts.

Kellan never said stop working. He said take a break, you’ve earned it, and the break lasted two years, and somewhere in there the break became my life and the life I had before became something I describe in past tense at dinner parties.

I was a nurse. Like it’s a place I visited.

“Who are you texting?” I ask.

“Hendricks. The Zurich FBO needs a retrofit before the Maserati group comes through in October.”

“Sexy.”

“You have no idea.” He finally looks up — full attention, both eyes, the phone face-down on his thigh.

The full attention of Kellan Carmichael is like standing in a beam of light.

Dark hair pushed back from a face that photographs well in business profiles, a jaw that could open mail, and eyes that make you feel like the most interesting person in whatever room you’re in.

The problem is that rooms contain other people and he makes all of them feel that way, too.

It’s a gift. Or a weapon. Depends on the day.

He reaches across the armrest and takes my hand. Squeezes once — firm, deliberate, the way he does everything. “Two more hours. Then it’s just us and the Alps and a fireplace the size of our living room.”

“A client’s fireplace.”

“A client’s fireplace with a wine cellar he told us to raid.”

“The client told us. Not you.”

“The client told me. I’m telling you. Chain of command.”

I squeeze back and I mean it. This is the part that’s real.

Not the jet, not the Swiss Alps, not the fourteen thousand dollars an hour that the air around us costs.

This — his hand in mine, the pressure that means I’m here, the way he can switch from CEO to husband in the space of a breath when he remembers to try.

The problem is the remembering.

Jonas Decker coughs from two rows back. A quiet, polite cough that means nothing except that Jonas is alive and present and has probably heard every word we’ve said since takeoff.

He’s been Kellan’s head of security for eight years — a quiet, square-shouldered man with a buzz cut and the kind of face that takes in everything and gives back nothing.

He was Army before this. Special operations, I think, though he’s never confirmed it and I’ve learned that asking Jonas direct personal questions produces a silence so complete it feels like a weather event.

“Jonas,” I say over my shoulder. “Tell me you looked at the mountains.”

A pause. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Did you see them turn pink?”

“I did.”

“See?” I turn to Kellan. “Jonas appreciates me.”

“Jonas is paid to appreciate you.”

“Jonas is paid to keep you alive. The appreciation is volunteer work.”

Another low laugh from my husband. Another buzz from his phone. Another thumb across the screen.

I turn back to the window and press my forehead against the cold glass.

The Alps have changed while we were talking — the pink gone, replaced by a hard bright white that hurts my eyes.

Peaks and ridges like a jaw full of teeth.

The Bernese Oberland, the pilot announced twenty minutes ago.

Eleven thousand feet below us and rising.

I think about the last time I felt this specific kind of quiet.

Not peace, exactly. More like suspension.

The held breath before something, though you don’t know what.

In the ER we called it the lull — that stretch of stillness at 2 AM where nothing is happening and the monitor beeps are steady and you know, you know in your body, that something is about to come through those doors.

You can’t explain how you know. You just do.

I press my forehead harder against the glass and I push the thought away.

The first engine dies without warning.

There’s no buildup. No shudder, no alarm, no polite mechanical throat-clearing.

One second the Gulfstream is humming its fourteen-thousand-dollar hum and the next second there’s a gap — a hole in the sound, a silence in the place where the left engine used to be.

The plane dips. Not much. Just enough that the coffee in the galley shifts and Kellan’s phone slides across the armrest.

He catches it. Looks up. His face does something I’ve never seen: it goes blank. Not calm — blank. A screen that just lost its feed.

“What was—”

The second engine dies.

The silence is absolute. I have never heard anything like it.

Not quiet, not the hush of a well-insulated cabin, but the complete and animal absence of the thing that was keeping us in the air.

Every vibration stops. Every hum stops. The Gulfstream G650, Kellan’s favorite, his pride, the plane he can rattle off the specs for the way other men recite batting averages, becomes a metal tube falling through the sky.

My stomach hits my spine. The coffee goes airborne. A pen rolls off the fold-down table and floats, briefly, in the air between us, and that floating pen is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen because pens don’t float and if the pen is floating then nothing is holding us up.

Kellan’s hand clamps down on mine so hard I feel my knuckles grind.

The cockpit door swings open and the pilot is talking — rapid, clipped, words that sound technical and urgent and completely meaningless because the only thing I’m listening for is the word fine and nobody says it. Nobody says normal. Nobody says this is going to be okay.

“Dual engine failure.” That’s Jonas. Behind us. His voice flat and factual, like he’s reading it off a screen. “Both out.”

The nose pitches down. Through the window the mountains fill the entire frame — white, massive, serrated, and coming up fast. I am a trauma nurse.

I have held a man’s intestines inside his body with my bare hands while the surgeon scrubbed in.

I have told a nineteen-year-old that her mother didn’t make it and then triaged the next patient before my eyes dried. I am not someone who panics.

I am panicking.

Kellan is out of his seat. One hand on the ceiling for balance, moving toward the cockpit, shouting something I can’t hear because there’s wind now — a roaring, rushing wall of sound that means something is open or broken or gone.

Jonas is on his feet in the aisle, braced like a man who has been inside falling things before and knows what to hold.

“Marie.” Kellan turns back. His face is white. His hand is reaching for me and it’s shaking and Kellan Carmichael’s hands don’t shake. “Seatbelt. Tighten it.”