He Left Me To Drown (Billionaire Grovel Romance #2)

Chapter 1

Sabrina Frost is wearing my husband’s watch.

Not literally. But she checks the time, and he checks his wrist, and they both look up at the same moment with the same expression — a small tightening around the mouth that means the investors are late.

They have been doing this for eighteen months, this synchronized awareness of each other’s rhythms. I used to be the person who could read Weston’s face from across a room.

Now I watch Sabrina do it and I think: when did I get replaced?

The resort’s main terrace opens onto a crescent of white sand, the Caribbean stretching out flat and turquoise to the horizon.

Crenshaw Property Development is evaluating this island for a luxury resort build, and Boyd has turned the site visit into a family production — eighteen people flown in on the company jet, four villas reserved at the existing resort that will be torn down if the deal goes through.

The Crenshaws do not visit places. They occupy them.

I am sitting at the far end of a teak table that seats fourteen, sketching the resort’s pergola structure in the margins of my notebook.

Force of habit. The columns are overbuilt — too thick for the span, which tells me the original architect did not trust the soil composition and compensated with mass instead of engineering.

I could fix this in a redesign. Nobody has asked me to fix anything.

“Anais, you’re doing that thing again.” Nash drops into the chair beside me and sets down two glasses of iced tea. He is the only Crenshaw who brings me drinks without being asked.

“What thing?”

“The thing where you redesign a building no one told you to redesign.”

“It’s structurally interesting.”

“It’s a pergola.”

“It’s a badly engineered pergola.” I take the tea. The ice clinks. Condensation runs down the glass and pools on the teak. “Thank you.”

Nash grins and stretches his legs out, tipping his chair back in a way that would give Boyd a stroke if the old man could see him from inside the conference room.

Nash is thirty-two, same as me, built softer than Weston and less deliberate about it.

He wears linen pants and a rumpled shirt and looks like he wandered onto a corporate retreat by accident, which is roughly how he approaches the family business.

He is the one Crenshaw I would call a friend, and we both know it, and neither of us says it out loud because the compound does not work that way.

“Dad’s in there telling the investors about Grandfather’s vision.

” Nash jerks his thumb toward the glass doors of the conference room.

Through the tinted glass, Boyd stands at the head of the table, one hand on the back of his chair, the other gesturing at a rendering on the screen.

Sixty-three, silver-haired, broad in the way of a man whose body remembers being powerful even now that the power is institutional.

“Weston’s letting him run for another five minutes before he takes over. ”

“How generous.”

“It’s strategy. Boyd gets his moment, Weston gets the deal. Everyone performs their role.”

“And what’s your role?”

“Keeping the one person here with structural engineering opinions from dying of boredom.” He tips his glass toward me. “You’re welcome.”

I laugh. It is a real laugh, which is something I do less of at Crenshaw events than I used to.

Through the glass I watch Sabrina shift behind Weston’s chair, tablet ready, dark hair tucked behind one ear.

She is twenty-eight and polished in the way that comes from studying what polish looks like and reproducing it perfectly.

She is not beautiful in the way people mean when they say beautiful.

She is precise. Every element of her — the clothes, the posture, the way she anticipates what Weston will need before he reaches for it — fits together like a structure designed to bear exactly the load it carries.

I am an architect. I recognize good design. I hate recognizing it in this woman.

Weston catches my eye through the glass and smiles. It is a real smile — warm, specific to me, the one that still makes my stomach dip even after six years. He holds up five fingers. Five more minutes. I nod and turn back to my sketch.

This is the marriage. Small signals across rooms. Real warmth inside a structure that leaves less and less space for it.

He loves me. I know he loves me. But love inside the Crenshaw compound is like a plant in a pot that is slightly too small — alive, genuine, and slowly being strangled by the container.

That evening, the retreat moves to a beach dinner.

Tiki torches and white linen and a chef the resort flew in from Nassau.

Boyd sits at the head of the table because Boyd always sits at the head of the table, even at a round one — the man would find a head on a circle.

The investors sit at his flanks, charmed and flattered, which is Boyd’s primary skill.

He tells a story about the first Crenshaw office in downtown Dallas, a two-room walkup his father rented in 1962, and the investors lean in like they are hearing gospel.

I have heard this story fourteen times. The number of rooms changes depending on the audience.

Weston is across from me, and Sabrina is next to him, and I am between Nash and a VP of acquisitions named Gerald who talks about golf handicaps with the intensity of a man describing combat.

“The course in Kiawah,” Gerald is saying. “Back nine. You cannot believe the wind.”

“I believe you, Gerald.” I take a sip of wine and let my gaze drift to the water.

The sun is setting and the sky is doing that thing tropical skies do — burning through colors so fast it looks like time-lapse photography.

Orange to coral to violet, all of it reflected on the flat water.

It would be beautiful if I were here as myself. As a Crenshaw accessory, it is scenery.

Weston’s hand finds mine under the table.

His fingers are warm and his grip is firm and I let myself have the moment — the salt air, the torchlight, his thumb rubbing circles on my palm.

This is the part that makes everything else complicated.

If the warmth were gone, I could leave. If the dynasty were all there was, I would have left years ago.

But he touches me like I am the only real thing in a room full of performance, and I believe him.

I just wish his hand were not also holding his phone, checking a message from Sabrina about tomorrow’s site walk schedule.

“The soil reports came back,” Weston says, releasing my hand to pull up a PDF. “Load-bearing capacity is better than projected. We can go heavier on the main structure.”

He says this to the table, but he is looking at Sabrina, who already has the numbers. She reads them off without glancing at her tablet. She memorized them. Of course she did.

“The existing footings are wrong, though.” The words leave my mouth before I decide to speak.

Everyone looks at me. The investors, Gerald, Boyd with his fork paused halfway to his mouth.

Nash, next to me, goes still in the way of a man who knows something interesting is about to happen.

“The pergola columns. They’re compensating for soil they didn’t test properly.

If you’re building on this site, you need a geotechnical survey from the ridge down to the waterline, not just the beach flat. ”

Silence. The tiki torches crackle.

“That’s a good point,” Nash says.

“We have a survey scheduled,” Sabrina says. Not dismissive. Factual. She has already handled it. She says it the way you might tell someone that yes, the door is locked, thank you for checking.

“Right.” I pick up my wine. “Good.”

Boyd clears his throat and pivots back to the investors with a story about a soil problem on a Houston project in the nineties.

The table moves on. Weston squeezes my knee under the table — his shorthand for I heard you, I see you, you’re right.

It used to feel like partnership. Now it feels like a consolation prize.

I drink the wine and watch the torchlight play on the water and I think about how six years ago I argued with Boyd about structural engineering at a dinner party, and Weston proposed the next week because he said he had never seen anyone talk to his father like that.

He fell in love with me for fighting. Somewhere along the way, he stopped noticing when I stopped.

The morning breaks clear and hot, the sky a hard blue that looks painted on.

I wake before Weston and lie still, listening to the waves through the open windows of our villa.

He sleeps on his stomach with one arm flung across my hip, which is how he has always slept, and for a moment the weight of him is only comfort, only familiar, only six years of this body next to mine.

His face is slack with sleep and he looks younger — less Crenshaw, more the man I married.

The jaw that projects authority in a boardroom is just a jaw.

The shoulders that carry the dynasty are just shoulders.

I trace a line along his arm with my fingertip and he stirs but does not wake and I feel a swell of tenderness that is so sharp it almost hurts.

Then his phone buzzes on the nightstand. He reaches for it without opening his eyes.

“Sabrina moved the site walk to nine.” He says it into the pillow.

“Okay.”

“You want to come? You could look at the soil situation you mentioned.”