Betrayed and Neglected by My Billionaire Husband (Billionaire Marriage in Crisis #20)

Prologue

Sophia

The elevator to the sixth floor of Whitmore Maison smelled like money and the quiet terror of people who desperately wanted some.

I was one of those people. My portfolio case was sweating in my grip, or maybe my palms were sweating onto the case.

Hard to tell. The leather was butter-soft, borrowed from my mother, and I’d already left a thumbprint on the corner that I kept trying to buff out with my sleeve.

The doors opened onto a reception area apparently designed to make art school graduates feel personally inadequate.

Cream marble floors, a single orchid on the desk that probably cost more than my rent, and a receptionist whose bone structure suggested she’d been hired primarily to intimidate visitors into good posture.

It was working. I straightened my spine so fast I heard a vertebra pop.

“Sophia Laurent? Monsieur Whitmore will see you shortly.” She gestured toward a cluster of chairs that might have been lifted from a museum. “Please, have a seat.”

I perched on the edge of one, because sitting fully back felt presumptuous, and flipped open my portfolio for the fourteenth time to make sure everything was still in order.

Twelve pieces, chronologically arranged, my absolute best work from the past three years, everything clean and polished and professional.

And then, tucked behind my final piece because I’d forgotten to remove it that morning, a sketch that had no business being there.

I yanked it out so fast the paper crinkled.

The unfinished necklace design stared back at me accusingly.

Three weeks I’d been wrestling with the center, and I still couldn’t crack it.

The cascade was right, the negative space was right, the way the smaller elements flowed upward was exactly what I wanted.

But the focal point was a mess of erased lines and question marks and one deeply unhelpful note to myself that just said “FIX THIS PART, IDIOT.”

I shoved it to the back of the stack and closed the portfolio. Fine. I’d skip the last page. No one ever looked at the last page anyway.

“Mademoiselle Laurent?” The receptionist again. “He’s ready for you.”

The conference room was glass-walled and enormous, with a table long enough to seat twelve and only one person at the far end of it.

Alexander Whitmore stood when I entered, which I hadn’t expected.

He was younger than I’d pictured, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight, with dark hair and a face that made you briefly forget what you were about to say. I forgot what I was about to say.

“Miss Laurent.” He crossed the room to shake my hand, and his grip was warm and brief and businesslike. “Thank you for coming in. Please, sit.”

I sat across from him, which put approximately nine feet of polished mahogany between us. The distance felt intentional. This was a man who’d probably been taught to conduct interviews before he learned to drive.

“Your portfolio impressed us,” he said, settling back into his chair. “Professor Fournier speaks highly of you. She says you argue with her constantly.”

“I wouldn’t say constantly.”

“She said you once spent forty-five minutes debating the ethical implications of lab-grown versus mined stones.”

“That sounds more accurate.”

His mouth twitched. Not quite a smile, but adjacent to one. “Walk me through your work.”

I opened the portfolio and turned it to face him, then stood and moved to the chair beside his because explaining jewelry designs from nine feet away was functionally useless. He raised an eyebrow but didn’t object, and I launched into my first piece before I could lose my nerve.

Presenting your own work means pretending to be someone confident enough to have made it.

You have to talk about your choices like they were choices and not a series of small panics that somehow coalesced into a presentable whole.

I’d practiced this presentation so many times I could do it without thinking, which was good, because what I was actually thinking was that Alexander Whitmore had very nice hands and smelled faintly of sandalwood and I needed to focus immediately.

“This was my thesis piece,” I said, pointing to the seventh design.

“The brief was ‘heirloom,’ but I didn’t want to do another vintage reproduction.

So I started thinking about what actually makes something an heirloom.

It’s not the materials or the craftsmanship.

It’s the story. The memory attached to it.

So I designed this ring to have a hidden compartment, here, for a handwritten note.

Something secret between the giver and the wearer. ”

He leaned forward to look more closely. “Where does the note go?”

“There’s a hairline seam along the inner band.

You can’t see it when it’s on. The paper has to be small, obviously, rolled tight, but it fits.

” I turned the page before he could ask more questions.

The prototype I’d made had held a note that said “remember to buy milk,” which was less romantic than I’d hoped.

“And this is my final piece. A commission I did last year for a private client.”

He studied the design for a long moment, and I watched his face for any reaction. His expression gave me nothing. Either he had an excellent poker face or he was genuinely unmoved, and I wasn’t sure which was worse.

“These are very good,” he said finally. “Safe, but good. Your technique is solid.”

Safe. The word landed like a small, polite knife. “Thank you.”

He closed the portfolio, and I reached for it, already running through my exit lines in my head. It had been a good interview. Professional. Probably pointless, since he’d just called my life’s work “safe,” but at least I hadn’t spilled anything or mispronounced anyone’s name.

“Wait.” His hand landed on the portfolio before I could pick it up. “Go back.”

“I’m sorry?”

“There was another page. At the end.”

My stomach dropped. “Oh, that’s not part of my presentation. That’s just a personal project. It’s not finished, it’s actually a complete disaster, it shouldn’t even be in there.”

“I’d like to see it.”

“It’s really not ready to be shown.”

“I’d like to see it anyway.”

I opened the portfolio to the last page.

The unfinished necklace stared up at both of us now, and I felt suddenly, irrationally exposed.

This was different than showing my polished work.

This was showing him the inside of my brain, all the erased lines and frustrated notes and half-formed ideas I hadn’t figured out yet. This was embarrassing.

Alexander studied the sketch without speaking. I watched him trace the cascade with his eyes, follow the negative space up to the center, and stop at the same place I’d been stopping for three weeks. The same place everyone stopped.

“The center,” he said. “You can’t figure out what to put there.”

“The cascade wants something to anchor it, but everything I try either overwhelms it or gets swallowed by it. It’s like the design is asking for something that doesn’t exist.” I heard myself talking too fast and forced myself to stop. “Sorry. It’s a frustrating piece.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he stood up, moved around the table, and sat down in the chair directly beside mine. Close enough that I could smell the sandalwood again. Close enough that his sleeve brushed mine when he reached for the sketch.

“What if the center isn’t meant to anchor?” He pointed to the flow of the smaller elements. “Look at the movement you’ve already created. Everything’s rising. Reaching upward. Why would you want to stop that?”

“Because a necklace needs a focal point.”

“Does it?” He tilted his head, genuinely curious.

“According to every design principle I’ve ever been taught, yes.”

“And if those principles are wrong?”

I stared at him. No one had ever suggested that the principles might be wrong. Professors corrected you when you broke them. Clients got nervous when you broke them. Breaking them wasn’t part of the interview process for an apprenticeship at the most prestigious jewelry house in Paris.

“What would you put there?” I asked.

He picked up my pencil. I watched him sketch three light lines across the center space, and immediately, viscerally, I knew they were wrong.

“No,” I said, and took the pencil back from his hand. “That closes it. The whole point is that the cascade doesn’t have a ceiling. It could go on forever. Yours puts a lid on it.”

“It’s not a lid, it’s a frame.”

“Same thing, different excuse.”

He made a sound that might have been a laugh. “All right. What would you do instead?”

I looked at the design with fresh eyes, trying to see it the way he’d described it, rising and reaching and limitless. What anchored something that didn’t want to be anchored? What held something that refused to be held?

“Absence,” I said slowly. “The focal point is absence. Here.” I sketched over my own work, hands moving faster than my brain. “A void at the center. Set with a stone that catches light, yes, but cut so it’s transparent. A window, not a wall. The eye goes in and out the other side.”

Alexander leaned closer to watch me draw, and I forgot for a moment that I was supposed to be impressing him.

I forgot this was an interview. Everything fell away except the feeling of the design clicking into place, piece by piece, while my pencil moved and I talked too fast and he asked questions that made me think in directions I hadn’t considered.

“What about the balance?” he asked. “You’re removing weight from the center. The asymmetry will pull left.”

“Good. Let it pull. Let it be a little wrong. Nothing interesting is perfectly balanced.”

“That’s either philosophy or blasphemy, coming from a jeweler.”

“Maybe it’s both.” I sketched another line, adjusted the cascade, felt the whole thing start to cohere. “The best pieces make you a little uncomfortable. They ask you a question instead of giving you an answer.”

“And what question does this one ask?”