Blacklisted by My Hollywood Billionaire Husband (Wives Betrayed #9)

CHAPTER 1

LONDON

Theo Mosley, eight pounds of pure tyrant, has decided that six p.m. is the perfect hour to scream at the ceiling. Dinner’s at eight. Kaylie Tucker lands at my doorstep at seven-forty-five, because Kaylie Tucker has never entered a room without an audience warming up for her.

“You’re doing amazing, sweetheart,” I tell my son, who has just spit up directly into my collarbone. “Really incredible range.”

He does not care. He is red, angry, and gorgeous, and I would burn down this entire city for him, which is the sort of thing nobody warns you about.

They warn you about the sleep. They do not warn you that you’ll be standing in your walk-in closet at five past six with milk on your shoulder and your pre-pregnancy dresses judging you from the rack, and you’ll feel like your own house is a hotel you’re only staying in temporarily.

I pick the navy one. The navy one zips, which is more than I can say for its three sisters, and right now a zipper that cooperates is my love language.

Theo finally winds down against my shoulder, hiccuping little aftershocks, and I do the transfer. Every mother knows the transfer. You lower the baby into the bassinet with the focus of a bomb squad, you hold your breath, you pray to a god you stopped believing in at fifteen.

His eyes stay closed. I’m out of the closet and halfway down the hall before I exhale.

Timothy finds me in the kitchen, where our housekeeper, Dora, is laying out appetizers she insists are “just small things” and which could feed a film crew. My husband takes one look at me, at the milk stain I’ve given up on, and does the single most attractive thing a billionaire can do.

“Give him to me.”

“He just went down.”

“Then give me the monitor and go finish getting ready.” He’s already rolling up his sleeves.

Timothy Mosley closes deals over breakfast that reshape an industry, and he cannot roll a shirtsleeve evenly to save his life.

One cuff sits at his forearm, the other near his elbow.

I love him so stupidly much in this moment that it actually hurts.

“Kaylie’s going to be here in—”

“In an hour and a half, and Franklin will be early, and the whole circus will run itself whether you’ve done your hair or not.” He takes my face in his hands and kisses me, unhurried, like the first ten years of us never got interrupted by anything. “You look beautiful.”

“I look like a woman who lost a fight with a breast pump.”

“You look like my wife.” He says it simply, and then he ruins the moment in the way only he can. “The dress is great. Very serious. Very ‘mother of the heir.’”

“I will feed you to Dora.”

“Dora would never.” Dora, across the kitchen, does not look up. “See? Loyalty.”

I laugh despite myself, and he grins, and for a minute we’re just us.

Not Mosley Studios, not the Dominion Saga, not the biggest franchise deal of Timothy’s career sitting at my dining table tonight wearing a borrowed face.

Just us, a baby upstairs, and a marriage I would have described, that night, as the one solid thing in my life.

Upstairs, I do my face in the bathroom mirror and tell myself what I always tell myself before Kaylie Tucker evenings. She is not that bad. You’re tired. You’re hormonal. Be gracious.

Timothy comes in while I’m wrestling an earring, and does the clasp with those careful producer fingers. In the mirror I watch him do it, this man who has never been intimidated by anyone. I say the thing I always swallow.

“She wants you.”

His hands keep moving. “Kaylie flirts with everyone. She flirted with the craft services table on Meridian.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.” He kisses the side of my neck. “It’s just how she’s built. I’ve never encouraged her. I’ve never given her one single reason to think—”

“I know you haven’t. That’s not the point.”

He turns me around, patient, a man prepared to be reasonable at me. “Then what is?”

“The point is that her target was never you.” I’ve had this speech ready for four years and it still comes out rougher than I rehearsed it.

“The sleeve thing, the Meridian stories—it’s her acting out your history at me like it’s a deed to property.

None of that is for you. You’re not tempted, so none of it touches you.

It’s aimed at me, Timothy. It’s her telling me, in my own house, that she knows a side of my husband I never will. ”

He’s quiet for a second.

“She has never said one word to you that I wouldn’t say in front of a boardroom,” he says finally. “If she ever does, she’s gone. You know that.”

“She never will,” I say. “That’s my whole point.”

He kisses my forehead, which is what he does when he thinks a conversation has resolved itself, and heads downstairs to check on the ice situation, because my husband can manage four hundred employees and still believe ice is the variable that decides a dinner party.

By seven-forty I’ve almost talked myself into his version.

Then the doorbell rings, and I hear Kaylie’s voice float up the staircase before Dora has the door fully open. Every nerve ending I own stands at attention.

“—no, leave the car running, I’ll know in twenty minutes if this is a two-bottle night.”

I come down the stairs and there she is.

Kaylie Tucker is one of those women who make you understand, at a cellular level, why people used to burn witches.

She’s in ivory silk, she’s got that blown-out hair that survives boat spray and helicopter landings, and she is kissing my husband on both cheeks in my entryway.

“Timothy. You look exhausted. I guess that means you’re working.”

“You look rested,” he says. “Which means you’re about to cost me money.”

“Always.” She turns, and her face arranges itself into delight. “London. Oh my God. Look at you.”

“Here I am,” I agree.

She hugs me. Kaylie hugs fully committed, slightly too long, with an audience in mind even when the audience is one housekeeper and a marble floor. She pulls back and keeps her hands on my shoulders, studying me.

“Motherhood suits you,” she says. “You have that glow. That settled thing.”

Settled. There’s a word. Furniture that’s finally found its room.

“I’m told it’s mostly dehydration,” I say.

Timothy laughs. Kaylie laughs a half-second later, and I clock it, the tiny lag, because I have clocked Kaylie Tucker for four years of marriage and two productions before that.

I know the private jokes she keeps in her purse for my husband.

I know the hand she leaves on his sleeve one beat past friendly.

I know she once told a room full of people, me included, that she and Timothy “finish each other’s shot lists,” and then looked at me to see if I’d flinch.

I didn’t flinch then. I’m not flinching now. That’s the thing about Kaylie. She’s never given anyone clean proof. She just leaves fingerprints on everything.

Franklin Reyes arrives next, with polo shirt and practiced warmth, Mosley Studios’ head of publicity, a man who has never had a feeling he couldn’t monetize.

Then two of the Dominion executives, Patricia and Arnold, who greet me with the gentle, careful energy people use around postpartum women and unstable explosives.

Dinner is Dora’s production and it’s flawless, and for the first hour it’s almost pleasant.

Kaylie holds court, and she’s genuinely funny, which is the worst part.

A monster you can laugh with is a monster you’ll let stay for dessert.

She does a bit about a director we all know crying in a trash can at Sundance that has Patricia wiping her eyes.

Then she turns to Timothy and says, “Do you remember what you told me on the Meridian set? About endings?”

And there it is. Meridian. Twelve years ago, before me, a film Kaylie and Timothy made that people still write essays about. She’s not telling a story. She’s planting a flag in a country I wasn’t born in.

“I tell everyone that about endings,” Timothy says easily. “It’s the only thing I know.”

Kaylie smiles at him. Then she smiles at me, and the second smile is a different product entirely.

After the plates are cleared, she waits for the exact right lull. Kaylie always finds the lull. It’s her superpower.

“Can I pitch something?” she says. “An idea.”

Franklin leans in. Franklin would lean into an open grave if Kaylie asked him to.

“The press is obsessed with us,” she says, and the “us” lands softly, carefully, on her and Timothy.

“They’ve been obsessed since Meridian. Every time he and I are in a room, the internet loses its mind.

And now with Dominion, it’s going to get louder.

So I keep thinking—what if we stop running from it? ”

I feel my spine straighten.

“Audiences are different now,” Kaylie goes on, warm, reasonable, TED-talk smooth.

“They’re fascinated by relationships that don’t fit the old boxes.

Nontraditional love. Nonpossessive partnerships.

What if we just… leaned in? No statements.

No lies. Just a little mystery. The three of us, photographed together.

A joke here, a wink there. Maybe people wonder if London and I share him.

Maybe it’s modern. Maybe it’s the most talked-about campaign in the world, and we never have to confirm a single thing. ”

The room does something I’ve felt rooms do on sets, when someone says an idea so big and wrong that nobody wants to be the first to blink.

Franklin doesn’t blink. Franklin is already nodding.

“Poly curiosity,” he murmurs. “It’s enormous right now. The engagement would be—”

“Stop,” Timothy says.

He says it calmly, and I love him for how fast it comes. “There’s no version of this where I have a sexual relationship with Kaylie, with anyone who isn’t my wife. That’s not on the table. That’s not near the table.”

“Of course not,” Kaylie says, hands up, laughing a little. “God, Timothy, I’m not proposing an orgy. I’m proposing ambiguity. A wink. Culture does the work for us.”

“Then no to the ambiguity,” I say.

It’s the first time I’ve spoken since the pitch began, and the table turns to me with the faint surprise of people who’d forgotten I was in the scene.

Kaylie’s face stays soft. “London. I figured you’d say that.”

“Then you figured correctly.”

“Can I ask why?” Curious. Not cruel. Kaylie at her most dangerous, with her tilted head and open palms. “It’s publicity.

It’s pretend. You’ve done pretend for a living your whole life.

And the framing would be so flattering to you—the wife so secure, so evolved, she doesn’t flinch at the world’s most conventional question. ”

And that’s when I see it. All of it. The setup, the polish, the trap with the velvet lining. If I say yes, she moves into my marriage with a key I handed her. If I say no, I’m the jealous wife who couldn’t handle a joke. Either way, she wins something, and either way, I lose the same thing.

“You’re not pitching publicity,” I say. “You’re pitching renting out my marriage for engagement, and my no is not a lease negotiation.”

Patricia looks at her wine glass. Arnold examines the ceiling. Franklin has the stricken look of someone watching a hashtag die in the womb.

Timothy exhales through his nose, and I can feel him deciding to be the reasonable one, the host, the man who ends scenes cleanly. “The concept’s dead,” he says. “Dominion sells itself. Kaylie, you’re brilliant, and the answer is no. London, more wine?”

He moves us on. He’s good at moving rooms on. It’s his whole career in miniature: he decides when a conversation is over, and somehow the room agrees with him.

But as Dora brings coffee and the talk slides back to directors and release windows, I watch Kaylie Tucker accept the death of her idea with a smile that. She is not disappointed. She is not even surprised. She got exactly what she came for, and it wasn’t a yes.

It was my no, on record, in front of witnesses, from the jealous wife at the end of the table.

She catches me looking. She raises her coffee cup, small and friendly, a toast with no occasion.

“To family,” she says.