My Billionaire Husband Called Me Crazy (Wives Betrayed #4)

CHAPTER ONE

By the ninth pregnancy test, I’m pretty sure even the pee sticks are judging me.

Nine. Lined up on the marble counter of a bathroom bigger than my first apartment, every one of them smug with its double pink line.

I wrap the newest one in toilet paper and bury it deep in the trash, under a cotton pad and an empty moisturizer tube, like I’m disposing of a body.

Which, to be fair, is roughly what my body feels like these days.

A crime scene. Someone has died in there and been replaced by a woman who dry-heaves at the smell of espresso.

Espresso.

In Italy.

I’m basically committing treason before breakfast.

Outside the window, Lake Como is showing off.

May sunlight on the water, mountains standing around in the background, a couple of yachts drifting past with the smug slowness of boats backed up by massive bank balances.

I’ve lived here for four years, and the view still hasn’t gotten old.

Nobody needs this much scenery. It’s the landscape equivalent of a diamond grill.

Villa Fortuna. Troy’s mother named it. Nothing says welcome home like a house with a name and a staff and a hundred years of somebody else’s family portraits glaring at you from the stairwell.

Downstairs, I can hear Lina bullying the coffee machine.

Lina has run this villa since before Troy bought it, and she runs me with roughly the same efficiency.

She’s sixty, Sicilian, and the only person on earth who can make Genevieve Hurley leave a room.

I’ve seen her do it with nothing but a look.

It’s like watching a chihuahua stare down a Dobermann… and win.

My phone buzzes on the counter.

It’s Rae.

Rae: So?

Rae: Don’t leave me hanging, Hurley.

Rae: That’s all I do now, wait for your news.

I smile and type back with one hand, the other pressed to my still-flat stomach out of some brand-new instinct I haven’t voted on.

Me: Nine tests. All positive. I think the science is settled.

Rae: SCIENCE QUEEN. Okay. When are you telling Troy?

Me: Tonight. Terrace dinner. Candles. The whole thing.

Rae: And then?

Me: And then he cries, obviously.

Rae: He will. He cries at that bank advert with the dog.

He does. I’m married to a billionaire who weeps at a fictional golden retriever opening a savings account, and I’m about to make him a father. For the first time in eight weeks of secretly wanting to vomit on everything I own, I let myself feel it. It rises inside me, huge and terrifying and warm.

A baby.

Ours.

Lina’s voice floats up the stairs. “Signora! You come down or I come up, and you do not want me to come up.”

“Coming,” I call, and take one last look at the nine pregnancy tests before I close the bin on them.

Tonight.

I’ll tell him tonight.

The plan is simple. Simple plans are my specialty, since complicated ones tend to involve other people, and other people are historically unreliable.

The terrace. Seven o’clock. The good tablecloth, the one from the Florence trip. Lina’s lemon risotto, Troy’s favorite, and the Barolo he keeps banging on about that I will obviously not be drinking.

I’ve told Lina it’s for our anniversary. Our anniversary is in October. Lina squints at me like a customs officer and says nothing, which is Lina for I will find out.

I spend the afternoon in my workroom instead, the small sunny room at the back of the villa where my tools gather dust like a museum exhibit. Exhibit: The Woman I Used To Be.

Before I was Aliza Hurley, I was Aliza Boyd, and Aliza Boyd restored antique jewelry in a workshop above a bakery in Milan. Filigree, enamel, lockets with dead people’s hair braided inside them, which is exactly as gross and exactly as wonderful as it sounds.

I was good at it. I had hands made for tiny screws and patience made for hundred-year-old clasps, and I had a waiting list, and then I had Troy, and then I had Villa Fortuna and a drawer full of dusty pliers instead.

It was my choice. Troy never asked me to give it up. That’s the thing I always say at dinner parties, and it’s true.

Today I have a project, though. I pull out the little silver music box I found at the flea market in Como town last month, dented and green with age, the ballerina inside frozen mid-pirouette with one arm missing.

A nursery piece. I’ve been fixing it in secret, twenty minutes here, an hour there, and today I solder the last of the hinge and wind the key and the ballerina turns, slow and lopsided, to a tinny waltz.

“There you go, kid,” I tell my stomach. “Your mother does actually do things.”

My phone buzzes again.

Troy this time, and my whole face does the thing, like a teenager with a lock screen crush. Pathetic. Unfixable.

Troy: Car’s running late. Milan was a war zone. Home by seven, save me from myself.

Me: You’re the one who keeps buying hotels. I have zero sympathy.

Troy: One more. The Riviera one. Then I retire and we grow olives.

Me: You’d fire the olives.

Troy: I’d restructure them.

I laugh out loud in the empty room, the music box waltzes on, and for a moment everything is so right that I should know. I should feel it coming, the way animals sense storms.

Instead, I go upstairs to change into the blue dress, the one he likes, and practise saying you’re going to be a father in the mirror like an idiot, settling on just saying it straight into his face over risotto like a normal human.

The mirror version of me looks happy. It’s been a strange few years of learning that happiness is a thing that needs noticing when it happens, much like a rare bird landing on the terrace.

Hello, bird.

Stay a while.

Troy comes through the door just after seven with his jacket over his shoulder and his phone still at his ear and his hair looking expensive without trying. Even mid-call, even exhausted, he crosses the hall straight to me like I’m magnetic north and kisses me hello.

“Ten minutes,” he mouths.

“Liar,” I mouth back, and he grins.

I go to pour the Barolo and a very conspicuous glass of sparkling water with lime, which Lina clocks straight away. Her eyes move from the water to my face and narrow to slits.

I give her my best blank expression. Her eyebrows rise so high they nearly leave her head.

The damn woman misses nothing. I’m going to have to tell her before midnight or she’ll suffocate me in my sleep.

I step out onto the terrace with the tray and the candles lit and the lake going gold at the edges. I stand there breathing it in, a hand flat on my stomach.

Okay. When he hangs up, I bring him out here, I sit him down, and I say it.

Simple plan.

My specialty.

Troy comes out ten minutes later, phone finally down, arms around me from behind, face in my neck.

“God, I missed this,” he says into my skin. “Missed you. Milan was hell.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. Everything. The Riviera deal’s bigger than we thought.

Three properties, not one.” He turns me around and he’s lit up, actually lit up, the way he only gets about deals and me and that dog advert.

“Liz, it’s going to be the flagship. The whole coast. It’s the one they’ll put on my obituary. ”

“Cheerful.”

“You know what I mean.”

He kisses me again, and I have both hands on his chest and the words right there, loaded, ready, Troy, I have to tell you something, and he pulls back and says, “Oh. Before I forget. Big news.”

Something in my stomach goes cold, eight weeks of instinct sharpening into one small point.

“Estelle’s heading it up with me,” he says. “The Riviera acquisition. She closed the Bellagio numbers in a day, Liz, a day, she’s a machine. Mother suggested her, and for once Mother was right about a hire.”

I stand still. “Estelle?”

“Estelle Marsh. You remember. You’ve met at the Christmas things. Tall, kind of terrifying, laughs like a Bond villain.”

“I remember,” I say.

I remember. I remember a woman who touches Troy’s arm when she talks to him like she’s checking it’s still there. I remember Genevieve introducing her as practically family with a pointed look at me, the unrelated by-blow.

“She’s flying in tonight,” Troy says, checking his watch. “Staying at the villa for the season. There’s no point her burning money on the Grand when we’ve got six empty rooms. It makes sense. We’ll be working around the clock anyway.”

Tonight.

Staying here.

For the season.

The risotto sits waiting. The candles burn. The Barolo breathes for no one.

“Troy,” I say.

“Yeah?”

Say it. Say you’re going to be a father and Estelle can sleep in the boathouse. Say it.

“Nothing,” I say. “It’ll keep.”

He’s already looking past me at the lake, where a boat is cutting a white line across the gilded water, heading straight for our jetty. He lifts a hand in a wave, and I watch his whole face change into the version he uses for work, bright and brisk and gone.

“She’s early,” he says. “Good. You’ll love her, Liz. Everyone loves Estelle.”

Everyone does not love Estelle.

Lina takes one look at her through the kitchen window and says something in Sicilian that I’m fairly sure would get her arrested in several countries.

But I have to admit, watching Estelle Marsh come up the path from the jetty with a single perfect suitcase and the kind of blowout that survives boat spray, I understand.

Tall, yes, blonde in the expensive way where you can’t prove money changed hands, wearing cream linen that should have wrinkled and hasn’t out of, what? Respect?

“Aliza,” she says, like she’s been saying my name fondly for years, and kisses both my cheeks. Her perfume is something French and subtle and probably illegal to manufacture. “You look exhausted. In a good way. Glowing.”

“Thanks,” I say, deploying my entire diplomacy budget for the evening.

“And the house.” She turns in a slow circle on the terrace, taking in the candles, the lake, the wisteria, like a queen reviewing her summer court.

“God, I practically grew up in this house. Genevieve and my mother would sit right here with their Campari sodas and Troy and I would steal peaches off that tree.” She points at a tree I’ve lived under for four years without knowing its history. “Before your time,” she adds, kindly.

And bam, there it is.

Four little words, all but gift-wrapped.

“Before my time,” I agree, and smile, my hand drifting to my stomach again, protective.

Dinner happens.

I want it on record that I try.

Lina serves the risotto with a face like she’s at a funeral, Troy opens the Barolo and pours two glasses, and Estelle talks about the Riviera deal with her fork in the air, all numbers and names and “Troy, tell her about Portofino,” and Troy tells me about Portofino, and they volley it back and forth like Wimbledon, and I sit at my own table, on my own terrace, at my own anniversary dinner that isn’t, holding my sparkling water like a prop in someone else’s play.

Twice I open my mouth.

Twice the conversation simply steps over me, not unkindly, but much like you would step over a sleeping dog.

The third time, Estelle lifts her glass and her eyes slide to my water glass and stay there. One second. Two. Long enough to be noticed, short enough to deny. Then they come back to mine, warm and bright but absolutely empty.

“To the season,” she says.

“To the season,” Troy says, and drinks.

I raise my water and clink their glasses and say nothing, and underneath the table, in the dark, I put my hand over the tiny secret heartbeat of my whole entire future and hold on.

Later, I tell myself. I’ll tell him when we’re alone, when the house is ours again.

Later, I’ll tell him, and he’ll cry like the bank advert dog, and everything will be fine.

Fine, fine, fine.

I believe that. Sitting there in the candlelight with the lake going dark, I genuinely, completely believe it.