My Billionaire Husband Made My Best Friend His Heroine

1. Brooke

— ? —

Brooke

There’s a particular kind of quiet that only happens in this penthouse before six in the morning, and I’ve learned to love it the way you love anything you don’t get to keep, gently and without letting yourself get attached.

I wake before the alarm, before the city fully commits to being awake, and the first thing I register is his hand.

Adrian’s fingers are still tangled in my hair from last night, loose now, gone slack with sleep, and there’s a book open and facedown on his bare chest where it slid when he drifted off mid-sentence.

He was reading to me. He does that. A man who gets paid obscene amounts of money to put words on paper, and somehow the best ones he saves for two in the morning with the lamp low and my head on his ribs.

I don’t move for a while. Moving feels like a decision, and I’m not ready to make any yet.

His chest rises and falls under my cheek, slow and even, and I let myself look at him in a way I never do when he’s awake.

When he’s awake he’s all clean angles and controlled expressions, the public Adrian, the one who answers interview questions in complete paragraphs.

Asleep, his mouth goes soft. There’s a crease between his brows that never fully smooths out even now, like some part of him is still editing a line in his dreams.

I lift my hand and trace his jaw, just the line of it, the day-old stubble catching against my fingertip.

“You’re going to make me lose my place,” he murmurs, eyes still shut.

“You’re asleep.”

“I was reading.” His arm tightens around me, pulling me in closer against his side, and the book slides another inch. “You moved and I lost my page. Now I have to start the whole chapter over. Hope you’re happy.”

“You didn’t even get to the good part.”

“There is no good part. I wrote it. It’s all mediocre.” His voice is rough with sleep, low and warm, and I feel it in his chest more than I hear it. “Go back to sleep.”

“It’s almost six.”

“That’s a rumor. Nobody’s confirmed it.”

I laugh into his shoulder, and he makes a satisfied sound like that was the whole point, as if getting a laugh out of me at this hour is a line item he can now cross off.

Maybe it is.

But I’ve stopped trying to figure out where the arrangement ends and the rest of it begins, because somewhere in the last several months the line got so blurry I couldn’t find it if I tried.

The night before is still on my skin.

I won’t dress it up in pretty words, but it’s there, the warmth of it, the way he pulled the book off the nightstand afterward and said one more chapter and read until my eyes wouldn’t stay open.

That’s the part that undoes me, honestly. Not the rest. The reading.

A man can want you in the dark and still not know you by morning. But a man who reads to you until you fall asleep, who keeps his voice going low and steady just to feel you go slack against him, that man has decided how he feels, even if he’d never say it out loud.

Adrian would never say it out loud.

I ease out from under his arm one careful inch at a time, and he grumbles and reaches for the warm spot I leave behind, but he doesn’t wake.

I stand there a second in the gray light, and then I do the thing I always do, the thing that is probably a bad idea for a woman trying to keep her heart in a lockbox. I steal his shirt off the floor.

It’s too big, obviously. The hem hits my thighs and the sleeves swallow my hands, and it smells like him, like cedar and the ghost of yesterday’s cologne and a warmth underneath that’s just skin, just Adrian.

I roll the cuffs twice and pad barefoot across the cold floors toward the kitchen, and for a few minutes the whole glass box of a penthouse is mine.

That’s the trick I play on myself at this hour.

I move through the rooms like they belong to me. I open his ridiculous imported cabinets and take down two mugs, and I fill the kettle and lean against the counter while it heats, and I pretend, just for the length of one pot of coffee, that this is my house.

That I picked these countertops. That the view of the city stretched out gray and endless past the floor-to-ceiling windows is a view I chose instead of one I inherited when I married a man I barely knew.

For one morning, it does belong to me. I let it.

The coffee grounds go in, and I’m reaching for the good beans, the ones he hides behind the fancy ones because he thinks I don’t know he prefers them, when I see the page.

It’s sitting on the counter by the fruit bowl, one loose sheet of manuscript, printed and marked up in two different pens. His edits in black. And there, curling down the right margin in blue, in handwriting I’d recognize anywhere because it’s mine, three words.

This sentence is pretentious. Fix it.

I remember writing it.

Last week, maybe, some late night when he left a stack of pages on the coffee table and went to take a call and I couldn’t help myself.

I never can. I read his sentences the way I read a blueprint, looking for the load-bearing ones and the ones just standing around taking up space, and when I find one that’s showing off instead of doing its job, I tell it so.

In pen. In his margins. I read his pages the way I read a structure, and my whole job is making sure it doesn’t fall down.

I’m smiling at it, at my own audacity, when two arms slide around my waist from behind.

I didn’t hear him get up. He’s quiet when he wants to be, which is unfair for a man his size, and his chin settles onto my shoulder and his chest presses warm against my back through the thin cotton of his own shirt on my body.

“You know,” he says against my ear, “that sentence won a literary award.”

“Mm.” I pick up the page and hold it where he can see it. “It’s still pretentious.”

“It’s evocative.”

“It’s three adjectives in a row describing a chair. Nobody needs to feel that much about a chair, Adrian.”

He huffs a laugh into the curve of my neck, and I feel his mouth curve against my skin, and he doesn’t argue. That’s the thing about him that gets me every time.

He could argue. He’s got a shelf of proof that he’s the better writer, awards and reviews and a name people say with reverence at parties. And instead he just laughs into my neck and tightens his arms and lets me be right.

“Give me the pen,” he says.

“What pen?”

“Whatever pen you used to assassinate my prose. I’ll fix it.”

“You’ll fix it because I told you to?”

“I’ll fix it,” he says, “because you’re right. You’re always right. It’s genuinely one of your least attractive qualities.”

I turn in the circle of his arms so I’m facing him, and up close he’s got sleep still in his eyes and his hair’s a disaster and there’s a pillow crease down one cheek, and he looks like nothing the world thinks he is.

The world thinks he’s polished. The world gets the version in the tailored jackets.

I get this one, rumpled and barefoot in his own kitchen at dawn, asking me for a pen so he can murder a sentence he’s proud of just because I said to.

“The coffee’s going to be ready in a minute,” I tell him, because if I keep looking at him like this I’m going to say the thing we’ve both been careful not to say.

“So?”

“So let go of me and I’ll pour you a cup.”

“Counteroffer.” His arms don’t move. “I keep holding you, and the coffee waits, because the coffee doesn’t have anywhere to be and neither do we.”

“You have edits.”

“The chair sentence isn’t going anywhere. You made sure of that.”

His forehead drops to mine, and for a second neither of us says anything, and the kettle ticks as it cools and the city hums somewhere far below the glass and it’s so quiet and so warm that I have to remind myself, hard, that I am not supposed to be this happy.

That this was a deal. That happy wasn’t in the paperwork.

But it’s here anyway, and I don’t have the strength this early to send it away.

“Okay,” I say quietly. “The coffee waits.”

He makes that satisfied sound again, the crossed-off-a-list one, and I close my eyes and let him hold me in the kitchen that isn’t mine, in the shirt that is, and I think, God help me, that this might be the version of us that gets to stay.

Here’s the thing about standing in a man’s kitchen at dawn, in his shirt, letting yourself feel that safe. You forget, for a second, how you got here. And then you remember, and the memory of it is the strangest part of all.

Because nobody tells you that a marriage that starts as a transaction doesn’t feel like a transaction from the inside. It feels like a series of small mornings, and you don’t notice you’ve fallen until you’re already at the bottom.

And it did start as a transaction.

If I let myself go back far enough, I can still see the exact table where it began.

Our mothers arranged the introduction the way they arranged everything, over dinner, in a restaurant with cloth napkins folded into shapes.

Alani and my mother had been friends since before either Adrian or I existed, and the two of them sat on one side of the table looking pleased with themselves while their children sat on the other side looking like hostages.

“Brooke is an architect,” my mother said, in the voice she uses to sell things. “Like her father. Top of her program.”

“I’m not practicing,” I said.

“She will be. She just needs the right footing.” My mother’s hand found my knee under the table and pressed down, one word per press. Behave.

Adrian looked at me across the bread basket, bored and beautiful and clearly counting the minutes.

“You draw buildings,” he said. It wasn’t a question and it wasn’t quite interest.

“I draw buildings,” I agreed. “You write books nobody finishes.”

Alani made a small delighted sound into her wine. Adrian’s mouth twitched, the first honest thing his face had done all night, and he said, “That’s fair,” and went back to his water.

That was it. That was the whole spark of us, one insult over a bread basket, and I didn’t even know yet that I was being auctioned.

I found out the specifics later, from my mother, in the kitchen of the house we almost lost.