My Billionaire Husband's Forgotten Wife

1. Louella

— ? —

Louella

The blindfold smelled of his cologne.

That was the first thing I noticed when Hector’s hands covered my eyes from behind, his breath warm against my ear as he whispered, “Don’t peek.”

It was barely dawn, the kind of gray-blue light that made our bedroom look like it existed underwater, and I’d been deep in that dreamless sleep that only comes when you’re truly exhausted.

“Hector, what…”

“I said don’t peek.” I could hear the smile in his voice. Actually hear it. When was the last time that had happened?

He tied a soft strip of fabric around my eyes, silk, maybe one of my scarves, and helped me sit up, his hands steadier than mine as I fumbled for balance. My heart was doing this stupid, hopeful thing in my chest, the kind of flutter I thought I’d trained out of myself months ago.

“If this is some kind of murder plot, I want you to know that Camille will absolutely avenge me,” I said.

He laughed. God, he laughed. That real laugh, the one that came from deep in his belly, the one I used to hear every day back when we were dating and he’d pick me up from my tiny studio apartment with coffee and croissants and plans for absolutely nothing.

“Noted. Now stand up. I’ve got you.”

He guided me through the rented cottage at the coastal vineyard where we’d gotten married four years ago, and I let myself lean into him more than I needed to.

His hand pressed flat against my lower back, warm through my thin sleep shirt, and I catalogued it like evidence.

Hector’s hand on my back. Hector awake before me. Hector planning a surprise.

The Hector I’d been married to for the past year would never.

Outside, the air smelled like salt and grape leaves and that particular early morning freshness that disappears the moment the sun fully rises. Gravel crunched under my bare feet, then grass, cool and slightly damp with dew.

“Okay,” he said, and I could feel him moving behind me, positioning himself. “Ready?”

“I’ve been ready for four years, Lauder. Show me what you’ve got.”

The blindfold fell away.

I blinked against the pale light, and for a moment I couldn’t process what I was seeing.

The vineyard stretched out before us in neat rows, but between two of them, our two, the ones we’d stood between when we’d said our vows, someone had set up a breakfast table.

White linen, silver warming dishes, a bottle of champagne already sweating in an ice bucket.

Candles that must have been lit just moments ago, their flames barely visible in the growing daylight.

“Happy anniversary,” Hector said quietly.

I turned to look at him. Really look at him, in a way I’d been avoiding for months because looking meant hoping and hoping meant hurting.

He was wearing old jeans and a soft sweater I’d bought him three Christmases ago, and his hair was doing that thing it did when he hadn’t bothered to tame it, all dark waves falling across his forehead.

He looked young. He looked like the man I’d married.

“You did this?” My voice came out strange, too thin.

“I had some help with the food. But the location, the timing, that was me.” He reached for my hand, tentative in a way that broke something loose in my chest. When had my husband started being tentative with me? “I know things have been… I know I haven’t been…”

“Hector.”

“Let me say this.” He squeezed my fingers. “I know I’ve been gone. Even when I’m home, I’ve been gone. The company, the pressure from my mother, the…” He stopped, swallowed hard. “I don’t want to be that person anymore, Louella. I want to be here. With you. I want to be your husband again.”

I should have said the mature, measured thing about how words were nice but actions mattered, about how I’d been drowning for months while he worked late and took calls during dinner and fell asleep on his laptop, about how his mother’s constant comments about the empty nursery were slowly killing me and he never once told her to stop.

Instead, I burst into tears.

“Oh, hey. Hey, no.” He pulled me against his chest, and I let him, let myself sink into the familiar architecture of his body. “I didn’t mean to make you cry. That’s the opposite of…”

“Shut up.” I was laughing now, or maybe still crying, or both. “Just shut up and hold me.”

So he did.

We ate breakfast as the sun rose higher, the vineyard turning gold around us, and we talked.

Actually talked, not the careful logistics conversations we’d been having for months, who’s picking up the dry cleaning, did you pay the electric bill, I won’t be home for dinner.

We talked about the trip to Portugal we’d been planning for two years and never taken.

About the artist residency in Tuscany I’d applied for back when I still thought of myself as an artist, before I became “Hector’s wife” full-time.

About the dog we kept saying we’d get and never did.

“We should do it,” he said, refilling my champagne glass. “All of it. Portugal, the dog, the…”

“The baby?”

The word landed between us like a stone in still water. He flinched, then recovered, then reached for my hand across the table.

“Only if you want to,” he said carefully. “I know the treatments have been hard. I know my mother’s pressure has been…”

“Unbearable. The word you’re looking for is unbearable.”

“Yes.” He held my gaze. “I should have stopped it. I should have told her that our family planning is none of her business, that her comments about the nursery and the bloodline and whether you’re ‘trying hard enough’ are cruel and unwelcome. I should have protected you from her, and I didn’t.”

I stared at him. In four years of marriage, I’d never heard him criticize his mother directly. Not once.

“Who are you,” I said slowly, “and what have you done with my husband?”

“I’m trying to be the husband you deserve.” He lifted my hand to his lips and kissed my knuckles, old-fashioned and earnest. “Starting today. Starting right now.”

***

By afternoon, we’d wandered through every row of the vineyard, stopping to taste grapes that wouldn’t be ready for harvest for another month, finding the exact spot where we’d had our first dance as a married couple.

The sun was hot on my shoulders and Hector’s hand was warm in mine and I felt this thing I hadn’t felt in so long I’d forgotten what to call it.

Hope. That was the word. Stupid, dangerous hope.

“Dance with me,” he said, as the light started going golden around us.

“There’s no music.”

“I’ll hum.” And he did, badly, some approximation of the song we’d danced to at our wedding while I laughed and stepped on his feet and let him spin me until I was dizzy.

When we finally stopped, breathless and flushed, he cupped my face in his hands and kissed me like we had all the time in the world. Like nothing was waiting for us back home, not his impossible schedule, not his mother’s disapproval, not the empty nursery that echoed with everyone’s expectations.

“I love you,” he said against my mouth. “I know I haven’t shown it. But I love you, Louella.”

“I love you too.” The words came easy for the first time in months. “I love you too.”

Later, in the wine cellar where they stored the barrels for aging, he pressed me against the cool wood and kissed my neck, my collarbone, the sensitive spot behind my ear that always made me gasp.

“Someone’s going to catch us,” I laughed, even as I pulled him closer.

“It’s our anniversary. They’ll understand.”

We didn’t make it back to our room for an hour.

***

Dinner was on the terrace, just the two of us, candles and wine and pasta made by the vineyard’s private chef. I was pleasantly sore and thoroughly relaxed, watching my husband across the table and thinking that maybe, maybe, we were going to be okay.

Then his phone buzzed.

His jaw tightened before he even looked at the screen. His shoulders crept up toward his ears, and his hand hesitated over the device like it might bite him.

“Don’t,” I said quietly.

“It’s my mother.”

“I know it’s your mother. I always know when it’s your mother.” I reached across the table and covered the phone with my hand. “Don’t let her in. Not tonight.”

He looked at me, then at the phone, then back at me. For a long moment I thought he was going to answer anyway, the way he always did, because Genevieve Lauder didn’t tolerate being ignored and Hector had spent his entire life not ignoring her.

But he silenced it.

“She doesn’t get to ruin this,” he said, low and fierce in a way I hadn’t heard from him in years. “Not tonight. Not you.”

My breath caught. That was the man I’d married. That was the Hector who’d told me on our third date that his family was “complicated” but that I was worth any complication. The Hector who’d proposed on a beach in the rain because he couldn’t wait for the perfect moment anymore.

I thought I’d lost him somewhere in the past year, buried under work and family pressure and the weight of expectations neither of us had asked for. But here he was, coming back to life like a flame that had been starved of oxygen.

Then a change moved behind his eyes. The softness faded. His gaze went distant the way it always did when he was thinking about work or his mother or all the responsibilities waiting for him back in the real world.

The vineyard Hector was already retreating, and the other Hector, the one who forgot anniversaries and missed dinners and let his mother say terrible things about his wife, was sliding back into place.

He went quiet for the rest of the meal.

That night, wrapped around him in our borrowed bed, I made a decision.

I was done with the fertility treatments. Done with the hormones that made me weepy and bloated and not myself. Done with the scheduled intimacy and the careful tracking and the way sex had become a chore we performed for the benefit of a child who might never exist.

I was going to tell him tomorrow. We were going to figure out what we wanted, really wanted, not what his mother wanted, together.

For the first time in months, I fell asleep feeling like maybe my marriage wasn’t ending after all.