My Billionaire Husband’s Mother Ruined My Marriage (Her Marriage in Crisis #111)

1. Nichole

— ? —

Nichole

The house isn’t a house. It sits above the water like something that grew here, like the cliff decided one day to become money and glass and hedges cut so sharp they could draw blood.

The driveway alone is longer than the street I grew up on.

I count the windows as we pull up - twelve across the front, and that’s just the face it shows the road.

Twelve women in the front hall. I make thirteen.

I cleaned my shoes in a gas station bathroom with a wet paper towel and the last of my hand soap, and I can still see the water stain drying on the left toe.

The woman next to me has a degree from Yale framed in her posture.

The one across from her is discussing out loud, to anyone who will listen - her master’s thesis on early childhood cognitive development.

I have a high school diploma. I have six years of double shifts I can’t put on a résumé because half of them were cash under the table. I have the kind of tired that lives in your bones and doesn’t leave when you sleep.

A woman with a clipboard and a face like she’s never been late for anything reads my name wrong twice.

“Nicole Clark?”

“Nichole Clarke.”

She doesn’t write the correction down. “He’s already turned down eleven. Don’t take it personally.”

I wasn’t planning to take it any way at all.

I’m here because the alternative is not being here, and not being here means going back to the apartment with the water stain on the ceiling and the landlord who keeps forgetting to fix the heat, and sitting at the kitchen table doing math that doesn’t work no matter how many times I run the numbers.

The marble floor is so polished I can see my own reflection in it. The reflection looks tired too.

“The study is through those doors,” clipboard woman continues, gesturing vaguely toward a set of double doors that probably cost more than my car. “When he’s ready, he’ll call you in one at a time. Please remain seated and-”

She stops. We all stop.

A door at the far end of the hall has opened - not the study doors, a smaller one, half-hidden behind a potted tree that’s taller than I am - and a child has slipped through it.

She’s small. Five or six, with dark hair that’s escaping from whatever style someone attempted this morning. Her socks don’t match - one has stripes, one has stars - and she’s dragging a stuffed rabbit by one foot. The rabbit has only one ear.

She drifts down the row of waiting women like she’s looking for something. Like she’s been looking for a long time.

The credentials start performing immediately. The Yale posture bends down with a smile so bright it could sell toothpaste. “Oh, what a pretty dress. Aren’t you just precious?”

The child doesn’t stop.

“Hello, sweetheart! What’s your rabbit’s name?”

The child keeps walking.

She passes one, two, three women who coo and fuss and reach out with perfectly manicured hands that she sidesteps without seeming to notice. She walks the whole length of that marble hall with her mismatched socks and her broken rabbit, and then she stops.

In front of me.

She looks up. Just looks - the way only very small children and very old people look at you, like they can already see the whole of you and haven’t decided yet what to make of it.

Her eyes are brown, almost black in this light, and there’s something in them that feels older than five or six. Something that’s been waiting.

I don’t put on the bright voice. I’m too tired for it, and she’d know anyway. Kids always know.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi,” she says back.

“That’s a good rabbit.”

“His name is Rabbit.” A pause. Very serious. “He only has one ear.”

“I noticed.” I match her tone, grave and considered. “He’s lucky, though.”

Her head tilts. “Why?”

“Two ears is greedy.”

The corner of her mouth moves. Just a little. The first unguarded thing I’ve seen in this whole marble mausoleum. Something low in my chest does a slow turn, strange and unexplained, like a key finding a lock I didn’t know was there.

I don’t have time to examine it.

“Olivia.” A woman in heels is already crossing the floor, her smile fixed and professional. “There you are, sweetheart. Come away from the-” She doesn’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t have to. From the help, is what she means. From the one who doesn’t belong here.

She puts a hand between Olivia’s shoulder blades and steers her back toward that hidden door. The child goes.

But she looks back over her shoulder the entire way. Straight at me. Her eyes don’t leave mine until the door closes between us.

The hall exhales. The women resettle into their careful postures. Yale is looking at me like I’ve done something wrong, though I couldn’t say what.

I couldn’t say what any of this is.

Then the study doors open, and the whole room changes.

The man who walks through them doesn’t hurry.

He takes his time crossing to us, and the twelve women ahead of me go still in a way that tells me everything about who he is before I see his face.

A jaw like it was carved for giving orders.

Dark hair pushed back, slightly disheveled, like he’s been running his hands through it.

The kind of face that doesn’t ask permission to be looked at.

He moves with pure arrogance, like the room belongs to him and always has.

There’s a dangerous ease in his shoulders, the kind only men who have never fought for anything ever get to carry.

My eyes drag, traitorous, to his forearms. Veins under golden skin. The tendon that flexes when he moves his hands. The expensive watch and that thin, warm-looking strip of wrist above it.

I look at the floor. I look at the chandelier. I look anywhere else.

And then he’s closer and I’m looking again, at the column of his throat this time, at the open collar, at the hollow between his collarbones, and I want to put my hand over my own eyes like a child who can’t be trusted.

What is wrong with me?

Callum Lippitt.

I’ve seen his name a few times in the papers. Old money, the kind that doesn’t need to introduce itself. Heir to something or other, a fortune that’s been compounding interest since before my grandmother was born. The papers love him because he gives them nothing.

He doesn’t ask a single name.

He reads the row of us like a bill he isn’t going to pay.

His eyes move over Yale, over the master’s thesis, over the women with their ironed blouses and their perfect smiles.

He dismisses each one in turn, not with words but with the way his gaze simply doesn’t catch.

They’re already gone and they don’t know it yet.

When he gets to me, he stops and my whole body knows it before my brain catches up. There’s a heat that moves across my skin when his attention lands, something I have no business feeling.

Longer than the others. Long enough that I feel it move up the back of my neck, a heat I didn’t ask for and don’t want. He looks at me the way you look at a piece of furniture delivered to the wrong address. A mistake someone will have to correct.

Fine.

I have been looked at like that before. I have been looked at like I don’t belong my entire life, and I am still here, still standing, still breathing.

I lift my chin and look back. All the way back. I refuse to be the one who drops it first.

The silence stretches. One second. Two. The women on either side of me have stopped breathing. I can feel them deciding something, can feel the whole hall deciding-

“You’re not qualified,” he says.

Flat. Bored. A verdict, not a question.

And my mouth opens before my brain can catch it.

“You don’t know what I am.” His gaze drops to my mouth, just for a second, before snapping back to my eyes.

The hall inhales. Nobody talks to him like that. I can feel it in the way the twelve women around me have gone statue-still, can feel it in the clipboard woman’s sharp breath from the corner.

Something flickers across his face. There and gone, faster than a heartbeat. The first genuinely interested thing I’ve seen in this house.

“You’ve read a piece of paper,” I continue, and I should stop, I know I should stop, but the words are already out and I can’t seem to call them back. “You haven’t asked me one thing.”

He steps in. Closer than a stranger should. Close enough that I catch the clean scent of him - something expensive, something that probably costs more than my rent.

His eyes move over my face like he’s memorizing the details, and there’s a muscle jumping in his jaw that doesn’t match the flat disinterest in his voice. He’s holding himself very still - the kind of still that looks like control but feels like something else.

I don’t know what to do with that. So I pretend I didn’t see it. But I hate, instantly, violently, that I noticed. His voice drops, pitched just for me.

“All right.” His eyes haven’t left mine. “Then tell me one thing worth staying for. You have until I decide I’m bored.”

Here is the terrible part. The part I will turn over later at two in the morning, lying awake in my too-small apartment with the water stain on the ceiling: my heart is going like I ran here. My mouth has gone dry. And it is not fear.

I have no name for what it is, and I am furious that it showed up now, in this hall, wearing this man’s face.

He’s waiting. The whole room is waiting. And I am standing in my gas-station-cleaned shoes with nothing to offer but the truth.

“My name,” I say. “You never asked it.”

His eyebrow moves. Just barely.

“Start there,” I tell him.

The corner of his mouth does something that isn’t quite a smile. It’s the threat of one. The promise of one. Something that might become a smile if I keep surprising him, and I don’t know what to do with the fact that I want to.

“Come into the study,” he says, and turns his back on twelve better-dressed women like they were never in the room at all. “Say something else that surprises me.”

The double doors stand open. He doesn’t look back to see if I’m following.

I follow.