My Husband’s Book about Another Woman (Billionaire Marriage in Crisis #17)

1. Imogen

— ? —

Imogen

I wake up reaching, the way I always do, my hand sliding across the sheets before my eyes are even open, feeling for the cold flat stretch of mattress that’s been his side of the bed for almost a month now.

Except it isn’t cold.

It’s warm, it’s solid, and it’s breathing. There’s an arm heavy across my waist and a chest pressed against my back, a mouth resting somewhere near my shoulder in that lazy, half-asleep way that only ever happens when he actually came to bed and actually stayed.

My husband is here.

I don’t move. I lie perfectly still with my hand splayed flat against his forearm, and I memorize him because if I move too fast he might realize he’s supposed to be somewhere else.

Hendrix’s breath goes slow against the back of my neck.

His fingers curl into the fabric of my shirt, loose but deliberate, as if even asleep some part of him is holding on.

His legs are tangled through mine, warm skin dragging against warm skin, and I have the ridiculous thought that this is the most secure I’ve felt in weeks, pinned under a hundred and eighty pounds of drooling novelist.

“I can feel you thinking,” he says, and his voice is wrecked with sleep, gravel and warmth, completely unfair for a man who has done nothing to earn the right to sound like that this early.

“I’m not thinking.”

“You’re thinking so loud you woke me up.”

“That’s physically impossible.”

“And yet.” He pulls me back into him, closing whatever half-inch of space I didn’t know was there, and presses a kiss to the curve where my neck meets my shoulder, sending that slow warmth that travels all the way down my spine. “Good morning.”

“You’re still here.” It comes out before I can stop it, softer than I want, more honest than I’ve let myself be in a while.

His arm tightens. “Where else would I be?”

I could give him a list.

The office. The desk in the study with the manuscript he falls asleep on.

The couch, the guest room, that liminal space behind his own eyes where the sentences live and I stopped getting an invitation somewhere around the new year.

A studio lot across town, some producer’s table where they carve his novels into screenplays over lunch nobody eats.

This is Hollywood, and Hollywood always has somewhere else for him to be, a premiere or a pitch or a dinner where the whole point is being seen wanting the thing everyone else wants.

I keep every single answer behind my teeth, because naming the cold side of the bed out loud is a good way to summon it back, and I would rather chew glass than lose this.

So I turn over instead, rolling in the circle of his arm until I’m facing him, and the sight of him this close in the gray morning light does the same stupid thing to my chest it’s done for almost three years.

His dark hair is a catastrophe. There’s a crease pressed into his cheek from a pillow or, more likely, a page. His eyes are still heavy, only half open, and they’re already on me as if there’s nothing else in the room worth the effort of focusing.

“You have ink on you,” I tell him, and drag my thumb along his jaw where a smudge of it has dried into the stubble. “Right here. You fell asleep on your work again.”

“I was editing.”

“You were unconscious. I found you facedown at some ungodly hour with a pen still in your hand.” I keep my thumb on his jaw a beat longer than the smudge requires. “You’ve been doing that a lot.”

An expression moves behind his face, the teasing burning off into the real thing underneath, and he turns his head, kissing the inside of my wrist.

“I know,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

“You say that a lot too.”

“Because I mean it a lot.”

His phone lights up on the nightstand. I feel him register it more than see it, the tiny shift of attention, the ancient reflex of a man whose whole life runs through a screen.

The name on it is Shane, his agent.

I brace for it. The apology, the tilt toward the nightstand, the ‘here we go.’

Instead he reaches over, flips the phone facedown without so much as glancing at the screen, and pulls his arm back around me like the interruption offended him personally.

I blink. “You’re not getting that?”

“Getting what?”

“Hendrix…”

“I didn’t hear anything.” He nudges his nose into my hair and I feel him smile against my temple. “Must have been the wind.”

“The windows are shut. There is no wind.”

“Then it was nothing, and I’m very busy.” He pulls back just enough to look at me, and there’s a thing loose and light in his expression that I haven’t seen in so long I’d almost forgotten the specific shape of it. “I cleared the day.”

I go very still. “You what?”

“Today. I cleared it.” He says it as if it’s nothing, as if it’s normal, as if the words don’t cost anything. “No writing or office. I told Shane not to call unless the building is on fire, and even then, I said, use your judgment, some fires burn out on their own.”

“You did not say that to Shane.”

“I said a version of it. A more professional version.” His mouth curves. “The point is, it’s yours. At least for the whole day, I’m all yours.”

And God, the way that sinks in. Three words I’ve been waiting weeks to hear, dropped so casually he doesn’t even know he’s holding a live wire.

“Careful,” I manage, aiming for dry and missing by a mile. “I might actually hold you to that.”

He catches my hand where it’s resting between us and brings it to his mouth, kissing my knuckles one at a time, unhurried, watching me over the top of them.

“Please do,” he says. “Hold me to everything. Make a list. I’ll clear it item by item.”

“You’re in a mood, huh?”

“I’m in a good mood.” His eyes drag down and back up, slow, and one corner of his mouth tips. “A very good mood. Can’t imagine why.”

Heat crawls up my neck before I can stop it, because I know exactly why, and so does he. The memory of last night sits right there in the room with us wearing that smug look on his face. I shove his cheek away with my palm.

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to. I can hear you being insufferable from here.”

But I’m fighting a smile and losing, and his eyes catch on it. Glinting, delighted, filing it away as if it’s a thing he gets to keep.

For one whole minute I let myself have it, the warmth of him, the weight of his arm, the easy rhythm of us that used to be the whole song and lately feels like a chorus I only get to hear on holidays.

This. On mornings like this one, I remember why everything was worth it.

“If you’re really all mine,” I say, before the moment can convince me to stay in this bed forever and skip my actual life. “Then you’re going to regret it, because I have the least romantic day planned in the history of days off.”

“I’m intrigued.”

“Errands, Hendrix. Grim, joyless errands. The dry cleaner. The hardware place, because the guest bathroom faucet has been acting up. Groceries, because we are two adults living in a house this size with a refrigerator that currently contains mustard and half a lime.”

“That’s not true, we also have champagne.”

“Champagne is not food.”

“It’s an ingredient.” He’s already sitting up, dragging a hand through his disaster of a hair, and there’s a boyish smile happening in his face that I don’t trust and can’t look away from. “I’m coming.”

“You’re not coming to the hardware store.”

“I’m absolutely coming to the hardware store. I want to see this faucet.”

“You have never once been consulted on a faucet in your life.”

“Then it’s time. I’ve been shielded from the faucet discourse for too long.” He leans down and kisses me, quick and certain, pulling back with a grin. “Get dressed, Imogen. We have grim, joyless errands to attend to.”

I should say no. Some tired, cautious part of me, the part that’s learned the shape of his disappearing, whispers that this is exactly the kind of morning that switches up by lunch, that I should protect myself, that hope is just heartbreak with better marketing.

But I tell that part of me to shut up, and I go get dressed.

***

Hendrix lasts exactly one errand.

Which is generous, considering the list I read him over coffee had four things on it.

We make it through the grocery store, and that’s where his patience runs out, though you’d never know it to look at him, because Hendrix doesn’t fidget or sigh.

He just goes quiet and dry and starts pushing the cart with the grim focus of a man who has never once had to think about where food comes from and has decided, today, to find out.

“We need real food,” I tell him, dropping a bag of lemons in. “Things that become meals. Not just the four sad condiments currently holding a vigil in our fridge.”

“Define meal.”

“A thing you cook. With steps.”

“I know what a meal is, Imogen. I’m asking what you’re planning to do with lemons.”

“I have no idea. They looked hopeful.”

He picks one up, turns it over, sets it back down as if he’s decided against it on principle.

We drift. I fill the cart with nothing a reasonable household needs.

Three kinds of cheese and no actual dinners, the fancy olives he pretends not to be obsessed with, a bag of the sour candy I’ve been not-so-secretly addicted to since I was small.

Meanwhile, he watches all of it land in the cart and says nothing but his silence has a texture, and I know that texture.

“Say it,” I tell him.

“You could hire someone for this.” He says it plainly, no heat in it, the way he says most things. “To spare you. Add it to the list. Someone to handle the house, the ordering, the standing in a fluorescent box choosing between cheeses. You’d never have to think about a lemon again.”

“We have people for the house.”

“Then a few more people. It’s not a scarce resource, Imogen. We can afford the entire staff of this store and the store itself.”

“I know we can.” I stop the cart. “That’s not the point.”

He waits. That’s the thing about Hendrix. He doesn’t fill silences, he lets them sit there until you climb into them yourself, and after almost three years I still fall for it every time.