My President Billionaire Husband Replaced Me (Wives Betrayed #11)

CHAPTER 1

LINDA

There’s a skill to eating dinner standing up in a ball gown while three people talk at you, and I’ve had twenty-six years of practice.

The plate is small. The stakes, apparently, are enormous.

Tonight is the autumn reception for the diplomatic corps, which means four hundred people in the East Room pretending they didn’t read this morning’s coverage of the trade talks, and me pretending I haven’t been awake since five doing the same math.

The five a.m. math was Second Tour, my veterans’ family employment initiative, which goes public in the spring and currently exists as forty-one pages of pilot data and a logo I hate.

We have manufacturers in Ohio ready to hire military spouses sight unseen.

We have a transportation union that wants in.

What we don’t have is a funding line that survives the budget markup, which is why I’ve spent the week being charming to appropriators’ wives, and why tonight’s guest list reads less like a party than a spreadsheet with catering.

“Mrs. Hinton, the Norwegian ambassador’s wife asked about the reading room.” Dana, my chief of staff, has a binder tucked under her arm and the expression of a woman triaging. “Do you want to mention Second Tour when you greet her? She has a brother, Army, twenty years.”

“I’ll mention it.” I fork a green bean. “Not in the receiving line, though. She’ll get ambushed all night. Find me before the toasts.”

“Copy.” Dana checks something off. “The President’s running late. McHenry called down. Something about the Fed chair.”

“Something about,” I repeat. “My favorite genre of presidential absence.”

She grins and disappears into the flow of staff moving through the ground floor.

I take my plate into the small pantry off the State Dining Room, the one the chefs use for staging, because it’s the only place within a hundred yards where no one will ask me for anything.

The risotto is excellent. I get four bites in before the door opens and a hand reaches over my shoulder and steals the fork.

“I was eating that.”

“You were guarding it.” Declan kisses my neck, fork already loaded. “There’s a difference. Guarding means you weren’t committed.”

He looks tired and happy, which is his natural state these days, the two wired together. The tuxedo is doing him favors. Twenty-six years and the man still gets away with things on bone structure alone.

“The Fed chair?” I ask.

“Retiring. Announcing Friday.” He steals another bite. “I found out from a cable business channel, which McHenry assures me is a feature, not a bug.”

“Do you need to go back down after the line?”

“Maybe. Probably.” He sets the fork on my plate, which is the closest Declan Hinton comes to an apology, and straightens my earring with a thumb. “You always disappear after the receiving line,” I say.

He smiles. “And somehow you’re still here when I come back.”

It’s an old line between us. He means it as devotion. Tonight, with a Marine band tuning up somewhere below us, I let him have it.

“Go. Be the President.” I take the fork back. “But if you eat off my plate at the reception, I’m telling the Norwegian ambassador you’re underfed at home.”

“She’d believe it. You starve me.”

“You had four bites of my dinner.”

“I was testing it for poison. You’re welcome.” He ducks out before I can answer, and the door swings, and the pantry is quiet again except for the clatter of the kitchen and the low hum of the building.

I finish the risotto. That’s marriage, after all.

The new fellow finds me twenty minutes before the receiving line, in the East Wing corridor where Dana has herded the program staff for final marching orders.

“Mrs. Hinton. Samantha Elkins.” She’s mid-twenties, dark hair pulled back smooth, a suit that costs more than fellowships pay, and a handshake calibrated to the ounce.

“I’m the White House Fellow bridging the Second Tour rollout and the West Wing task force on workforce re-entry.

Dana said I should introduce myself before tonight so I’m not a stranger with a clipboard. ”

“Consider yourself introduced. Do you have a clipboard?”

“I’ve been told the clipboard is implied.

” She smiles, and it’s a good smile, warm without being pushy.

“I want to say, before we talk logistics. Your speech at the shipyard in Norfolk, the one about military spouses rebuilding careers. ‘Service doesn’t end when the uniform comes off. It changes hands.’” She says it word-perfect, from memory.

“I wrote that line on an index card in grad school. It’s the reason I applied to work here. ”

I am, I’ll admit, a sucker for this. Not the flattery. The specificity. People usually compliment the dress.

“That speech cleared a path for a lot of hiring pilots,” I say. “If you’ve read it that closely, you’ll be useful. Welcome aboard, Samantha.”

“Thank you, ma’am. I won’t waste the access.”

Dana gives me the two-minute signal over Samantha’s shoulder, and I move toward the residence elevator to fix my face. Samantha falls in a half-step behind, asking Dana a question about the ambassador seating chart that is, I note, exactly the right question to ask.

The fellow program sends us bright ones every year. Most of them spend twelve months trying to stand near important people. This one seems to want to know how the important people stand.

The East Room glows. Four hundred guests, crystal chandeliers, the Marine band in red, and a receiving line that moves like a conveyor belt of handshakes and careful teeth. Declan is beside me, big hand at the small of my back, murmuring the occasional private commentary only I can hear.

“Ambassador with the blue sash hates me.”

“He loves you. His country sells us fish.”

“Same thing, in trade terms.”

I laugh despite myself, and a photographer catches it, and tomorrow some outlet will run the photo with a caption about the Hintons’ enduring marriage. Fine. Let them. It’s the truest thing they’ll print all week.

The line ends. Declan squeezes my hand, apologetic, and is swallowed by McHenry and a man from Treasury before he’s cleared the doorway. Disappeared after the receiving line, as promised.

I’m midway to the ambassador’s wife when Samantha Elkins materializes at my elbow, folder open.

“Ma’am. Small save. The Portuguese delegation’s seating put the minister’s wife next to her ex-husband’s trade attaché. Protocol caught it late. I flagged a swap with Dana and she’s moving the cards now.” She shows me the chart, two names neatly transposed. “Nobody will ever know it was wrong.”

I look at the chart, then at her. It’s a good catch, the sort that prevents a week of frosty cables. “Nice work.”

“It was in the briefing book,” she says, waving it off. “You flagged the Portuguese situation in the margins weeks ago. I just read your notes.”

She’s gone before I can answer, back to the wall where the staff stand, and I think: good hire, whoever made it.

I work the room. The Norwegian ambassador’s wife does have a brother, Army, twenty years, and when I mention Second Tour her whole face changes, and we talk for ten minutes about hiring pipelines while her husband pretends not to listen.

This is the part of the job nobody claps for and the only part I’d miss.

I’m crossing toward the terrace doors when I see her.

Samantha Elkins is standing near the fireplace with a briefing folder, and she’s not reading it. She’s watching Declan.

Look. Women watch my husband. He’s the President, he was on magazine covers before he was on ballots, and there isn’t a state dinner in history where somebody didn’t gaze a little too long. It registers and rolls off. Twenty-six years builds calluses.

This is different, and I can’t have told you why at the time, except that she isn’t gazing.

She’s studying. There’s a stillness to it, the stillness of someone taking an inventory.

When Declan laughs at something the French finance minister says, Samantha smiles a half-second late, rehearsing a response to a stimulus she plans to encounter again.

Then she does something bold. She crosses the room, waits for a seam in the conversation, and steps into it.

“Mr. President, forgive me. The minister’s point about port automation.

The Norfolk pilot has numbers on that.” She’s calm, unhurried.

She opens the folder and shows him a page.

“Longshoremen retrained in eleven weeks at the pilot sites. If the trade framework gets criticized for ignoring dislocated workers, that’s your answer. ”

Declan reads the page. I know the moment it registers because his eyebrows go up, and he says something, and Samantha answers, and the French minister leans in, and within ninety seconds my husband is keeping her in the conversation, pointing at a line on her page, engaged the way he gets when someone hands him a lever he didn’t know existed.

She’s smart. That’s the thing I clock before anything else. She didn’t flatter her way in. She brought him a tool.

Dana materializes at my elbow with the toast schedule. “Everything okay?”

“Fine,” I say. “The fellow is earning her keep.”

The residence is quiet at midnight, staff gone soft-footed. I’m at the little table by the window with tea, still in the gown, when Declan comes in pulling at his bow tie.

“You’re still here,” he says.

“Somehow.”

He drops into the chair across from me and steals my tea, drinks half of it, sets it back.

The table between us is walnut, older than the presidency, older than the money.

We had one in Boston, laminate, wobbling on a folded coaster, back when he was a man with a failing startup and I was the one who believed in him anyway.

Sometimes I think every table since has been an attempt to get back to that one.

“Your new fellow has a crush on you,” I say.

He laughs, immediately, no hesitation. “Linda, she’s practically a kid.”

“She’s an adult woman.”

“She’s a policy fellow. She did eight months at the Labor Department. She thinks FLSA reform is a personality.” He reaches across and takes my hand. “I noticed her because she handed me a statistic that won an argument. That’s the whole thing.”

“She quoted my Norfolk speech at me from memory. Index card in grad school, apparently.”

“There you go. She worships you. Half the young women in this building do.” He says it warmly, meaning it as reassurance.

“Just clocking it,” I say. “For the record.”

“Clock away.” He pulls me up out of the chair and into him, and his chin rests on my hair. “I only ever see you.”

I believe him. He has never given me a reason not to.

He’s asleep within minutes, one arm heavy across me. I’m not. Through the bedroom window the East Wing colonnade is lit up soft and gold, and my mind keeps walking back to the reception, to the fireplace, to a young woman holding a folder she wasn’t reading.

The last thing I remember before sleep: crossing the room near midnight to collect Dana, and catching Samantha’s face as she watched us, Declan with his hand on my back, me leaning into him.

Admiration, unmistakable. Longing, unmistakable. Both at once, aimed at two different members of the same marriage.

She didn’t look away when I caught her. She smiled at me, and raised her glass.

An enthusiast, I told myself. A smart kid with a hero complex and a crush, and this town chews up a dozen of those a year.

I went to sleep believing it.