Chapter 5
Adrian
The Wright family estate in the Hamptons was built for perfect, uninterrupted afternoons. This Sunday was no exception.
Manicured lawns, kept violently green despite the July heat, rolled down to the edge of the Atlantic. A string quartet played Vivaldi from the shaded stone terrace. New York’s financial elite murmured at the correct volume. The late afternoon light hit the imported hydrangeas on schedule.
A flawless scene. Expensive optics.
And it was crumbling between my fingers.
I checked my watch for the fourth time in ten minutes. 3:45 PM. The party had been running for nearly an hour. My wife was nowhere.
“Adrian, my boy.”
I smoothed my expression into relaxed confidence before I turned.
My father, Conrad Wright, stood at the edge of the patio, leaning slightly on a silver-handled cane—a concession to a recent hip replacement.
Everything else about him was as rigid and imposing as ever.
His pale blue eyes, the ones that could spot a weak Q3 earnings report from across a crowded boardroom, swept over the crowd. Assessing. Calculating. Judging.
“Dad. Glad you made it out of the city,” I said, and smiled the way I’d been trained to.
He didn’t smile back. He looked right past my shoulder. “Where is Grace? The host shouldn’t leave her guests unattended. Especially today.”
“She’s running a bit late,” I said. The lie sat thick and sour on my tongue. “A last-minute appointment in the city. She should be arriving any minute.”
His silver brow furrowed. “An appointment? On a Sunday? On the day you’re announcing the gender of the next Wright heir? I hope it was a medical emergency, Adrian, because otherwise, it demonstrates a severe lack of priorities.”
“It was unavoidable,” I said. I kept my voice even, yielding no ground.
He hummed, low and judgmental. His gaze crossed the lawn and settled on my older brother.
Nolan had his youngest daughter on his shoulders, his wife laughing beside them.
A perfect, picturesque family unit. Nolan was safe.
Nolan was reliable. Nolan had three heirs.
It didn’t matter that Nolan’s investment ideas were uninspired or that he kept a mistress in Midtown. He looked the part.
“Make sure she’s here for the toast, Adrian,” he said quietly. “The board is watching. The trustees answer to me. I am watching. We need stability.”
“She’ll be here,” I promised.
He walked off to speak with the CFO of a rival firm. I stood there with a steel band tightening around my ribs.
The chairmanship. The family trust. Ten years at Wright Capital—the aggressive expansions, the sleepless nights, the brutal acquisitions—all of it hinged on one baby.
On projecting the image of a settled, legacy-producing leader.
My father belonged to an older generation.
He didn’t hand power to men with no little legacies running around, and he didn’t hand power to men who couldn’t control their own households.
If Grace didn’t show—if she blew this up after Thursday’s disaster in the clinic—it would all go to Nolan.
I scanned the crowd again and caught a figure near the massive, tiered champagne fountain.
Celine.
There was a flute of sparkling cider in her hand.
She threw her head back and laughed at something a junior partner’s wife had said.
She was working the room. Mingling. Accepting congratulations on behalf of a family she was supposed to be a silent, invisible, generously compensated part of.
I hadn’t wanted to invite her to the gender reveal. Grace had insisted…before.
The anger was cold and clean. I set my half-empty scotch on a passing waiter’s silver tray with a sharp clink and moved through the crowd.
I didn’t make a scene. I walked past the champagne fountain, caught Celine’s eye, gave a microscopic jerk of my head toward the heavy oak doors of the library, and went inside without looking back.
The library was cool and quiet. Leather, old paper, lemon polish. The heavy doors clicked shut behind me, muting the quartet and the chatter. A moment later, the brass handle turned, and Celine slipped inside.
“Adrian,” she breathed—a soft, intimate purr that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. “The party is beautiful. You really outdid yourself.”
I crossed the room in three long strides and backed her up against the heavy mahogany door. I didn’t touch her. I had never touched her. I used my height, my presence, and I pinned her in place with nothing but fury.
“What the hell are you playing at, Celine?” I kept my voice low. A hiss, not a shout. Shouting costs leverage.
Her blue eyes went wide and innocent. “I’m not playing at anything. I was invited, remember?”
“You were invited as the surrogate. As an employee.” I leaned closer and watched the innocent mask falter. “Not to hold court with my father’s board members. And you certainly weren’t invited to tell my wife a psychotic, fabricated lie about a night that never happened.”
The mask slipped away. Underneath was something hard and calculating. Frighteningly clear. “Is it a lie, Adrian?”
“I never touched you.”
“But you wanted to,” she whispered, leaning closer.
Her floral perfume filled my nose, sweet and cloying, turning my stomach.
“That night at my apartment, when you came to check on the baby. You thought I was asleep on the sofa. I wasn’t.
I felt you standing there, Adrian. Watching me.
You stayed so much longer than you had to.
Don’t stand there and tell me you didn’t feel it too. ”
My jaw locked so tight my teeth ached.
I remembered.
That week had been the worst of it—the exhaustion, the crushing weight of the lies I was managing to keep Grace happy.
I had reluctantly gone to Celine’s, just to drop off the specialized prenatal vitamins she had requested.
Grace had begged me to do it on my way home from the office.
I’d asked to use the bathroom after setting the bag on the counter.
When I came out, Celine was asleep on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, some documentary murmuring low on the television. I had let myself out without waking her.
That was all. That was the whole of it.
And when I’d gotten home, there had been a message waiting—wounded that I had left without letting her know. It had been suggestive, fishing for something I hadn’t offered.
“Nothing happened,” I ground out. My hands curled into tight fists at my sides. “I brought you vitamins because my wife asked me to. I left. Whatever you think you felt that night, you felt it alone.”
“Did you?” A small, patronizing smile. “You left me that voicemail later that night, didn’t you? When you called to apologize. You said you needed me. You said you wanted this baby with me.”
“I was calling to apologize, and you know it!” There’d been nothing to apologize for, but even then, Celine made me uncomfortable.
I’d known in my bones she wanted more than the large check she was supposed to collect at the end of all this.
“You edited the audio,” I said. “You took an apology voicemail apart and rebuilt it into an affair. You weaponized a misunderstanding.”
Celine shrugged, a delicate, unbothered lift of her shoulders. “It’s better Grace thinks we had an affair, Adrian. She was never the right woman for you.”
“You don’t know anything about her.”
“She’s weak.” Her eyes flashed with disdain. “She gives up everything for you and then quietly resents you for it. I wouldn’t resent you. I understand what it takes to be at the top. I understand the pressure.”
She reached out and laid a hand gently over the swell of her stomach. My child. My blood heir.
“I care about you, Adrian,” she said softly. “And I’m carrying your child.”
I stared at her. The whole structure of it finally assembled itself in my mind.
The three million was a bonus. A stepping stone. Celine wanted the life—the Hamptons estate, the absolute security of being a Wright. And she had calculated, correctly, that the only way to get it was to destroy my marriage and hold my heir hostage to force my hand.
A parasite. And I’d invited her in.
I filed the realization away. Celine’s delusion was a problem for later. I had a board to placate, a father to impress, and a wife to find.
I leaned in until my face was inches from hers, and dropped my voice to absolute zero.
“Listen to me very carefully,” I whispered. “You will walk back out there. You will smile. You will speak only when spoken to. And if you breathe one single word to my father, or my brother, or anyone in my family about the truth of this arrangement...I will ruin you.”
Celine blinked, taken aback by the sudden lack of emotion in my voice.
“I will freeze the credit cards I’ve allowed you,” I continued.
Itemizing her execution. “I will bury you in litigation until you can’t afford a cup of coffee.
I will hire a team of lawyers to prove you violated the morality clause of the NDA by attempting extortion.
You will have this baby, and you will never see it again. Do you understand me?”
Her confident smile faltered. Genuine fear in her eyes at last—primal. She swallowed hard and nodded once.
“Good,” I said. I stepped back and straightened my cuffs.
I opened the heavy oak doors and walked back out into the blinding afternoon sun. The party was still humming along, ignorant of the skirmish that had just occurred inside the house.
I walked toward the patio, scanning the long gravel driveway. A black town car was idling near the central fountain.
And then, she was there.
Grace stepped onto the stone terrace, and the breath physically left my lungs.
She wasn’t wearing the muted, elegant pastels I usually bought for her.
She was wearing a structured emerald green silk dress I had never seen before.
It clung to her curves, bold and unapologetic.
Her dark hair, usually pinned up in a neat, controlled chignon for a party, fell in loose, chaotic waves over her bare shoulders.