Neglected and Betrayed by My Billionaire Husband (Her Marriage in Crisis #130)

Prologue

Zachary

Over Six Years Ago

There are worse places to commit a crime than a library, but the woman I’m about to commit it for still thinks we’re here to make out in the biography section.

I’m letting her think that. It’s the only part of tonight I have under control.

“Five minutes,” the security guard says, jingling his keys with the energy of a man who regrets every decision that brought him here. “You said five minutes, Mr. Dean. That was twenty minutes ago.”

“Time is a construct, Dennis.”

Beside me, Juliette presses her lips together to keep from laughing. I deliver the line with total sincerity, because the alternative is admitting that my heart rate currently belongs to a smaller, faster animal and has since we parked.

Dennis is not amused.

He’s a big guy, mid-fifties, the kind of man who took this job because he thought it would be peaceful.

Quiet nights. Empty building. Him and the books and the soft hum of the climate control.

Then I showed up with an envelope and a proposition, and now here we all are in the emergency lighting at almost midnight, and only two of us know why.

“Don’t start with me.” The keys stop. “I got a wife at home. She made dinner. She’s texted me twice already, and what am I supposed to say? ‘Sorry, honey, some rich guy needed the library’? She’s not gonna believe that. I wouldn’t believe that, and I’m standing in it.”

“Tell her you worked late.”

“Doing what? Guarding books? The books are fine. The books have never once been in danger, not one night of my life.” His phone buzzes.

He pulls it out, looks at it, puts it back without answering.

“That’s her. Right there. She thinks I’m dead in a ditch or I’m at the track, and honestly?

The track’s easier. At least the track makes sense. ”

He squints at us through the dim red glow of the exit signs.

“What the hell are you even doing in here?”

“Research,” I say, as smoothly as I can manage for a man who left his cue cards in the car on purpose and already regrets it.

“At eleven-thirty at night?”

“The best research happens after hours. Fewer distractions.”

Dennis weighs the obvious lie against the envelope I promised him, and the moment he decides he doesn’t get paid enough to care crosses his face in real time.

He looks at Juliette instead.

She arranges her face into serious academic inquiry. Scholarly dedication. A woman with a legitimate professional interest in nineteenth-century American literature that requires access to a closed building at midnight.

What she actually looks like is a woman planning to make out with her boyfriend in the biography section, which is exactly what she thinks is happening.

Good. Let her keep thinking it. If she suspected the truth for one second she’d read it straight off my face, because she reads everything off my face, which is the entire reason we’re standing in this building.

“She’s a librarian,” I say, gesturing at her like exhibit A in my defense. “She has a professional interest in after-hours collection access.”

The look she gives me says she is going to marry me and then murder me, in that order.

Half of that is the plan.

“I have a professional interest,” Dennis says flatly, “in not getting fired.”

“Dennis.” I reach into my jacket - the left pocket, not the right one, the right one is spoken for - and his eyes track the motion with suspicion and hope in equal parts. “I told you I’d make it worth your while. And I’m a man of my word.”

The envelope is thick. I counted it at my desk this afternoon like a cartoon villain.

Dennis’s eyebrows climb toward his hairline and stay there.

“That’s-”

“Enough for you and Donna to take that Bermuda trip she’s been talking about.” I press it into his hand. “She mentioned it to the cleaning staff. Word gets around.”

Dennis stares at the envelope. Then at me. Then at Juliette, with an expression that says is this guy serious right now.

“You bribed the cleaning staff too?”

“I prefer to think of it as networking.”

Juliette snorts.

“He’s for real,” she tells Dennis. “Unfortunately.”

Dennis looks at the envelope again, and I watch a man calculate pi?a coladas in real time.

“Fifteen more minutes,” he decides, and the envelope vanishes into his pocket with a speed that suggests his moral crisis has been fully resolved. “And if anyone asks, I never saw either of you.”

“You’re a gentleman and a scholar, Dennis.”

“I’m an idiot who’s going to Bermuda.”

He shakes his head and walks off, footsteps echoing down the stacks until the sound fades into the ventilation hum, and then it’s just us. Juliette, and me, and a speech I have rehearsed so many times I could deliver it under anesthesia, which is roughly my plan.

“See? Networking.”

“You bribed a security guard.”

“I compensated a security guard for his flexibility.”

“With an envelope full of cash.”

“With an opportunity for a romantic getaway.” I take her hand and pull her deeper into the stacks before she can cross-examine me further. “There’s a difference. Come on. We’re on a schedule now.”

“Whose schedule?”

She digs her heels in, and I turn to find the expression she wears when she knows I’m up to something - one eyebrow banked, mouth fighting itself.

“The one you created by bribing Dennis?” she presses. “Or the mysterious one you’ve been refusing to explain all night?”

“Both.” I trace a circle on her palm with my thumb, which is cheating, and I know it’s cheating, and I do it anyway. “They’re connected.”

“Zachary.”

“Juliette.”

“What are we doing here?”

And there goes the grin. I feel it fail.

Because here’s what nobody tells you about this: the ring is bought, the guard is paid, the building is empty, and none of it helps.

I have closed mergers over breakfast. I argue with my mother in public, which is closer to combat than anything they teach in business school.

And I am standing in a dark library with my whole future in my right-hand pocket, and there is no due diligence for this.

“I wanted to bring you back to where we met,” I say.

“We met at the research desk. During normal business hours. When there was no bribery involved.”

“I know.” I squeeze her hand. “But I couldn’t exactly do what I’m planning to do at the research desk during normal business hours, could I?”

“What are you planning to do?”

“You’ll see.”

“I hate surprises.”

“You love surprises. You just like to pretend you don’t because it makes you feel more in control.”

She hates that I’m right. I watch her hate it - it travels her whole face and surrenders at the mouth - and she follows me anyway, deeper into the stacks, toward the back corner where all of this started.

“How do you know that?” she asks.

“Because I pay attention.” I tug her along past Biography, past Poetry. “Third Friday of every month for almost a year, Juliette. I’ve been paying attention for a while.”

The shelf is where it’s always been, tucked between American Literature and the emergency exit.

The first time I stood in front of it, I was holding a book upside down, and a woman at the research desk asked, with a completely straight face, whether I found it impressive, reading inverted like that.

I turned the book over with as much dignity as the situation allowed. My ears, I have been reliably informed, went pink.

“I’m not actually here for the books,” I admitted, which was the truest thing I’d said all week.

“No?”

“No. I’m here because every third Friday, there’s a woman at the research desk who makes me forget how to hold a book.”

It was the worst line of my life. I’d retired better material in prep school. She should have had me escorted from the building.

Instead, she laughed.

I smiled.

And a year of third Fridays later, here we are: me, her, a bribed guard, and the exact shelf where I forgot how to hold a book.

“This is the shelf,” I say, stopping in front of it.

“I know this is the shelf. I work here.”

“You worked here.” I pull a book off the shelf - the same collection of nineteenth-century essays I once held upside down - and flip through it with exaggerated interest. “Past tense. You quit last month.”

“To spend more time with my boyfriend, who keeps showing up during my shifts and distracting me from my actual job.”

“Distracting you from what? These?” I wave the book at her. “Absolutely riveting stuff. I can see why you’d be torn.”

“Put that back.”

“I think I’ll keep it, actually. Sentimental value.”

“Zachary.”

“Say my name like that again and I’ll buy the whole library.”

“You can’t buy a library.”

“I can buy a building and fill it with books.” I set the book back, and my hand stays on the spine a moment longer than it needs to. “Same thing.”

“That is absolutely not the same thing.”

“Agree to disagree.”

***

Juliette

He turns to face me, and whatever he’s been carrying all night finally reaches his face.

The charm is still there, but underneath it now: nerves.

Which is insane, because Zachary Dean doesn’t get nervous.

He negotiates deals worth more than my entire lifetime earnings without breaking a sweat.

He argues with his mother in front of entire rooms full of people like it’s a sport he intends to win.

But right now, in the dim red glow of the emergency lighting, he looks like someone who’s about to jump off a cliff and isn’t sure if there’s water at the bottom.

“Juliette.”

“Yes?”

“I need to tell you something.”

My heart quits doing its job. “Okay.”

“I’ve been coming to this library for almost a year.” He takes a breath big enough to see. “I made up entire projects just to have a reason to come back on Thursdays.”

“It was Fridays.”

“Third Fridays.” The laugh that escapes him is wet at the edges, and oh god, is he crying?

Is Zachary Dean, who handles boardrooms and arguments and his terrifying mother without flinching, actually about to cry in the American Literature section?

“You worked the research desk on third Fridays. I had it memorized by summer.”

“Zachary-”

“I held more than one book upside down.”

“More than one?”