Neglected, Betrayed Wife of a Billionaire Husband (Her Marriage in Crisis #128)

Prologue

Maya

My hands won’t stop shaking.

I’ve been standing in Oliver’s penthouse for three minutes, maybe four, staring at the city lights bleeding through floor-to-ceiling windows while I try to remember how to form words.

The skyline stretches out beneath us like a galaxy of gold and white, forty stories of nothing but air between this room and the pavement below, and I’ve never felt more untethered in my life.

I’m going to tell him. I have to tell him. The test is still in my purse, that little plastic stick with its two pink lines that changed everything, and he deserves to know.

Four months. We’ve been together four months.

Nowhere near long enough for what I’m about to say.

“Maya.” Oliver’s voice cuts through my spiral, careful and controlled. I can feel him watching me from across the room, those black eyes tracking every micro-expression on my face. He’s always been able to read me too well. “You’re scaring me.”

“I’m scaring myself,” I admit.

“Whatever it is, just say it.” He takes a step toward me, and I hold up my hand to stop him. If he touches me right now, I’ll fall apart. I need to get the words out first.

“Just… give me a second.”

“You’ve had three minutes of seconds. You’re pale, you’re shaking, and you look like you’re about to pass out.” Another step. “Talk to me.”

I turn to face him fully, and God, he’s beautiful.

Even now, even with my whole world tilting sideways, I notice the sharp line of his jaw, the pull of his white shirt across his shoulders, the intensity in his expression that made me fall for him the first time I looked up from my notes in his office.

I was there to interview him for an article about his company’s expansion, and he looked at me like I was the most interesting thing in the room.

No one had ever looked at me like that before.

No one’s looked at me like that since.

Four months of stolen dinners, of late-night conversations, of chemistry that makes my skin burn. Sixteen weeks of falling so hard and so fast that I forgot to protect myself, of thinking maybe, just maybe, I’d found the real thing.

And now this.

“I’m pregnant.”

The words hang in the air between us like a held breath. Oliver goes completely still, frozen mid-step, his face unreadable.

One second passes. Two. Three.

“Say something,” I whisper. “Please. You’re killing me here.”

He crosses the remaining distance between us in three swift strides, and before I can retreat, his hands are cupping my face, tilting it up toward his. His black eyes are burning with something I can’t quite name. Shock, yes, but under it, fierce heat.

“Marry me.”

I jerk backward so hard I nearly trip over the coffee table. “Oliver, no.”

He blinks, his hands still raised in the air where my face used to be. “No?”

“I just told you I’m pregnant. You don’t have to propose out of obligation.” I put the coffee table between us, needing the barrier, needing space to think. My voice comes out steadier than I feel, which is a small miracle. “I won’t trap you into something you don’t want.”

“Maya…”

“I mean it.” I cut him off before he can argue. “If you need time to think, take it. Take as much time as you need. If you want to walk away, I’ll understand. I won’t like it, but I’ll understand. We barely know each other. This wasn’t planned. You didn’t sign up for this.”

“Neither did you.”

“No, but I’m the one who’s pregnant, so I don’t exactly get a choice in the matter.

” I press my hand against my stomach, still flat, still unchanged on the outside even though everything inside me is different now.

“You do. You get to choose. And I won’t let you choose me out of guilt or obligation or some misplaced sense of duty.

I won’t be that woman, Oliver. I won’t let you wake up in ten years and resent me for trapping you. ”

He stares at me like I’ve lost my mind. “You think that’s what this is? Obligation?”

“What else would it be? Four months, Oliver. People don’t propose after four months unless there’s a reason forcing their hand.”

“There is a reason.”

“Yeah. I just told you the reason. Two pink lines on a stick I peed on this morning. That’s the reason.”

“No.” He shakes his head, and something in his expression shifts. Softens. “You. You’re the reason.”

“Oliver…”

“Maya, shut up for one second and let me talk.”

I shut up. Mostly because the look on his face has stolen my ability to form words.

He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a small velvet box. My heart stops.

“I bought this three weeks ago,” he says quietly.

“I’ve been carrying it around like an idiot, trying to figure out the perfect moment.

I was going to wait until our six-month anniversary.

I had this whole plan: dinner at that Italian place you love, the one with the terrible wine and the amazing pasta, and then a walk along the river, and then I was going to drop to one knee like a cliché and ask you to spend the rest of your life with me. ”

He opens the box.

Inside, nestled against black velvet, sits an emerald pendant on a delicate gold chain. The stone is deep green shot through with gold, catching the city lights and throwing them back in fragments. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

“I wasn’t going to propose with a ring,” he continues. “Because I know you, Maya. I know you’d overthink it, worry about the cost, wonder if it was too much too soon. So I got you this instead. Something you could wear every day. Something to remind you that I’m serious.”

“Oliver…” My voice breaks on his name.

“I’m not proposing because you’re pregnant.

” He steps around the coffee table, closing the distance I tried to create, and I don’t retreat this time.

I can’t. My feet won’t move. “I’m proposing because I can’t imagine my life without you in it.

Because you walked into my office four months ago and told me my company’s PR strategy was aggressively mediocre, and I haven’t stopped thinking about you since. ”

A wet laugh escapes me despite everything. “That was professional feedback.”

“That was the hottest thing anyone’s ever said to me.

” He takes my hand, turns it palm-up, and presses the necklace into it.

The metal is warm from his body heat, and I curl my fingers around it instinctively.

“Everyone else in that room was kissing my ass, telling me what they thought I wanted to hear. And then there was you. This gorgeous, fierce woman who looked me dead in the eye and told me I was doing it wrong.”

“You were doing it wrong.”

“I know. You were right. You’re always right.” He closes my fingers around the pendant, his hands wrapped around mine. “Say yes, Maya. Say yes, and I’ll spend the rest of my life proving I mean this. You and this baby will always come first. I swear it. Always.”

I stare at the emerald peeking out between my fingers. At him. At the certainty blazing in his black eyes like he’s never been more sure of anything in his life.

Every rational part of my brain is screaming that this is insane, too fast, too sudden, far too much.

We barely know each other. Neither of us has ever said I love you, and he isn’t saying it now, and some small voice in me notices that even through the roar of my own heartbeat.

There are a thousand ways this could go wrong, a thousand reasons to say no, to ask for time, to be sensible.

But my heart, my stupid, reckless, hopeless heart, is already his. It has been since the moment he smiled at me across his ridiculous glass desk and asked if I always eviscerated people I’d just met.

“Only the ones who deserve it,” I’d told him.

“Then I must have deserved it,” he’d replied. “Have dinner with me tonight so I can prove you wrong.”

Four months ago, I said yes to dinner.

Now I’m saying yes to forever.

“Okay,” I whisper. “Yes. Okay. Yes.”

His mouth crashes into mine before I finish the word.

The kiss is desperate, fierce, everything I didn’t know I needed.

He kisses me like he’s drowning and I’m oxygen, like he’s been waiting his whole life for exactly this moment, and I kiss him back just as hard.

My back hits the window, cold glass against my shoulders, his body a wall of heat against my front, and the city glitters forty stories below us like scattered diamonds.

“Bedroom,” I gasp against his lips.

“No.”

“Oliver…”

“I need you now.” His hands are already sliding under my shirt, palms rough and warm against my skin.

“Right now, Maya. I can’t wait. I can’t…

” He breaks off, kissing down my neck, teeth grazing my pulse point.

“Tell me to stop and I will. But I need you to know how much I want this. How much I want you.”

“Don’t stop.” I grab his face and drag his mouth back to mine. “Don’t you dare stop.”

He doesn’t stop.

His mouth moves over mine like he’s memorizing the shape of my yes, the way my body is already softening against him even though my hands are still shaking from everything I just told him.

The emerald necklace presses into my palm where he folded my fingers around it, and I can feel the cool weight of it between us as he walks me backward toward the floor-to-ceiling windows.

The city glitters far below. His penthouse feels suspended in the dark.

He eases the necklace from my fingers and sets it safely aside, and then he turns me so my back meets the glass, cool against my heated skin through the thin fabric of my dress.

His hands slide down my sides, slow, reverent, like he’s afraid I might disappear if he moves too fast.

“Let me worship you,” he murmurs against my throat. “Let me show you what you mean to me.”

I nod because I can’t find words yet. He drops to his knees right there in front of the window.

His palms skim up my thighs, pushing the hem of my dress higher until cool air touches my skin.

He presses a kiss to the inside of my knee, then higher, then higher still.

When his mouth finds me through the lace of my panties I gasp and my head tips back against the glass.

He peels the lace aside with careful fingers and licks into me like he has all night.

One hand stays on my hip to steady me. The other slides up under my dress to rest flat over my stomach, right where our baby is growing.

The touch is so gentle it makes my throat tight.

He knows. He feels it even though there is nothing to see yet.

His tongue circles and strokes, patient and thorough, until my legs start to tremble.

I reach down and thread my fingers through his hair, holding him there when the pleasure sharpens.

He makes a low sound against me and keeps going, two fingers easing inside while his mouth works my clit.

I come with a broken cry, hips jerking, the city lights blurring behind my eyelids.

He rises slowly, kissing his way back up. Collarbone first. Then the swell of my breast through my dress. He pulls the fabric down and takes my nipple into his mouth, sucking until I arch and moan. Then lower again, mouth open and warm over the same spot on my stomach where his hand rested.

“I’ll be there,” he says between kisses. “Every moment. Every milestone. I’ll never be like my parents. Our child will know what it means to be loved.”

I pull at his shirt until it comes off. He lifts me then, hands under my thighs, and I wrap my legs around his waist. He pushes inside me in one smooth thrust, both of us breathing hard against each other’s mouths. The glass is cold at my back. He’s hot everywhere else.

He moves in deep, steady rolls of his hips, never rushing. One hand stays braced against the window beside my head. The other holds my hip, thumb stroking the skin there. Every time he sinks in he kisses me like he’s trying to pour the promises straight into my body.

“You’re everything,” he breathes against my lips when I start to tighten around him again. “You know that, right? Everything.”

The words and the way he’s looking at me push me over. I shatter in his arms, clutching at his shoulders, and he follows right after with a groan that sounds like my name. He keeps moving through it, slow and deep, until we’re both shaking.

After, tangled together in his bed, he traces patterns on my shoulder while I catch my breath. The emerald pendant sits on the nightstand where he placed it carefully before undressing me, catching the moonlight and throwing green shadows on the wall.

“I meant it,” he says quietly. “Every word.”

“I know.” I press a kiss to his chest, right over his heart. I can feel it beating, strong and steady. “I believe you.”

“You and this baby. Nothing else matters. Nothing else will ever matter as much.”

I want to freeze this moment forever. The two of us wrapped around each other, the city glowing outside the windows, his promises still warm in the air between us. I want to remember exactly how this feels. How safe. How loved. How certain.

“You’re everything,” I whisper back to him, borrowing his words because mine aren’t big enough.

His arms tighten around me, pulling me impossibly closer, and he presses his lips to my hair and keeps them there, breathing me in like a vow.

I believe every word he says and every promise he makes.

Seven years later, I’ll stand in our kitchen at midnight, dinner cold on the table, and wonder what happened to the man who held me like I was sacred.

I’ll look at the emerald pendant in my jewelry box and try to remember the last time he touched me like I was precious instead of convenient.

I’ll watch him choose work over our daughter again and again, and I’ll wonder if the man who knelt at my feet and called me everything ever really existed.

But tonight, I don’t know any of that.

Tonight, wrapped in his arms with his child growing inside me and his ring soon to be on my finger, I let myself believe we’ll be the exception to every sad story I’ve ever heard.

I let myself believe that love like this doesn’t fade, doesn’t fracture, doesn’t slowly suffocate under the weight of neglect and broken promises.

I let myself believe that love is enough.