Neglected by Her CEO Husband (The Unseen Wives #1)

Chapter 1 – MADDIE

MADDIE

The ballroom of the Ellemore Estate was the perfect place to celebrate the promise of forever. I stood in the center of it with a clipboard I didn't need and a mental image I'd been building for weeks.

"The tables should pull in tighter," I told Lisa, the planner. "Right now they're sitting too far from the center. People will feel like they're eating in a warehouse."

She tilted her head, considering. "We sketched it at twelve feet apart."

"Bring it to eight. And angle the head table so it faces the windows, not away from them. When the sun sets, that whole wall will turn amber. You want Quin sitting in it, not with her back to it."

Lisa made a note, then looked up at me with something close to admiration. "You have an eye, Mrs. Sterling. I mean it. Most of my clients tell me what they hate. You tell me what the room wants."

I smiled. "The room knows what it wants. I just listen."

Her phone buzzed and she pressed it to her ear, and I watched her face fall by degrees. When she lowered it, her mouth had gone thin.

"Great. The peonies fell through. Their grower had a blight and they can't fill the order."

"How many arrangements?"

"Forty. Plus the installation over the arch."

I didn't let myself panic. Panic was a luxury, like sleeping in or saying no. I looked at the windows again, at the gold pooling on the floor, and focused on finding an alternative.

"Forget peonies. Go to ranunculus and garden roses.

The ones that look like they're about to spill open.

Cream and the palest blush, nothing saturated.

Then run trailing amaranth down the center so it pours off the tables.

" I gestured at the arch as I spoke. "And the installation needs to be stripped back.

Make it sparse. Branches and a few blooms, like something growing wild through a ruin.

It'll photograph better than a wall of flowers anyway. "

Lisa stared at me.

"You came up with that in ten seconds."

"I've had the room in my head for a month. The flowers were always the easy part."

She sighed, tapping something onto her tablet. "Quin is lucky to have you as a sister-in-law. I hope she knows she owes you."

I smiled and didn't tell her that no one had asked me to manage this.

That I'd simply seen the proposal go up on the family group thread and felt the old machinery start turning in me, the part that needed everything Sterling to be flawless.

Because this was what I'd given my art career up for, or rather, traded it for.

Building the Sterling family empire even taller.

Standing at Damon's side as the perfect, devoted wife, and all that entailed.

My phone rang. Ellie's name lit the screen, and I excused myself and stepped into the alcove by the windows to take it.

"Tell me you're calling to say yes," she said, no hello, which was very Ellie. We'd been best friends since high school and some things never changed.

"Yes to what?"

"The exhibition, Madeline. The group show. I sent you the email three weeks ago and you've been ghosting me like a man you matched with on accident."

Yeah, right. We both know I never matched with anyone. I only dated two guys casually before I met Damon at university. Before our families pushed us together.

I pressed my fingers to my temple. "Ellie, I'm so sorry. I can't."

"Can't, or won't?"

"Can't. I genuinely can't. I'm planning Quin's engagement party, and I'm standing in the venue right now.

And Damon's got the launch coming, so I'm hosting the investor dinner next Thursday, and there's the foundation gala after that, and the journalist thing this week, plus our anniversary next month and?—"

"Maddie."

"—and somewhere in there I have to find a tailor who can fix the hem on the dress I'm wearing to the engagement party, so honestly the timing just isn't?—"

"Maddie. Stop. Listen to your own list."

I stopped. The gold light shifted on the floor.

"When are you going to make time for you?" Her voice had dropped, gone soft in a way that hurt more than if she'd shouted. "When's the last time you actually painted something? Not picked out a color scheme for a party. Painted, purely for joy? For yourself."

I opened my mouth and found I didn't have a number.

I tried to remember. The studio at the back of the house, the one Damon had built me as a wedding gift, with an abundance of north light and clean white walls, had become a place I walked past on the way to the linen closet.

My brushes were stiff in their jar. There was a canvas on the easel I'd primed and never touched.

When had I primed it? Before Curtis's birthday.

Which was… Last autumn. A year, easily. Maybe even more.

"I don't know," I admitted.

"That's the problem, babe. You don't know."

"I'm sorry, El." My phone buzzed against my cheek, a text sliding in. "I really am. But I have to go, Damon needs?—"

"Of course he does."

"I'll call you later. I promise."

"You won't," she said, but there was no cruelty in it, just sadness, and she hung up before I could lie to her again.

I looked at the text. Where are my onyx cufflinks? Not in the box.

I typed back: Left side of the dresser, in the small dish under your watch winder.

The reply came fast. Looked there. Not there.

I closed my eyes and sighed. Told Lisa the flowers were handled, that I'd approve the final layout in the morning, and walked out into the circular drive where the car was waiting. The whole way home I held my phone in my lap and didn't paint a single thing in my mind.

The house was quiet and enormous, the way it always was, swallowing the sound of my heels on the entry stone. I climbed the stairs and found him in the bedroom.

Damon stood at the mirror, half-dressed, a charcoal shirt open over his chest and his collar still loose.

Even like that, unfinished and distracted, he had the kind of presence that filled a room and dared it to argue back.

Tall, with that dark hair he kept short and severe, and those gray eyes that could pin you to a wall or slide right past you depending on his mood.

He was the most beautiful thing in any room he entered and the coldest, and I'd spent eight years learning to live in the space between those two facts.

He didn't look up when I came in. Didn't say hello.

"They're not in the dish," he said, working his cuff. "I checked. Twice. I need them for tonight and you've moved them somewhere."

I set my bag down and crossed to the dresser.

His left side. The small porcelain dish under the watch winder, exactly where I'd told him.

I lifted the watch winder an inch, and there they were, two black onyx studs catching the light.

I plucked them out and held them up between two fingers, level with his face.

He turned. Looked at my hand. Had the grace, at least, to falter.

"Huh," he said.

"Huh."

A corner of his mouth tipped up, and there it was, the smile that had made me forgive him a thousand small cruelties. He reached for the cufflinks, debonair even in defeat.

"You put them there to make me look bad."

"You wish." I drew my hand back, just out of his reach. "I told you exactly where they were. You didn't lift the winder."

"That's a hostile place to keep cufflinks."

"It's where they belong. It's where they've always belonged." I kept my hand up, the studs glinting between us. "Say please, Mr. Sterling."

He sighed, rolled his eyes, and leaned in, and kissed me. Quick, warm, the smell of his cologne folding over me, and for half a second the eight years dissolved and I was twenty-three again, a new bride so sure that this man would learn to want me the way I wanted him.

I let him take the cufflinks. But I kept my hand on his chest.

"Where are you going?"

"Meeting." He turned back to the mirror, threading the first stud through his cuff. "Journalist. Some woman from the Tribune doing a piece on the anxiety line before launch. Mark thinks we should get ahead of the messaging."

"Tonight?" I couldn't hide the disappointment in my voice. It was supposed to be the first night in two weeks he was home for dinner.

"It has to be tonight. The piece runs next week."

I watched him in the glass, the way his jaw set when he talked about work, the way he came alive for it in a manner he never quite managed for me.

"So," I said, careful to keep it light. "Should I expect to enjoy dinner with my husband sometime this decade? Or are we strictly a passing-in-the-hallway arrangement now?"

His hands stilled on the cuff. In the mirror, his eyes found mine, and the warmth had drained out of them, replaced by something flat and tired.

"Don't be childish, Maddie." It was the measured voice he used on board members who'd overstepped.

"You know what this is right now. The launch is the biggest thing this company has done in a decade.

There are thousands of jobs riding on it.

That's important. I'd think you of all people could understand that I don't have time for dinner theatrics this month. "

It landed exactly where he'd aimed it. Childish. Theatrics. As if wanting to eat across a table from my own husband were a tantrum.

I felt the words rise. I plan your dinners, I host your investors, I'm planning your sister's engagement party, and you think I'm the one who doesn't take your work seriously enough?

They settled back down, though, the way they always did, swallowed and digested and tucked away with all the others.

I'd gotten very good at it. You could fit a marriage's worth of unspoken things in a body if you packed them all in carefully.

"Of course, Damon," I said. "I understand."

"Good." He fixed the second cufflink, satisfied, the matter closed. He shrugged into his jacket, checked his reflection, and was already somewhere else, already in the car, already at the table with the journalist, already gone.

Sometimes I wondered if I stayed with him the way he stayed with me when we were apart, but I knew better than to ask that question. Knew I wouldn't like the answer.

He pressed a kiss to the top of my head on his way past, the way you'd pat an obedient dog before leaving.

"Don't wait up," he said, and then the door, and then the stairs, and then the low purr of the Lexus pulling out of the drive.

I stood alone in the bedroom with the gold gone from the windows and the porcelain dish empty under the watch winder.

Next month was our anniversary. Eight years.

I hoped that he'd remember. But this time, I wasn't going to remind him.