Pregnant and Betrayed by My Billionaire Husband (Her Marriage in Crisis #113)

1. Blythe

— ? —

Blythe

The champagne was good. It was always good on the Anchorage II, because Stan’s father had spent forty years teaching his son exactly two things: how to pick a wine and how to let other people fix his problems. Stan had mastered both.

And it worked. Chadwick Shipping was solvent. The debt restructured, the fleet off the auction block, the creditors paid just enough to stop circling. A hundred and forty years of legacy saved, and not a single document with my name on it.

My phone buzzed again. I pulled it out and scrolled through the messages, still smiling, because that was the job.

Stan, you brilliant bastard. Drinks at the club this week?

Congratulations, Stan. Your father would be proud.

Heard the news, knew you’d pull it off. The Chadwick name means something.

Thirty-seven messages since we’d left the harbor. Every single one addressed to my husband.

I sipped my champagne and watched the sun bleed into the water and I didn’t feel bitter about it, not really.

That was the thing about being underestimated.

It was a kind of freedom. A woman nobody took seriously got told everything.

Bankers talked numbers in front of me like I was furniture.

Wives told me which husbands were gambling, which were fucking their secretaries, which were about to default on loans their boards didn’t know about.

I collected information like other women collected jewelry, and I used it the same way: strategically, and never when anyone was watching.

A swell rolled under the hull and I curled my hand around the stanchion, the way I always did.

Don’t worry, I’d told a hundred people at a hundred rails, lifting my glass with the other hand.

I never learned to swim. I hold on. Newport thought it was charming.

A grown woman who’d spent half her life on the water and never once been in it.

“Ma’am?” The captain’s voice behind me. “Can I get you anything before I head below?”

“I’m fine, Reyes. Thank you.”

He hesitated. “You sure? Mr. Chadwick said I could go home at the dock, but-”

“Go,” I said. “Enjoy your evening. Stan and I can manage.”

He nodded, still hesitating, and I filed that away somewhere small and dark where I kept things I didn’t want to look at yet.

The crew had been sent home at the dock.

All of them except Reyes, and now Reyes had gone below.

Which meant Stan wanted to be alone with me on the water, and Stan never wanted to be alone with me anywhere.

I heard him retch from somewhere below deck and winced.

“Seasick,” he’d said when we boarded, one hand on his stomach, already heading for the master cabin. “Give me an hour.”

A fourth-generation Chadwick had never been seasick in his life.

Stan had spent half his childhood on this boat.

He’d proposed to me on this boat, actually, down on one knee on the aft deck with the Newport skyline behind him, a ring his grandmother had worn, a speech about building something together that I’d believed completely because I was twenty-one and stupid and he was so goddamn beautiful when he wanted something.

That was the thing about Stan. He was only ever beautiful when he wanted something.

I finished my champagne and went to the galley for ginger ale and crackers, because after seven years of marriage, that instinct was still there, the caretaking, the smoothing over, the making things easier for a man who had never once made anything easier for me.

Then I climbed down the stairs to the cabin level, walked the narrow hallway, and heard him through the door.

Moaning.

I almost turned around. I almost let him have his privacy, because Stan’s body was his own and if he needed to handle something alone, that was fine. But then I heard him speak.

“Come on, baby.” His voice was thick and rough in a way I hadn’t heard in months. “Fuck that pretty pussy with your fingers.”

I stopped breathing.

A woman’s voice answered through a speaker, tinny and distant: “Like this?”

I knew that voice. I knew that voice better than I knew my own, because I’d heard it in cribs and tantrums and teenage screaming matches and tearful 3 a.m. phone calls. I’d heard it ask me for money and advice and the name of my gynecologist. I’d heard it say I love you, Bly a thousand times.

I opened the door.

Stan was on the bed with his hand around his cock and his phone in his other hand, and for one perfect frozen second we just looked at each other. Then he startled, threw the phone, and it skidded across the hardwood floor and landed at my feet.

I picked it up.

Birdie was on the screen, my baby sister, twenty-four years old, half-naked, her face twisted in panic. “Shit. Shit shit shit-”

The call cut out.

Birdie. Of course it was Birdie.

We were never close, my sister and I. You can’t be close to someone who only ever sees you as a catalogue.

When she was seven she wanted my doll, the one with the porcelain face, the one Grandma left me, and my mother said give it to her, Blythe, you’re older, and I did, and Birdie left it in the rain within a week.

At sixteen she wanted the boy who’d asked me to the spring formal, so she told him I’d said yes to someone else.

She never wanted things. She wanted my things, specifically, because they were mine, and the second they stopped being mine they stopped being interesting.

Apparently that included my husband.

I looked at the phone in my hand. The text thread was right there, still open, and I scrolled up before I could stop myself.

The doctor says eight weeks.

When are you telling her?

After the deal closes. She’ll never have to know.

I want it to have your eyes.

Eight months of messages. Photographs. Plans. A whole life I wasn’t supposed to see.

I walked up the stairs very carefully, one hand on the wall, and I made it to the rail before I threw up into the Atlantic.

The sun was almost gone. The water was black and endless and it caught my champagne and my crackers and my marriage and swallowed all of it without a ripple.

I heaved until there was nothing left, and then I heaved some more, and when I finally stopped and straightened up, Stan was standing behind me buttoning his cuff.

“Blythe,” he said. Calm. Measured. Like I’d caught him with his hand in the cookie jar instead of around his dick. “Let me explain.”

“Eight months,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine. “She’s pregnant, Stan. She’s having your baby.”

He sighed. Actually sighed, like I was exhausting him. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

“When was it supposed to happen?”

“After the deal closed. After things calmed down.” He stepped closer, hands out like he was approaching a spooked horse. “She was going to move to Boston. No one would’ve known. You never would’ve had to-”

“When did it start?”

He paused. “Blythe-”

“You and my sister. When did it start?”

The pause was longer this time. The boat rocked gently under us, and somewhere behind him the lights of Newport twinkled like everything was fine, like the world hadn’t just cracked open and shown me something rotting underneath.

“A year,” he said finally. “Give or take.”

I laughed. I actually laughed, this horrible broken sound that came out of me like a cough. “A year. A year of - what? Sneaking around while I saved your company? While I sat next to you at every meeting and smiled and pretended I didn’t know how close you were to bankruptcy?”

“You didn’t have to do any of that.” His voice changed. Something harder underneath it now, an edge I’d seen in flashes over seven years but never this clearly. “I didn’t ask you to do any of that, Blythe. You chose to humiliate me.”

“I chose to-” I stared at him. “I saved your company.”

“You humiliated me.” He stepped closer, and I stepped back, my hip hitting the rail.

“For ten months, I sat in rooms full of men I’ve known my entire life and watched them take notes on what my wife said.

My wife. Do you have any idea what that felt like?

The jokes? The comments? ‘Stan, your wife’s smarter than you are.

’ ‘Better let Blythe handle the contracts.’ ‘Where does she keep your balls, in her purse?’”

“Those men were going to take everything from you.”

“They were going to take everything from me because you wouldn’t let me handle it my own way!” His voice rose, and I flinched, and he saw me flinch, and for half a second he looked satisfied. “I had a plan. I was going to sell off the Asian routes, restructure the European-”

“You were going to run the company into the ground.”

“It’s my company!” He was shouting now, his face red, his hands clenched at his sides.

“My name! My legacy! And you - you pathetic, poor, grasping little-” He stopped himself.

Took a breath. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet.

“I pulled your family out of the gutter, Blythe. I gave you everything. The clothes, the house, the life. Your mother was going to lose her home. Your father hadn’t worked in three years.

And I married you anyway. I gave you the Chadwick name, and what did you do with it? You embarrassed me.”

I stared at him. Seven years of marriage. Seven years of thinking I knew him.

“She can’t even have babies,” he said, almost to himself. “Seven years and she can’t even-”

“Birdie’s pregnant.”

“Birdie’s healthy.” He smiled, and it was the worst thing I’d ever seen. “Birdie’s young and sweet and she doesn’t make me feel like shit in front of my friends. Birdie loves me.”

“I loved you.”

“No, you didn’t.” He stepped forward, and I stepped back again, and there wasn’t anywhere else to go.

“You loved what I could give you. The money, the name, the life. You were never going to be anyone without me, Blythe. Your family was nothing before I came along, and they’ll be nothing after I’m done with-”

I slapped him.

I didn’t decide to do it. My hand just moved, and the sound was loud in the quiet dark, and then his head snapped to the side and when he looked back at me there was a flatness in his eyes I’d never seen before.

“Stan.” I held up my hands. “I shouldn’t have-”

He shoved me.

The deck was wet. My heels slipped. My hip hit the rail wrong, too high, too hard, and for one eternal second I was balanced there, tipping, my arms windmilling in the dark.

Then I went over.

The water was cold. Colder than I’d expected, cold enough to stop my heart, cold enough to steal the scream right out of my throat.

I went under and came up gasping, and the salt burned my eyes and my sinuses and I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t feel anything except the weight of my dress dragging me down.

“Stan!” I choked on the water, coughed, went under again. When I came up the second time, the hull of the Anchorage II was right there, so close I could almost touch it. “Stan, please - I can’t-”

He was at the rail. I could see him clearly, backlit by the running lights, his hands in his pockets. Just standing there. Looking down at me.

“Stan, I can’t swim!” I was crying now, or maybe it was just the salt, and my arms were so heavy and my legs wouldn’t kick right and the dress kept pulling, pulling, pulling me down. “Please! You know I can’t-”

He said something over his shoulder. To the captain. To Reyes, who was still on board, who could throw me a line, who could-

The engine note changed.

The stern lifted.

The shadow of the yacht slid away from me, and Stan was still at the rail, still watching, getting smaller and smaller against the dark sky.

I screamed his name and swallowed the ocean, and then I went down, down, down.