Reclaimed (The Revenge Wives #10)

Chapter One

"You made it with the cinnamon again."

Preston said it the way he said most things to her these days, pleased and a little surprised, like a man finding money in an old coat.

He was leaning against the kitchen island in his golf clothes, the good navy pullover she had bought him in the spring, holding the coffee she had fixed the way he liked it before he was even awake.

"I always make it with the cinnamon," Cordelia said.

"See, this is why I keep you." He crossed the kitchen and kissed the top of her head, quick and warm, the way you kiss something that will always be there. "Seven years and you still know exactly how I take it."

"And you still can't reach the cinnamon shelf yourself."

He laughed. She felt the small pull of satisfaction she always felt when she made him laugh, the same pull she had felt at twenty two, in the last spring of college, when he was a scholarship boy with one good jacket and a way of looking at her like she was the most interesting thing in any room.

Everyone at that school had known who Cordelia Hargrove was.

Third generation of Hargrove Broadcasting, the name her grandfather had built into half the city, the girl with a board seat waiting at the end of her trust fund.

Her parents had wanted someone with a name to match hers, and for once in her careful life Cordelia had not done the sensible thing.

She had wanted the hungry boy from nowhere instead, because she had seen something in him the boys with names never needed to grow, the raw climbing want of a man who intended to matter.

Backing that want had felt like the shrewdest read of her young life.

Lately, in small unguarded moments, she caught herself auditing that read.

The agency Preston ran wore his name on its doors and her money in its walls, and somewhere in the last few years the climbing had quietly stopped.

The hunger she had married had put on a good pullover and learned to take Saturdays.

She filed the thought, each time, where she filed everything with no useful place to go, because he was content, and contentment was the advertised prize of a happy marriage, and by every measure that could be written down a happy marriage was what she had.

The fire had banked over the years, the part that used to keep them up past midnight most of all, but Preston had explained that so gently and so often that she believed it the way she believed the tide.

Nobody stays on fire, Cordelia, he liked to say, usually with his thumb moving slow circles on the back of her hand. That's not what marriage is. You fall in love with a person and you wake up family. Family isn't about passion. Family is about who's still in the kitchen in the morning.

She had found that beautiful. On the nights the bed felt large and quiet she had repeated it to herself, and it had always worked, because it was Preston who said it, and Preston had never lied to her about anything that mattered.

"I'm at the club till about three," he said, draining the cup. "Then the Hendry foursome wants drinks. Don't hold dinner."

"I never hold dinner. I have a board call at eleven anyway."

"Of course you do." His voice went fond. "My wife. The only woman alive who schedules a meeting on a Saturday." He set the cup in the sink where the housekeeper would find it and squeezed her shoulder on his way past. "Love you. Don't work the whole day."

"Love you," she said, and meant it, and turned back to her tablet without watching him go.

That was the part she would think about later. That she had not watched him go.

A crash came from the hall, followed by no apology, followed by the specific high wail of her son building toward a Saturday demand.

"It's TODAY." Oliver appeared in the doorway in his pajamas, one sock on, face already pink with the conviction of the wronged.

Five years old, hers and Preston's only child, and a headache from the day he could talk.

Where the temper came from was one of the standing puzzles of her life, since she ran on rails and Preston had never once raised his voice in this house.

Children arrived unfinished, she told herself, and it would settle as he grew, and she had years to see to it.

"You PROMISED. You said I get to go to Auntie Sabrina's today and it's today and I want to go NOW."

"Good morning to you too." Cordelia set down the tablet. Noise, she had learned, was never to be met with noise, not with this child. "Yes. Saturday is Auntie's day. That hasn't changed since you woke up shouting about it."

"Then why am I not THERE."

"Because it's eight in the morning and you're wearing one sock, my love." She crouched to his level. "Auntie Sabrina is still asleep. People who are asleep cannot make you waffles. Get dressed, eat something, and Nina will drive you over at ten. That is the deal."

"Ten is forever."

"Ten is two hours."

"That is forever," said Oliver, and on his way out he swept his arm along the counter so the fruit bowl's oranges went rolling, not even in temper, only because they were there.

"Oliver." She did not raise her voice. Volume was wasted on him; the only currency he traded in was consequence. "Oranges back in the bowl, or Nina drives you at noon instead of ten."

He weighed it with the insolence of a small emperor being taxed, then slapped the oranges back one by one, each harder than the last, and stomped up the stairs after his other sock, both feet punishing every step, past Nina, who had wished him good morning twice already and been walked through twice like a door.

He was not, she could admit it to herself, a likable child.

He was rude to the staff, merciless at bedtime, allergic to the word no, and none of it frightened her, because as she saw it nobody handed you a person finished.

You got the raw willful material and years of small corrections, and she intended to spend every one of them, strict where his father was soft, doting the whole while, the only one of the three adults in his life who ever held a line.

Preston called her hard on him. Sabrina called her a Victorian. She could live with both.

Her phone lit on the counter. The name on the screen loosened something in her chest before she had decided to allow it.

"Adrian."

"Tell me you are not actually taking the Hargrove call from your kitchen on a Saturday."

"I'm taking it from my study, thank you. The kitchen is for breakfast."

"You don't eat breakfast."

His voice did what it always did, which was arrive low and unhurried and pour into her ear the way warm things pour into a cold glass.

There was no version of Adrian Vale that hurried.

He spoke the way certain men move through a room, as though the room would simply wait for him, and somewhere in her second year of marriage Cordelia had quietly filed away the fact that her own pulse tended to do the same.

She had known him nearly her whole life.

He had been Edmund Vale's serious son at every Hargrove Christmas since before she could walk, the old lawyer's boy her father liked better than the lawyer, the older boy who taught her to drive a stick shift in the back lane of the estate, the one steady fixture in a childhood otherwise run by people who scheduled their affection by the quarter.

She had watched him grow out of that boy and into a man who wore a courtroom the way other men wore a good coat, and she had become, over those same years, a quiet expert at not looking too long at the result.

She let herself picture him now, for exactly one second, because it was only a phone call and there was no one in the kitchen to catch her at it.

Just the impression of him on the far end of the line.

The dark suit the firm paid for and he wore like a small apology to it.

The sleeves shoved up his forearms because he had been at work since before she woke.

That unhurried mouth, and the gray come in at his temples that should have softened him and somehow did the opposite.

Whatever the years had taken from everyone else she knew, she suspected they had only made Adrian harder to look away from.

Then she set the picture down where she kept it, face to the wall, and let him go on telling her how to do her job.

"I put the indemnity language in your inbox. Read it before the call, not during. You skim when you're bored and that clause is a trap."

"I do not skim."

"You skimmed the Ferris contract and I lost a weekend to it."

"That was one time."

"It is always one time with you." She could hear the smile under the words, low and warm enough that she had to remind herself, briefly and pointlessly, that she was a married woman standing in her own kitchen.

He had a way of handing her own business back to her that no one else had, half exasperation and half something steadier, and he was the last person in her life who told her the truth without first checking whether she wanted it.

"Eat something. Read the clause. I'll send notes after. "

"You could come read it to me. You are three blocks away and you still owe me a coffee from the Ferris weekend."

"I owe you nothing. You owe me a weekend." A pause, and his voice dropped half a register, the way it did when he stopped being her lawyer for a moment and was only the man who had known her longest. "Drink your coffee, Cordelia. Go win your meeting."

"Go away, Adrian."

"Going," he said, and the line went quiet, and she stood in her bright kitchen a moment longer than the call had needed, the way a person lingers near a warm thing on a cold day without admitting that is why she is standing there.

Then she put it away, the way she put it away every time, and went to take her call.