The 90 Day Husband

Chapter 1

The Houston sun poured through the windows of his penthouse, gold and ruthless, lighting up the city he had built his name on. Sixty-four floors below, the streets were already humming. Above him, only sky. The view should have looked like victory. Instead, it looked like the lid of a coffin.

He picked up the cufflinks, set them down, then picked them up again.

Saturday night was the engagement gala.

Saturday night, in front of three hundred carefully chosen guests at the Tarasoff Tower ballroom, he was supposed to formally announce his engagement to Bettina Jasper, only daughter of Wendell Jasper, patriarch of the most politically connected oil family in Texas.

A forty-year contract arrangement between Tarasoff Energy Holdings and Jasper Petroleum, brokered in pencil and finalized in ink on his father's deathbed three years ago.

Dynasties merging. Empires fusing. A twenty-carat diamond already waiting on a velvet pillow in a vault downstairs.

Yegor had met Bettina exactly eleven times.

They had never kissed.

There was no relationship. Just a merger wearing a dress.

A sharp rap on the bedroom door made him close his eyes briefly before he answered.

"Come."

His sister Lyuba walked in like she owned the building, which, technically, she partly did.

Her dark hair was pulled into a sleek twist at the nape of her neck, her cashmere blazer the color of dried blood, her heels making sharp little pistol cracks against the marble floor.

At thirty-eight, she still carried herself like the eldest child of Russian aristocracy, which was what their mother had raised her to be, and what their American childhood had never quite scrubbed out of her.

She stopped in the doorway. Her sharp gray eyes, the same gray as his, inherited from their father, swept over him from head to foot.

"My God," she said in Russian. "You look like a man walking to his own execution."

"Doesn't everyone, on the week of their engagement?" He answered in English, dry as ash. He shrugged into his shirt. "Galina cried, but it was happy crying. So I'm told."

"Mother's tears are professional. They don't count." Lyuba came into the room and picked up his tie, a strip of pale silver silk laid out on the bench at the foot of his bed. She held it up to the light. "Yegor."

"What?"

"This is wrong."

"It's silver. To match the cufflinks."

"I am not talking about the tie."

He paused. Then he took the tie out of her hands.

"Don't start, Lyubochka."

"He's been dead three years."

"I am aware."

"You don't have to do this."

"I do."

She put a hand on his arm. Her face softened, just for a second, into something almost tender. He hated when she did this. He could fight her when she was sharp. He had no defense against her when she went soft.

"Papa would not want this if he could see it now," she said. "I knew him better than anyone. He loved you. He loved this company. He thought he was protecting both. He did not know it would feel like this."

"And what does it feel like, Lyuba? You tell me. Since you're the expert this morning."

"It feels like a cage you walked into willingly."

He stepped back from her hand. The silk of his shirt slid cool against his shoulders.

Out of habit he ran a palm over the short bristle of his dark brown hair, the buzz cut he had worn since he was a boy of sixteen in his first summer on a Permian Basin rig.

He had kept it long enough through his twenties to look groomed in boardrooms. He had taken it back to a buzz at thirty-four because he had grown tired of pretending he was anything other than what he was.

A working man's son in expensive clothes.

A Russian-born, Houston-raised brute who had built an oil empire on his father's bones.

"It's done," he said quietly. "The contracts are signed. The Jasper family is already in town. The guest list went out six weeks ago. Three hundred people are flying in Saturday. The hall is booked. The diamond is in the vault."

"Cancel the diamond."

"Lyuba."

"I'm serious, cancel the diamond and the ballroom. Pay the catering kill fee. You can afford it. You have more cash sitting in three accounts I personally oversee than most countries keep in reserve."

He almost smiled. "A little over a billion of it, last time I checked."

"Then act like it. Buy your way out. Buy yourself out of this thing."

"And what would I tell Wendell Jasper?"

"That you changed your mind."

"He would sue the company into the ground. He has the political connections to do it. You know this."

"Then fight him."

"I am fighting him. By honoring the contract." He picked up the cufflinks. "By not handing him a weapon."

Lyuba stared at him, then let out a breath that sounded almost like a laugh, though there was no humor in it.

"You are exactly like Papa," she said. "All steel. No air."

"Thank you."

"It wasn't a compliment."

She left, her heels stabbing the marble all the way down the hall.

Yegor stood alone in the bedroom, the silver tie hanging from his fingers, and stared at himself in the long mirror across the room.

Thirty-four years old. Six feet two. A face cut like winter, softer at the mouth than people expected.

Gray eyes the same wolf-pale of every Tarasoff man for four generations.

Skin still tanned from a weekend at the family's Galveston house.

The buzz cut, the broad shoulders, the body of a man who still found his way to a gym at five in the morning because the boardroom would not give him peace and the rigs were too far away now.

He looked like the photograph the press had been running of him for years.

He looked like a man who had everything.

He had never felt more like a stranger to himself.

His phone buzzed on the dresser, he glanced down. Jet ready for Vegas, wheels up at 11.

His pulse settled, just a fraction. Vegas, one last weekend. A few of his college friend and good steaks. A few hours where no one called him Mr. Tarasoff, no one talked about quarterly forecasts and no one held up a contract he had signed over his father's deathbed.

He thought, not for the first time, about what his life had become.

He had two and a half billion dollars, give or take a quarterly fluctuation.

He had a penthouse in the sky, a house in River Oaks he barely slept in, six cars he barely drove, a jet that cost more to fuel than most people earned in a decade.

And he could not remember the last time he had wanted to wake up in the morning.

He woke up because the markets opened. He worked because work was the one place the grief and the loneliness could not reach him.

He had built a fortress of obligation around himself so total that there was no longer any version of his days that belonged to him.

And on Saturday, he would marry the fortress shut.

He did not love Bettina Jasper. He did not dislike her either.

She was a perfectly pleasant young woman and in two days he would put a twenty-carat diamond on her hand and stand beside her for the photographs and begin the long, comfortable, dynastic nothing that was supposed to be the rest of his life.

His father had wanted it. His father had built it.

His father was three years in the ground and still, somehow, running Yegor's life from inside a headstone in St. Petersburg.

A man walking to his own execution. Lyuba was not wrong. She was almost never wrong, which was the most irritating thing about her.

The gala was on Saturday night.

He had two days.

He picked up the cufflinks one more time and slipped them into his jacket pocket. He would not need them in Vegas. But it felt good to have them with him, like a passport out of a country he was not yet sure he wanted to leave.

*****

A thousand miles east, in Nashville, the kitchen of a converted brick warehouse smelled like browned butter, smoke and gochujang, and Tanisha Boone was screaming at the top of her lungs.

"WE WON!"

She slammed both hands flat on the steel prep table.

The metal rang. The line of cooks behind her erupted, a roar of high-fives and air-punches and somebody's apron flying like a flag.

The TV mounted in the corner of the kitchen, still tuned to the regional finals of the Southern Heat Cooking Invitational, replayed the moment for the third time.

"And the winner of the Best New Southern Concept Category…Hot Honey Nashville!"

Tanisha grabbed the nearest body, which turned out to be her best friend Renata Sallow, they spun in a half-circle until they crashed into the walk-in. Renata, plus-size and gorgeous in a flour-dusted bandana and pink chef's coat from her bakery next door, was already crying.

"You did it," Renata said. Her Filipina features lit up in pure joy. "Girl. You DID it. I told you. I told you, I told you, I TOLD you."

"You said I was crazy for trying."

"That was two months ago. Before they tasted the chicken."

Tanisha laughed. She bent over the prep table, both hands braced, and just breathed.

Her cornrows, fresh from her cousin's salon two days ago, were neat and tight against her scalp, the long braids gathered into a thick, loose ponytail at the nape of her neck.

Small gold hoops glinted at her ears. Her warm brown skin was still flushed from the kitchen heat, and she had a smear of hot honey glaze on her cheek that Renata reached over with a thumb to wipe away.

"You look so beautiful, T," Renata said. "You look like you, again."

The smile faded for half a second. Tanisha looked down at her hands. At twenty-eight, she had small, capable hands, nails kept short for the kitchen, one knuckle still slightly knobbed from where a man named Dorian Quincy had stepped on it eighteen months ago after he was finished with her ribs.

She had not thought about that knuckle in three days. She liked that.

"Speech," Renata said. "You owe me a speech."

"To you?"

"To the room."

"They're cooking."