The Billionaire Husband's Neglected Wife

Prologue

Nora

The cow was dying.

I knew it the second I pulled up to the Brennan farm, two in the morning, my headlights cutting across a barn lit up bright enough to land a plane.

A prolapsed uterus doesn’t wait for convenient hours, and neither does the panic that comes with it.

Mrs. Brennan was already running toward my truck before I had it in park, her robe flapping behind her, her voice cracking on words I couldn’t make out yet.

“She’s bad,” she said when I got close enough. “She’s real bad, the whole thing came out, there’s so much blood, I called and they said someone else was coming too but he’s not here yet and she’s dying, Dr. Smith, she’s dying right there on the ground.”

“Show me.”

The barn smelled the way all emergency births smell: iron and fear and hay gone wet.

The cow, a beautiful Hereford named Petunia according to the tag on her ear, was down on her side, her flank heaving, the prolapsed uterus a horrifying mass of tissue spilling out behind her.

Mr. Brennan stood in the corner with his hands in his hair, useless the way men get when a creature they love is suffering and they can’t fix it.

“I need hot water,” I said, already pulling on gloves. “Clean towels. A bucket, biggest you have. And someone hold her head, talk to her, keep her calm.”

Mrs. Brennan ran. Mr. Brennan dropped to his knees by Petunia’s head and started murmuring to her, his big rough hands stroking her face. Good. I could work with that.

I was elbow-deep in the process of cleaning the tissue, trying to assess how much damage we were dealing with, when the barn door slid open behind me.

I didn’t look up. I couldn’t. “If you’re the other vet, glove up and get down here. I need pressure on the femoral while I work.”

No response. Just footsteps, heavy ones, and then a body dropping to the ground beside me.

Huge. I caught the impression of broad shoulders, tattoos crawling up forearms, a jaw set hard enough to crack teeth.

The new grad, I realized. The one everyone at the clinic had warned me about.

Rude, they said. Doesn’t talk. Thinks he’s better than everyone.

His hands found the pressure point before I could tell him where it was.

“Good,” I said, and kept working.

We didn’t speak for the next hour. We didn’t need to.

His hands moved when mine needed them to, passed instruments before I asked, applied pressure and released it in a rhythm that matched my own.

When I needed the uterus elevated, he was already lifting.

When I needed sutures, the needle was in my peripheral vision.

It was the strangest thing I’d ever experienced with another vet, this silent conversation conducted entirely through timing and touch.

The sun was coming up by the time Petunia was stable.

The prolapse was reduced, the sutures were holding, and she was drinking water from a bucket Mrs. Brennan held with shaking hands.

Mr. Brennan had cried twice, apologized for it three times, and was now sitting against the wall with his eyes closed, still murmuring prayers under his breath.

The new grad and I walked out of the barn together, both of us covered in blood and other fluids I didn’t want to think about. My back was screaming. My hands were cramping. I was so tired I could feel it in my teeth.

“There’s a gas station about two miles east,” I said. “They have surprisingly decent donuts. If you want.”

He looked at me. Blue eyes, pale and startling in his blood-smeared face, blond hair curling damp at his temples. He nodded once.

Twenty minutes later, we were sitting on the fence outside the Brennan property, watching the sun paint the sky pink and orange and eating powdered donuts out of a paper bag. The silence between us was different now. Comfortable. Earned.

He was bigger than I’d realized in the barn.

Tall and broad and built in a way that should’ve been intimidating but somehow wasn’t, not with powdered sugar on his chin and his massive hands cradling a donut with absurd delicacy.

The tattoos I’d noticed before covered both arms from wrist to bicep, intricate black and gray work that looked expensive and deliberate.

He ate two donuts without looking at me, his jaw working, his gaze fixed on the horizon.

I was starting to think the rumors were right about him not talking when he cleared his throat.

“You’re the best partner I’ve ever had.”

His voice was deeper than I’d expected. Rough, like he didn’t use it often. And the tips of his ears had gone red, a flush creeping up his neck, like the sentence had cost him more than he’d budgeted.

I looked at this enormous silent man with his tattoos and his powdered sugar and his ears burning pink in the dawn light, and I felt a click low in my chest, a latch catching. The start of a story I didn’t know yet.

“Nora,” I said, and held out my hand. “Since we’re apparently partners now.”

He looked at my hand, then at me, and took it.

“Hunt.”

His palm was warm and rough and twice the size of mine, and he held on for exactly one second too long before letting go.

I didn’t know yet. How could I have known?

That this quiet, blushing man would become the center of my entire universe.

That his voice would become the first thing I wanted to hear in the morning and the last thing I wanted to hear at night.

That I’d build a whole life around the shape of him, around the way he anticipated my hands before I asked.

I just knew that the donut was good, and the sunrise was pretty, and the man beside me felt like the answer to a question I hadn’t known I was asking.

A year later, I almost died.

It was my fault. The draft horse, a seventeen-hand Percheron named Duke, had gotten his leg caught in a cattle gate, and the owner had made the critically stupid decision to try to free him with a crowbar before we arrived.

By the time Hunt and I pulled up, Duke was panicking, thrashing, his eyes rolling white with terror.

The leg was still trapped, and now there was blood, and the owner was on the ground with a broken nose from a hoof to the face.

“I’ll take the head,” Hunt said, already moving. “You work the leg.”

It was the wrong call. I knew it even as I nodded, even as I dropped to my knees beside the gate, my hands finding the mechanism that had jammed.

Duke was too far gone, his terror building instead of ebbing, and Hunt’s hands on his halter weren’t going to be enough.

I could feel the wrongness of it in my gut, that animal instinct that tells you to run.

I didn’t run.

The leg came free. Duke reared.

The rope that was supposed to be a secondary restraint whipped loose and caught my ankle, and suddenly I was on my back with a thousand pounds of panicked horse coming down on top of me and no time to move, no time to do anything but understand that this was how I died, under hooves, in the mud, with the taste of copper on my tongue.

Hunt’s hands closed on my jacket.

He yanked me sideways so hard my shoulder nearly dislocated, rolling us both clear with half a second to spare.

Duke’s hooves came down on the exact spot where my head had been.

I heard the impact, felt it vibrate through the ground, and then we were still, the two of us tangled together in the mud, his body covering mine.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. My heart was slamming so hard against my ribs that it hurt, and my hands were shaking, and I was alive. I was alive because of him.

Hunt pulled back just far enough to look at me.

His face was white, his chest heaving, his hands still fisted in my jacket so tight his knuckles had gone bloodless.

Those pale blue eyes were wild in a way I’d never seen before, the composure he wore cracked wide open, and underneath it was terror, or its nearest relative.

“Nora.” His voice cracked on my name. “Jesus. Nora.”

“I’m okay.” I wasn’t sure it was true. I couldn’t feel my hands. “Hunt, I’m okay, I’m fine, you got me.”

He didn’t let go. His breath was coming too fast, ragged, and he was still looking at me with that broken-open expression, his forehead dropping to rest against mine.

We were so close I could feel the hammer of his heart through both our jackets, could feel the tremor running through his arms, could feel the adrenaline pouring off him in waves.

“You scared me.” The words came out rough, torn. “You scared the hell out of me, Nora.”

“I know.” I lifted my shaking hand to his face. Mud on his cheek. Blood on his lip where he’d bitten it. The most beautiful man I’d ever seen. “I know. I’m sorry.”

He leaned into my palm with a sound that might’ve been a sob if he’d let it finish.

His eyes closed. His jaw worked. And I understood, in that moment, that this man who barely spoke, who everyone thought was rude and cold and hard to know, had been holding himself together for a year just to be near me.

That all those silent shifts, all those wordless emergencies, all those powdered-sugar sunrises on fence posts, had been building to this: his hands in my jacket, his forehead on mine, his heart pounding against my ribs.

He was never going to close this distance himself. He was too scared. Too convinced he’d ruin it. Too certain that a man like him didn’t get to have a woman like me.

So I kissed him.

I curled my muddy fingers into his hair and pulled his mouth down to mine, and I kissed him in the mud, next to a terrified horse and an unconscious farmer, with adrenaline still screaming through both of us.

Nothing about it was gentle or sweet. It was desperate and shaking and flavored with blood and fear, and Hunt made a sound against my mouth like a seam in him was giving way.

Then he kissed me back.

His hands released my jacket only to find my face, cradling it, tilting it, his mouth moving against mine with a hunger that told me he’d been thinking about this.

Practicing it. Wanting it for longer than I’d known.

He kissed me like he’d been holding his breath for a year and I was the first air he’d tasted, and when I gasped against his mouth his tongue found mine and I stopped thinking about anything at all.

By the time we pulled apart, we were both shaking. His forehead found mine again, his thumbs stroking my cheekbones, his breath mixing with mine in the small space between us.

“Back to back,” he said. “Always. From now on. You don’t go down without me beside you, and I don’t go down without you. That’s the deal. That’s the only deal I’m ever going to make.”

I kissed him again, softer this time. A promise.

“Back to back,” I said. “Always.”

He pulled me to my feet, and we went to check on the horse.