The Billionaire Team Owner’s Betrayal (Miami Sports Wives Revenge Club #5)

CHAPTER ONE

Camille found the anklet the night before everything ended. It was funny given some small, self-protective part of her almost didn't pick it up.

It was wedged beneath the daybed on Grant's private terrace, catching the pool lights as if it had been dropped there and forgotten.

Diamonds, real ones, set in a chain too delicate for anyone who actually worked for a living.

She turned it over in her palm and told herself it belonged to a stylist, a caterer, one of the dozen women who drifted through their lives arranging flowers and lighting and the appearance of a marriage.

"Whose is this?" she asked, when Grant came out with two glasses of the Sancerre he only poured when he wanted something.

He barely looked at it. "One of Brielle's assistants, probably. She's had half her team out here all week with the party."

"On the terrace? Under the daybed?"

"Camille." He said her name with the patience he'd been using on her for weeks now, the tone of a man addressing a problem he'd already solved who resented that it wouldn't stay solved. "You've been odd for weeks. Is this what this is? You think I'm sleeping with the party planner?"

She hadn't said that. She hadn't let herself think it in full sentences, either, but he'd built the accusation for her and handed it back wrapped in condescension. She was the one apologizing by the time he took the glass from her hand.

Twenty-two years of marriage had taught her that Grant could turn any question about him into a referendum on her. She was too suspicious, too tired, too much like her mother, who according to Grant had never trusted anyone and died alone because of it.

Camille set the anklet on the outdoor bar and told herself she'd ask again tomorrow.

She didn't get the chance.

By ten the next morning she was at the arena, sitting across from a documentary producer named Skye who kept saying the word narrative like it was a spell.

The rough cut played on a monitor between them: Grant at twenty-eight, mortgaging everything he owned to buy a team nobody wanted.

Grant at thirty-five, shaking hands with the mayor.

Grant, Grant, Grant, occasionally interrupted by three seconds of Camille smiling in the owner's box, captioned, in Skye's proposed script, and his wife believed in him too.

Believed in him too.

As if she hadn't found the investors. As if she hadn't sat across from men Grant's father's age at more dinners than she could count, laughing at their jokes and remembering their children's names, building the credibility Grant burned through his ambition too fast to build himself.

As if the Tempests Foundation, which now fed and mentored eleven hundred kids a year, had assembled itself.

"We can add more of you," Skye offered, misreading her silence as vanity. "Some lifestyle footage. The house, maybe you cooking—"

"I don't cook," Camille said, and stood, because if she said one more word she was going to say all of them, and this was not the room for it.

She was due at the owner's suite by two.

Grant was meeting the arena's insurance underwriters about liability on the new premium boxes, tedious enough that he'd asked her to sit in and keep the conversation moving, which meant keep Grant from losing his temper at people he needed.

She'd done it a thousand times. She put on the calm, capable face she'd built her whole adult life around and went.

His assistant, Priya, was standing outside the suite looking rather panicked. "He's not answering. The underwriters have been waiting twenty minutes."

"He's probably on a call." Camille said it easily. She'd done so for years, covering for him with investors, with sponsors, reporters, with herself.

"I tried the front. It's locked from inside."

There was a service corridor behind the suite that led to the private bedroom Grant had built for himself, for naps between games, he'd said, for the occasional overnight before an early flight.

Camille had a key card. She'd had one for eleven years and used it only a handful of times, mostly to leave him aspirin and water after the nights he drank too much with sponsors.

She used it now, telling Priya to wait and telling herself she was being efficient.

The corridor was narrow and carpeted. Laughter reached her before she reached the door: Brielle's, low and delighted, and beneath it Grant's voice, unhurried, amused, a register she hadn't heard aimed at her in a long time.

Some part of her, even then, needed to be wrong.

She opened the door.

The room came into focus with details she would remember for the rest of her life. Brielle, on her back, laughing up at the ceiling. Grant above her, solid and unhurried, a man entirely at home in his own betrayal.

The ivory lingerie—her lingerie, the set Grant had bought her for their wedding night twenty-two years ago, silk so fine it had felt like water when she'd first put it on, saved after in tissue paper in a box she hadn't opened in a decade—was draped now over a stranger's hips, a strap slipping off a shoulder that was not hers.

Around Brielle's ankle, catching the light as it had the night before, was the anklet.

Camille did not scream. She would think about that later, the strange discipline of her own silence, as if some final professional instinct had kicked in even as her marriage ended eight feet away from her. She stepped back into the doorway's shadow and listened.

"When are you telling her?" Brielle asked, stretching like a cat, entirely unbothered by the question or its answer.

Camille’s thumb found her phone. She pressed record and held it unobtrusively at her side.

"After the party." Grant's voice, still catching his breath. "She hosts the fiftieth, smiles for the cameras, does what Camille does. Then we handle it… quietly."

"She's not going to just accept a settlement."

Grant laughed. "She's spent twenty-two years protecting my image.

She won't know how to stop." A low laugh, the one Camille used to think was warm.

"She'll take whatever I give her, because the alternative is admitting the last two decades of her life were an act.

People don't do that. Not people like Camille. "

"Will she keep the house?"

"We'll see how she behaves."

Camille stopped the recording after nearly half a minute, preserving her husband’s plan to dispose of her in his own voice. She stood in a doorway she was legally, contractually, absolutely authorized to walk through and listened to him reduce their marriage to a line item.

She eased the door shut, the way you close a door on a sleeping child, and walked back down the corridor she had walked a thousand times as a woman who believed she knew her own life.

A private restroom was as far as she got before her body took over. She was violently, thoroughly sick, kneeling on marble tile in a two-thousand-dollar dress.

When it was finally over she sat back against the wall and tried to regulate her breathing before panic took over entirely.

That was where Adrian found her.

He'd been looking for her because she'd missed the youth-foundation interview. Some old instinct that had nothing to do with schedules had sent him down that hallway instead of calling. He crouched in front of her.

"Camille." His voice was very quiet. "What happened?"

"I'm fine. Something I ate."

"You are not very good at lying. You never have been." He said it gently, an old fact between old friends, not an accusation. "What did he do?"

And she told him. All of it, in a voice that didn't sound like hers, flat and precise, because precision was the only thing keeping her upright. The anklet. The lingerie. She won't know how to stop.

Adrian went still. Then he was moving, already turning toward the suite with the quiet fury of a man who'd spent twenty years learning to control this same anger on a court. She caught his arm before he'd taken a full step.

"Don't."

"Camille—"

"Don't." She said it again, steadier this time, and the last of the grief that had been coming apart in her for ten minutes finished coming apart. What replaced it was colder, steadier, and considerably more useful. "He wants his fiftieth birthday party. He's going to have it."

Adrian searched her face. "What are you saying?"

Camille wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, straightened her dress, and stood up.

"I'm saying it's going to be unforgettable."