The Husband Who Loved Me Too Late (Marriage in Crisis, Grovel & Redemption #9)

Payton

The day my billionaire father acknowledged me was the day he sold me.

For twenty-seven years, I was nothing more than the daughter he abandoned—the little girl raised by my mother above our tiny independent bookstore while he built one of the largest business empires in the country.

Then he needed me.

One marriage contract later, I became the wife of Max Winslow, heir to the rival dynasty my father had spent decades trying to defeat.

My husband never wanted me. He never pretended otherwise. Our marriage was polite. Respectful. Empty. For six years, I loved a man who looked at me like another clause in a contract, telling myself that one day obligation might become love.

Then his first love came back.

When I followed my husband to a luxury hotel and watched him walk into another woman’s suite, I finally accepted the truth I had been refusing to see.

You can’t lose a marriage that never truly existed.

So I walked away. This time, I chose myself.

Max

I spent six years blaming my wife for a life neither of us chose.

She was the face of my father’s control, the final condition of a merger that stole every decision I’d ever wanted to make.

I convinced myself our marriage had always been business.

Until I stood in another woman’s hotel room…

and realized I couldn’t betray the wife I’d never allowed myself to love.

By the time I understood the truth, it was already too late.

Payton was gone.

Now the mansion feels empty.

The silence is unbearable.

And the woman I once believed was nothing more than an arrangement has become the only person I can’t live without.

I spent years treating my wife like a contract.

I’ll spend the rest of my life proving she was always my home.