The Marriage He Performed (Billionaire Grovel-Redemption Romance #12)

Chapter 1

Winslow

The chafing dishes had been open since five, so the fire hall smelled of green beans that had given up.

Winslow worked the tail of the receiving line in her car shoes, the low ones with the scuff on the inside arch where nobody ever looked. A woman named Doreen Pike had her hand and would not be giving it back yet.

"Twice," Doreen said. "And my husband. He doesn't vote."

"Then you did the harder job."

Doreen laughed and held on a beat past the beat. They always held on. Winslow had learned to let them, to be the one who never pulled away first, and it cost her nothing anymore.

The shoes were hers. That was a small war she'd won in year three.

A woman in Alexandria sent boxes down twice a season under a line item the foundation called public representation, and everything in those boxes had a sole that squeaked on a gymnasium floor, so Winslow bought her own at a place on Williamson Road and kept two pairs in the truck.

Nobody had ever asked what happened to the others.

Fairbanks money didn't notice a pair of shoes going missing any more than it noticed weather.

Twelve feet down the line, her husband was doing what he did.

Fifty people in a room that smelled of scorched coffee, eleven seconds of his whole attention for each one, and every last one of them would go home tonight and tell somebody the senator listened.

She used to stand back and feel lucky watching it.

Now she watched for the drop, every time, knowing there wouldn't be one.

She fed him names. Nobody had ever written that job down. She kept half a step behind his left shoulder and said them low into the space under his ear.

"Whitaker. Fire chief. The hip."

"Chief." Callum had the hand, then the shoulder. "How's that hip treating you?"

"Ruiz. Son shipped out in March."

"Mrs. Ruiz." Softer voice for that one. He had four voices and she knew all of them.

He never looked at her when he took a name. He hadn't in years. He took them the way a surgeon takes an instrument, and the line kept moving, and not one person in this hall would have guessed there was a woman behind him running the tray.

Dara came at her sideways with a phone held against her chest.

"Six minutes," she said. "Water bill up front, the school thing after, then we're out. You good?"

"I'm good."

"You want a plate? There's a plate."

"I'm good."

"There's a man from the Roanoke paper who wants three minutes with you about the literacy thing."

"After."

"After," Dara agreed, and went.

Winslow stood a moment with her hands loose at her sides in the middle of a room full of people who all knew her name, and nobody in it said it.

A woman came past with a sheet cake on a foil tray and stopped.

"Honey, are you with the office? They need somebody on the coffee, the big urn's gone out."

"I'll get it."

"You're a doll."

She got the urn going. It took four minutes and a wall socket behind a folding table.

She came back around the room with her hands smelling of scorched coffee.

The woman with the cake never learned who she was.

Winslow did not tell her, and would not have known how to without making it worse for both of them.

There was a wing on the hospital in Botetourt with FAIRBANKS cut into the limestone over the door.

There was a scholarship at the community college, and a stretch of the Parkway a Fairbanks had bought and handed back to the country in 1961.

Callum's Senate salary would not have covered the insurance on the cars.

Every soul in this hall knew that, which was why they had all voted for him twice and would do it again, and it was also why not one of them would ever have said his last name to his face without softening it first.

Winslow had grown up on Wharton Street in Pittsburgh.

Her father drove a beer truck for Iron City for thirty-one years and had never once in his life been in a room where his own name was the reason people were nervous.

It had taken her four years to learn how to stand in a hall of this kind.

It had taken about eleven months to learn that the learning was the job.

Callum took the podium under a banner two of the volunteers had hung crooked.

Winslow moved to the edge of the stage-left riser, where the photographers would get her at three-quarters, chin up, smiling at him and not at the room.

She'd worked that out herself in the first cycle.

From the front she looked adoring. From the side she looked like a woman who believed him.

He opened with the joke about the interstate. He always opened with the joke about the interstate.

"Six hundred and forty households in this county," he said, "and last August, for eleven days, not one of them could drink what came out of the tap."

Second row, a man in a feed-store cap nodded slow.

"There wasn't a flood. There wasn't a storm. A pump built in 1974 finally decided it had done enough."

That was hers. She'd given him that line in a car outside Bristol two winters ago.

He'd turned in his seat with his whole face lit and said say it again.

She'd said it again. He'd used it that night.

He'd used it the next night, and every night since, and it got its little hum out of the room every time.

He had never once asked her for a second one.

She stood at her angle with her chin up and tried to remember the last occasion he'd asked her what she thought about anything that wasn't a seating chart. The number that came back was a year. Then it was more than a year. She stopped counting before it got worse.

She knew his schedule better than he did.

She knew his blood pressure medication lived in the left-hand door of the truck, that his sister's birthday was the ninth, that he could not eat shellfish and would not say so to a hostess.

She'd signed a prenup at thirty in a conference room in Richmond, with a lawyer the family paid for.

He had been excellent. She had understood about a third of it and signed anyway.

Ten years on, she could have run this whole state's third district off the notes app on her phone.

Not one question with a question mark in it. That was the arithmetic, and she'd done it standing up at a fundraiser, which was the wrong place for it.

Her jaw had locked. She worked it loose while everybody clapped.

A woman from the county paper caught her by the coat rack afterward, notepad out, pen already going.

"Mrs. Fairbanks, what's the hardest part of a campaign year for a family?"

Winslow opened her mouth.

"The hardest part is she does all the work and I get all the credit," Callum said, arriving, hand at the small of her back, grin cocked at the reporter. "Put that in. Verbatim."

The reporter laughed and wrote it down, and that was the interview.

The man from the Roanoke paper found her by the door on the way out, which was how Dara had planned it, since a doorway conversation has a natural end.

"Three minutes on the literacy program," he said.

"You've got four."

"How many counties?"

"Nine this year. Eleven if the Botetourt board votes how I think it will.

" She had the numbers because she'd built the thing, out of a spare room, with two women from a church in Salem and a grant she had written herself over four nights in January.

"It's ninety percent volunteers and a woman named Pauline Odell who has been doing this for thirty years without any of us. "

"Is this a Fairbanks Foundation program?"

"It gets money from the foundation."

"So that's a yes."

"That's a yes," Winslow said, and smiled at him, and gave up on the sentence she'd have preferred to say.

His palm was warm through her coat. It stayed four seconds, which was the length of a photograph, and then it was gone.

***

The truck smelled of cold coffee and the pine thing Ruben hung off the mirror and would not be talked out of.

Ninety minutes back to the house. Callum got in on his side and had his phone out before Ruben cleared the gravel, thumb going, the screen throwing blue up under his jaw. Winslow got in on hers, put her belt on, and looked at the window.

She'd counted once, out of curiosity, on a drive back from Danville in the spring. Thirty-one minutes before either of them said a word, and the word was exit.

Tonight they made it to the state road.

"Doreen Pike," she said.

"Mm."

"She wants a photo for the post office. She's asked three times."

"Tell Dara."

"I told Dara. Dara told me to tell you."

"Then tell Dara I said yes."

He didn't look up. The dark came at them off the shoulder in pieces. Mailbox. Mailbox. A dog's eyes, gone.

She let it be quiet after that. There'd been a time when quiet in a car with Callum Fairbanks was one of the good things.

He used to drive with his hand on her knee and narrate the towns, inventing whole grim lives for people they passed at forty miles an hour, and she'd laugh until she had to hold the door handle.

She could still hear how he sounded doing it.

She could not remember which year it had stopped.

Somewhere past Bent Mountain his phone buzzed against his palm and he made a sound.

Not a word. A breath out through the nose, half a laugh, the sound a person makes alone in a room. His thumb was already going. His shoulders had come down off his ears for the first time all night.

Winslow watched the reflection of his screen in the window glass. She couldn't read it. She didn't need to.

"Senna?" she said.

"Whip count." Still typing. "She's got Merrill at maybe."

"Merrill's always at maybe."

"That's what I said." He laughed out loud at whatever came back. "That's exactly what I said."

He typed for another twenty minutes. She watched the mailboxes.

The house had the hush it got after Nadine went home.

Not silence. A big place with the heat cycling and one lamp left on in the front room by a woman paid to leave one lamp on.

Winslow had lived in that hush for ten years and had never in her life gotten used to how much it sounded like being a guest.

Callum went straight down the hall to the study with his phone at his ear, already talking, the study door swinging half shut behind him. He never quite closed it and never quite didn't.

Winslow went up.

She wanted a coat. The old barn one with the torn pocket, because the porch was cold and she wanted the porch. It lived in the back closet of the guest room, which was where things went in this house when nobody had decided anything about them.

She pulled the door, reached past the garment bags, and her knuckles hit hard plastic.

The Pelican case. Black, scuffed to gray at the corners, the airline stickers from Reykjavík and Pittsburgh and one she couldn't read anymore fading off the lid.

She hadn't touched it since the move. She got a hand on the grip and dragged it forward, and the weight of it coming into her arm shut her throat.

She hadn't flown commercial in six years. There was a plane in a hangar in Lynchburg with a tail number she'd never bothered to memorize, and she'd been on it eleven times, and she'd hated ten.

She sat down on the guest room floor in her fundraiser dress and put her thumbs on the latches.

Downstairs, through two floors and a wall, her husband laughed.

She let go of the latches. She got the coat. She shut the door.