The Other Husband (Billionaire Inheritance Arrangement #8)

Chapter 1

WILL

My twin brother had been at my place for less than five minutes, and somehow, he’d already managed to make the entire place feel unstable.

That was Jesse’s gift.

Some people brought calm. He brought the energy of a natural disaster. Except disasters didn’t usually wear designer shoes while wreaking havoc.

By the time I came back from the kitchen with two tumblers of whiskey filled to the brim, he was pacing the length of the living room, his hands flexing at his sides like he might take a swing at the furniture just to see its reaction.

I handed him a glass, hoping alcohol and something to hold would calm him down, but he didn’t even look at it.

“This is insane,” he said, for probably the sixth time since he walked in the door. “You know that, right? Completely fucking insane.”

“I’m reserving judgment.” I took a sip of my drink and settled into a leather armchair in front of the fireplace. “I wasn’t actually there for the meeting, so you’re going to have to catch me up before I commiserate.”

To be fair, I’d gotten the highlights outside Dad’s house earlier, but it had mostly been yelling and stomping. Jesse had started spiraling before I could get the full story from him and our oldest brother Alex had been tight-lipped, simply expecting me to fix it without giving me much to go on.

Jesse dragged a hand through his hair and started pacing again. Up. Down. Up. Down.

I was going to get a crick in my neck if I kept watching him. A tennis-spectating injury without even leaving my house. The place wasn’t small, but he still always managed to make it feel cramped when he got like this.

Restless. Too much energy with no place to go.

The luxury townhouse used to belong to my mother’s family.

She’d left it to me in her will and it had been home for ten years now.

While it offered me some much-needed privacy from my family, who were increasingly up in my business, it had also become a sanctuary for Jesse whenever he graced us with his presence, blowing into town from Miami like a hurricane with a trust fund.

Usually, I didn’t mind. Jesse at rest was entertaining. Jesse in a spiral, however, was significantly less so.

“This is all Sterling’s fault,” he suddenly announced. “Meddling fucking—”

“Sterling?” As in our eldest cousin? I blinked hard. Well, that’s new. “What does he have to do with it?”

“Everything,” Jesse snapped. “He just had to go and run into some old family friend while he was in Scotland for a charity event.”

“That does happen sometimes,” I said, still confused as hell. “People run into other people. They might even talk to those people if they know them and he’s got that castle in Scotland, so it even makes sense that he was there.”

He shot me a look that suggested he took great offense to my very existence right about now. “You know what I mean.”

I did, but I wasn’t going to make this easy for him. What he’d said earlier about pulling the old twin-switcheroo might’ve been a joke, but he was still going to pay for it. Plus, I honestly didn’t understand why Sterling running into an old friend was such a problem.

“Okay, I’ll bite. Who did he run into and why does talking to this person make everything that’s wrong with the world his fault?”

“James Roderick,” he said, then lifted his glass to his lips and drank at least a quarter of his whiskey in one long gulp.

“Apparently, Dad and Uncle Harlan knew him when they were young. They used to be loose friends or whatever. Now suddenly, he shows up out of nowhere and derails my entire life.”

“That does sound inconvenient,” I agreed mildly. “You might have to land the plane before this starts making sense, though.”

He stopped pacing long enough to glare at me. “I’m serious, Will.”

“Really? I couldn’t tell.” I sighed and leaned back in the armchair, kicking my ankle up on my knee and getting comfortable. It was starting to look like this was going to take a while. “Let’s go back a few more steps, shall we? Who exactly is this James Roderick?”

The pacing started again and I reached up to massage my neck just as he spat out a name like it was a missile. “James Roderick.”

“Yeah, you said that.”

“Earl James Roderick, and he’s offering Dad something he’s wanted for a long, long, long time.”

That gave me pause. There weren’t many things our father wanted that he hadn’t already gotten, one way or another. Honestly, it was a damn short list that consisted mostly of things that had proven stubbornly out of reach.

“That sounds ominous,” I said carefully. “Also, is the guy’s name Earl or James?”

“James. Who is an Earl.” Jesse let out a sharp laugh. “It’s not just ominous. It’s a fucking disaster.”

“Enlighten me.”

He turned to face me fully, looking at me like he was about to deliver awful news. “Do you remember Eugenie?”

I choked, and not metaphorically. I actually choked. The whiskey went straight down the wrong way and I coughed hard enough that I had to set the glass down before I dropped it.

“Eugenie,” I managed eventually. “Eugenie Eugenie?”

“Yes, Eugenie Eugenie.” Jesse said it like that clarified things instead of making them significantly worse.

“Your Eugenie?” I asked.

“She’s not my anything, but yes. That Eugenie.”

“The Eugenie who set off your car alarm at three in the morning because you didn’t answer your phone?”

“Yes.”

“The Eugenie who—”

“Yes,” Jesse said, exasperation dripping from his tone. “Eugenie, the British maniac I hooked up with in college.”

I leaned back in my chair and stared at him. “What does she have to do with any of this?”

“James Roderick is her father,” he said gravely.

I picked up my drink again, downed a generous amount of it, and then looked back at him. “He has my deepest sympathies on that one, but I’m still not seeing how this ruins your life specifically.”

He let out a hollow laugh, but something cold settled in my stomach, the pieces clicking into place in my mind. There was, in fact, one thing my father had wanted for a very long time.

Something he’d come close to once before, but Trent and Alex had shut that down before Charlotte had gotten dragged into a future she didn’t want. Apparently, Dad hadn’t let it go when his plan to marry off our sister failed. He still had his eye on a certain prize.

“James is offering Dad a future Westwood having a royal title,” he said. “Provided, of course, that I marry his daughter and she produces my offspring.”

“The Rodericks are royal?” I asked lamely.

“He’s an Earl, Will. That’s royal,” Jesse said. “Apparently, that’s good enough for Dad.”

I rubbed a hand over my face. This was bad. Objectively bad. A lot worse than I’d thought. But I was still reeling when Jesse delivered one last, final blow.

“The Roderick sisters are on their way to Chicago as we speak.”

I stared at him for a long moment, waiting for a punchline I knew deep down wasn’t coming. Jesse did drama like other people did cardio, frequently and with questionable judgment, but this had a weight to it that felt different.

Less theatrical. More inevitable.

Oh, God. I think he’s actually serious about this. Still, I kept my features schooled into a mask of calm. “Let’s not panic yet.”

He barked out a laugh. “You don’t have to panic at all.”

“Technically speaking, I’m older than you,” I pointed out. “Which means that if they want—”

“They’re not looking at you,” he cut in “This is my leash, Will. I walked away from Westwood and Sons and this is their way of forcing me back into the fold. You heard Alex. They think I need something to anchor me, and apparently, that something is going to be a wife with a title.”

I brought my glass to my lips and took another deep, slow sip. At this rate, I was going to have to pour more whiskey. A lot more. Jesse started pacing again, back and forth across the rug, pivoting, and turning back again.

If he kept it up much longer he was going to wear a trench in the hardwood. That, more than anything, finally snapped me back to reality. Pacing wasn’t going to change anything. It wasn’t going to help anyone.

Action. That’s what we need.

I looked at him, waiting until he caught my gaze before I spoke. “Tell me exactly what Dad said. Not the dramatic interpretation. The actual words.”

“Why?” Jesse waved a hand. “You already know what he said. There was something about opportunity, a bit about legacy, and droning on about the importance of strong alliances. The usual crap.”

I sighed. Unfortunately, that tracked. “Did Sterling really just stumble into this?” I asked, frowning.

“Yeah,” he replied bitterly. “Alex said Sterling happened to run into this old family friend none of us ever knew we had and now, suddenly, I’m being shipped off into an arranged marriage like we live in the eighteenth century.”

“You did go to England with Eugenie that one time,” I said. “Maybe they thought there was still something there.”

Jesse stopped pacing long enough to look wildly offended when he turned back to me. “There definitely fucking isn’t.”

I didn’t doubt that. Jesse and Eugenie together had been, well, volatile was probably the polite word for it. They’d met in college and immediately locked into one of those relationships that burned so hot and fast that it set off alarms for everyone within a five-mile radius.

They were both party animals. That had been the foundation of their whole thing. Parties, trips, dramatic exits, even more dramatic reunions, and public fights followed by very public reconciliations. Just being a spectator had been exhausting.

Drama seemed to follow Eugenie the way chaos followed Jesse. Together, they’d been less of a couple and more of a traveling natural disaster. A long, slow march toward mutually assured destruction.

When he’d invited me to her family’s estate in England one summer, I’d gone mostly out of morbid curiosity—and maybe a little bit of brotherly concern.

Okay, a lot of brotherly concern.

Even though I’d only stayed a few days before heading to London, that had been more than enough. I’d hated Eugenie almost immediately.

She was beautiful, sure. Blonde and magnetic in a way that demanded attention no matter what anyone thought of her personality, but she’d also been wild and mean in a way that had made it clear which twin had the lowest IQ.

Not me.

Eventually, I’d pulled Jesse aside and told him that he needed to end things before the two of them wound up in an international prison. He’d laughed in my face, obviously not heeding my advice.

The only thing that had saved that trip from being a total loss for me had been getting to meet Elizabeth. Eliza, as she was affectionately known.

Although getting to meet her had been where it’d ended. It wasn’t like we’d gotten to know each other at all. We’d spent maybe six minutes in the same physical space, and they hadn’t even been consecutive minutes.

Just fragments of time stitched together into something that had stuck in my brain with embarrassing persistence. She was Eugenie’s middle sister. The quiet one.

During those few days I’d spent at their estate, I’d seen her everywhere. Stepping out of dark hallways with an armful of papers. Crossing the back lawn with purposeful strides. Leading small groups through the gardens.

She regularly gave tours of their family estate and I’d lingered at the edge of them, just watching the way she moved through the castle like she was part of it. I remembered thinking she didn’t even seem real, more reminiscent of something out of a painting.

She was soft spoken, composed, and entirely at odds with the chaos that seemed to orbit the rest of her family. It had been hard to reconcile her with Eugenie. Harder still to believe they were related at all, but if Eugenie had been the storm, Eliza had been the calm at the center of it.

“…and Dad just kept going on about how this was perfect timing. How the families already knew each other, so this was meant to be—”

It took me a second to make sense of the fact that I was hearing my own voice out loud, rambling about something I wasn’t even thinking about. Then I realized it was Jesse. He was still here, still talking, and apparently, I’d just missed a whole lot of what he’d been saying.

“Is Eugenie aware of this?” I cut in after blinking myself out of my thoughts. “Have you spoken to her at all?”

Jesse arched an eyebrow at me, looking almost amused for the first time since he’d come storming out of Dad’s office this afternoon. Then he let out a dark chuckle and shook his head. “I don’t know, but Eugenie isn’t the one they want me to marry.”

The words landed like a physical blow, a sharp, unexpected pang of something that felt suspiciously like jealousy twisting in my stomach. I nearly choked again before I set the glass down carefully, my gaze never leaving his.

“Who, then?” I asked. “Which one of the Roderick sisters are you supposed to be marrying?”