The Wife He Accused (Billionaire Grovel and Redemption #1)

Chapter 1

MELODY

The first time Melody Carter Winters heard the word gold digger, it had been disguised as a compliment.

A woman in a sage-green Oscar de la Renta had touched her wrist at a charity luncheon and said, You must feel like you've won the lottery, sweetheart.

Melody had smiled and said something like that and gone home, stood in the shower until the water ran cold, because she could not work out which part of the sentence had hurt more. The lottery or the sweetheart.

That had been months ago. She had gotten better since then. Or quieter. She wasn't always sure those were different things.

Tonight, no one would be that careless.

Tonight the Winters’s autumn gala spilled across the upper floors of a Fifth Avenue building that had never known a recession, all veined marble, museum-loaned Rothkos, and tall windows opening onto Central Park like a private painting hung for the evening's pleasure.

A string quartet played Vivaldi from the mezzanine, badly enough that Melody knew it was on purpose: Catherine Winters considered technically perfect music try-hard.

Champagne moved through the room in glittering circuits carried by waiters who had been instructed not to make eye contact.

Every woman wore diamonds the way other women wore weather, as a fact about themselves they had no reason to comment on.

Melody stood in the middle of it in wine-colored silk, with her mother's pearl earrings, the only jewelry in the room that hadn't been appraised, and Alexander Winters’s hand steady at the small of her back.

She had learned the rules. How to smile without showing too much eagerness.

How to sip champagne without ever finishing a glass, because finishing implied thirst, and thirst implied need.

How to say I read it, yes, it was wonderful about books she had not read, because admitting she hadn't read them would be treated as charming the first time and pitiable the second.

How to let a silence sit without rushing to fill it the way she used to, back home, where silence had meant somebody's father had lost his job or somebody's mother was sick again and you had to talk fast and bright to keep the bad thing from settling.

What she had not learned, what she suspected she would never learn, was how to stop calculating.

Even now, with Alexander's palm warming the silk against her spine, some part of her was tallying.

That's the third time the woman in emerald has looked at me; that's Senator Hollis's wife, and she pretended not to recognize me last time too; that pause before the waiter offered me champagne was longer than the pause before he offered Catherine.

A running ledger she could not put down.

Alexander leaned in. His mouth brushed her temple, barely contact, the kind of gesture other people would not even register as one.

"You're doing that thing again."

"What thing?"

"Disappearing while standing still."

She turned her head. His face was close enough that she could see the small scar at the edge of his eyebrow, the one he'd gotten at twelve falling off a horse he'd been told not to ride. She had asked about it on their second date, and she had thought, He's used to people not asking.

"I'm right here," she said.

His eyes moved across her face the way they moved across a contract.

Alexander had built a reputation on reading rooms in under thirty seconds and being right about them.

It was one of the things the financial press loved about him.

It was also, Melody had come to understand, one of the things that made it dangerous when he got it wrong, because he so rarely did, and when he did, he had no practice noticing.

"Stay with me," he said.

"I always do."

His thumb shifted half an inch against the small of her back. To anyone watching he was still the man on the cover of Forbes last March — composed, unbothered, the heir who had earned the company twice over. But she knew that thumb. She knew what it meant when it moved.

"Forty minutes," he murmured. "Then I'll get you out of here."

"Forty?"

"Three board members. One donor who thinks he's a friend."

A laugh slipped out of her despite herself. "You make it sound so romantic."

"It is romantic. I'm suffering in public for you."

"For me."

"For us." A small pause, and then, the way he always offered the things he most wanted her to say yes to, so casually it could be mistaken for an afterthought: "We could go upstate this weekend. You said you wanted somewhere quiet."

The pull in her chest was immediate and embarrassing.

Upstate meant the house in Columbia County with the kitchen that opened onto the orchard, and the bed where he read to her on Sunday mornings from whichever novel she'd left on the nightstand.

The walk to the pond where, last spring, she had cried about something she could not remember now, and he had not asked her to explain it, only put his coat around her and waited.

"Are you bribing me?" she said.

"Is it working?"

"Possibly."

"Then yes."

And there it was. The small, secret smile that belonged only to her, the one that did not exist in any photograph the press had ever published. For a few seconds the room loosened its grip on her and she remembered, oh right, this is why.

This was the part outsiders did not understand.

They saw the surname, the company, the apartment, and they assumed that whatever they could see was the whole of him.

They did not see the man who had once driven forty minutes through traffic to bring her a soup when she had a cold, and had pretended not to know it was inconvenient.

They did not see the way he texted her terrible coffee jokes during mergers, or how he remembered, from a single offhand comment six months ago, that she hated lilies because they had been at her father's funeral.

They did not see him at three in the morning the night her mother had a stroke, his hand on the back of her neck as she sat on the bathroom floor, saying I've got you, I've got you, I've got you until her teeth stopped chattering.

He loved her. That had always been the part that made the rest of it survivable.

"Alexander." The voice cut through the moment. Catherine Winters, smooth, cool, her voice pitched to carry exactly as far as it needed to and no farther. "There you are."

Catherine approached as if the room had been built around her path, midnight silk moving in one unbroken line from her shoulders to the floor, the diamonds at her throat catching the light and throwing it back as if the light owed her interest. She kissed the air beside her son's cheek, and Melody felt Alexander's posture adjust by half a degree: straighter, more contained, the small private version of him folding itself away like a letter she had been allowed to read and now had to give back.

"Melody." Catherine's gaze turned on her, polite and assessing. "You look lovely."

Three words. Spoken, somehow, in the cadence of I'm impressed you cleaned up.

"Thank you," Melody said. "The room is beautiful."

"It should be. I've only been planning it eight months." A flick of attention down the silk. "That color is striking on you. Very brave."

Brave. She turned the word over in her head the way she sometimes turned over a coin she'd found on the sidewalk back home in Ohio: was it real, was it worth anything, or was it just something somebody had dropped because they could afford to.

Brave meant no one else here would have worn it.

Brave meant I noticed. Brave meant I want you to know I noticed.

"Thank you," she said again, because the only winning move with Catherine was to refuse, gently, every invitation to escalate.

"You'll need to find the Van Alstons before dinner," Catherine said to her son, already moving on. "Oh — Mrs. Pierce was asking about your little foundation, Melody. She seems quite taken with your little initiative."

The italics were silent and perfect. Little. Initiative. The two words hung in the air after Catherine had drifted away, like perfume that had been worn too long.

Alexander was very still beside her.

"Ignore her," he said.

"I do."

"You're clenching your jaw."

"I'm ignoring her with tension."

His mouth almost moved. Almost. She loved that almost more than she loved most actual smiles.

He guided her toward the terrace doors, where the air was thinner and the perfume of the room could not reach.

The city stretched below them in black glass and gold light, and Melody set the rim of her champagne flute against her lower lip without drinking, just to have something to do with her hands.

"Your mother is very talented," she said. "She can insult someone in under ten words."

"She's like that with everyone."

"That isn't true. She's charming with the people she approves of."

"You are someone I approve of."

It was meant as a joke. He even almost-smiled when he said it. But it sat oddly in the air between them, the way some sentences did when they were technically the right words and yet not, somehow, the answer to the question that had actually been asked.

She looked out over the park.

"Sometimes," she said, "I think that matters more to you than it does to anyone else."

She felt him still beside her. "What does that mean?"

"It means I'm tired and your mother makes me want to commit small, elegant crimes."

"Melody."

"It's fine. Really."

"Has someone said something to you?"

Not tonight. The tabloids had been cruder in the early days — small-town girl catches billionaire heir; Winters romance: real or strategic?

— but the people in this room had refined the same content into something more deniable.

Polite questions about whether she was adjusting.

Compliments on how natural she still seemed.

Observations from women in pearls about how refreshing it was that she still sounded like she was from somewhere.