The Wife He Left for His Dynasty (Hers to Forgive #4)

1. Lena

LENA

The dress shows up late in the afternoon in a garment bag with the hotel’s crest on it, carried by a courier who insists he has to come into the hotel room to hang it himself. Apparently those were my mother-in-law’s orders.

The dress is navy silk, with real weight in the skirt, and a modest neckline that I already know will sit across my collarbones like a hand at my throat.

It’s beautiful. Everything Diana sends is beautiful. I’ll give her that much: no matter how our relationship struggles, she never sends me ugly clothes to wear.

The jewel case comes with it, handed over by the courier since he can’t hang it up. There’s a small card on the lid in her handwriting.

Wear the Kingsley diamonds, they go well with navy. Keep your hair up off your face.—D.

I read it twice, standing there in my slip, feeling the implicit order in the note.

My jaw clenches without me even thinking about it, and there’s a tight spot in my chest, a rising fury that I know I can’t do a thing about.

I’d love nothing more than to ask my mother-in-law why she expects to dress me like a Barbie doll, but I know I can’t do that, and besides, it wouldn’t be fair to Connor.

So I’ll just rinse the anger away with the first glass of wine tonight.

It isn’t the instruction that gets me. It’s that she wrote it on heavy stationery embossed with the family crest, delivered alongside a dress that I have no doubt is worth an unimaginable sum of money and was probably pulled from the runway before anyone could ever think of wearing it.

So I’m supposed to be grateful. In this family the orders come wrapped up as presents, and if you say one word about it, you’re being ungrateful.

I ran a hotel before I became a rich man’s wife.

It was my grandmother’s, and it had thirty-two rooms, with gorgeous blue Delft tile in the breakfast room, and brass keys the guests kept stealing for souvenirs.

She taught me the difference between a building that’s maintained and one that’s barely hanging on.

A building with deferred maintenance looks fine for years, fresh paint and flowers on the desk, and then one January the ceiling comes down because nobody wanted to deal with it.

A marriage is a little bit like a building, and standing there with Diana’s card in my hand, I wonder when the ceiling is going to fall down on mine.

I put the diamonds on anyway.

The door opens, Connor comes into the room with his shirt open and his tie hanging loose around his neck, still devilishly handsome. He stops in the doorway and stares at me, taking in the open back of my gaping dress, because I can’t reach the zipper.

“Don’t move,” he says. He crosses the room and puts his mouth on the base of my neck before he touches the zipper at all, and everything in me loosens as his warm breath skims my skin.

“Your mother sent a card to go with the dress. It was very imperial.”

“That’s my mother.” He finds my eyes in the mirror. “You look like the most gorgeous woman this city has ever seen.”

“That’s a low bar. This city can’t see anything. These hills do not, in fact, have eyes.”

He laughs into my shoulder, and then the laugh turns into another open-mouthed kiss as he pulls me against him. His phone starts buzzing on the dresser. He doesn’t look at it, and my stomach unknots just from that.

“We’re supposed to be there at seven,” I say, not really meaning it at all. “You’re going to make us late.”

“I know.” His hand comes up under the hem of the dress and gathers the silk, and his palm slides along the inside of my thigh with the patience of a man who’s done this in this exact spot before. “Tell me to stop.”

Nobody outside this room would believe this about him. He asks. He’s always asked, every time, and he waits with his hand still while I answer. Mostly because he likes to hear me beg for him.

“Don’t stop,” I say, and my voice has gone low and embarrassing already.

He gets the dress up around my hips and my underwear down, and I put both hands flat on the dresser then position myself to watch him in the mirror.

Jaw set, shirt open, tie swinging loose, two fingers working into me and his thumb finding my clit like we’ve got all night.

The phone goes off again right by my hand and I close my eyes and my whole face goes hot.

“Look at me,” he says, and I do. “We have all the time in the world if I say we do.”

He gets his belt undone one-handed, pulls himself out, and pushes into me in one long stroke, and the sound I make is undignified and I don’t care even a little.

Six years, and he’s just as hot for me as the day we met.

He holds still, breathing hard, and I can feel his pulse racing as his chest presses against my back.

Then he moves, and the dresser starts knocking against the wall.

His hand comes around and stays on my clit, working me in tight circles while he fucks me from behind, and I brace on my forearms and let it build.

He’s fast and a little mean about it, because we’ve only got a bit of time, but he knows me well enough to get me there quickly.

My thighs start to shake around his hand. “Connor?—”

“I know. I’ve got you.” His voice has gone rough. “Come on, sweetheart. Let me feel it.”

I come with my mouth open, hard enough that my knees quit on me, and he holds my hips up through it and follows right after, buried deep, groaning against the side of my head, his breath in my hair.

He comes inside me the way he has since a couple of months into this marriage, when I quietly threw the pills out and neither of us made a speech about it.

Afterward he stays where he is a while, one hand spread flat over my stomach like he’s keeping something in, and I’m so warm and so stupidly happy that I laugh at the ceiling.

The phone buzzes again.

He steps back and hands me a towel without my asking, grinning like an idiot, and my legs are still unreliable. Then he picks up the phone.

“We’re late,” he says, and reads the screen, and his thumb stops moving. His face doesn’t change so much as it gets polite, and my stomach dips, quick and sick, gone almost before I can name it.

“Who is it?”

“Nobody. My mother’s office.” He pockets it. “Nothing that can’t wait.”

I put my hair up off my face because she asked me to, and I tell myself it’s because it looks better that way, and we go.

The flagship’s ballroom is done in white and gold for the children’s foundation, and I know what all of it cost, because I sat in the meetings where they picked the linen.

I’m good at doing this, at being the wife to the rich and important man.

I like knowing the caterer’s name and his kid’s name, and I like the little jolt I get when every person in the room turns slightly towards me because I walked over the threshold.

The literacy program the foundation runs in the county schools is mine. I built it myself out of research that was important to me, and every year Walter gets thanked for it from that podium without any mention that I even exist. That’s what it means to marry into this family.

There’s a press line inside the ballroom tonight, along the west wall, and there has never been press inside this event before. I clock it on the way in, decide it’s Diana’s doing, and set it aside for the evening. I’ve gotten good at ignoring my mother-in-law’s actions in this family.

Near the dessert table there’s a young woman in a black dress that’s a little too formal for her, holding a plate full of food, standing at the angle that makes it look like she’s on her way to join someone.

Grace Howard, from the west side, one of the college hopefuls the foundation is honoring tonight.

Her mother’s over by the bar holding her clutch like it’s full of cash.

“That crab thing is a trap,” I tell her. “It’s mostly mayonnaise and it squirts all over when you bite into it. Makes you look sloppy, like you don’t know how to eat, but it’s the crab thing’s fault.”

Grace looks up, startled, and then laughs. A real laugh, too loud for an event like this, and she slaps her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide with horror.

“Don’t apologize. Nobody’s laughed in this room since 1994.

” I pick up a plate for myself so she isn’t the only one holding one, and I feel myself loosen into the role I’m meant to play.

“You wanna know the trick to these things? Pick one person and talk to them and only them like there’s nothing else going on around you.

That way you can forget you’re in a room full of rich people. ”

She tells me she’s going into hospitality management, a little defensively, like she’s had to defend it before.

So I tell her the truth: it’s the only business I know of where being kind is a technical skill, and the good ones are ruthless about the boring parts.

She asks what the boring parts are. Linens, payroll, drains, I say, and she writes it down in her phone with her thumb, and my throat goes tight in a way I’d have a hard time explaining.

“Come find me later,” I tell her. “I’ll tell you which schools are worth the money.”

Then the lights drop and Diana’s at the podium in gray, silver-haired, unhurried. She never raises her voice. She doesn’t have to. The room goes quiet before she even opens her mouth.

“Before we announce this year’s recipients,” she says, “a small indulgence. The Founders’ Jubilee is coming, and we’ve been going through the archives—fifty years of this company in boxes nobody has opened since my father was still climbing scaffolding. I’d like to show you a small preview.”

The screen behind her warms up gold. Ambrose in his thirties in front of the first building, sleeves rolled, squinting into the sun.

A ribbon-cutting in bad weather. My husband at nine in a clip-on tie.

The room goes soft. A laugh, a little aww, everybody settling into the story of a family that’s been standing here forever.

And then a hotel robe.

My face starts to smile before I’ve caught up. Then it stops. I’m not in a wedding dress. I’m in a robe, and my hair is wet, and the sound goes out of the room and comes back wrong, like water in my ears.

That’s not the wedding. That’s the suite. That’s the night before. Diana’s diamonds draped over terrycloth, my sister half out of frame with the bottle, and me raising a glass in a posh voice I did once, for one bit, in a room with nobody in it but friends.

“To the Kingsley fortune.” My own voice, younger, coming out of speakers built for a ballroom. “As you all know, I’m only marrying Connor Kingsley for the money. Every last dime of it.”

Then the laughter. My friends howling off camera, the best kind of laughing, and up on that screen it doesn’t sound like friends at all. It sounds like a victory party.

The clip ends there.

There was a camera in that room.

My scalp shrinks. My hands go numb in my lap and my ears fill with a high, tidal roaring.

I signed something in the blur of that week and forgot it inside an hour, and somebody has kept that footage in a box the whole time I’ve been married, waiting, and they cut it at the exact spot where the laughing was loudest.

The room laughs along at first, warm, because they think it’s a joke a bride made.

Then the sound curdles. Somebody catches on faster than the rest, and the quiet spreads out across the ballroom.

By the time it reaches our table, nobody’s watching the screen.

They’re watching me. Along the west wall the press line has its phones up, and one of them isn’t pointed at the screen at all.

He’s already framed on my face. He looks like a man who was told where to aim before he got here.

Briefed. All of it, briefed.

Connor is standing. I don’t know when he stood.

His hand is on my arm, his face is white, and he’s staring at that screen like it’s something he needs to read a second time.

I wait. I wait right there with my heart slamming for him to say that isn’t what it was, because it’s the only sentence that fixes any of this.

He leans down to my ear. His voice is low and even and it isn’t quite his.

“We’ll discuss this privately.”

My stomach drops out from under my ribs. The skin on my arms prickles like a scald, and his hand on me is suddenly a stranger’s hand.

He wasn’t in that room. He’s got nothing to go on but a screen and his mother’s finger on the switch. Handed a choice between his wife and a calm room, he picks the room, and he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. I watch it happen to his face. The clip is nothing next to that.

Diana has come down off the podium. She’s at the head of our table with her hands folded, waiting to see what I’ll do, because she already knows.

So I reach up and unhook the clasp at the back of my neck.

My fingers are shaking so badly I fumble it, twice, and the whole room gets to watch me fight my own jewelry.

Then the diamonds pour into my palm, heavier than they look and still warm off my skin, and I lay them out flat on the white linen in front of her.

“Paying the bill,” I say.

I leave my wedding ring on. That one’s mine.

Then I turn, and the room turns a beat behind me, chandeliers smearing at the edge of my sight.

It’s the longest walk of my life and I make it on legs that answer from somewhere far away, one heel and then the other, chin level, shoulders back, the front-desk posture my grandmother drilled into me holding my spine up while everything under it shakes.

Past the dessert table, where Grace stands with her plate still full and her mouth open.

Past Fiona Brennan, hand already up beside her mouth, turning toward Beth.

Past a waiter who steps out of my way and looks at the floor—the only person in this ballroom with any manners left.

Nobody stops me. Behind me my husband says my name once, in the voice you use across a lobby, and then the doors take the rest of it.

Outside, under the gold awning, the night air bites my bare throat and my eyes water from it. Daniel already has my car up, because Daniel is very good at his job and he’s been watching those doors all night. He opens the door and doesn’t ask me a single thing, and I could kiss him for it.

The reporters are out on the sidewalk in a loose half circle, faces lit blue from underneath, and not one of them shouts.

They just watch me fold myself into the driver’s seat in Diana’s navy silk with my throat bare and my hands shaking so hard I have to grip the wheel to make them hold still, and they type.

Thumbs going, heads down. Writing me into a story that’ll be finished before I’m off the block.