The Wife He Threw Away (The Discarded Wives #1)

PROLOGUE

Ada

Five years before he threw me away, Sebastian Vale got down on one knee in a field of night-blooming jasmine and told me I was the only thing in the world he couldn’t buy.

I should have heard it for what it was. A man like Sebastian doesn’t talk about people the way he talks about acquisitions unless, somewhere underneath, that’s what they are to him.

But I was twenty-one and drunk on the smell of that jasmine, and he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

He’d flown me to the perfume fields outside Grasse because I’d mentioned (once, months earlier, half-asleep) that I dreamed of standing in one at harvest. He remembered.

He remembered everything back then. The steel-grey eyes that made grown executives lose their nerve were soft when they looked at me, and the thin scar through his left brow lifted when he smiled, and he said, “Marry me, Adeline. Let me spend the rest of my life failing to deserve you.”

I said yes before he finished the sentence.

We didn’t make it back to the car.

He kissed me down into the warm grass, and the jasmine broke open under us, and the whole field turned to scent: green and white and impossibly sweet.

His hands knew me already; that was the thing about Sebastian, he learned a person like a language and then spoke them fluently.

He dragged my dress up my thighs with a patience that was its own kind of cruelty, his mouth at my throat, murmuring my name like it cost him something.

“Sebastian…” His name came out broken.

“I’ve got you,” he said against my skin. “I’ve always got you.”

His fingers found me, slow and sure, and I arched into his palm with the stars smeared overhead and jasmine in my hair. When he finally moved over me, when he finally sank into me, he watched my face the entire time like he was afraid to miss a second of it. Like I was the rarest thing he owned.

Afterward I lay against his chest and listened to his heart and believed (god, I believed) that I would grow old in the sound of it.

I told him that night that I could smell our whole life in that field. A base of sandalwood. A heart of jasmine. A future.

He laughed and said, “Then bottle it. Make it ours.”

So I did. I built it molecule by molecule over two years in a lab no one knew I ran, and I called it éternel, because I was young and I thought some things lasted.

That fragrance would go on to make Vale Group four hundred million dollars.

It would go on to be introduced to the world by another woman, on the night my husband decided I was nothing.

I believed him when he knelt in that field.

That was my first mistake.

My last one was believing he’d never make me sorry for it.