The Wife He Wronged (Billionaire Grovel and Redemption #5)

Chapter 1

ISABELLE

Isabelle Grant had spent six weeks finding the right sconces for the hallway, and now, in the half-light of a Monday evening with the fog pressing against every window in the house, she stood back and realized that she'd been wrong.

The brass was too warm. She'd wanted something that would catch the last of the natural light as it came through the transom above the front door, that narrow hour between five and six when the Pacific Heights house turned into the version of itself she loved most, but the fixtures pulled gold when the hallway wanted silver.

Pewter, maybe. Or unlacquered brass that would patina down over time, go almost green.

She was reaching up to touch the mounting plate, already mentally drafting the email to the salvage dealer in Tiburon, when Xavier came through the front door and stopped.

"Don't move," he said.

"I'm taking these down."

"I said don't move." He set his bag on the floor.

He was still in the charcoal suit from this morning, and in the transom light he looked like something a painter would have ruined his career trying to finish: the dark hair pushed back off his forehead where he'd been running his hand through it all day, the green eyes that went almost black in low light, the jaw and the mouth and the whole absurd structure of his face that still made women at his own dinner parties forget what they were saying mid-sentence.

His tie was already loosened, the top button undone.

He did that in the car on the way home, every day, that small unmaking of himself that meant the public version was finished and the private one had started.

He leaned against the doorframe and looked at her with her arm still raised, her fingers on the brass plate and the light from the transom cutting across her collarbone.

"You're staring," she said.

"I'm looking. There's a difference."

"The sconces are wrong."

"The sconces are perfect."

"They're pulling gold. The whole hallway is reading warm when it should read —"

"Bella." He crossed to her and took her wrist, gently, brought her hand down from the wall and held it.

His thumb found her pulse, an old habit from the first year of their marriage that had never stopped, as though he needed to confirm the biological fact of her sixty times a day.

"The sconces are perfect. The hallway is perfect. You are —"

"If you say perfect I'm going to make you eat dinner at the island like a bachelor."

He grinned. When Xavier Grant grinned, it still made her stomach drop. Ten years and her stomach still dropped. She’d decided a long time ago to stop being embarrassed about that.

"I was going to say unreasonable," he said. "In the most flattering sense."

She let him kiss her. He tasted like the peppermint he kept in his jacket pocket for the drive home, and his hand moved from her wrist to the back of her neck.

For a moment the sconces, the brass and the hallway went away and there was just this: the door closed, the fog outside, the two of them in a house she had made beautiful one decision at a time while he was out building an empire.

Nobody knew she'd done it. That was the thing.

Four years in this house and every guest, every dinner companion, every one of Xavier's partners and their wives had complimented the interiors and then looked at Xavier as though he'd hired someone extraordinary.

He never corrected them. She knew it didn't occur to him that there was anything to correct.

Isabelle had taste. She found beautiful things.

It was like complimenting a woman on her bone structure. You didn't credit the bones.

She'd repointed the brick on the garden wall herself the spring after they moved in.

She'd found the original ceiling medallion for the dining room in a demolition yard in Oakland, wrapped in newspaper from 1987, and she'd spent two weekends cleaning the plaster detail with a toothbrush.

The kitchen tile was reclaimed terra cotta from a farmhouse in Sonoma that had been torn down for vineyard space.

She had driven up on a Thursday, talked the contractor out of sending it to the dump, loaded it into the back of her car, and spent several days on her knees with a rubber mallet and a level she'd taught herself to read from a YouTube video.

Xavier had come home to a finished floor and said, "This is incredible, baby. Who did you find?"

And she’d said, "A guy in Sonoma," because it was easier.

They ate dinner at the table, not the island.

She'd made something simple — roast chicken, with the skin that went the color of dark honey and the pan drippings spooned over roasted potatoes.

Xavier ate like a man who'd been starving and told her twice it was the best thing he'd ever tasted, which he said every time and meant every time, and she loved him for the meaning even when the repetition had worn the words smooth.

After, he pulled her onto the sofa in the front room, put her feet in his lap and they watched the fog finish swallowing the city through the tall windows.

His hand rested on her ankle. He was reading something on his phone—deal flow, term sheets, the quiet hum of money at work—and she was pretending to read a novel and actually looking at the room she'd built around them.

The fireplace surround was salvaged marble she'd found through a dealer in Petaluma.

The bookshelves she'd had built by a cabinet maker in the Mission who still cut dovetail joints by hand.

The plaster walls she'd had redone twice because the first colorwash had been too pink and nobody understood when she said she wanted the gray that fog turns just before dark.

She'd mixed the final wash herself, standing on a ladder with a rag and a bucket, until the walls looked like the inside of an oyster shell.

All of it, every surface and join and hinge, was hers. And it looked like his.

"Come to the Anderson thing Saturday," he said, not looking up.

"I'm already coming."

"Come as you. Not as my plus-one." He glanced at her over his phone. "I mean — wear something that makes Diane Anderson want to die."

She laughed. She laughed and tucked her feet tighter into his lap, thinking about the small room at the end of the upstairs hallway.

The one with the north light that she’d never furnished.

The one she called the guest room even though no guest had ever slept in it, the door always closed, the light falling on bare hardwood and empty walls that she had painted, six months ago, a very pale celadon green without telling him why.

She knew why.

She’d known for several mornings, since the second line had come up in the bathroom and she'd pressed both hands over her mouth so hard her rings left marks on her lips.

Years of trying. Four rounds. Two losses: one so early it was almost theoretical and one at nine weeks that was not theoretical at all, that had a heartbeat she'd heard and then a silence she still heard sometimes in quiet rooms.

They’d stopped talking about it. A slow retreat, like the manner of no longer touching a bruise once you understand it isn't going to heal on its own schedule.

And now. Now she was carrying it again, further along than she'd confirmed, and she’d told no one.

Not Xavier. Not her mother. Not Douglas, who would have held her hand and said the exact right thing because Douglas always said the exact right thing.

She’d told no one because she understood, for some reason she couldn't explain, that the moment she said it out loud to anyone it would become real enough to lose.

Xavier's hand moved from her ankle to her calf, absently, still reading. She watched him and the secret settled between her ribs like a stone.

Soon, she thought. When I'm ready. When I'm sure enough to survive it if it happens again.

His thumb traced a circle on her skin. Their home glowed around them, bathed in warmth and love. And from the outside, from any angle at all, it was everything anyone could want.

Isabelle closed her eyes and let herself believe that.