My Groom Chose Her Again, So I Married My Billionaire Boss novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Terms

On their wedding night Elias sets the rules, Whitney's tearful post goes viral, and Joanna sees a photograph in his study of herself from before she worked for him.

"He hasn't told me what?" I asked Elias in the back of the car.

The driver had the glass up, and the city slid by in wet streaks of light.

"Desmond wanted you rattled," Elias said. "It worked."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the one I have tonight."

He took off his jacket and laid it over my bare shoulders without looking at me.

It smelled like cedar and rain.

I almost said thank you, and then I remembered that I was angry.

The penthouse was on the fortieth floor of a glass tower, and the elevator opened straight into the living room.

It was bigger than the apartment I had shared with Trevor, and it had nothing in it that wasn't useful.

No photographs, no flowers, one long gray sofa and a wall of city.

"The guest suite is down the hall," Elias said. "Your bag arrived an hour ago. Bea packed it."

"Bea packed my bag?"

"I called her from the car on the way to you."

I stared at him.

"You planned the dress, the license and my suitcase before I'd said yes?"

"I planned for you to say no and still have somewhere to sleep."

He poured two glasses of water and put one in my hand.

"Terms, Joanna. You're owed them."

"Terms."

"One year of marriage. Separate rooms. In public, I'm your husband, and I'll touch you the way a husband would. In private, I won't touch you at all."

"Why a year?"

"It's long enough for Langston to lose, and short enough that you can still start over."

"And my name?"

"Yours to keep. Your job is yours. Nobody here will ask you to give up anything."

Trevor had asked me to give up my apartment, my savings account and my job.

I had said yes to all three.

"And you?" I said. "What do you get?"

"Desmond Langston standing in a room, finally unable to do what he wants."

"That's revenge."

"It's a goal."

"You've said that sentence to yourself many times."

The corner of his mouth moved, very slightly.

"One more term," he said. "I won't lie to you about the Langstons. Ask me anything you like about them."

"Then what was Desmond talking about?"

His hand stopped with the glass halfway to his mouth.

"There are things I'll tell you when you can use them," he said.

"That's a lie."

"It's a delay."

"It's a pretty word for the same thing."

"Maybe," he said. "Good night, Mrs. Stannard."

He walked down the other hall, and I heard a door shut with a very quiet click.

I stood in the middle of a stranger's living room in a wedding dress that wasn't mine.

My phone had been buzzing against my hip for an hour.

Sixty-three messages from Trevor.

*Call me.*

*You're being childish.*

*My father is furious. You've embarrassed him.*

*Please, Jo. I made a mistake. Just talk to me.*

The last one had come in a few minutes ago.

*I never loved her the way I love you.*

I blocked his number, and then I felt my thumb shaking, so I blocked it again to make sure.

The guest suite had an enormous bed and a closet that already held three dresses I had never seen.

All of them were my size.

I sat on the edge of the mattress and took the pins out of my hair.

Then Bea's name lit up my screen.

*Jo. Don't read it. Okay, read it. I'm so sorry.*

Under it was a link.

It was a post from Whitney, published twenty minutes ago.

There was a photo of my torn, wine-soaked dress hanging in the bridal suite, and under it she had written three paragraphs.

*I will carry this guilt forever. I only wanted to be there for my friend on the hardest day of my year. Joanna, I forgive you for the things you said. I hope you find peace.*

She had forgiven me.

She had forgiven me, in public, in front of nine thousand strangers, for being the person she'd done it to.

The comments were already stacking up.

*Poor girl lost her brother and this bride attacks her??*

*She married her boss the same day. Classic.*

*Gold digger.*

I read forty of them, and my face went hot.

I wasn't going to cry.

I texted Bea back.

*Does the hotel keep security tape from the bridal suite floor?*

The reply came in seconds.

*I'm a paralegal. I can make the hotel give me a tape if I have to stand in their lobby until Tuesday.*

*Good. Do that.*

*Jo. What are you going to do with it?*

I looked at Whitney's three paragraphs for a long moment.

*Put it in front of everyone she wanted watching,* I wrote.

I needed water, and the glass in the living room was empty.

When I walked back down the hall in my bare feet, the light was still on at the far end of the apartment.

Elias's study door stood a few inches open.

I didn't mean to look.

He was at the desk with his back to me, and the lamp lit one wall of framed papers.

In the center of that wall, in a plain black frame, was a photograph.

I stepped closer and the floorboard gave me away.

It was a picture of a young woman crossing a street with a cardboard coffee tray.

Her hair was pinned up, and she was laughing at something to her left.

The date in the corner of the print was three years old.

It was the week before I had walked into the Stannard Group lobby to interview for a job I'd found online.

The woman in the photograph was me.

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