His Love Came Too Late, I'm Already Another's Wife novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Green Dress
At the Ward Hotels gala, Preston's father announces Preston's engagement to Maia's best friend. Maia steps out and asks the one man at the service door to marry her, and he answers before she finishes.
Eldon Ward tapped a fork against his glass, and three hundred guests in the Ward Regency ballroom turned toward the stage.
I was in the third row, wearing the green dress Preston had picked out for me.
His text had come at noon: Wear the green one. Tonight changes everything. Trust me.
I had read it nine times in the bakery's back room, with flour up to my elbows.
Seven years I had waited for a sentence like that.
Zara found my hand in the dark and squeezed it.
"Breathe, Mar," she whispered. "Whatever he says tonight, I'm with you."
She had been my best friend since the first week of college, and she smelled like the same vanilla lotion she'd worn then.
I squeezed back.
Eldon did not smile much. Tonight he did.
"Thirty years of Ward Hotels," he said. "And I owe it to my son."
Preston stood beside him in his black tux, his sandy hair combed the way I liked it.
"I also owe a toast to Maia Hensel," Eldon said, and every head swung toward me. "The girl my son carried out of a burning car six years ago. He has never once bragged about it."
People clapped.
I nodded and smiled at them, because that was the story, and I had been grateful for it for six years.
I always wanted to say something about that night. I had never been allowed.
Preston was staring into his glass and would not look up at me.
"Now," Eldon said, "the real news. Gouverneur Hotels and Ward Hotels are becoming one family. My son has asked Zara Gouverneur to marry him."
The room roared.
Zara's hand left mine.
She stood up, one palm pressed to her chest, and her eyes were already wet.
She did not look at me once as she crossed the floor.
Preston caught her at the foot of the stage and kissed her while the cameras flashed.
I sat there in the green dress.
A woman behind me whispered, "Isn't that the baker? Wasn't she his girlfriend?"
Someone else had their phone up, pointed at my face.
I stood, very straight, and walked out through the side doors.
The corridor was empty and smelled like lilies and floor polish.
Preston found me in under a minute. He was breathing hard.
"Maia, listen to me. It's a merger. It's business. Dad needed it."
"You told me tonight changed everything."
"It does. It changes nothing between us." He reached for my wrist. "You keep the apartment. I come Thursdays like always. She never has to know."
I took my wrist back.
"Zara is my best friend."
"Zara is a Gouverneur," he said. "You know what that means for the company. Don't make this ugly."
Eldon came around the corner behind him with a folded paper in two fingers.
"Be sensible, Maia," he said, kindly, which was worse. "I own the building your little bakery sits in. A gracious girl keeps her shop. This is a check for your trouble."
I looked at the paper, and at Preston, who would not meet my eyes.
I did not take it.
At the far end of the corridor, a service door stood open on the loading dock. A man in a rented suit leaned there, holding a paper cup of water.
Eli Corrigan.
Preston's half brother. Eldon's mistake, Preston called him, the one you didn't mention at the table.
I had met him three times. Once he drove me home when my car died, and said nothing the whole way.
His left sleeve was pushed up. A pale burn scar ran from his wrist to his elbow, shiny and old.
Preston had told me it came from a garage fire.
Eli did not look at the check or at the scene.
He looked at me. He held the cup out, and his hand was perfectly steady.
I took the water. My own fingers were not steady at all.
Behind me, Preston said, "Eli, what are you doing here? Dad said you'd stay in the kitchen."
Eli did not answer him.
So I stepped out.
I walked away from both of them and stopped in front of the one man in the building nobody could buy.
"Are you married?" I asked.
"No."
"Do you want to be? Tuesday?"
I heard how it sounded. I said it anyway.
Preston laughed, once, in disbelief.
Eli did not laugh. He did not ask why, or whether I was drunk, or what Eldon would say.
"The courthouse opens at nine," he said.
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