My Billionaire Husband Signed Away My Street novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Clause
At Gran's wake the stepmother reads a will clause that hands the house to whichever grandchild marries first, and Chelsea is already engaged; Pen answers her in front of forty guests, and the quiet surveyor on the porch says 'Marry me'.
My stepmother waited until the ham was out to read the will.
Forty people stood in my grandmother's front room with paper plates, and nobody could leave without walking past her.
Maribeth tapped a fork on her glass and opened a leather folio.
"Gran made one request," she said, in the voice she uses for closings.
"The house at 9 Orchard Row goes to the first of her grandchildren to be lawfully married within sixty days of her death."
"That grandchild must live in it."
I had been holding a casserole dish for an hour, because I had nowhere to put it down.
I put it down on Gran's piano.
"That's not in the will I read," I said.
"You read a draft, sweetheart."
She said it kindly, with her head tilted, and every neighbor in the room heard the knife in it.
"This is the March amendment," she went on.
"Notarized. I'm the executor, so it came to me."
I work as a paralegal, and I have read every page Gran ever signed.
She never mentioned a March amendment to me, and she told me everything while she dyed her hair at the kitchen sink.
Chelsea slid up beside her mother and lifted her left hand to the chandelier.
The diamond was the size of a cough drop.
"Trent proposed three weeks ago," Chelsea said.
"We set the date for November fourteenth."
"That's a month from now," Maribeth said.
"Which is inside the sixty."
Dwight, my stepbrother, laughed into his iced coffee, and somebody's grandmother gasped.
Chelsea and Dwight aren't Gran's blood, but my father adopted them when he married Maribeth, and the paper says grandchildren.
Maribeth smiled at me with all her pearls.
"You're welcome to stay until the end of the month, Pen."
"The agent is coming Thursday."
The room had gone so still I could hear the refrigerator.
I looked at Chelsea's ring and at the folio under Maribeth's arm.
Then I looked at the doorway, because that was where the only person I didn't know in the room was standing.
I knew him a little.
He was the surveyor who had been working Orchard Row for six weeks, tall and lean, with silver hair and a hi-vis vest.
Gran had given him tea on the porch twice, and he had stayed for the funeral.
He stood against the doorframe with a plate he hadn't touched, looking at Maribeth.
I picked up my father's wool coat from the chair.
"I'd like some air," I said to forty people.
"Take all the time you want," Maribeth said.
I went out onto the porch and shut the door on the sound of the ham being cut.
The third stair has been broken since I was nine.
I sat down on the top one, because the cold felt better than the room.
The door opened and shut behind me.
"You don't have a husband," the surveyor said.
"Congratulations," I said.
"Is that a real clause, or did she write it?"
I turned and looked at him properly.
He had dark brown eyes, and a yellow pencil behind his ear, and a stillness I had mistaken for shyness for six weeks.
"The amendment is probably real," I said.
"She isn't clever enough to forge a notary stamp."
"Then you have fifty-nine days to find a husband."
"Thank you, I'm a paralegal, I can count."
He nodded.
"Marry me," he said.
I waited for the punchline.
He did not give one.
"Tomorrow morning," he said.
"The city clerk's office opens at nine, and the judge on call can waive the wait."
"I'm Amory Bexley, I'm thirty-five, I'm not married, and I have never been arrested."
"I can't tell you why before. I can tell you why after the house is yours."
A car passed, and its headlights crossed his face, and he did not look away.
"You're asking a woman you've said eleven words to," I said.
"Twelve," he said.
"Eleven is the tea."
It should have been funny, and I almost laughed.
Instead I did what Gran taught me and read the terms.
"One year," I said.
"Separate rooms, the house stays in my name alone, and you pay nothing and take nothing."
"Done."
"No lies about anything that touches this street."
He took a second longer on that one.
"I will tell you the reason after the house is yours," he said.
"That isn't what I asked."
"It's what I can promise."
Behind us, through the window, Maribeth lifted her glass to the room.
Chelsea was already crying happy tears into someone's shoulder.
I stood up and put out my hand.
"Nine o'clock," I said.
"Bring your ID and a pen."
He shook on it, and his hand was warm and calloused.
"One more thing," he said.
"Her folder."
"Check the listing agreement tucked behind the will. Look at the date."
I went back in, slid it out of Maribeth's folio while she hugged someone, and read it under the chandelier.
It was a listing agreement for 9 Orchard Row, signed by Maribeth as seller.
It was dated the day before Gran died.
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