My Husband's Brother Owns My Secret novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Lot Thirty-One
At the bank's fall benefit, Neve overhears her husband and his lover planning to blackmail her with the nude she posed for at 21, auctions off her wedding ring in front of the room, and drives to the painting's owner, who turns out to be her husband's brother.
My husband planned to show the whole club my naked body, and I found out holding a tray of auction paddles.
I was outside the library door at our fall benefit.
I'd come to fetch more paddles because the bidding on lot thirty had gotten rowdy.
Then I heard a woman laugh inside, low and pleased.
"Girl on a Blue Sheet," she said. "I'd know that scar anywhere."
My fingers went cold on the tray.
The door was open about an inch.
Cate Ainslie was sitting on my husband's desk with her black dress pushed up her thighs.
Graydon stood between her knees.
His hand was under the cashmere, flat on her back.
"Left hip," Cate said. "Little crescent. I saw it at the club pool in September and nearly dropped my drink."
"You're sure."
"Graydon, I've looked at that painting a hundred times. It's her. Eight years younger and asleep, but it's her."
He laughed, soft.
"My wife. In the most famous nude in Chicago."
"So buy it."
"The owner won't sell through the agent."
Cate pulled a folded paper from her clutch.
"The insurance appraisal has an address. Some bowling alley on Milwaukee Avenue. Moonlite Lanes."
"Then I'll go myself."
"And if she won't sign the waiver?"
Graydon kissed her neck before he answered.
"Then it hangs in the bank lobby at the Christmas gala. Under a sheet. I pull it myself, in front of the board and every member of the club."
"Your mother will die."
"Mother will blame Neve. Everyone will. And the prenup says she gets nothing for hiding it."
I stood very still in the hall.
Eight years ago I was twenty-one.
My mother was dying of ovarian cancer in our front room in Bridgeport.
She wanted a nurse at home instead of a hospital bed.
A painter at my school paid nine thousand dollars for six weeks of me asleep on a blue sheet.
That money bought my mother the nurse.
She died in her own bed, holding my hand.
I quit school that winter and never told anyone where the money came from.
Not my sister Fran. Not my husband.
Inside, Cate laughed again.
"You're a monster."
"I'm an executive vice president," Graydon said. "Same thing."
I set the tray of paddles down on the hall table without a sound.
Then I walked back into the ballroom.
The auctioneer was closing lot thirty, a weekend at somebody's lake house in Door County.
"Sold, to the gentleman in the bow tie!"
Two hundred people clapped.
I had planned every inch of this night.
The white roses. The string quartet. The seating chart that kept two divorced board members apart.
I walked straight up to the podium.
The auctioneer smiled at me. "Mrs. Winthrop! Our hostess, everyone!"
More clapping.
I pulled off my wedding ring.
It was his grandmother's, three carats, and it had never fit right.
I set it on the podium under the microphone.
"Lot thirty-one," I said. "One wedding ring. Worn four years. Starting bid, one dollar."
Somebody laughed.
Then nobody did.
The quartet stopped in the middle of a bar.
Graydon came through the side door, smoothing his tie.
There was red lipstick on his jaw, just under his ear.
Two hundred people looked at the lipstick, and then at Cate coming in behind him.
At the front table, an old woman in diamonds raised her paddle.
"One dollar," she said.
"Sold," I said, and stepped down.
Graydon caught me at the ballroom doors.
He didn't grab. He never grabbed.
He just put his hand on the small of my back.
"Neve," he said quietly. "Whatever you think you heard, you'll be home by midnight. You have nowhere to go."
"I have an address," I said.
His hand went still.
I walked out to my car in my green silk gown and drove south.
I took my heels off at the first red light.
Forty minutes later a neon moon buzzed over Milwaukee Avenue.
Moonlite Lanes.
Inside it smelled like popcorn and floor wax.
Pins crashed down sixteen lanes at once.
Men in matching bowling shirts turned and stared at my dress.
I went to the bar.
"I need the owner," I said. "It's about a painting."
The bartender, a gray-haired woman with a pencil behind her ear, stopped wiping a glass.
She looked at my face for a long moment.
"He said somebody might come for her one day," she said. "Upstairs. The door's open."
The stairs were narrow and steep.
At the top was one long room with brick walls and a lamp on.
A made bed. A stack of library books. A pair of work boots by the door.
Over the bed hung a painting I hadn't seen in eight years.
A girl asleep on her side on a rumpled blue sheet.
Her face was half turned toward me.
Her hair was spread across the pillow, redder than mine is now.
The little crescent scar sat on her left hip, painted so carefully it looked raised.
I'd been twenty-one. I'd been so tired.
Behind me, the floor creaked.
"I wondered if you'd ever come," a man said.
I knew the voice.
I'd heard it exactly twice, both times at Beatrice Winthrop's Sunday table.
I turned around.
Hutch Winthrop stood in the doorway with his flannel sleeves pushed up and sawdust on his jeans.
My husband's little brother.
The one who left our first family dinner before dessert.
The one who missed our wedding because he was in Montana.
He looked at me, then at the painting over his bed, and he didn't look away from either.
"I bought her seven years ago," he said. "And I knew it was you the night he brought you to dinner."
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