Spoiling My Sweet Wife to Her Core novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Necklace
Lizzie wakes inside a frame at her own engagement party and fights back; a stranger claims her as his wife.
The first thing I felt was a stranger's hand clamped around my wrist.
The second thing I felt was a diamond necklace being dragged out of my clutch bag.
One moment I had been dying on the asphalt, and now I was standing under a chandelier.
Two hundred people in black tie were staring at me.
A man in a navy tuxedo held the necklace over his head.
"It was in her bag," he said. "The Ashworth Star was in her bag."
My head spun with memories that were not mine.
A trucking company. A dead father. A fiance named Preston, and the blond man in the tuxedo was him.
I had been a nurse for nine years, and I knew shock when I felt it in my own body.
So I breathed in through my nose and counted to four.
Then a woman in a pale pink gown stepped out of the crowd with her hand over her mouth.
"Lizzie, how could you?" she said. "I saw you go into the study. I saw you."
Her name was Whitney, and she was my stepsister.
My borrowed memories said she had cried at my father's funeral and then moved into his house.
Her voice shook beautifully, and every guest leaned toward her.
"Preston, I'm so sorry," she said. "I didn't want to say anything."
Preston looked at me.
"Six months," he said. "I put a ring on your hand for six months."
"Give that ring back right now," Preston said.
I looked down at the ring on my finger.
The old Lizzie would have cried here.
I knew it the way I knew my own pulse, because her body was already shaking and her throat was already closing.
I decided the body could shake all it wanted.
I pulled the ring off, and I walked up to Preston, and I dropped it into his champagne glass.
It sank with a small, clean sound.
"Don't bother with the rest of the speech," I said. "I'm leaving."
He blinked. "You don't get to leave. You stole from my mother."
"Then call the police," I said. "Call them right now, in front of everyone."
Nobody moved.
That told me everything I needed to know.
Nobody calls the police when the thief is the wrong person, because the police ask questions.
I turned to Whitney.
She was wearing one long white glove on her right hand.
Her left hand was bare and pressed flat to her chest.
Everything else about her was perfect.
I had spent years in an emergency room, and I could tell a bandage under a glove from across a room.
The glove had a stiff, brown edge at the wrist, and her fingers were curled.
"That's a pretty glove," I said. "You only wear one."
Whitney's smile held, but her eyes jumped.
"It's a fashion choice."
"Then take it off," I said. "Show everyone how fashionable it is."
A murmur went through the crowd.
Someone near the front lifted a phone.
Then three more phones came up, and then twenty.
"Don't be ridiculous," Whitney said, and she tucked her gloved hand behind her back.
"It's only a hand," I said. "Why hide it?"
Preston stepped between us.
"Enough," he said. "Security will take her out."
His voice cracked on the last word, and I noticed it.
A man who was sure of himself did not crack.
Two men in black suits came across the marble toward me.
I did not move, because I did not have anywhere better to be.
"Take your hands off her."
The voice came from the back of the ballroom, low and dry.
It cut through the room, and the two men stopped.
A tall man was standing in the doorway with his coat still on.
He had black hair and gray eyes and a scar that cut through his left eyebrow.
Every person in that room had left a path for him without being asked.
I heard someone whisper, "Denton Kane."
He walked down the middle of the ballroom with his hands in his pockets, and he looked at nobody but me.
He stopped close enough that I could smell rain and cedar on his coat.
Then he took off his coat and put it around my shoulders, and the heat of it nearly undid me.
"Mr. Kane," Preston said. "This is a family matter."
"No," Denton said. "I hold your family's debt."
He did not raise his voice.
"I own the note on this house, Preston. Since last Monday, I own the note on your father's firm too."
The color left Preston's face, one inch at a time.
Denton turned to the room, and two hundred people held their breath.
"Everyone here saw Miss Flynn thrown out of her own engagement party," he said. "So hear this from me."
He put his hand at the small of my back.
"She is my wife," he said. "We marry Monday."
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