He Wants Her Back: The Billionaire's Leading Lady novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Six Weeks
Juno finds her secret billionaire holding the hand of a woman with her face, ends it in a hospital hallway, and comes home to find him waiting in the dark.
The test said pregnant in plain letters, and the man I wanted to tell was holding another woman's hand on every phone in America.
I didn't know the second part yet.
I was sitting on the floor of my trailer in my costume, wet hair and a fake bruise on my cheek, with the stick in my fist.
Six weeks, the box guessed.
I called Damon.
It rang out.
I called again, and again, and once more.
Four calls, nothing.
That wasn't strange by itself.
For three years I had been the call Damon Strade took when he felt like it.
I was the woman who came in through his garage.
I'd never once walked through his front door.
Someone banged on the trailer.
"Juno, open up." It was Bea, my manager and my best friend since drama school. "Open it right now."
I shoved the test into my jacket pocket and let her in.
Her red curls were everywhere and her face was white under the freckles.
"Don't scream," she said. "Actually, scream. Just look first."
She turned her phone around.
The photo was from a hospital room.
A woman lay in the bed with her hair spread on the pillow.
A man sat beside her, bent close, holding her hand in both of his.
I knew the scar across his knuckles.
I had kissed it the night before last.
The headline under it said, "Vivica Lane, Damon Strade's First Love, Survives Crash. He Hasn't Left Her Side."
I knew the name Vivica.
Everyone in Los Angeles knew the name.
She was the model who left him eight years ago, a week before their engagement party, and sold the story to a magazine.
Damon had never said her name to me once.
Then I looked at her face.
My stomach dropped through the floor of the trailer.
Dark brown hair to her shoulders.
Hazel eyes.
My nose. My jaw.
A small brown beauty mark just above her left eyebrow.
I touched my own forehead without meaning to.
"It's you," Bea whispered. "Juno, she's you."
"No," I said. "I'm her."
That was what the comments said too.
"So THAT'S why he picked the actress."
"Billionaire finds cheap copy while the original's away."
"Imagine being the stand-in and not knowing."
I read them sitting on the trailer step while the crew called my name for the next shot.
Then I stood up and took off the fake bruise with my thumb.
"Where is she?"
"Juno."
"Which hospital, Bea?"
The private hospital sat on a quiet street in Beverly Hills with valets out front.
There were photographers on the sidewalk.
I walked past them with my sunglasses on and my heart going like a hammer.
On the fourth floor, Damon's head of security stood outside a door.
He saw me and his face went flat.
"Miss Hartigan. You can't be here."
"Then stop me," I said, and opened the door.
Vivica Lane was sitting up against white pillows.
Up close the face was worse.
It was the face I saw in my mirror every morning, a little older, a little tighter.
Damon stood by the window in his dark suit.
He turned around.
For one second something moved in his gray eyes.
Then it closed.
Vivica smiled at me.
"Oh," she said softly. "So you're the copy he kept."
A nurse by the IV pole went very still.
I looked at Damon.
I waited for him to speak.
My name. The truth. Anything.
"Go home, Juno," he said. "Not here."
Not here.
Three years of not here.
Not at dinner. Not at premieres. Not at his mother's house. Not in a photo.
He'd never been ashamed of me in a hospital before, because he'd never been anywhere with me at all.
I reached for my wrist.
The bracelet he'd given me on our first anniversary was thin and gold, with one small sapphire.
I unclasped it and dropped it on Vivica's lunch tray, next to her pudding cup.
"Now you have the matched set," I said.
Vivica's smile slipped for half a second.
I turned to Damon.
"We're done," I said. "You can stop opening the garage for me."
The nurse made a small sound behind her hand.
Damon's jaw went tight.
"Juno. Not like this."
"This is exactly like this."
His security man stepped aside before I reached him.
In the elevator I took out my phone and blocked Damon Strade's number with a shaking thumb.
Then I blocked his email, his assistant and his driver.
My hand went to my jacket pocket.
The test was still there.
He would never know, I decided.
Not from me.
The elevator opened on the lobby and I walked out the front doors.
The photographers saw my face and went crazy.
"Juno! Juno, are you the stand-in?"
"Did he pick you because you look like her?"
"Juno, how long have you been the copy?"
I kept my chin up and didn't answer, and I didn't cry until the car.
Bea drove me home and I made her leave me at the door.
I needed to be alone with it.
My apartment was on the ninth floor of a building on Wilshire.
The lights were off when I let myself in.
I dropped my bag and reached for the switch.
The lamp by the window clicked on first.
Damon was sitting in my armchair with his tie loosened and his elbows on his knees.
He looked at me like I was the one who had done something wrong.
"You don't end things with me in a hallway," he said.
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