Some people work for money or acclaim. Others for passion and the love of the game. I’m familiar with all four, but above all, I work to preserve the legacy I’ve been entrusted with.
I was not meant to be Maison Valmont’s CEO. Not yet.
My father had a sudden heart attack four years ago, and the succession happened sooner than any of us anticipated. The company he had spent thirty years building passed to me to expand and control. My younger sister was still at university, and her interests ran to design and creativity, not boardrooms and spreadsheets.
It was a role I’d been working for since I was thirteen.
Since the accident where my older brother died.So amazing,people would say.It’s a miracle you survived the avalanche.
There’s no sense to why I’m here and Etienne isn’t. Why my father only lived to seventy-three. But I’ll be damned if I dishonor their memories by being anything but the best.
Family is everything.
And Paige’s uncle targeted my younger sister. In his fight against my ever-tightening snare, he hired professionals to pretend to stalk her. Terrify her and split my attention. A desperate play, to be sure, but one I’m not going to forgive. And I’m not going to forget.
There’s only one thing Ben Wilde cares about more than his own life, and that’s his precious little company.
And now it’s mine.
They say revenge tastes best served cold, and I celebrated mine with cold champagne yesterday after the courthouse. I won.
And a new wife was the price.
I look up to find Paige still chatting with one of the flight attendants. My little sister is going to kill me when she finds out I married Ben Wilde’s niece and didn’t give her a chance to talk me out of it.
The private investigator I hired gave me an entire dossier about Paige Wilde. At twenty-eight, she’s two years younger than me. She lost both her parents in a tragic car accident and went to college on a tennis scholarship.
She lives a quiet life in Gloucester, the old fishing townoutside of Boston where Mather & Wilde was founded and still has its factory. From the dossier, she spends every day working at headquarters, quite unlike her scheming uncle, who prefers spending his days being seen amongst the New York glitterati.
She must have known what her uncle was doing. Either that, or she just sold out her only living family member for a chance to gain a bigger stake in the company.
There’s not a trustworthy bone in her body.
When it’s time to start taxiing, she finally sinks in the chair across from me with a sigh. There’s a champagne flute dangling from her left hand, nails painted a deep red color.
“Hello, husband,” she says.
I look up from my laptop. “You’re late. Again.”
“I am, aren’t I?” She tilts her head. “I did it just for you.”
Two sentences, and she’s already under my skin. “It gave me more time to look through your company’s financials. Is it too late to give you back?”
She sets her champagne glass down and buckles her seat belt. “You knew exactly what you were buying.”
“Company-wise, sure. You, on the other hand…”
Her eyes return to mine. “I wasn’t bought.”
“Of course not. I’d never imply such a thing,” I say. My tone is flat, and if she reads sarcasm, so be it.
There’s true anger in her eyes, and triumph flares inside me. She’s not the only one who can goad.
“Mather & Wilde can recover. Wewillrecover,” she says. “My uncle is gone, and that’s what I needed.That’swhy I married you. I’m getting just as much out of this deal as you are.”
I raise an eyebrow at her. We both know that’s not true. I own almost all of her company, apart from the stake she now has. The stake she got through marriage.
For her, that company is everything.
