Chapter 1 - The Bride Nobody Asked
The first time my husband slept beside another human being in twelve years, he was bleeding through my sheets.
Nine hours later, he woke with his hand wrapped around mine.
Outside my bedroom, his head of security was waiting with evidence that my father had paid someone to kill him.
But three months before any of that happened, the most frightening thing Asher Rowe had ever said to me was a promise.
“We will never share a bed.”
He delivered it in the marble entrance hall of his Lake Forest house while I stood in a wedding dress somebody else had chosen.
I was twenty-seven. I owned a bakery in Oak Park. Until the previous Thursday, my biggest concern had been whether a bride would notice that her ivory roses leaned toward butter yellow.
Then my father told me he owed three million dollars.
By Sunday, I had become part of the repayment plan.
Thomas Pike explained it over dinner, between criticizing my dress and asking the waiter to remove the breadbasket.
“Asher needs a connection to the freight company. We need breathing room.”
“We?”
My father looked irritated.
“Don’t make this harder.”
He had forged my signature on guarantees. Borrowed against accounts I hadn’t known existed. Tangled my bakery with his collapsing company until every explanation sounded like another locked door.
Then he offered marriage as the exit.
I should have found an attorney.
I should have told someone.
But fear has a way of making the loudest person sound like the only person who knows what happens next.
At the wedding, my father kissed my cheek and whispered, “Try to look grateful.”
Asher heard him.
I knew because his expression changed, although he said nothing.
Later, in the entrance hall, my new husband stood six feet away.
“You’ll have the east wing,” he told me. “Your accounts remain yours. The liabilities attached to your name will be settled.”
“My father’s liabilities.”
“Yes.”
“And what do you get?”
“A legal connection to Pike Freight.”
“And me?”
He looked directly at me.
“You remain yourself.”
It sounded generous until I remembered I hadn’t been allowed to choose any of it.
“Will I be expected to sleep with you?”
“No.”
The answer came immediately.
Relief should have followed.
Instead, I noticed how rigid his shoulders became when he added that we would never share a bed.
As though the subject frightened him more than it frightened me.
For three months, we lived on opposite sides of a house large enough to keep two unhappy people from inconveniencing each other.
I learned him through sounds.
The espresso machine before sunrise.
A car leaving after midnight.
Footsteps outside his study at hours when the rest of the world had stopped needing anything.
Then one night, I dropped a mixing bowl.
Asher appeared in the kitchen with a pistol.
I screamed.
He lowered it instantly.
“What are you doing?”
“Making brioche.”
“At three in the morning?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
His eyes moved to the dough.
“Neither could I.”
That was our first conversation that wasn’t about arrangements.
Afterward, I began leaving food outside his study.
The first plate came back untouched.
The second came back empty.
On the third, I left a note.
Progress.
The following morning, someone had written beneath it.
The mustard was excessive.
I laughed for the first time in that house.
Soon he began sitting at the kitchen island while I baked. He read documents. I kneaded dough. Sometimes neither of us spoke for an hour.
It was unexpectedly comfortable.
Then, one afternoon, a woman named Celia Voss visited with her husband, Nolan, Asher’s operations director.
She watched me cut a slice of lemon tart.
“I wish I had your confidence.”
I set the knife down.
“About what?”
Her smile sharpened.
“Eating whatever you like.”
I had been a large girl, then a large woman, long enough to recognize an insult dressed for company.
Before I could answer, Asher looked up from the papers beside Nolan.
“Audrey made that tart.”
Celia laughed lightly.
“I’m sure it’s delicious.”
“It is.”
He held out a plate.
“Cut me a piece.”
I did.
Then he took his first bite while looking directly at her.
The silence became magnificent.
Later, after the Vosses left, I found him in the kitchen.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Eat?”
“You know what I mean.”
He set his fork down.
“I don’t enjoy people being cruel in my house.”
“Our house?” I asked before I could stop myself.
Something flickered across his face.
“Our house.”
It was a small correction.
I carried it upstairs like something fragile.
That night, I heard footsteps outside my door.
They stopped.
For several seconds, nobody moved.
Then Asher walked away.
I lay awake wondering whether he had come to say something.
May you like
I didn’t know then that he had spent twelve years avoiding sleep because the last time he trusted a quiet house, everyone he loved had been inside it.
And by morning, one of them was dead.
