The Wife He Was Never Supposed to Find

The truck driver got out into the downpour, came around, and opened her door with a flourish nobody had asked for. "Ashford Grand, ma'am," he said, in a Georgia drawl you could spread on toast.

"Ma'am, you're dripping on the Italian marble," the doorman said. "It costs more than that truck."

"Then that truck and I have something in common," Bella Marsh said, wringing out her ponytail onto his polished floor."We're both having a terrible Tuesday."

Bella climbed out and wrung her ponytail onto the curb. "Keep the change."

"There's no change. You paid exact."

"Then keep the sentiment."

"Best tip I've had all week," he said, and drove off, leaving her to the storm.

The storm had turned Manhattan into a car wash with no exit. Her umbrella was brutally executed by the winds this morning and her only interview blazer was now a wet, sad sponge. But the Ashford Grand Hotel rose in front of her in glass and gold, and if she walked out of here with this job, she could stop eating crackers for dinner.

She marched to the front desk.

The receptionist was maybe twenty-five, flawless bun, name tag reading Tiffany. She looked up with a smile that was pure hospitality.

"Welcome to the Ashford Grand. How can I..."

The smile slid right off her face.

Bella glanced behind her. Nobody there. Just a fern and a man with a luggage cart pretending not to listen.

"Hi," Bella said slowly. "I have a ten o'clock with HR. Isabella..." She caught herself, as she always did. Three years of practice. "Bella Marsh."

Tiffany didn't type. Didn't blink. Her eyes dropped to Bella's left hand, bare except for a thin pale stripe of skin at the base of her ring finger that Bella had never been able to explain, then lifted back to her face.

"Mrs. Ashford?" Tiffany whispered.

Bella laughed. It came out louder than she meant in the hushed lobby.

"Okay, I'm gonna need you to run that one by me again."

"I'm so sorry, I just... you look exactly..." Tiffany's hand flew to her mouth. Her face drained of color so fast Bella half expected her to sit down on the floor. "I need to call someone."

"Is this a prank? Because if this is an HR hazing thing, I'm too wet to be hazed."

"Please don't move."

"I'm literally a puddle. Where would I go?"

But Tiffany had already snatched up the phone, and Bella felt the first small, cold prickle at the back of her neck. It was the same prickle she got right before the dream. The one with the staircase and the gunshot and a man's voice saying her name like a prayer he'd stopped believing in.

She shook it off. It's nothing. You're tired. You're wet. Get the job.

Behind her, an elevator chimed.

It was a soft, expensive sound. Somehow it made every hair on her arms stand up.

She turned.

The man who stepped out was tall, dark-haired, and wearing a charcoal suit that looked like it had been poured over him by someone who hated the rest of the male population. He was mid-sentence into his phone, one hand in his pocket, a Manhattan king on his own turf. Then he looked up.

The phone slid out of his hand and hit the marble.

Nobody moved. Even the guy with the luggage cart stopped.

The man just stared at her. His jaw had gone tight, and his chest rose like he'd forgotten how breathing worked. Bella had been looked at plenty of times. She knew admiration, lust, and the occasional "excuse me, are you in line?" This wasn't any of those. It was a look like he'd been underwater for years and she was the first air.

"You're alive," he said.

His voice was low and rough, and something deep in her stomach did a slow, treacherous roll.

Oh, no, she thought. Not now. Not him. Absolutely not.

"Last time I checked," she said. "Gonna say yes on that one."

He took a step toward her. Then another. Up close, he was worse. His eyes were a dark, stormy gray, and the shadows beneath them said he hadn't slept right in a long time. A thin scar cut through his left eyebrow. His cologne smelled like cedar and rain and something she swore she knew.

"Isabella," he said.

Her real name. The one nobody in this city had ever heard.

She went cold. "I'm sorry, you've got the wrong person."

"I don't."

"Sir, I promise I would remember you." The words left her mouth before she could stop them, and she heard how they sounded. His gaze dropped, just for a second, to her mouth. Heat flashed up her neck, and she hated that he'd seen it.

"I mean," she tried again, folding her arms, "I would remember a guy who drops a four-thousand-dollar phone like it's a hot potato."

A muscle ticked in his jaw. "It's a nine-hundred-dollar phone."

"Oh, well, then. Carry on."

He almost smiled. She saw it start, one corner of his mouth, and then it died as fast as it came, like he didn't trust it.

"You always did that," he said quietly.

"Did what?"

"Made jokes when you were scared."

"I'm not scared."

"Your hands are shaking."

She looked down. They were. She shoved them into her soaked blazer pockets and glared at him. "I'm cold. It's forty degrees and I swam here."

Without a word, he shrugged off his suit jacket and held it out.

"No, thank you."

"Isabella."

"It's Bella."

"Take the jacket."

"Do you boss everyone around, or am I special?"

His eyes held hers. "You were never special. You were everything."

The lobby went silent. Somewhere behind her, Tiffany made a small, strangled noise.

Bella's heart was doing something ridiculous. She was a grown woman with rent due and a credit score that would make a banker cry, and she was not about to melt over a stranger's line, no matter how good it sounded in that voice.

"Okay. Wow." She snatched the jacket, mostly to prove she could. It was warm and heavy and smelled so much like him that she nearly dropped it. She put it on anyway, because she was freezing and her pride could go to hell. "That's a great line. Does it work on a lot of women, or should I be flattered?"

"I've never said it to anyone but you."

"Mr...."

"Ashford."

Ashford.

Her stomach dropped. The name on the building was Ashford. The name on the receptionist's lips was Ashford. And in every dream she'd had for three years, the man at the top of the stairs...

No.

"Damien Ashford," he said, as though she'd asked. As though the name should unlock something. When it didn't, she watched the hope in his face flicker and go dark. "You really don't know me."

"I really don't."

"You don't remember the hotel. The penthouse." He swallowed. "The wedding."

"I'm sorry, the what?"

"Our wedding. Three years ago in June. St. Regis Chapel. You wore your grandmother's pearls, and you were late because you got lost looking for the flowers you'd already carried in."

Bella's mouth opened. Nothing came out.

She'd been late to everything her whole life. She'd once spent twenty minutes searching for her glasses while they sat on her head.

But she didn't have a grandmother's pearls. She didn't have a grandmother. She had a foster file, a hospital bracelet, and a three-year gap she'd paid a lot of money to stop thinking about.

"That's..." She shook her head. "No. You're confusing me with someone who looks like me."

"Isabella."

"I woke up in a hospital in Pennsylvania with a head injury and a bag full of someone else's cash. I've been Bella Marsh ever since. I've never been married. I would know if I was married!"

"Would you?" he said softly.

It landed like a slap. She stepped back, and the jacket slid on her shoulders, and in the same breath he reached out and caught her wrist.

Just her wrist. Two fingers on the pulse.

Heat shot straight up her arm, through her chest, and settled somewhere low and unmistakable. Her breath caught. His did too. They both heard it.

For three full seconds neither of them moved.

"Your pulse is racing," Damien murmured.

"That's called anger."

"Is it?"

"Yes. And low blood sugar."

"Isabella..."

"Let go of my wrist, Mr. Ashford."

He did, slowly, his thumb dragging once across her skin as though he couldn't help it. She felt that drag all the way to her toes, and from the look on his face, he knew it.

This is insane, her brain screamed. He is a stranger. He's a very hot stranger who's either deranged or lying.

Her body, the traitor, apparently hadn't gotten the memo.

"Okay," she said, voice not quite steady. "Here's what's happening. I'm going to walk upstairs to my interview. I'm going to be a professional adult. And you're going to go back to your elevator and think about your life choices."

"You're interviewing here?"

"Don't look so surprised."

"Which position?"

"Assistant event coordinator. Entry level, benefits, free dental." She raised her chin. "I'm very good with a clipboard."

Something strange crossed his face, a flash of pain so raw it made her want to take back every sarcastic word. Then it vanished, and he stepped closer. His voice dropped so only she could hear.

"Three years ago, you were the best event planner I ever met. You booked a hundred-and-fifty-person gala in four days and made my father's board cry. You'd be running this department."

"Then clearly I have a fan club in this building."

"You left me a message the night you vanished."

Her smile fell away. "I didn't leave anybody anything."

"It was on my phone. Your voice. I've listened to it every night for three years." He held her gaze, and the storm outside might as well have rolled in through the glass. "Don't look for me. And if I ever come back..."

He stopped. Something moved in his throat.

"What?" Bella whispered. She didn't know why her heart was pounding. "What did it say?"

"Don't trust me."

The words fell between them like broken glass.

Bella's blood turned to ice, because she knew those words. She had never heard that message and never seen that phone. But she had woken up four hundred times with that exact sentence in her mouth, in her own voice, in the dark.

"That's not possible," she said hoarsely.

"Isabella."

"I have to go."

"Don't." For the first time his composure cracked, and for one wild moment she thought he might grab her. "You can't just disappear again."

"I'm not disappearing, I'm going to an interview!"

"At my hotel."

"I didn't know it was your hotel!" She threw up her hands, and the jacket swallowed her fingers. "I didn't know any of this! You can't just walk out of an elevator and tell a stranger she's your..."

The elevator chimed again.

Heels clicked across the marble, slow and unhurried. A woman stepped into view, tall and elegant in a cream suit, with sharp cheekbones and an expression carefully arranged into calm.

She stopped three feet from Bella. Her eyes traveled over Bella's face, her wet hair, her bare ring finger. Then she turned to Damien.

"Tell me this isn't what it looks like."

"Victoria," Damien said, never taking his eyes off Bella. "Not now."

"Not now? Damien, she's standing in the lobby wearing your jacket." Victoria's voice was soft, almost kind, which somehow made it worse. "Three years. Three years of private investigators and dead ends, and she just walks in the front door?" She finally looked at Bella, and her smile didn't reach her eyes. "Welcome back, Isabella. Forgive us if we're a little shocked."

"Forgive me," Bella said, "because I'm still waiting for someone to tell me this is a prank."

"I wish it were."

Something about the way Victoria said it made Bella's skin crawl, and she couldn't have said why. It wasn't the words. It was how little surprise there was behind them.

"Isabella." Damien's voice was low, urgent. "Come upstairs with me. Just for ten minutes. Let me show you..."

"She's not going anywhere with you until we understand what's happening," Victoria cut in.

"Excuse me," Bella said, holding up both hands. "I have a ten o'clock. I also have a pulse, a brain, and a vote, and I'd like to use all three."

Her phone buzzed in her pocket.

She almost ignored it. Then she saw the screen out of the corner of her eye, an unknown number, and a message that made her stomach drop through the floor:

Don't trust him. Don't trust her. Get out of the building NOW.

She looked up. Damien was watching her face. Victoria was watching her face. Tiffany, behind the desk, had gone very still.

And across the lobby, near the revolving doors, a man in a gray raincoat lowered the phone from his ear and looked directly at her.

He had been waiting for her to read it.