Chapter 2

The door to the room banged open.

"Joanna, you jinx! You bring nothing but bad luck!"

Henry's mother, Linda, eyes were red from crying, and she swung a hand at my face before I had a chance to move.

This time I was ready for it. I smiled and stepped back.

Linda swung so hard that she missed and went stumbling into a chair, and she screamed.

She didn't even stop for the pain. She pointed at my face and started in on me.

"Where is Henry? I asked you where Henry is.

"How did my son end up married to somebody this useless? If Henry doesn't get here and thirty billion dollars goes to somebody else, I will take you apart myself."

Behind her stood the crowd of relatives who normally lived off her.

They closed in around me, all of them talking at once.

"Worthless. You can't even get your own husband to come home. If Henry misses that will, we will skin you alive."

I knew they were losing their minds.

Linda was not the rich man's wife. She had started as his mistress, and she got pregnant before his wife did and gave birth to Henry.

Back then, to force her way in, she showed up at the house with a baby on her hip when the wife was days from delivering, and she did it to provoke her.

What she said was vicious enough to put the wife into early labor. She hemorrhaged and died on the operating table.

Jason came into the world without a mother, and Linda and Henry treated him like something to be scraped off a shoe.

On a good day they insulted him, and on a bad day they beat him.

In the end they found a reason to ship him overseas young, so he would never get near the center of the Shenwell family.

Michael let Linda move into the estate, but he never thought she was fit to be his wife, and in all those years he never married her.

So if Michael died and Henry didn't lock down the inheritance, Linda would be out on the street the same week.

Linda's eyes were bloodshot. "Are you deaf? Call Leo and tell him to put Henry in a car and get him here."

I looked at her without a word and dialed Leo's number.

He picked up on the second ring, with laughter and fireworks behind him.

"Joanna, do you ever give it a rest?"

Leo's voice was dripping with impatience.

"Can a man not get a little space? Stop hanging on Mr. Shenwell like some bitter ex-wife."

He warmed up to his own lecture. "I'll say it plain. If you were my wife, I'd smack you ten times a day until you learned. A woman keeps house and stays out of a man's business."

His brazen words left everyone in the room momentarily stunned.

But I remained perfectly calm, deliberately slowing my speech.

"Leo, believe me or don't. Michael is dying. He signed a will. Whichever of them reaches his bedside first, Henry or Jason, takes everything."

The other end went strangely quiet.

Leo's tone changed. "Are you serious?"

Linda heard it and grabbed at it like a rope. She threw herself at the phone, crying and laughing at once.

"It's true, it's true. Please get Henry back here. I am begging you. This is thirty billion dollars."

"Oh. If it's true, then I'll go tell Mr. Shenwell right now," Leo said, taking his time with it.

Linda let out a long breath and patted her own chest. "Thank God. As long as Henry gets here."

Then the phone exploded with laughter.

Leo laughed like he had heard the best joke of his life, until he was gasping.

"Oh my God. Joanna, you do not know when to quit. I already blew up your little scam, and you're still out there running it with your extras?"

He snorted smugly.

"Let me tell you something. Mr. Shenwell said that tonight, if God himself came down, nobody would interrupt him and my sister. That sob story of yours is played out.

"So if you know what's good for you, get lost. Mr. Shenwell is filing to divorce you. He will love exactly one woman in this life, and that woman is my sister.

"Once she's a Shenwell, I'm family here too. You? Go pack a bag and learn to beg, you idiot."

He hung up on me again.

The joy went out of Linda's face and left it white.

My eyes were red and I looked like the picture of misery, and inside I was ice.

I had been married to Henry for three years, all of it spent shoring up his position in the Shenwell family.

I lost count of the nights I stayed up patching holes in his business and cleaning up what he broke.

And he turned around and spent company money on an island and a yacht for Lydia.

He said it to my face, too. "Joanna, you already have the Shenwell name. Lydia has nothing. What is wrong with spending a little to make it up to her?"

And Linda waved it off. "What man doesn't stray? As long as Henry still comes home, why do you care how many women he keeps?"

Fine.

Henry believed his one true love outranked everything on earth.

In that case, he could give up the money too.